Not So Into The Green

Although green is by far my favorite color, I have never loved St Patrick's Day. It's sandwiched in there right between Valentine's, Asher's birthday and Easter. Just kind of inconvenient. My kids are lucky if they have clean green clothes to wear that day. My sweet sis-in-law, Julia, however, went the extra mile and made the girls fun shamrock clips to wear. Thanks Julia. Apparently I'm not Irish.

February Randomness

Just a couple random shots from February. We were eating lunch one day and looked out our kitchen window and saw a dozen deer in the field behind our house. Emma and Asher watched them for a very long time. It was fun to finally get a glimpse of them. We have hoof marks in our yard all the time, but rarely actually see the deer. Well, unless we almost hit them as they dart across the road. 

I forgot to include this at Christmas, but when I was a child we always did a puzzle during Christmas break and I wanted to continue this with my kids since they love puzzles so much. They really got into the Peanuts movies this year, so when I found this puzzle, I knew we had to get it. It took them a week or so, but they finished it and I just wanted documentation before I took it apart.  

Love Day

This year for Valentine's Day the girls got an American Girl outfit for their dolls and Asher got a movie. Since Valentine's Day also happened to fall on our weekly pancake(when I say pancake, I mean anything that's not cold cereal) breakfast day(Saturday), I made heart shaped french toast with strawberries. Our ward had a dinner and dance at the church that night which was a great free date. The food was delicious and we didn't do much dancing, but it sure was fun. 

Emma and her loot.

Abs

Clairey

Asher

Breakfast

I Love to see the Temple

We went to the Draper Temple open house back in February and the kids all thought it was pretty cool. Asher's favorite parts were the Maggie Moos(the baptismal font-we tried to explain where his name came from, but it was over his head) and the bid spartewy fings (the big sparkly things-chandeliers). The girls pretty much liked the whole thing. Sadly, the only picture I got was on the bus ride over there-which was also a highlight of the trip. It was too cold to stand outside and take pictures.

Prelude to a Valentine

I love that my kids have so many friends in our new neighborhood. There is always someone to play with and it reminds me of the neighborhood situation I had as a child. This particular day back in February, they wanted to make Valentine cookies with their friends and all it took was one phone call and they each had a friend. Thank you Brown's for having age coordinating kids.

Abbey and Emily-fuzzy picture for some reason.

Claire and Katie

Emma and Zach-this kid is hilarious and his shirt says it all.

Gym Recital

The girls had their last gym recital at Olympus at the end of January. It was complete chaos! We won't be doing that again. In fact, I'm moving them to a different gym in Utah County for convenience sake. We've liked Olympus just fine, but for the amount of money we pay each month, I don't feel they were getting the best instruction and progressing as fast as they could. Plus, when Paul is full time at BYU, he can pick them up on his way home. Hopefully this will be a good move.

Her Mother's Daughter

When I loaded the latest batch of pictures from my memory card to my computer I found about fifteen pictures that I didn't personally take. All consisted of the following genre. Abbey may not resemble me in any physical way but she is definitely my daughter!

Coming Together

When we moved into this house almost a year ago, we were very excited about the prospects of having a room devoted just to storage. Sadly, this is what happened and we found ourselves wondering where we stored it all before. 

First things first, we did epoxy on the floor ourselves. We got a quote from the guy at Home Depot for around 1200$ and it wasn't hard to determine we did not want to spend that much on a storage room floor, so we bought the DIY kit at the same place for 60$.

Paul bought lumbar from Burton Lumber and built the shelves himself after watching how our basement guy did the closet shelves.

Then we primed and painted them to match the walls. We now have two full walls of shelves and need to finish one more small wall where the metal shelves are and then we are done. We moved the metal ones into our cold storage which is a smaller room through the door that you can barely see in the first picture. That is where all the food and water storage is. Now I just need to go through all the bins and throw a bunch of stuff away before the baby is born.

Halfway Gift

I hit the halfway mark yesterday! I'm not sure if I should be excited or anxious-maybe a bit of both. I certainly am tired and haven't blogged much. I have a lot to catch up on. I have been working hard though. So hard, in fact, that I created this little guy. Just a trial run for the real thing. This guy is much smaller and pokier, but has still made me sick, uncomfortable and gets me up at night. But I don't have to feed it or change it's diaper, so that's a plus. I have had way too many of these though, and there's just not as much satisfaction in this as there is in the real thing. Welcome to the family anyway, little stone. You've now joined all the others that have come before you.