Base

 I suspect you'll be tired of baseball pictures by the time the season is over.  :)

Chi-town

 I had a quick trip to Chicago this week for a one-day conference at Northwestern, but I managed to squeeze in a quick visit with Eckerd folks!  Appropriately, I met up with Scopi and Skip at a place called the Geek Bar.  :)  Scopi was teasing me about taking pictures with "an actual camera" instead of with a phone.

Batters Up

 The boys' coach is hard core -- temps only in the 30s (maybe up to 40s) this morning, but practice was not cancelled!

Shiny

After lunch on Saturday, Matthew requested a rag and some water, and diligently cleaned the playset.  Here, James has joined in for cleaning the fire truck.  They were hoping to win the Shiniest Fire Truck contest (their opponents were the Rescue Bots).

Play Ball

 Gorgeous day for the boys' first baseball practice!

(The boys' friend J is on the same team.  J and James are the smallest boys in their class, so I had to laugh when I found out that their team is the Giants! For some reason the youth sports around here like to name their teams after the major league teams.)

And why are there three kids on third base in the last picture?  I don't know, but there were five of them there by the time the practice "game" ended.

Welcome to Muddington

 Matthew announced, "We have homework tonight!"  When I asked what it was, he said gleefully, "Play outside!"  Now that's the kind of homework I can get behind.  :)

So they built a mud village on their playset, with a king and four minions. (The mud came from under the tire swing.)

***

Jamesie said, "There were three birds out here, and two flew away!  There's one left.  That's subtraction. I just did subtraction with real birds!"

Matthew the Vet

Mattie took good care of the stuffed animals with the veterinarian kit that Grandma got for him!

We are back home now.  (Except for the early-morning wake-up, the travel day was much easier flying out of Gville instead of Jacksonville!) We had some nice spring-like weather to greet us.

James and Grandma

Spring Arts

 We were going to make a family trip to the Spring Arts Festival, but Grandma volunteered to have the boys stay home with her instead.  We are really glad she did, because the festival was great fun for us but probably would have been just an hour of "don't touch that!" for the five-year-olds.

Mike actually purchased the lizard guitar shown here (it's made of a bongo drum with a Merle Haggard record on the back), but then he changed his mind and the artist is now making him a custom one with a washboard on the bottom.  :)

There was no shortage of beach pictures, but I exercised great restraint and came home with only one of them. :)