Christ is risen!
These baskets full of candy will soon be full of eggs.
Why shouldn't we have Easter trees too?
Mama's decorations are beautiful!
Jack explores his candy basket and gets ready to hunt.
Yes, the back deck is fair game too!
But one egg fell off the deck and was quickly recovered... by Frisky! The dogs enjoyed their Easter too!
Happy Easter to all!
HE IS RISEN!!!!
Happy Easter! He is Risen!
According to tradition, we dyed Easter eggs Saturday night.
Lovely!
As I (Abby) said in an earlier post, this year's Spring Break Project is to build a tree house in the back yard woods. 
This is the wood that we got from the Harper's farm.
Jesse and Daddy select and cut it.
Then they fixed the four main boards to the tree.
A few more boards and we have a scaffolding.
Where Jesse surveys his kingdom.
Ooo! An artsy shot!
And now they have added more structural support from below.
Another artsy shot!
And we have a complete platform and ladder!
Now we just have to add walls and a roof! (Easier said than done, of course.)
AND NOW: a few random pictures from the week!
This is a cool picture of a Carpenter bee. Jack found it buzzing around on our deck, a popular place for the bees to burrow their nests in the wood.
And Frisky trying on a cool pair of shades!
Tex is here!
Tuesday we visited Uncle Mark down in Troy AL. Uncle Mark flies and supervises the care of trucking magnate Wiley Sander's airplane collection. We visited to see the WWII aircraft, and Uncle Mark generously gave us more than half his day to show us the planes.
This is Nathan standing underneath about eight bombs, which are ready to fall from the airplane!
This picture shows the size of some of these planes.
This is an airplane that was used back in the sixties, but it was not in the air force. It was used to transport celebrities and rich people searching for gold in the west.
Luxurious for its time.
Uncle Mark shows us the cockpit.
The passenger area includes a map of the entire US that folds out like a table. It shows many of the common airplane routes across the nation, but was only used as an amusement for the passengers; the pilots would use far smaller and more detailed maps of certain areas.
Jesse and Jack get ready to take off!
A dizzying panel of instruments.
We were amazed by how many NO SMOKING signs we saw inside the airplanes. It seems now as though that would go without saying.
Nathan salutes from the cockpit...
Of a big plane!
How many boys can fit in one cockpit?
Uncle Mark shows Nathan another cockpit.
Sam and Christopher.
Now this is a spacious interior!
This is a truly luxurious area, complete with fold-out tables and a kitchenette. It's a big plane, but it only carries twelve passengers, making the interior comfortable and roomy.
This is a workshop/break room for the men who work on these planes.
THANK YOU, UNCLE MARK!!!!
Monday was the first day of Spring break for the Kawell household! Since Daddy is a professor, he gets Spring break off too, so (ah, the freedom of home-schooling) we take the same week off that he does.
The big Spring Break Project this year is the building of a tree house in the back yard. The tree was selected and the boys decided to build it off the pattern in The Dangerous Book for Boys (an incredible book by the way). Our good friends the Harpers, who have been renovating an old farm house and the fields around it, offered to do a trade. They would give us all the wood we could carry if we would come help them out on a few projects around the farm. It was a fun day! The biggest job was the burning of a huge pile of old wood in the middle of one of the fields.
Now this is a huge pile. Literally whole trees were stacked on top of each other waiting for the match!
It was quite a fire!
As you can see from this picture, the pile was truly out in the middle of a field surrounded by green grass and not much else. But when you're burning such old, dry wood the heat gets pretty intense and we had our job cut out to keep it contained when a flaming piece of wood flew out and sparked a fire near an old oak. Thankfully, a pond was nearby and after a lot of yelling and stamping we put it out. Fire is a terrifyingly powerful force!
The charred logs look like a heap of old bones.
After spending most of the day, we piled a trailer full of boards from the farm's old sheds and drove home pretty well tired out!
Well, the Kawell clan just experienced our second broken bone. Jack broke his arm playing basketball a couple years ago, and now it's Nathan's turn. Wednesday, at a friend's house, he... um... fell and broke his arm. Only readers who know boys will understand how it happened. The twins and Nathan were clowning around outside when someone had the idea that Jack could tie Christopher and Nathan up together, back to back. The idea worked flawlessly until they lost their balance and Nathan fell underneath his heavier older brother, effectively breaking both bones in his right arm. Mama rushed him off to the hospital while our sweet friends worked out a way to get the rest of us where we needed to be that afternoon. Nathan had to go under anesthesia to get it set, but he was awake and alert by that evening and came home from the hospital the next day.
It was a bad break. Both bones in his arm snapped and doctors were impressed by his courage.
The little invalid!
His room was gorgeous. Alabama is where all the great celebrities and sports stars come for broken bones, and the nurse told Nathan that he was next door to an NFL player! There was a separate room too, with couches and another flat-panel television!
The desk and television in the main room.
And this is the brave brother! Jack, being the only sibling to have broken a bone before, went along in the long ride to the hospital to support Nathan's arm and courage.
Nathan is doing very well now, this morning he says that he feels nearly no pain!
If you are up to it the next posting is of the x-ray.
The object at the top of the right hand photo is the doctor's hand holding Nathan's.
