Never seen before

Looking through old pictures I ran across these. It was August 2008, and Bridger was into drawing the clues from Blues Clues shows.  Can you see the bandaids, stethoscopes, and pawprint?  He was nearly 4 years old. This happened to be a Sharpie marker (permanent marker) on the hardwood dining room floor. No matter how hard we as mothers try to keep certain things out of reach of certain someones, we're not 100% successful. We found this one evening, and the kids helped me scrub it off. It took some elbow grease, that's for sure. Not an easy wipe up!  We ended up using bleach spray, and did it before Troy ever saw.  I don't think I ever did tell him. Not that I need to hide it from him though, which is why I'm putting it on here now. Ahhh, the memories.

Arrow of Light

Seth earned his Arrow of Light in Cub Scouts.  Wow--those 3 years went by FAST!  

 

Ironically, Seth's dad was the Cub Master for nearly all 3 years Seth was in Cubs.  That just barely changed, so the new leaders presented him with his award.  Seth waited an extra month, so his dad could at least be present--he was out of town for work at last month's meeting, and ended up having to be out of town again this time.  Grrr.  I told Seth that many dads miss seeing their boys receive their awards.  It was just disappointing for Seth (and me) because his Dad has been the one presenting all those awards for the past several years, and just when Seth earns his, he can't be there.  Oh well, it's not really that important (and I'm probably making it worse than necessary by even writing about it!)

 It's tradition in this pack to shoot an arrow with a light stick attached, for their award.  I was helping with the transition of leaders, and somehow the light sticks got lost, even though I thought I had them for sure in my van!  Ugh.  It was light outside though, so the light stick wouldn't have really shown up much anyway, but I felt like a loser mom/leader for having it for all the other boys, but not my own son.  The new leader held the meeting at his house though, which was a beautiful setting, and helpfully memorable for Seth.  He "crossed over" (walked over the bridge) from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts at last month's meeting (but since Dad missed that one too, I didn't take the camera and get a picture of his crossing over.  And I haven't sewn his Webelos patch on yet either.)

 

 These pictures are from Seth's last Pinewood Derby back in April.  Seth often earned the award for having the most natural looking car.His first 2 years, he came in 4th place.  This year he didn't do as good, but he made his car by himself and still had fun.  Seems like the boys mostly like racing each other for fun anyway, after the "official" race is done.

 

 On to Boy Scouts!  Seth's Grandpa has scouting in his Blood, and received a Silver Beaver award.  His dream job would be to run a Scout Camp full time.  Too bad we live 13 hrs away, but I still think Seth's bound to have a special time in Scouts with his grandpa's love and support for it.  Grandpa already has Seth well started on collector patches and got him a nice 100-year scouting anniversary ballcap for his birthday.  Hope we don't lose that one!

Twas the Night Before Easter

Did you know there's a new Veggie Tale called "Twas the Night Before Easter"?  Bridger loves singing a song from it over and over.  I have to admit, it's pretty funny.

Onto the main point.  Typical Night Before Easter Stuff in our home.  I wish I could've sewn matching dresses for all the girls, but alas, it was not realistic.  It was still fun getting matching dresses for the 2 little girls though.  They look like Easter Eggs.  Aspen picked the striped multicolored ones.  I picked the yellow and pink dresses with embroidered flowers. They were itchy though, and Aspen liked the other ones better.  We tried them both on to decide which to keep, and I had fun taking pictures of them twirling and having fun.  I still haven't read my users manual on my camera, so even though I experiment with different settings and lighting, these are not that great.  Still fun for me though.  (There was a time many years ago when my good camera broke, and Troy was in graduate school, and all we could afford was a $20 camera.  Even though it took blurry pictures, the memories were still better than none at all, so it helped me be happy with even blurry pictures.) Yes, there are lots of pictures on here, so if you want to skip to the egg coloring, scroll down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Molly mostly liked peeling and eating the eggs.

These 2 eggs are some of Seth's.

The golden touch!  

Hanna left the golden (and blue) color on her hands for church the next day.

 

Alana colored the tie-died ones with Aspen.
Here are Aspen's favorites.  (Unfortunately, they don't show up well here.)

Waiting for the Return of the Ring

This picture looks like something out of Lord of the Rings, or Star Wars, or Narnia.  Since it was Easter morning, the title of this post would be more appropriately named something like "Awaiting the Return of the King."

 

My sister's family has this tradition of waking up to see the sunrise on Easter morning.  We decided to try it this year, though I was sooo tempted to skip it.  We're always up late the night before coloring Easter Eggs, and with Easter later this year than usual, the sun rose even earlier.  So basically, we woke up the same time I wake up every weekday morning to get kids ready for school, only this time, we drug MORE kids out of bed.  (I did skip Molly and Bridger and let them keep sleeping--in hopes they'd be better at church.)

 It actually turned out quite nice waking up that early.  We were all back inside just relaxing on the couches by about 6:00 am (the sun rose around 5:50 am), and had plenty of time to enjoy each other's company before getting ready for church.  I was a mean mom and made the kids wait to search for the Easter Eggs until Bridger woke up around 7:30.  Plus, the Easter Bunny was a tad bit lazier this year and only brought candy.  He used to bring other little things too...so some of the younger kids were a bit disappointed.  Oh well.  (At least they each got their own basket!  Finding things for 7 baskets of kids of all ages just didn't work out for the Easter bunny this year.)  They did get an all-you-can-eat breakfast of chocolate and candy though.  Isn't that every child's idea of heaven?  There have been 2 times in the past 5 years that we've only had one big basket for the whole family, rather than small individual baskets.  I like that better.  I think we'll do that more often.  I hope I'm not depriving my younger children...I think we'll wake up for the sunrise next Easter too.

 

 Happy Easter! 

Number Cruncher

 We have gone through SOOO many of these dollar-caluculators.  Molly keeps biting the buttons off.  For months she's done this.  It's been about a month since the last one, and for a while, I thought maybe she had gotten past that phase.  She was walking around pretending it was a phone and jabbering into it for about 15 minutes.  In the end though, I turned around to find this once again.

 She's really into saying "Cheese!" for the camera now, followed quickly by, "Me see!  Me see!"  If she sees I have the camera, she instantly does this.  Makes it hard to snap candid pictures of her doing what was so cute!

 

 One more calculator left for now.  How long will it last?

Friday the 13th

It's Friday the 13th.  Our 17th wedding anniversary, and yes, the day we were married, it was also a Friday the 13th.  One of the luckiest days of my life.  17 years.  I was 17 when I started dating Troy!  Wow.  Alana's almost 16.  Almost old enough to start dating.  Oh my!  What if she starts dating her future husband in the next year or so like I did?  I want to stop the clock!  Can't we rewind and do it all over again?  Not that I'd change it all.  Yes, I'd like to change the things I did poorly, but what I really mean is that I'd love to repeat all the wonderful things we've done together as a family, before moving on!  In another 17 years, we will likely be well into our grandparent-chapter of life.  People say this all the time, including myself, but time really does seem to speed up faster and faster all the time.  We've been through a lot in 17 years.  3 college degrees between the 2 of us, 3 different jobs, 7 moves, 6 children (7 this year), going through the trenches learning about autism (thankfully we don't feel like we're in the trenches with that anymore--we've got a grip on it for the time being), a small farm/ranch, and all the day to day stuff.  Troy's currently in the last phase of trying to earn his tenure with Washington State University (a permanent job), which he'll turn in this summer.

So to make today a little bit special, Troy took the afternoon off work.  We went to Applebees for lunch with Molly.  She enjoyed peeking over the booth at the people in the next booth.  We stopped by the Scout office and bought Seth a Scout Book, now that he's officially 11 yrs old and in scouts.  I returned a pair of shoes, and we bought 3 big bags of dog food at Costco, which was nice to stock up on, since my cart is always too full to get dog food when I'm there.  I've tried pulling 2 carts through that store before, but they get heavy, and things fall off the cart and spill in the parking lot (like big bottles of hair conditioner), so I prefer to keep my Costco trips to 1 cart (even though that cart often is a mountain, much higher than the sides of the cart.)  Then we came home to meet the school bus in time for the younger kids to get home.  An audio book was being downloaded onto the iPod, and something unexpected happened, and EVERYTHING got erased off of it.  Totally obliterated.  I guess we were bound to have something happen on Friday the 13th.  Then Troy and Seth headed to the Father Sons campout with friends from church, Aspen Bridger Molly and I raked grass clippings, Alana and Hanna moved irrigation handlines, Hanna went to dance, and Alana and Aspen went to babysit.  (Yeon was sleeping all afternoon.)  I straightened the sprinkler heads that weren't standing upright, and then chased 2 of the neighbors calves out of our pasture, back with their own mamas, and tried to fix the fence where they jumped over it, and the other hole they walked right through.  Yeon and I loaded the dishwasher, I went to pick up Hanna and Aspen, and then the kids watched Princess Diaries.  Now I'm on here as I hear the movie ending.

By the way, I think I've said this before, but it was amazing to me on the day we were married in the Salt Lake Temple, that there were only about 34 weddings there that day.  A Friday in May.  When my sister was married in June, there were over 130 weddings on that day!  Even though it's the temple, people still tend to avoid getting married on that day.  Which meant we had more time to take pictures on the temple steps!  (Often, they pump families through there so fast, each family only gets 20 minutes for photos on the stairs, before they need to let the next wedding party have their turn.  And this is using all 4 grand staircases outside the temple.)

Nights at the Museums

Here's a post I started and forgot to finish.  Better late than never (especially because about half my posts never get finished.)  I remembered I was trying to downsize a video of the kids dancing to include in this, and never figured it out, and then forgot to post this altogether last spring.  So...

On our Spring Break trip to Utah, we went to 2 different museums on 2 different nights.  I wanted to at least walk through the Church History Museum to see the Pioneer stuff, but a pleasant surprise awaited us upstairs.  The Childrens' Room was called something like "Adventures in Book of Mormon Lands" and was so fun! We ended up staying for another hour or more.  I didn't take pictures of every part of it, because my battery was running out at the end of this long fun day on Temple Square.

This painting is titled "Faith, Hope and Charity," and was located right behind the statue of Moroni upstairs.
This was probably our (Alana, Hanna and myself) favorite painting there.

This was a favorite.  What fun skirts!  Even Bridger loved dressing up and dancing along with the screens in the background Latino style.  

(There was a big mirror set up so the kids could see themselves and the dance leaders behind them on the screens at the same time.)

Nephi's Boat, complete with Liahona inside.  

Bridger liked playing with the magnetic fishing pole and fish the best.

(That's a fish in his hand.)

My favorite:  the pieced quilt magnet wall.

Aspen "quilting".

Skipping down the sidewalk in the rain with Grandmary. (Grandma-Mary.)  

After that, we went and ate at Crown Burger for our first time.  Yum.

The other museum was the Bean Life Science Museum at BYU.  It's free, so that's nice!  

Molly is my first child to take such a liking to elephants.  She loves them, and she says "e-phant, Silly!" so cute!

Aspen was looking all over for a skunk, because she just wrote a book all about skunks at school.  We finally found this in the basement.  And she was OH-SO EXCITED to find this soft skunk puppet in the gift shop.  I wasn't going to let her get anything, but she was willing to pay for it herself.  Then she accidentally left it behind Grandma's bed the next day.  Hope it doesn't scare Grandma when she finds it behind her bed!

(Funny how she likes them so much, even though we "dispose" of them around our place.)

 

Because of the great research Aspen's fantastic 2nd grade teacher has been helping them do in class, Aspen was also in a group who just wrote a book about owls.  So when Aspen sat in on a little museum demonstration here this night (with about 20 other people) , Aspen was the only one who knew the name of the owl being shown was a Great Horned Owl.  She was even brave enough to say it in front of all those strangers.  (An amazing accomplishment for her, since she usually clams up and doesn't speak a word around people she doesn't know.)  Good job Aspen!