The phenomenal inner workings of the female form...

I ran into Jordan's blog the other day and it couldn't have described my feelings last Saturday more perfectly,

"If I have a midlife crisis now...that means...this is the middle of my life?Which means I will die at age 60ish, which means...way too much. So I'll holdoff and chalk this one up to the phenomenal inner workings of the female form for which I have no owner's manual. Figuring it out here. Looking for my still in the spinning."

************************************************

Calmed horror was my mood while I took my lovely daughter, dressed down to pull-up only, home to cry for 45 yes 45 minutes until she realized that I was not going to give in and let her play dress up as Snow White at her friend's birthday party. Needless to say, she missed most of the party but she did finally calm down enough to go have ice cream and play for a few minutes. oh joy.

I didn't think to take a picture of this moment, but for your enjoyment (or for future blackmailing purposes) above is yet another one of her fits over clothes!!! What am I to expect if this is happening at age 2????

ah--her "normal" happy self...

Funny

This is Jonas doing what he does best--making the kids laugh! They were cracking up as he threw them both over his shoulders on the way home from t-ball practice. That is, until I decided to take a picture of the scene.

This is Jasmine saying it's not going to happen:

And this is the forced re-creation:

funny

My friend Leah

I got a real treat last Monday morning. My friend Leah called and said that she was was coming into town with the kids to visit us!
I have this friend Leah that is so great, we met in Logan and now she lives about 5 hours away and I miss her. We had such fun 2 days of catching up, hanging out, watching movies (rent Date with Drew, it's hilarious) and eating yummy foods. We went to the rec center and swam and the kids had a blast playing together. Wednesday the weather was finally nice and we got to go play at the park. We have boys the same age and girls the same age, how perfect is that?

I hate to see them go each time.

Easter Sunday

My appreciation for Easter has grown in spades since last year.
We had such a great weeklong celebration leading up to a very spiritual, calm and reverent day. First of all I woke up and headed downstairs to my little office to work at 4am and was so bothered by the fact that it was raining! How gloomy, not the weather that I pictured for the perfect Easter Sunday. And then, as if right on Q, when I finished working at 8am, it was the wonderful after the rain sunny-ness, the earth smelling fresh and renewed. Perfection!
We had church services in the morning, then the family came over later for dinner at our house. It was very pleasant and good company. I had resolved to have nothing to do with the Easter Bunny on Sunday, however I had forgotten that for the past few years the cousins have had a tradition where they create an egg hunt with for the little kids with the eggs that they got the day before. How nice is that?

So I couldn't tell them no, and the kids had fun of course.

For dessert we had the Easter Story cookies that we made the night before, they were really yummy and then the kids all helped make "resurrection rolls" which were very delicious and easy too. It really was a great day!

Fishing with Faith

I had no idea the kind of passion Shayden had about catching a fish last Saturday. I mean, on the way up to the lake he was asking me questions about eating fish, like is it healthy, but little did I know his determination to bring one home. So we are casually hanging out have a great time when I let him know that it is time to go right? To which he exclaimes his objection. Well, this is really not out of character for him, so I was about to assert my authority and make him leave at

that moment regardless of his dislike, however, one of the nice moms that was there said to him "do you want to just cast out your net one more time?" (he had resorted to fishing with a net at that time). So of course I had to go along. But suddenly Shay was walking the opposite direction into the open field and the nice lady turned to me and said that he had told her that he needed to pray about it first. So my heart filled with pride as I turned to see my son kneeling out in the open green with his head in his lap offering a prayer that he would catch a fish.

It was in that moment that I (along with all the other adults present) resolved to help him catch a fish in any way that we knew how. He took off running toward the canoe where he had seen a few trout jumping, and told the guy on the canoe (Casey) emphatically that he had to get on that boat. After hurredly putting on a lifejacket at the insistance of Casey, they were off! Circling and circling the lake, you could see the determination in Shayden's eyes as he tried so dilligently to hold the net in just the right way.

Meanwhile the rest of us on the dock cheering him, eyes pealed, waiting in anticipation if his Faith would be rewarded. If we could have willed it, a fish would have miraculously jumped into his net. But alas, and much to our dismay, this did not happen. I was surprised, he actually took it quite well. He just walked away head hanging, obviously dissapointed. I was then left with the task I dreaded--teaching the lesson of seemingly unanswered prayers. I had to tell him that prayers don't always get answered the way we like and that doesn't mean they are not heard. I told him about times when that has happened to me. So it turned out to be a good life lesson for both of us and definitely a story worth telling! What a sweet boy I have!

Our Spring Day Celebration 2007!

We celebrated the arrival of Spring on Saturday. We have our Easter Bunny festivities on Saturday instead of Sunday to leave the more reverant observance of the holiday for Easter Sunday.
I debated whether to to cut out the Easter Bunny altogether, I'm not sure how I feel about him. But alas, I decided that he can have a place in our celebrations, with a little tweeking.
The kids were presented their egg hunt baskets filled with a few things that I have been collecting over the past few weeks, little things, these were from us, their parents, imagine that? And on the way out the door they found these little plastic eggs with their names on them filled with goodies--these were left by the Bunny. The kids loved this although it was bad placement by the bunny himself because unsuspecting Shayden stepped right on his plastic egg and cracked it! Whoops!
Then were were off to the first egg hunt. We opted to try the Barnes and Noble variety, a bit of a dissapointment though but they did get a few cute Easter Bunny stories read to them.
We made a quick stop to play with the cousins in Kaysville on the way to our meet our friends (a mission companion of Jonas' and his family).
Then the real treat was an egg hunt on the our friend's parents beautiful property in Mountain Green, UT. Wow, I am always in awe when we go there, it is so peaceful and serene, it feels so heavenly. They raise trout and have created this man made lake. The kids searched for eggs all along this beautiful scene of greenery, it was awesome.
The kids took turns out on the lake in the canoe, which they always love.

Shayden even got to fish, more on that to follow...
It was really a fun day altogether and we had just enough energy when we got home to do our

little Easter devotional and make our Easter story cookies, see more on our Easter Week under Easter/Spring Day in the links to the right.

TGI...Spring Break!

I have been away from my beloved online journal for 4 days and I have so much to say!!! I left you at the start of our spring break, it was short, only a 5 day weekend, kind of a rip off in my estimation, especially considering I work all day Thursdays so that didn't count, although I will allow that they can have and did have just as much fun if not more with their dad.

On Friday however, S woke up and kept asking me what we were going to do for fun? What kind of question is that? As if we don't have fun everyday for heaven's sake! Nevertheless, his cute little longing face inspired me to forgo the usual housework and head for the hills, well not really although it was a beautiful spring day, but to the Children's Museum! What a great place for a kid to be! We made a quick stop at the library's story time and then our good friends treated us to the museum on their membership and we were there for 4, count them, 4 hours!!! But they were not ardeous hours, they were fun hours, that went by quicker than expected. Sooo much pretend play there, which is my favorite kind...here you will find some of my favorite pics...

Egg-cellent!

We got together with a good friend of the family and her son and decorated eggs on Wednesday night. It was really fun, we experimented with a couple of different

methods and just used food coloring and vinager for the dye. Next year I am going to rub the eggs with vinager first though, to see if that helps make them more vibrant.

We tried to crush the egg shells and then paint glue on the eggs to get them to stick, but it was not really happening,

My favorite ones were the initial ones, they are so cool I thought.

This got me so excited for the Egg hunts this Saturday!

More about our Spiritual Easter Celebration later...

April Fools!

So much to my dismay, it seemed that all my pranks were going to backfire on me. DH didn't wear the right shoes, S picked up the quarter that I had "glued" on the sidewalk with ease, etc. But alas, at the end of the night I finally got DH when he was innocently trying to type a letter in Word and couldn't figure out why it popped up April Fools! every time he would type "and". Hee hee. Equally funny was when he went to brush he teeth before bed and out of the toothpaste tube came what looked like a bug (or worse) which was really just a piece of raisen. So in the end I did get a laugh.

Oh, and the kids enjoyed the fake "sunnyside up eggs" that I made for them, (just apricots on top of whipped cream) pictured below...

Oh Hilary Weeks!!!

So the main reason I wanted to go to Ladies Night at the Downtown Deseret Book is to see a concert by Hilary Weeks. I love, love, LOVE her music and have several of her cd's! But I have never seen her perform so this was a real treat. I got to see her personality and she see her sense of humor. She was great, and at the end was the best of all, she sang All My Days and she told the story behind it about a little girl named Jasmine with leukemia. She sang it at her funeral. And since that song always makes me cry, you can imagine what I was doing last night!!!! Sooo amazing!!!!

Saturday Fun 3.31.07

We had so much fun today. We watched the morning session of conference at home and then we headed to Fat Cat's Bowling with my work (Early Head Start) and the kids had a blast! Shayden was really quite good, especially for our team of amatuer bowlers, with his score of 87 he earned 2nd place on our team of adults and kids! I earned 4th place with my score of 84, hee hee.

In my defense, I shared my turn with Jasmine so I may have won if not for that. Ha! Probably not :)

We then hurried off to run some errands one of which was to the mall which happened to be by the Easter Bunny. Luckily, now that I am trying to "document" my life, I just so happened to have my trusty camara with me and was able to snap a shot of the kids with the cute bunny (much cuter than last week!) without having to buy a pricey package, not that I would have anyway.

After that a quick trip to Super Walmart (well, as quick as possible in that maze) afterwhich we picked up my mom and hopped on the trax system, Salt Lake's light rail system and headed Downtown for ladies night during Priesthood session. The Brown girls (and boy) met us there. We had so much fun!