After the earthquake in Haiti, I showed pictures of the disaster to the kids, and we pitched in to help. I promised to match them 5-to-1, and bless their hearts, they coughed up $5 and $15 for the Red Cross!

Other reasons to be proud of my girls: Audrey wrote a one-page paper in Chinese, describing our New Year celebration at First Night Raleigh. And Sydney wrote her first computer program, a multiplication table using Python. Both of my little nerd girls got their own Twitter accounts.

I attended the "Triangle Mobile App All-Stars" in downtown Raleigh. It was a chance to learn from accomplished iphone app developers.

At the end of the month, we got some slushy snow. Little did we know, there'd me more to come!

Still recovering from the snow, we missed several days of school.

We celebrated Chinese New Year with the Raleigh Academy of Chinese Language (RACL) and their annual cultural show. Later, we celebrated with friends, the way we always do -- with FOOD!

Our Indian Princess tribe, the "Thunder and Lightning Bugs", were pretty active in February. In addition to our meeting (was it in an igloo instead of a teepee?), we had a "Polar Bear Swim" at the YMCA's pool (thankfully, the INDOOR pool). Finally, we all went to the Ringling Brothers Circus -- their theme song was "Do Not Try This At Home", with good reason!

This month's Linux User Group meeting was a doozie! Dr. Richard Hipp, the author of SQLite, visited us and talked about databases, how SQLite evolved, and also his new project, "fossil".

Just as the snow melted from a few weeks ago, we got another dose!

Our kids' school had their "not-so-spring" event (much earlier than normal). As usual, it was a fun night of activities and raffle drawings.

After writing and building and practicing for several months, Audrey's "Odyssey of the Mind" team was finally ready for competition. They had a practice performance at their school, and then the real deal later that weekend. Their problem was called "Nature Trail'r", and they built a wagon that Audrey pulled while some other kids rode it. Their skit was silly, as kids' skits will be, and they all had a pretty good time. The team did a good job (but they did not win an award, nor did they expect to).

Sydney and I cooked a meal for Momma, earning a feather for her Indian Princess vest. I thought the meal was too dry and too spicy, but Sydney says it was "goo-OOD!" That's two-syllable good!

The weather warmed up in March, and the whole world exploded with pollen... much more than usual. But if you could stand to be outside, we were treated to a special show of pink blossoms on the cherry trees.

We went to the NC Museum of Natural Sciences for "Reptile Day", where the girls discovered that snakes are cool. It's a good thing that Momma stayed home... she does NOT think that snakes are cool.

I spent one weekend hanging out with a bunch of questionable characters at "CarolinaCon", our very own hacker conference. As always, they struck just the right balance between being informative, uncouth, a little bit drunk, and just plain awesome.

Sydney and I finished off the month by hosting an afternoon of geocaching for our Indian Princess tribe. Attendance was low, but those who did show up had a great time, and they just might've gotten hooked on a new game! Only ONE of our loaner GPS's was destroyed in the process!

The girls were tracked out for the entire month, and the weather was beautiful. That's a perfect combination.

We started with a trip to Mimi & Pops's house for Easter. We visited with the grandmothers, and we had an Easter egg hunt.

We knew we wanted to take a trip somewhere, so we asked the girls where they wanted to go. Audrey suggested New York, because she's always heard about it, but she's never been closer than Newark Airport. So that's where we went!

We spent three non-stop days in the city, visiting all of the major sites: the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Natural History, and Rockefeller Center. We also met my cousin Allison for an insider's view at life and work in the city. We saw the Blue Man Group. And the girls' favorite part, we explored Central Park.

When we got home, I has just enough time to get our taxes done, and then it was time to escape again.

Sydney and I attended "Spring Outing" weekend with our Indian Princess tribe at YMCA Camp Seafarer. They kept us busy, with BB guns, archery, canoeing, a fossil dig, a 3-story treehouse, and a campfire with Elvis and fireworks. But the big kahuna event was the DOUBLE zip line, where dads and daughters zip down the wire until they splash into the frigid lake.

Seeing all of the kids on bikes at Spring Outing inspired me to finally take our bicycles down from the hooks on the garage ceiling... they had been hanging there for SEVEN YEARS. To my surprise, they were in pretty good shape. So we have been riding around the neighborhood and along our local greenway.

A personal acheivement: I made it through all of the lecture videos from the Stanford University iPhone programming course, CS193P.

The family spent one Sunday at "Maker Faire", a gathering of folks who like to make stuff: crafts, music, electronic gizmos, and sometimes just plain silliness. It was stimulus overload!

The kids discovered silly bandz, little rubber bands that come in hundreds of shapes, than can be stretched out and worn on the wrists.