Easter

 We had a wonderful Easter this year.  We watched the Prince of Peace video (You can watch it here) on lds.org and a few more that they had online.  I love all of the media that the church has. Anyway, so we watched all of those videos leading up to Easter and talked about them with the kids.  We reviewed the story of the Resurrection.   It's fun now that the kids are a little bit older and we can have more in depth discussions with them. 

Anyway, so Easter morning we woke up and the Easter bunny had come and hid eggs all over in the backyard.  We went out bright and early in the morning and the kids found all the eggs.  Then we went to church and in the evening we had our egg bash.  These pictures are all out of order, but I'm not about to go through and reverse them all.  SO just ignore the order.  :)

 Our egg bash was held in the basement.  I love this picture because Sadie is always sitting like that like it's no big deal.  She is so flexible.  

 Zac was definitely the most excited about the egg bash.

 Riley cried after her first match because she wanted her egg to crack and it didn't.  She doesn't understand the point is to have the uncracked egg.  ha ha.

 Sadie and Zac are getting good at rolling their eggs pretty straight.

 I love this picture even though it's blurry.  You can see how excited Zac is that his egg didn't crack.  and Riley is happy too!.

 This is the congratulatory hug to Riley the Champion!

 Here she is with her winning egg.  Although the whole time she just wanted her egg to crack.  ha ha.

 Emery had a great time too.  :)

 

 We held the kids off from going outside until about 7:30 I think.  ha ha.  Sorry neighbors if we woke you up! :)

 We were waiting for daddy very patiently.

I went outside to get a picture of the kids walking out onto the deck.  I waited (in the cold!!) for a long time and then peeked my head inside to see why they weren't coming.  They were waiting for me to come back in!  ha ha..

Let the egg hunt begin!

 They found them all really quickly!

Zac wasn't scared to climb up to get the hard ones!

Riley did great too!

Then we all went inside and ate tons of candy!  I told the kids that every time they empty one of their eggs to remember how the tomb of Christ was empty because he was resurrected.  It probably went over their heads, but hopefully it sunk in a little bit.  :)

Our little announcement

 Our family had a little announcement: (I'm pretty sure everyone who reads this has already seen this, but I want it in our blog book.)

We will be welcoming a new member of our family in October.  We are all very happy and excited.  

Spring break-part 2

 Our fourth day of spring break brought us to the Bean Museum.  Just as we were walking up to the building two school buses pulled up.  I rushed the kids in and we took the above picture before anyone else got in.  Phew.  Turns out...my friend Laurel and her son Andrew were on one of the buses.  Random.  But we didn't bump into each other, but it would have been fun to run into them. 

 The butterflies are always a must see.  They really are amazing and beautiful.  

 And the beetles are really gross.  Ha ha.  

 After we explored the Bean Museum, we walked down to BYU campus.  The kids ran in the grass and I loved looking at the pretty trees.

 We tried to get a selfie with the Y in it, but I'm not an expert selfie taker...so the Y didn't make it into the picture.  Ha ha.  But the one of the kids is pretty cute.  A random man walked past as I was taking this and said "that's gonna be a good picture!"  :)

 Then we ran into Cosmo in the bookstore!  Ha ha.  The kids each got a new BYU shirt (thanks to a sale! only 5 dollars each!) and then we headed back to the car. 

 When Ben and Lindsy came with their kids, they got some Krispie Creme donuts.  On the box there was a coupon for buying one dozen and getting one dozen glazed for free.  I totally used that coupon and we got some yummy donuts.  Unfortunately, we didn't get to see them making any donuts, but we still got some hats!

 When we got home, Riley crashed on the blue recliner.  

 The next day, we went to the park in the morning and then we had to drop a friend off at work.  So while we were out doing that, we stopped and got some yummy ice cream.  Riley's fell on the floor, but I just scooped it up and put it in a bowl .  Good as new!  ha ha.  

 That morning at the park Emery asked me to give her an underdog on the swing.  I guess I did it a little bit too vigorously because when I looked back she was only hanging on with her hands on the chains.  She let go right when the swing was all the way back and she landed flat on her face and stomach.  This is a picture of her battle wounds.  My bad. 

 All the kids wore their new BYU shirts today. Cute little BYU fans!

Rob went on a campout with the Young Men in the ward on Thursday night so we had a movie night and watched Pete's Dragon and went to bed late.  :)  Then the next day (the day before Easter!) we finally colored our eggs.  It was fun and it's getting easier now that the kids are older and can pretty much do it themselves. 

 WE had some very colorful eggs.

 Emery got pretty into it and was the last one to be done.

 We all ended with our fingertips dyed lots of different colors.

We ended the week with a broken dryer.  I hung the clothes up and the dried really fast in the sun.  I though, "this isn't bad!  I can do this!"  Then for the next 2 weeks it rained!  So we finally got our dryer fixed.  

Spring break was a success I would say!

Spring Break- part 1

The kids usually only get like 2 days off for spring break so this year when I found out they had a whole week off I decided to try to make it fun. We had one fun activity planned per day.  Here is a summary of the first half of our week.

On Monday morning we had to change our plans because we were going to do something outside, but it was cold and raining.  So we decided to go to the mall and try out a new nicklecade that my friend told me about.  (Thanks Laurel!) The kids were excited because I didn't tell them where we were going. 

When we got to the mall, we noticed that the Easter bunny was there just waiting for people to come talk to him.  I made sure we didn't have to buy any pictures (yes, I'm cheap) and then took the kids in to talk to the Easter bunny.  They were all pretty shy but they ended up giving the bunny a high five and getting some cool bunny ears which they all wore for most of the day.  If you look closely, you can see the bunny in the background of the above picture. 

Then it was on to the nicklecade.  It is brand new so it was clean and there wasn't anyone else there.  The kids, especially Zac were in heaven.  They each helped do chores around the house before we went so they could earn some money.  This Ice Ball game was a favorite.

Emery made me laugh because whenever she put her coins in she did this stance.  Then I helped her earn some tickets.  They all got to buy little prizes with their tickets.

Then we visited the fountain and they all got to throw a penny in.  Emery had just wiped out pretty hard on her hip on the ground.  She is still sporting a pretty bad bruise from that fall.  But she was tough.  

I went a little crazy taking group pictures with the kids...they are never all together like this so I took every opportunity to get a cute picture.  :)

That night the moon was so pretty coming over the mountains.  THis picture does NOT do it justice...but it was so pretty.

The next day I took the kids to Jungle Jims because Sadie had never been and it was two dollar Tuesday.  :) 

Here they are on the fast roller coaster.  Emery still refuses to go on this ride.  

Cute girls waiting for their next ride.

Pretty much every ride goes in circles...I'm surprised these kids can handle so much spinning.  

Having fun.

Riley loved the Carousel.  

When we left, Sadie was feeling sick.  ha ha.  But she had fun anyway.  And Riley fell asleep on the floor three days this week.  She was so worn out.

On Wednesday morning we went to Gardner Village and tried out the farm they have there.  It is a non-profit that takes care of rescued or neglected animals.  They had horses, pigs, a goat that was about to give birth to twins, alpacas, chickens and ponies.  It was pretty stinky there so Zac kept asking when we could leave.  ha ha.  The girls and I really enjoyed it.  When we first got there the guy told us that usually they charge people to bottle feed the cows, but that he would let us do it for free since it was time to feed them.

Riley got to go first.

Then Zac...

And finally Sadie.  Emery didn't want a turn.  ha ha.  I think it was because of all the slobber she saw hanging off of the bottle!  

Riley enjoyed riding this horse.  :)

Emery really loved petting all of the animals.  One of the goats started eating her dress and I had to wrestle it out of his mouth.  ha ha

A pony getting some head scratches.

This alpaca came up and stuck his head out of the gate.  It was perfect timing for this picture.

This one wasn't as great of timing...it pulled its head out right when I snapped the picture...but oh well.  

This is Riley with a horse named Riley.  :)

Then we walked over and met up with some friends at Gardner Village and ate our lunches that we brought.  I thought this door looked cool so of course I had the kids take a picture in front of it.  A little toy fell out of Zac's pocket while we were taking this picture and we didn't notice until a little while later so we retraced all of our steps and finally gave up.  As we were walking past this spot on our way to the car I spotted it!  Wahoo!

Group picture with our friends.  I love going in to the Chocolate Covered Wagon because they have a taffy pull machine that I could just watch all day.  

After our outing we went home and rested for a bit.  Then we made these yummy rice krispie treats.  I saw Taylor and William had made some and they looked yummy.  So we copied them.  :)  Thanks for the idea Taylor!

Ok...that was the first part of our spring break week.  I'll post about the rest later. :)