Evan's Spring Break

Evan has been off of school this week for spring break. Since the public schools were out last week, that is when the gym he usually attends had day camp. Thus, he has been stuck at home all week. It has not been a problem as he is very good at keeping busy.

Todd plays a game on Facebook called Farmville. It involves setting up a farm, planting different crops and then harvesting the crops for coins. Todd logged Evan into his account a couple of days ago and Evan has been very diligent in keeping the farm growing, montoring when it is time to harvest and generally keeping everything going. Impressive farming, Evan!

Evan had taken over Todd's Farmville game.

In addition to virtual farming, Evan has been having a lot of fun hoeing in all of the dirt that we have outside. He was so excited about wanting to plant something that Todd agreed to get some plants and help Evan do a "patio garden." Todd came home with a few things and he and Evan transplanted them into some larger plastic container. I think these will take longer to grow than the virtual ones.

Todd transplanting some tomatoes, jalepenos and cilantro.

Helping dad with real plants.

Today, Evan got a little bored and decided to dig into some of the materials that we have to use in science experiments. He found some food coloring and thought that it would be a great idea to have a green hand. The results are below:

Evan thinks that having a green hand is very cool!

The result after Evan tried to wash the food coloring off.

I helped him wash again and this is the best we could get it. I guess it will just have to wear off!

Deciding On a Name for a Blog

One of the first challenges that I had when starting this blog was coming up with a name and URL. Todd is very good at coming up with names, slogans, etc. Me…not so much. When we lived in Irving and Todd worked at a Spinner's Pizza store, they were looking for a name for a new product that they were launching that included two pizzas. Todd came up with the name "Twin Spin." The owners liked the name and it appeared on all of their advertising including their TV commercial. The jingle on the commercial had a rap beat. I remember some of it to this day:

Twin spin, twin spin, that's the word,
Spinner's is the best, or haven't you heard?

A couple of years ago I had to come up with a name for a small business that I was starting. I like names to mean something, so I reached into my memory bank to see what I could come up with. When I was growing up, my great grandparents had a home in a small community in south Texas known as Hackberry. We would have family reunions there every few years and it was always fun for me as a child to go there. Interestingly, we never had a reunion "in Hackberry," it was always "at Hackberry;" kind of like having an event "at the White House" or "at Buckingham Palace."

Considering all of the fond memories that I had of Hackberry, I decided to use that as part of my business name. I added the work "creek" to it because I liked the idea of flow that I associate with running water. Thus, Hackberry Creek was born. My whole family, including my boys, help out with the venture. We sell beads and jewlery making supplies and sell through our site on eBay and through our website.

Since so much of my life and the life of my family revolves around my business, I decided that I would like to use the name "hackberry" in the title of my blog. I used the url name finder at NameBoy, which is a pretty nifty tool. You can put one or two words in and the generator comes up with a list of available url's. These were some of my favorites:

Thehackberry.com
Hackberrytime.com
Hackberryzine.com
Hackberryzone.com
Hackberrywire.com
Hackberryworld.com

I finally decided on thehackberrylife.com. Hackberry for me has come to symbolize some of the things that I value most in life such as simplicity, fun, working together and family.