Horseback riding

The two girls have been doing horseback riding lessons since the fall.  They are enjoying it although Karina likes it a lot more because it involves animals and there is nothing she likes more than spending time with animals.

They ride for about an hour each and a friend of ours teaches them about form and posting and dressage.

Here is Karina walking her horse in a circle on the lead line.  

Meanwhile, Eliana is starting to get her horse ready.  The blanket needs to come off and the saddle needs to be put on.

Eliana is brushing her horses back.  I'm sure that feels good for the horse!

 They are learning various things that are done in a dressage because later on, they had a dressage competition.  This is where they have to learn a routine and get the horse to walk and trot in a certain pre-set pattern.  This is recorded and they are judged on how well they did.

Afterwards, Karina gets all the tack off of the horse she rode.

And gets him back in his stall.

Eliana's turn!

She also needs to learn the dressage routine.

Here are their dressage tests.  They get video recorded and then we sent in the video.  

They both did really well and came back with super high scores!

Happy Easter!

This year, Easter came with weird weather.  We had a really cool and wet spring, and also got snow right before Easter.  It smashed down all our tulips.  So strange!

In preparation for Easter, Karina started a baking frenzy!  She made chocolate cupcakes.  Even though she doesn't like chocolate, she makes them for other people to enjoy.  She also prepared whipped cream as a topping.

She also made gluten free pop tarts using almond flour.  Making the dough is pretty labor intensive. First she had to mix the dough in the mixer.  The mixer is super heavy though, and she isn't able to lift it onto the counter.

Then she rolled it out into a sheet.

Then cut them into rectangles.

The rectangles then each get raspberry jam filling and get another rectangle on top that needs to be sealed.

This is the kitchen when Karina is hard at work!

On Easter day, the kids woke up to a bunch of Easter baskets!  They were filled with candy, of course, and in Karina's case, also with Lays and Ruffles potato chips.

They also got these toys, which turned out to be a hit.  They are corrugated tubes made out of plastic that you can stretch out or scrunch back in.  Why is it always the cheap 99 cent toys that the kids play with the most?

Then came the annual indoor Easter egg hunt.

Each kid had about ten eggs hidden in "their" designated color.  Karina's was pink.

Here is Eliana casually looking for her eggs.  Maybe when you become a teenager the egg hunt becomes slightly less exciting.

Here is an egg cleverly camouflaged amongst the real chickens' eggs.

And each kid had an egg with an extra something....a $1 bill!

We then had Easter breakfast and then headed over to our friend's house for "church".  We are still gathering for church in friend's houses with just five or six families.

They have a huge backyard and over a hundred eggs were hidden.

The race is on to see who finds the most!

Some were pretty hard to find!

And as a special treat, the kids got Crumbl cookies as an Easter gift from Yeh-yeh and Nai-nai.  Yum!

That afternoon, the kids dyed a bunch of eggs.  Since our chickens only produce brown eggs, we went to the store to buy white eggs.

And here they are in all their glory.  Good job kids!