Easter

We had a fun Easter morning at our house!

An Easter basket loaded with lots of treats from Poland.

Uncle Tom was already hard at work building a fence outside the dining room window while Tavish was discovering what the Easter Bunny brought.

I'm having a chocolate bunny for breakfast no matter what you say.

Tavish's first six pack of Kinder eggs.

Showing us the koparka (his other favorite Polish word) that the Easter Bunny brought. I like the funny expression on his face :)

And some Easter egg shaped beanbags that I made for him (at 11pm the night before of course)

And best of all...another jajko hunt!

We finished off the day at Grandpa Santa's house with all the East Coast family and lots of yummy food!

Circus

Randomly, last Friday, Tavish says to me while we are driving somewhere..."I wanna go on a date" (he must have heard us talking about our date the week before). Perfect I think to myself because the three of us are going to the circus tomorrow! So I tell him we are going to go on a date to the circus...the next morning comes and, of course, Tavish is excited in the morning for our date to go see elephants (his interpretation of the circus). He was excited all the way up until it was naptime/lunchtime/crowded all at the same time. But we still managed to have fun while wrestling the boy and we got to see elephants on our date!

Spring Fever

Curse the Marquardt genes!

This poor boy has the worst case of allergies...he's been on Zyrtec for a year now and not even that could save him. His face is swollen, he has red raccoon eyes, a rash that gives him the itchy-scratchies and nonstop snuffles that wake him and us up all night long...

Jajko Hunt

There are only a few Polish words that Tavish will consistently say without prompting and "jajko" (ya-yo) is one of them...jajko means egg in Polish. So when I told him we were going to hunt Easter eggs at his little church playgroup on Tuesday he got excited about the "jajko hunt". The fantastic mother that I am...I have no pictures because it was about to rain any minute so we were trying to beat the storm. But it was funny to watch Tavish compete with about 20 other kids, all much faster than him, to find the very obvious eggs in the grass. It took some prompting and pointing but Tavish found his first egg after all the other kids had about 5 or 6 each and when he found his hot pink egg (his favorite color) he was totally content and done looking. I had to take him to another area of the grounds to hunt for a few more eggs before the other kids found out there were more and swept them out from under his nose...his grand tally was 6 eggs but he was happy because they were filled with candy which he promptly discovered and ate. Afterwards the kids made some bunnies and ran around on a sugar high...

Here is Tavish hard at work on his bunny...

And here is the final product the "spider bunny"...notice his jelly bean nose has sunk in to the marshmellowness of the bunny, it had to be retrieved later and then eaten.

Date Night

Kennedy Center + Pink Martini = awesome date with the hubs last Friday night

Pink Martini is one of my most fave bands and thankfully Rafal has allowed me to brainwash him to that effect as well...he even impressed me by pulling out some of their lyrics in our conversation unprompted...just when I think he never listens! Anyway Pink Martini was playing with the National Symphony Orchestra this past weekend at the Kennedy Center and me being the awesome wife that I am scored us some tickets for a welcome back date...well any excuse to go really! But I am glad to have Rafal back :)

Nuseum

This is not a typo...this is Tavishese for museum. Specifically the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum out by Dulles Airport. Did you know there are TWO Smithsonian Air and Space Museums? Last Friday we took Uncle Tom to the Udvar-Hazy one. We had taken Tavish once before when he was about 18 months and didn't think he would remember it, but as we were driving up when he saw the building he shouted "airplanes!"...so I guess he did...

How would you like this coming at you when you walk in???

And then straight ahead is the Blackbird with the space shuttle Enterprise in the background...even Uncle Tom was impressed for a minute or two which is hard to do.

There are airplanes "up in the sky"...

...and "on the ground"

And on the way out Tavish got to give the stop sign a little hug (he has a small obsession with pointing out stop signs)...which I had to explain to some friends of ours that we happened to run into at that exact moment :)

We had fun (in between the screaming fits during which Uncle Tom would politely walk away...which is what I wanted to do but that would just make him scream more...Tavish that is, not Tom) and Tavish has been talking about the "nuseum" and the airplanes every day since...

Reunited

The last few days have been busy...Thursday night Tavish and I came home and found Uncle Tom in the back yard, all the way from Poland!


This is probably the first time Tavish has smiled in the past month and I'm sure the chocolate bar in his right hand and the red car in his left hand that Uncle Tom brought him might have a little something to do with it...Uncle Tom even made him a special shirt :)



This is pretty much how Tavish has been while Rafal has been away for his Air Force training...poor buddy can't even smile while he's swinging...




But that all changed on Saturday when Tavish woke up from his nap to find Daddy back home! He's all smiles now and Rafal has a little shadow that follows him everywhere!