Easter 2011

He gets it, he so totally gets it.

Lion Video

The Lion Video.  A note, it's about 9 minutes long.

The storyline - a peacock living in the forest decides she is the "Lord of the Jungle" and starts ordering all the other birds to make her bizarre and difficult things to eat.  The final order is tapioca pudding and while the birds scurry off to fulfill that task they wake the true Lord of the Jungle, the Lion, who declares he doesn't like tapioca pudding.

How Our Grass Ate Our Weekends

So we all know it's spring, and that means that the grass is getting green, flowers are blooming, bees are buzzing.  Hmmm.  Mostly.

Around here we had an exceptionally dry winter.  The mountains got glorious snow, but Denver was dry, dry, dry.  I did strange things like drag out the sprinkler in January and February so I could water our trees and grass.  Not so they would grow but so they wouldn't die.

Hmmm.

Yay spring!  We learned from last year and start our heavy lifting projects early, before it gets hot.  Travis hauled some more rocks, we made some new flower beds, had our trees trimmed, and straightened a fence that was leaning precariously.  All the while waiting for our grass to get green.

The spot of grass you see here (plus Travis finishing up fence repairs after finally getting it vertical again) is pretty much the only green in the yard.  The rest of our back yard has been ravaged by rabbits and the front yard ravaged by mites and fungus.  You can see the greenbelt area beyond our neighbors fence, it's got a lot of winter damage, too.  We've spent so many weekends first working on then battling with the grass only to watch it get worse and worse.  ARGH!

Last week I decided to take serious action and set up an appointment with our county extension agent.  He came today and I got professional, unbiased help and learned exactly what was wrong with our yard. I am now armed with great and EASY information on how to fix the yard, just in time for our potential snow this weekend.

The Lion Speaks Tonight

The play was a huge success.  FFM played "The Lord of the Jungle," aka a lion.  I whipped up a headband for him out of yarn scraps, we found a hand-me-down sweatshirt that was a couple sizes too big but JUST the right color in his closet, and since part of his part was to swing a tail we repurposed a dress-up trunk monkey tail (brown and curly) for the lion tail.  (A sidenote, I was very surprised at how opinionated FFM was on the specifics of his costume, some things I suggested were definitely NOT OK.)  I'm biased, but it was totally adorable.

His part was tricky, the lion had to nap for the first half of the play.  Most of the kids wandered around the 'stage' but FFM stayed put in his spot, curled up fast 'asleep' until his cue.  Since the class was only a month long none of the kids memorized any parts, they just repeated the lines that the teacher read out loud.  It kept the performance moving along and the kids got to actually say 'lines' instead of just make animal noises.

I took a movie but it's a bit long to upload to YouTube so I'll hunt for some editing software to cut a smidge out.

Debut

FFM is taking a new class titled "Acting and Art."  This class entails acting out parts in a children's book and creating costumes and scenery to go with it.  The final class = an onstage production!  This week he came home with the invitation.

Our outgoing, scene stealing, not afraid of standing up on stage kiddo is really enjoying this class.  He's been pretty mum about the big production, though, only telling me that there is a peacock involved and that he needs a "King of the Jungle" costume that's a "lion with a BIG BIG shaggy mane!" Or a dragon.  But then he tells me the dragon needs to look like a lion with a big shaggy mane...