Creepy

One morning I woke up at 5:23 to an odd crashing sound.


This was the culprit. He had just been standing on the counter to put that top one on. Two cups later, the whole thing collapsed (again, like the first one that woke me up.) 5 o'clock in the freakin' morning.

Farmer boy

Just a regular day in the life of Koen. Nothing unusual here.

Tea for three, please

This Poppy is the best. He happily endured this girl's two-hour tea party. She'll remember it forever. 

Baptism - aka "Can I get a whoop whoop!"

Caden has been so excited since the beginning of the year to get baptized! His baptism day was June 11, 2011 at 11 am (I SO wish it was in November, just to complete all those 11's :)). It was stressful getting to that font though!
See, what happened was Tessa had been having a horrible cough for a few weeks, and I had taken her in to the doctor and we decided she had allergies. But then Davin started coughing, and we figured allergies aren't contagious. One morning Dave woke me up and said he was researching online and thinks Davin may have whooping cough. I was like, no way, it sounds nothing like whooping cough. But he found a great site the dispelled some of the sterotypes of whooping cough, and after listening to the examples I agreed that it could be. Then later that evening Davin woke up from a nap and started wailing that his ear hurt. My parents were here that week in anticipation of the baptism so Dave and I both took Davin in to urgent care to get checked out. That was a pain in the rear, but finally we convinced the dr to order a whooping cough test, and took him to the hospital to have it done.
Next day, Dave got a call saying the test had come back positive (the rest of us were at the movies - uh, whoopsie). They were like, "We're going to have to report this to the county." We still didn't know a whole lot about whooping cough so he was pretty devastated by the news - it must be something really big and were our kids going to die? (Turned out to mostly be like a bad cold and it's really not that big of a deal, except mostly for infants. Also, you can't get it except to directly inhale the bacteria from air that has been coughed into - the bacteria can't survive outside the body.) Then the  county health department called and talked to Dave and gave him some more info, called in prescriptions for the whole family (I think Koen and I had started coughing by then, maybe Caden too), and got address details for our bishop so they could send him a letter warning him about our cooties. They said after 3-5 days on antibiotics, or after 3 weeks without them, we would not be contagious. Unfortunately, baptism day was on day 3.
What to do! Gummy and Poppy were here from Canada, specifically for the baptism, and leaving on Sunday. Plus, Caden had been counting on getting baptized and it would have been extremely difficult emotionally to put it off. There was a lot of discussion about who could come and whether we'd even be able to use the font or not (I was all for doing it in the lake, then). We finally decided to go ahead and do it on Saturday and just limit the people who could come (or whoever wanted to, at their discretion). It ended up being a wonderful time and a nice intimate group! Our family, both sets of grandparents, Uncle Sean and Aunt Tiffany (the troopers!), one bishopric member and his son Caden's age, the primary president and the couple in charge of baptisms were the only ones there. Almost everyone participated in some way (Tessa sang a song and was very sweet, just had to start over on the second verse when she was interrupted by a coughing spurt). Then we went to a park (because germs are less likely to be caught outdoors?) and had pizza and cake and it was a beautiful day!
We are so grateful for the brave souls who came and for all the wonderful friends and family who would have otherwise come! We felt very loved and supported at this special time.

 Nice Aunt Tiffany even did a photo shoot with her snazzy new camera. Thank you!

Real quick, here are some pictures of absolute patheticness :) It was really annoying because Tessa seemed to be almost better, but then when we gave her the antibiotic she backtracked and got really sick again. Talk about frustrating!

She kept coughing so hard that she was getting bloody noses - big gushers. She was also very hot when we took this photo. I could not resist the opportunity - she was the epitome of ill.

Lately

We've had a full and busy spring!

 We got a whole buncha chicks! 26 broiler chicks, 2 barred rocks, 1 buff orpington, and then ...

we incubated and hatched our first round of chicks ever! It was quite a challenge with a few little birds who got stuck in their shells. Out of about 20 incubatin eggs, 13 hatched and 10 survived. We love our second generation! Moving on ...

This is the cheering squad,

 And this is the player. It was a cooooold spring season - one day was cancelled due to snow. Ya, probably won't do that again.

Ouch! Nice shot! (in more ways than one)

 Daddy got his hair did.

 And we had lots and lots of rain, and mud, and backyard discoveries (those are slugs).

Caden turned 8, which means he gets to start cub scouts! Wahoo!

 Tessa had another ballet recital and got to do 2 dances this time. It was really cute.

And Koen's just been hangin' out and doing what he does best: making messes. (This lunch was all his idea.)