Catch-up

I haven’t written anything since last year, so I thought I’d try to play catch-up and do an update. This may be a super long post as I have pictures and such to do. I guess what I’ll do is post the most recent first and go from there.

The thing that I’m most excited about is our family pictures. I had a friend take them for us and they turned out pretty good considering we have four kids three of which are still pretty little.

Here are some of my favorites:

There are just so many cute pictures of the kids it’s hard to choose.

I mean who can resist these?

Okay so we had a few problems with the grumpies, but it just reflects their personalities right? They got to play on the tractor and that seemed to help too.

And it just wouldn’t be Cassandra if we didn’t get some with the thumb in the mouth. =)

Okay so I have lots of favorites I just couldn’t pick. =)

A big thanks to Melinda for taking the pics and my mission comp Paula who suggested using windows live writer which has made posting them so much easier!

Catch-up #2

All right hopefully I can finish this up today so that I can get it posted. Here is our Easter weekend. We had a wonderful time visiting with family. Josh (a.k.a. Unkie Jots) and my SIL Nicole and her kids were able to come and visit. Josh to see our cousin Chelsea get married and Nicole to visit her family down here. It was a very full weekend. Friday we went to the zoo with all 8 of the kids.

I think we all had fun. The kids I think just loved being together. They were able to have some good cousin time between the sleepover at our house the night before and the zoo the next day.

Saturday evening Dwayne and I dropped off the kids at his parents got to go to my cousin Chelsea’s wedding. It was a beautiful wedding. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera, but my cousin Chase’s wife, Lauren, took some pictures. If you’d like to see them click here. It was a wonderful wedding and we were able to stop in for a short time at the reception before picking up some ice cream at cold stone on our way to pick up the kids. It was nice to get out and away from the kids for a bit and spend some time with my hubby.

Sunday the kids woke up to Easter baskets from the Easter bunny and went on an egg hunt in the back yard. I got a wonderful idea from a family in my mission to put the Easter story into a dozen eggs. Each egg holds a verse from the Easter story and an item to represent the verse. As the kids open the eggs in order we get to read the Easter story. I think this is a wonderful way to balance between the fun of the Easter bunny and the real reason we celebrate Easter.

Then later that afternoon we went to Dwayne’s parents for another Easter egg hunt and a wonderful Easter dinner.

Catch-up #3

Boy there are a lot of things I wanted to blog about I apologize for the randomness. Here is a picture from the afore mentioned sleepover. (We let all the big kids sleep out on an air mattress together. This was after the movie was over and they were all passed out.) Believe it or not they all slept through the night!

Here is just a funny thing. Cassandra started to jabber. So Dwayne and I are having a contest to see if she says mama or dada first. The older two both said dada first, but Nathan gave me hope by saying mama first. So she was jabbering away one night and Dwayne was saying that for sure she was saying dada to him, but I don’t think so I think she was just jabbering. What do you think?

We decided to plant a garden this year, and Dwayne’s mom suggested we do it at their place. So, back in February we went over an helped make, fill, and plant three square foot garden boxes like this one. I’ve been reading a lot about how simple these are to make and maintain and wanted to try it out. We’ll see how well it goes this year. If it works out good I think we’ll do something similar (we’ll have to be creative as our yard isn’t as big) next year at our house.

Continuing on with February, for Presidents day we went on a little hike and started a new adventure called letterboxing. This was an idea I got from reading one of my frugal blogs I keep up on and was a suggestion for a free activity to do. We went to Thunderbird park and with my SIL Renee and her kids and my MIL Jan. We were lucky and Jan was able to find one of the three boxes. So we were able to get the first stamp in our book and put our stamp in someone else’s log book. It was very exciting.

Oh I had to add in here what Rebekah did for Valentine’s day. I had made the beds and Dwayne had to go somewhere that morning and when I went in a little later I found this on our pillows… In case you can’t tell she gave us each a valentine made out especially to each of us and she even got them on the right sides of the bed. How cute is that?

A friend had given me a couple of steaks as a thank you for something I had done for her so we had a wonderful steak and sautéed asparagus along with sparkling cider saved from New Years for our Valentine’s dinner after the kids went to bed. It was kind of late but was so nice to be able to sit down and enjoy a nice meal together.

Okay I think this is the last thing. Here is a video from Christmas. I think this is hilarious. My brother Josh and another one of my brothers Jerris and his wife Jill got together and got Rebekah a Wii for Christmas. I wrapped up the game and a separate controller that came with it and then had her open them one at a time saving the actual Wii for the last. Her friend Abby has a Wii so Rebekah has been asking for one too. Well, as she was opening the presents she would see something on it that said Wii so she’d start yelling, “I got a Wii, I got a Wii!” and then we’d tell her that no, it wasn’t a Wii it was just the game or the controller to which she would reply, “What am I going to do with these.” She thought and thought and thought about it and decided she’d just have to use them at Abby’s house. So here is the video after all the presents had been opened we finally let her open this last one and here’s what happened. This is for you Josh, Jerris, and Jill!