Elizabeth passed her red stripe test! We are going to have a black belt in our house...

As part of her black belt preparations Elizabeth needed to write an essay answering the question "How has karate impacted your life?", which you may read by following the link. We talked about what an essay was and how we needed an introduction and conclusion, but other than that I tried hard to stay out of it. I was fascinated to discover that Elizabeth naturally plans her writing in advance - first bullet points, which are then fleshed out into sentences and finally paragraphs. She wrote three drafts out by hand prior to typing them up.

She wanted to put a cover page on the essay and was very excited to find that Word does this sort of thing for you.

I resisted "improving" it, aside from pointing out obvious spelling errors. I'm biased, but I think it's a pretty darned good essay from a ten year old, even if it does rather read like an advertisement for Douvris. She's pretty into karate, in case that wasn't obvious.

Every so often, the kids demand that I take a picture of their plates. Usually this is something like deformed cereal, abnormally large fruit, or evidence that they were playing with their food rather than consuming it politely. Food faces are rather popular. I guess it's not terribly surprising that the kids like to make shapes in their food given that their mother frequently enjoys arranging cute food for them. In any case I tend to humour them.

I find it kind of interesting to look back at some of the variety of what passes for supper around here as well.

Lovely Easter service this morning, then we came home for ham (also lamb and a vegetarian option). There were mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes, plain green beans and green beans oriental, matzoh ball soup, buns, a butter lamb and a couple of trifles. Uncle Mark, Grandma Margaret, Uncle Chris, Auntie Yukiko, Erika, Maria, Auntie Heather, Andre, Auntie Janice and our family all fit around one table!

The kids had so much fun together that the girls didn't want to go home. Elizabeth came to ask whether they could stay and since she was willing and able to lend them pjs and since we had spare toothbrushes I told them they could. The three girls had a sleepover in the basement and helped me out by preparing the eggs for the following day's egg hunt.

The kids are going through a dress-up phase for no particular reason so we had an elephant playing violin and a knight doing his piano (well, guarding it mostly...).

The great excitement today was a visit from Michael who came bearing balloons, pjs, sunhat with ears and chocolate. The kids were most impressed by his balloon animal skills.

Our spring bucket list specifies that we must both "visit a few museums" and "see the baby animals". Easter weekend at the farm helps check off both of those goals!

I didn't really think of it until it was too late to pet the baby chickens, which was a little disappointing but we enjoyed petting "sheeps" and staring at pigs. The tractor exhibit is being closed soon so we made sure to get our bumpy tractor fix in case it was the last time.

Also in the random notes about things changing (and not for the convenience of visitors), apparently the dairy barn now closes early. Despite missing out on virtually all the special Easter activities and nearly getting locked out on the wrong side of the fence, the kids had a wonderful time. Amelia and Matthew are very much looking forward to farm camp in the summer.