April Showers Bring April Flowers

Tulips are my favorite flower because seeing their little green buds come up means winter is over! Mine take forever to open up and bloom and when they do I look at them multiple times a day. And because they don't last as long as I want, I took some pictures of my favorite ones.

 These are the blossoms on our crabapple tree. Pretty sure I'll plant one of these trees everywhere I live.

 It's Erica's favorite tree too. We get a little freaked out by tall the buzzing from the bees though.

Easter 2019

On Palm Sunday for Family Home Sunday, we made our own palm leaves.

In our study of the Book of Mormon this time around, we are finding all the different names of Christ so I had the kids write down their favorites on the leaves and we hung them in our doorway.

Easter Saturday we dyed eggs in basement of Justin's parents' house. They love doing this and I remember loving it as a kid too but 8 little hands and 10 cups of dye stress me out. They did great though and it helped that we were in an unfinished basement.

Easter morning I woke up super early to work on dessert and put their eggs in a bowl in the center of the table. One by one as they woke up, they pulled out their eggs and lined them up. I don't know when they took these photos but I found them on my phone later and it made me laugh.

After a deluxe waffle and strawberry breakfast they put on their new Easter church clothes.

It's hard finding dresses for Sarah that aren't too frilly or too short so I made her this knit skirt and bought her this top from Children's Place.

He's such a good smiler for pictures!

Henry picked out his shirt and tie this year. Usually he doesn't care.

I didn't realize they color coordinated so well until I took this picture. I didn't even try or put their clothes together.

After church we went to my parents' house to see a few of my siblings and their kids. This year was unusual because we didn't have any egg hunts on Saturday; both were on Sunday. Here are the seekers on my parents' front porch

 Henry's making a super dorky face in this one but James is so cute.

 And it was unusual for us to not hide eggs in the yard and garden. It poured all day so the grass was super soggy. We hid eggs inside and on the deck and rocks and luckily the weather held while the kids gathered candy.

 Gotta love 16-year-old cousins helping a baby.

 Then we drove a mile to Justin's parents' house for ham and funeral potatoes dinner and an egg hunt with baby Madison. She's excited.

Why is James's mouth already blue?

Needless to say the kids got an unhealthy amount of candy. Then we went inside for cake.

Here's how my cake turned out. It's a carrot cake of course!

And that's all. I love Easter.

Other April Things

I wanted a picture of Erica dressed so cute and retro for school and the boys jumped in too.

Henry often cleans out his backpack right before leaving for school so I find these cute things lying around. This is Super Taco.

After of series of fortunate events, I had a box of 20+ (free!) lemons. I juiced them all froze the juice one night. The boys love lemonade and thought that's what I was making so came to help.

I froze 9 cups of juice which is enough for 4 pies and 4 pitchers of lemonade.

I took all the kids in for a check-up at the dentist. Erica wore the hood on her jacket because it helped her feel brave.

The nice assistant could see that James really wanted a turn so she let him climb up too. He was so good! I thought she was just humoring him by counting his teeth but then she asked him what flavor of toothpaste he wanted and cleaned his teeth. The dentist even checked him over too.

None of my kids had a cavity so that was great news and the dentist was so impressed she asked me what I do to encourage such great brushing. "Oh they just have good teeth from their dad," I said which has got to be the truth because my kids don't brush every time I tell them to and they brush for like 10 seconds when they do--I didn't want to divulge that bit of information so it was awkward.

I wish Henry would get a cavity so maybe he'd actually brush more but now he just feels vindicated.

What do you do when you walk into Ream's and see strawberries for $7 a case? Buy 2 of course!

And spend the next 2 hours making jam. This recipe takes a different kind of pectin and uses waaaaaay less sugar and is delicious. It seems more like a fruit topping than jam. I made these 17 pints of jam with 25 cups (about 10 lbs) of strawberries but just 8 cups of sugar.

It's only April and my jam making is done for the year!

I went to Walmart early Saturday because I wanted to go by myself and before it got busy and I can't believe that's what my life has come to.

Seeing this glorious sunrise made me feel better about my decision.

After church Henry threw his shoe on the roof of the maintenance shed at church. I came out to this scene. Justin hoisted him up to retrieve it. It would be funny except he had thrown his shoe on our neighbor's roof a few days before. It's getting old.

On the way home I declared Dye Family Rule #459. If you throw your shoe on the roof of any structure, it stays up there and you have to use your own money or do jobs to pay for a new pair of shoes.

I finished listening to all 90 of President Packer's conference talks.

I listen to BYU devotionals and conference talks every morning while I exercise (30 minutes good for the body and soul) and sometime in January I decided to just listen to all of Pres. Packer's talks in order, starting from the beginning in 1971. He's my favorite because he's my birthday bud and he's a draw a line in the sand kind of guy and we need that. I was super sad when he died but since there are so many of his teachings I haven't read, it's like he's still alive each time I study something new (to me).

Here are my takeaways from his 90 talks.
1. He retells stories and reiterates his same points. Nearly every decade or so I heard the story about his son saying he's not a monkey or the one about the husband upset with the country doctor for infecting his wife and she dies, or spiritual alligators. I found this comforting. I like that there are parameters to an apostle's spiritual repertoire.
2. While his voice in his last few talks is so gravelly, I had to listen intently, his voice isn't gravelly at all until the 1908s.

3. After his talk finished, the app would play the next talk that followed that session. It was fun to hear voices I hadn't heard for awhile like Elders Haight and Maxwell and President Benson. And it was cool to hear voices I had never heard before like Pres. Kimball, Elders N. Eldon Tanner, and LeGrand Richards.

Who's next??? President Monson's 233 talks or President Hinckey's 232?

I tease my kids that not only is James going to be the tallest he may also be the smartest. He's the only one that did this puzzle at this age.

"Did anyone help him do this?" The rest of the kids were at the table and shook their heads. "He did all of this himself?!" After he finished, he happily flipped it over and did it again. I have it on video as proof but it's looooong.

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Who's ready for Easter candy? 🙋