Spring Has Sprung

These were the scenes around the house today.  While the 80 degree temperatures suggest otherwise, Spring is here and in full, all be it quick, bloom.

 Here's a red bellied woodpecker up in one of our trees.

 The blooms on our Paulownia tree.  They are a pale purple, look kind of like a snap dragon flower and are rather pretty.

 A Paulownia bloom.

 Last Fall I had to really thin out the irises and the effort paid off.  The blooms are beautiful and since I had so many they are all around the house now too.

 I have a dogwood tree in my yard!  Dogwoods are my favorite tree, hands down.  Simple, yet so elegant looking on.  When we bought the house, I was almost giddy that we had one in our yard.

 Finally, a really true sign of Spring: a robin sitting on a nest of eggs--right by our side door!

It's Madness I Tell You

 We don't have a ton of traditions in our family, but the ones we do have are a big deal to the kids.  One thing that we do every year is fill out March Madness Brackets.  We've been doing this since Jakob could chose...so about 10 years now.  We do both men's and women's...and everyone must fill one out as soon as they can talk.  Jakob and Phil usually know the most about the teams and pick according to past performance and ability.  Ethan and Sophia have figured out that the higher ranked and record shown on the brackets are good indicators.  I usually have my favorites and go with those.  Clara is still at the stage where she picks whatever team sounds neat, that means Gonzaga is going far in both brackets.  Everyone roots for BYU and Vandy, usually having them go further than they really could.  All in all it is a lot of fun and Jakob loves helping the girl's fill their brackets out.  The winners get to pick out their favorite ice cream flavor and we buy a 1/2 gallon (or 1.75 qt as the case may be) for all to eat.

As for the other madness...out of no where on this 80 degree day in March came a hail storm.  The kids where out playing and it got windy really fast.  I went outside to make sure things weren't blowing away and heard something loud fall on our metal carport.  Within seconds, this is what was falling, golf ball size hail.  It was crazy.

 I told Jakob to grab a quarter, but he couldn't find one, so the nickle with have to give you an idea of the size.

 Here's some weird shaped ones that came down.  The one on the left looked like a donut and the one on the right looked like brains.

 We finally got a golf ball so that you could see the size difference.  This was after it had started to rain as well, so they were starting to melt.