So much for blogging once a week

How long can I use the excuse of our move?  Okay, this is the last time (probably).

 These pictures are of my kids making me a mother's day gift at Lowe's.  I took them, but still acted surprised on Mother's day!  My husband was working, there was no other option!  I love programs like this one at Lowe's....I think they call theirs Build and Grow.  I love them because it allows my kids to make some cool stuff in a controlled environment - and other than whatever you impulse purchase at the hardware store while you are there, it is totally free.  This day I purchased a picture for my wall for $29.99 and some ant poison.

 My neice danced at her second recital this year and it is in Strasbourg at the hall, so there is lots of room to run around there...the cousins raced, cartwheeled, ran for fun, etc...it was fun to watch...so fun that my sister showed off her mad cartwheeling skills too - and when her husband challenged her about it she even did some cheerleading for us!  I so love her, she is so much fun!

 We had a family BBQ for Mother's day at the park here - it is a huge park, with lots of picnic areas.  It was really fun.  A different sister (above) suggested it and then we even had inlaws as well - super fun, did you know that I am all about the potluck??

Okay, this next set of pictures deserves a pre-description... I found this awesome post on Pinterest - actually the coolest thing I have found on Pinterest so far (which is not saying much I never go on there) anyway...I found a link to this blog post and so we decided to try it out ourselves!
We took an ordinary bar of ivory soap

 and put it in our ordinary microwave

we all gathered around to see (you can even see my reflection in the door taking the picture)

 and what do you know, the soap starts to gently erupt into these puffy clouds!!!  It was the coolest thing I have done with my microwave since the first time I made microwave popcorn!  When we took the soap cloud out we discovered that there was still a little bit of the soap that hadn't expanded - so just to see what would happen we put that little bar back in and sure enough, it made a second cloud!!!

It was very cool, and not even a little messy!

 Although it was very flaky, so if you handled it too roughly, little soap flakes did fall off, but you just had to be careful!  I can't wait to do it again in our new microwave,  just to see if a turntable makes a difference!

Anyway, that is a few more pictures of things we did in May....