Having cousins close rocks our world!

Meet Ted's cousin, Jen Hurst. Now we are cousins, too! And our fabulous brood are also cousins all together.

This is the amazing lady who invites us to her home, she feeds us gourmet meals and snacks, loves to play with the kids, and we love watching her 5 and my 2  kids play like they are brothers and sisters. We go to the park; we walk; kids rollerblade, bike, play games, jump on the tramp; I can hardly find the words to describe how wonderful it is to be cousins with such a fun, loving, spunky, active family! Not to leave our her hip husband, Ben--he rolls with the crazy flow of this many kids in his house. Way to go, Ben! For them to live a few hours away is the treat of all treats living down here in Texas. Our kids get along famously and we love going to Austin to see them. I'm trying to upload about 12 photos from the trip but for some reason google is only letting me upload one at a time...what happened to the way it used to work? I think I need help from a tech-saavy person... :)

Lucky Leprechaun!

This masterpiece was created by Maddie and Nick and our cousins (via Ted and his cousin Jen, married to Ben) Tyler, Ryan, Evan, and with a little help from tiny tykes: Sam and Douey. They spend hours on St. Patrick's Eve, collecting stuff from all over Jen's house (in Austin, which by the way we love! We looked at model homes for my sister, Holly's family, and are in HIGH hopes they will move down; then I'm afraid we'll have to move down, too! Eek! because we are signing on our new home here in TeenyTown near Fort Worth on Monday!! rats! Austin will have to wait!)

Back to the story; (I haven't blogged for so long that I have a lot of random things to share)

The kids went online and found this design for a leprechaun trap. He uses the white rocks to rock-climb the box to the top where he'll see gold coins (goody!) and a sign saying "keep out" which the kids are smart enough to know about 'reverse psychology' so they put that up there. Just before he walks across the tops of the box to get the gold coins, the box has a sly gash cut into it and the plan was that he would fall in and be stuck down there...

But he got away.

Lucky Leprechaun became his name.

He did leave the kids sparkly green hats, green licorice, green m&ms, green, minty kisses, and jellybeans.

It was so fun! This is a fun holiday to get creative. Sometimes they come visit your classroom at school while you're at PE and they wreck up the room and leave green dust and gold coins. That happened to Maddie in 2nd grade. Green guys (and gals) are groovy!

Then Maddie made some rainbow cupcakes to celebrate the ole' leprechaun's searh for the pot of gold: where? under the rainbow.

These were awesome! WE loved them! Some 60s revolutionary cupcakes. Groovy cooking, Mads!