Watson Family News

Back in May we set a cage to try and catch the raccoons under our deck.  I came home on afternoon and found — not a raccoon — but this!

Over spring break we all packed into our van and headed down to the wildlife safari. We met my parents there and spent a beautiful sunny morning driving around checking out the wildlife. The animals were pretty much the same ones you would see in a zoo, but it was so much cooler to see them wandering around in the wild — especially when they got close to the car. I’ll post a bunch of pictures in our photo album soon.

Update: Pictures are available at http://www.thewatsons.info/gallery/v/2006_safari.

This morning we were shocked to wake up to 4 inches of snow at our house. Evan’s school was cancelled and I stayed home from work. The other time it snowed this winter we waited too long to go outside and it had almost all melted. Today, as soon as we finished breakfast, we pulled on our winter snow clothes and went outside.

See more pictures in our photo gallery.

I’m 33 years old today. I did a Google search on the phrase “33 years old” and found a bunch of results, most of them not good. If anyone knows something interesting or special about being 33, please let me know.

Tonight I read Meet Diego! to Evan for his bedtime story. We noticed that there were an awful lot of excalmation marks, so after we finished reading, we went through the whole book and counted them. The final tally … 41!

Today was the science fair at Evan’s school. His project was an experiment to see if a Hot Wheels car would go farther with more weight on it. Sheryl and I both had fun working on it and Evan did a great job. He wrote out the Hypothesis, Procedures, and Conclusion sections all by hand and came up with what to say by himself with a little parental consultation. His final board looked really great, too, thanks to Sheryl’s scrapbooking eye. I’ll try to post pictures once they get uploaded to the computer.

Ever since Evan started Kindergarten, it seems, somebody in our family has been sick.  This past week Sheryl and I have been battling nasty coughs and Evan had a fever and missed two days of school.  Between being sick and the constant rain, it seems like we never get a chance to do stuff outside.  Today, though, Evan seems to be doing better and it’s a beautiful sunny day.  If the weather holds and we help Evan finish his science fair project soon enough, maybe today will be the day we break the trend.

Yesterday Evan, Davis and I met Sheryl’s dad at the car show at the convention center.  This year Evan and Davis both had fun climbing in and out of all the different cars.  Evan liked the back seat, but Davis wanted to drive.  I’m not sure what that says about their personalities.  We also collected all the different catalogs from each car company, which managed to mostly fill up a fairly large shopping bag.  Last night in bed Evan read through every single one of them.

I gave an update on Davis the other day, so I thought today I would give an update on Evan. His reading and writing skills have really taken off recently. He reached the tipping point a month or two back where he was able to read well enough to read a book on his own. Every night before he falls asleep he will read 3 or 4 books in bed. Some nights he even reads a story or two to Davis.

Davis has really started learning new words very quickly the last few weeks.  He can now name most of basic colors: blue, white, black, red, yellow, pink, orange and green.  Well, green doesn’t really sound anything like green, but whatever he calls it, he calls it the same thing consistently.