the Month of Forest

March is definitely Forest's month. It includes his birthday, NCAA March Madness, and availability of Cadbury Creme Eggs in most stores. If I had my act together, I'd bake him an apple pie for 

Pi Day every year to add even more special-ness to his month, but at least we made green pancakes for St. Patrick's Day. Making "yummy delicious" pancakes (of any color) is one of Forest's many talents.

The girls of the house greatly enjoyed celebrating his 34th birthday. He came home from work for lunch, presents, and cake.

 

 

 

 

In the evening I got Forest all to myself--a sitter came over to watch the kids while we picked out some manly shoes for him and went to a restaurant for dinner. The birthday boy scored us a free chocolate souffle for dessert.

I hope he had fun celebrating another year. 

St. Patrick's Day came next in our Month of Forest festivities. We are not very Irish and generally don't give too much thought to this holiday, but this year Ramona was so excited about leprechauns, rainbows, gold, and the color green, I put just a little effort into the green part. And I dug up a rainbow-y onesie for Paula.

Green pancakes for lunch, green clam chowder for dinner.

Green angel food cake with green whipping cream for dessert.

This week it was time to tackle our brackets for March Madness. Lately Ramona has a hard time with anything that involves decision-making, so she got a little overwhelmed by all of the choices at first. But eventually she got into a groove and made her picks.

Her champion: The somewhat obscure NCCU Eagles.

Mika seemed a lot less stressed about filling out her bracket. I think she enjoyed sorting through all of the team logos.

For a while it looked as though she was going to choose Oregon (Donald Duck) or Florida (Gator = fire-breathing dragon) for her champion, but in the end she opted for the Massachusetts Minutemen. Naturally, they would beat the ducks and the dragons, because they have "shooters" (guns). I love two-year-old logic.

This year marked Paula's very first bracket. We have never filled out a bracket for a child this age, so in the beginning we weren't certain what method to use for determining her picks. With Ramona in utero, we pressed on my belly and felt for kicks. When Mika was six months old, she was old enough to reach out and grab cards with her preferred team logos. For our barely-toddler-aged girls, we used bribery and set snacks on the cards to help designate chosen winners.

Paula missed out on an in utero bracket, and she is still too little to intentionally grab cards, much less snatch food off of them, either. So we decided to watch her eye and head movement for cues to complete her bracket.

 

It ended up working quite well--most of the time she would turn to focus on one logo before the other with two cards held up in front of her.

After two sessions of eye-movement picks, she made her final decision: UNC is her chosen champion.

Because of all the effort expended on filling out brackets for our daughters, Forest only spent about five minutes on his own bracket. And I didn't even bother. But we had fun keeping up our family tradition for this time of year--all a part of celebrating the Month of Forest.