Nat said she wanted to go to the beach today and since it was a nice warm day, we decided to go. She picked Natural Bridges State Beach which is near Santa Cruz. It was a really nice beach. The water was really cold but the kids still had fun playing.

Tyler has David’s smile

The science fair was tonight at school. Both kids opted to build toothpick towers as their project. Other options were a toothpick bridge, catapult, or research project. For the toothpick tower, the contest was to see how many books you can stack on top before the tower breaks. Natalie tied for 1st place with 49 books!! And Tyler got 37 books! Not sure where he ranked on the list, but I’m pretty sure he was the top 6th grader. The top 4 winners were all girls and all in 8th grade. 2nd place was 44 books, and 3rd place was 43 books. David and I are really proud of both of them!

Nat’s middle school volleyball season came and went! It was only a month long. She made the varsity A team this year. To my surprise, she was the tallest girl on her team. They didn’t make it to playoffs this year, but came very close.

Yesterday, while shopping for groceries, Tyler asked if he could buy a small watermelon to make watermelon jello. It was something he learned in cooking class at school. A small watermelon cost $3.99! But I didn’t want to say no since he wanted to make something, which is rare. When we got home, he started on his project, but soon got his sister to help him because he got really impatient and messy.

The watermelon jello came out really nice and pretty

It wasn’t sweet enough, even though they added some sugar. Next time, he’ll try using strawberry jello so it still looks like a watermelon

The weather has been warm the past few days and we started to notice algae growing in the pool so David decided to clean it yesterday since it was Easter Sunday and pretty much everything was closed. I told him to have Tyler help him – this would get him off his video games for a while at least. He asked Tyler to sweep the leaves in the pool.

Here they are together with their matching sun hats

This is really “everyday life with Dad”.

I was recently looking at the pictures in David’s phone to get some of Nat’s volleyball pictures. I found these two (funny) pictures in there.

Hat’s anyone?
This one was taken at Macy’s. Nat and I were shopping separately and Tyler and David decided to do this.

Super large green onions at Mitsuwa