Magic

A few months ago, Edie put some small toys in a cup, tapped a stick on it, pulled them back out, and said, "ta da!" Tamsen got a video of it and sent it to my mom, thinking it was cute. We didn't know it at the time, but it started a parade of magic trick videos going back and forth.

My parents have been having a great time recording silly magic tricks and sending them to us for the kids to watch. Here's an example of one they called "Magic Marty."

Marty really likes this one. Edie likes it okay, but since she doesn't appear in this one, she usually skips over it in favor of something that features her a little more prominently, like this one.

She adores this one, enough so that a few days ago, she assembled a few cups (or things she was calling cups, anyway), lined them up on the floor, and did her best to reproduce the video. I sent that to my parents, which triggered another avalanche of magic videos. Here's a video of Edie watching one of them.

You may be wondering where Marty is in all of this. Fear not! The boy is still around, cramming as much in his mouth as he possibly can. It's a lot!

Back yard

This last weekend our internet went out, forcing us to enjoy each other's company and explore entertainment options other than watching Peppa Pig videos. Tamsen had recently picked up some bocce balls at a moving sale, and since Edie had seen them in the garage and was literally unable to stop talking about them, we got them out and gave them a try.

Edie had, well, a ball.

We explained the rules of the game to her, and that was all good and well, but she really just wanted to throw the balls around and declare herself the winner, no matter where her balls landed. She was probably playing a different game than we were.

She did her best to play with Marty, too. She's an explainer, just like her dad, so she relished getting to tell Marty how to play the game and how to throw his balls.

But if Edie was playing a different game than the rest of us, Marty was even a step further removed. He just wanted to waddle around the yard carrying his balls. He did a good job of it, too!

After a while of that, he put them down and started wandering around the yard in search of other things to play with. He found the statue of the Virgin Mary that the previous owners of our house left behind and did his best to make friends.

After that, he tried to ride Edie's tricycle down the porch stairs until Tamsen stopped him and let him wander around the yard.

His legs are too short to really do anything with the pedals, but he's not really that bothered around "riding" the tricycle. He just wants to sit on it, scoot around, and maybe stick the handlebars in his mouth. You know, regular stuff.

A few days earlier, Edie got a kite from Amazon that she had been begging for, and since the wind had picked up a little, we went outside to test it out. We have a lot of tall trees surrounding the yard, so it was tricky getting the kite to stay up until we could get it up over the trees, at which point it was ready to fly to the moon.

It was Edie's first time really properly flying a kite, and she was hooked.

Let me tell you, that kite was high.

Lucky for her, I really like to fly kites, too, so I'm sure we'll have plenty more chances to test it out over the summer.

Spending this much time in the back yard made us stop and think what it is that we spend so much time doing when we have the internet up. Is it really worth watching one more video or spending a few more minutes aimlessly browsing Twitter when we could be creating memories like this? Yes, of course it's worth it. YouTube isn't going to watch itself, people.

March

Many of you have already seen this video, but Sam is in a blogging lull, so I thought I'd post it on here. I started using an app called Leap Second, which prompts you to select a one-second video clip every day. I cheat egregiously and use as many clips as I want per day, resulting in a video three times longer than it should be. Anyway, here's the month of March, which started off with three of us being sick, and ended with us watching General Conference.