Retsae in St. George

We had fun doing Easter-y stuff with Oma and Opa the day before Easter.  We dyed eggs, the kids discovered fun things in their Easter baskets, and we had an Easter egg hunt outside.

Luke was laughing at his bunnyness, looking at himself in Ben's phone.

I was working on Luke's basket in the weeks leading up to Easter but didn't quite finish it.  It needed a few more layers on the sides.  I was afraid of letting him use it during the Easter egg hunt because I knew the eggs wouldn't stay in, but it ended up being perfect.  He found 4 eggs right away, then as he walked around, he would tip the basket and his eggs would fall out and he'd find them all over again.  He was quite entertained and the other kids were free to do the real hunting.  I couldn't have planned it better if I'd tried.

St. George

We traveled to St. George this weekend to spend Easter with my grandparents.  We loved getting to have a few days with them.  We drove down on Friday morning and that afternoon we decided to go see "Zootopia," which we all really enjoyed.

On Saturday morning we went to the St. George Tabernacle and neighboring park, where the annual Art Festival was going on.  Ben took the kids to check out some of the activities they had for kids in the park while I went into the Tabernacle with Oma and Opa to save seats for the concert at noon.  It so happened that the choir from the high school across the street from our house was on tour and performing in St. George and Ben and I knew 6 teenagers who were performing, thanks to our time serving with the YM and YW in our ward.  It was the perfect thing to do together.

We'd talked about the kids possibly playing in the fountain but it was actually pretty chilly and windy,
so I'm glad that they maintained a safe distance.

Luke rubbed up against Eliza's paintbrush when she was working
on one of the art projects and had a blue streak in his hair for the rest of the day.

Eliza is pointing to her face-painted cheeks (a unicorn and a rainbow) and Jack is striking
a Spidey pose, since he had a Spiderman icon on his cheek.
You can just barely see Cat and me in the background, sitting on the second row of seats.

When we left the Tabernacle after the concert, Luke started yelling, "Pen-gin!  Pen-gin!"
and we looked across the parking lot to see the Easter Bunny, a Rastafarian Easter Chicken,
and an Easter Penguin heading over to the Art Festival.  They were kind enough to take a picture
with the boys and I think Luke smiled better with these guys than he's ever smiled in a family picture.

Eliza and Luke are Missing

Eliza and her friend discussed the "Miss Nelson" books for their Sparkle Dancing Book Club last week.  The girls and their younger siblings put on disguises in honor of the event.  Luke giggled as I drew a little mustache and goatee for him, and insisted he wear sunglasses.  Eliza was determined to dress up as Miss Nelson and put all the makeup on herself.  How do you think she did?

Mii Rocket Saturday

I woke up to uproarious laughter on Saturday morning.  The kids were using the Wii U to take pictures of themselves and see what kind of Mii the program came up with for them.  I loved hearing them all having such a good time together.  After making individual Miis, they experimented with what would happen if they took a group selfie.

That evening our neighbor invited us to launch rockets with him and his grandsons at a nearby park.  It took some tinkering to get everything just right, but after a few failed attempts, we saw some really cool launches.  We have a video of the first successful launch.  The parachute didn't deploy properly on this one and one of the fins ended up breaking when the rocket launched, but the parachutes did better on the other launches.

Temple Dedication Sunday

We didn't have regular church services on Sunday as the (active) LDS population over the age of 8 throughout the state of Utah was invited to participate in the Provo City Center Temple Dedication via broadcast.  There were three dedicatory sessions and we made plans to swap childcare with another family so that everyone old enough to attend would be able to do so together.

I was nervous about the younger kids being at the house literally all day long and having to do Sunday-appropriate things, but it turned out just fine.  We had a relaxed morning, then had a little family devotional where we watched some short videos about the new temple and Ben read to us from D&C 109, which is the dedicatory prayer of the Kirtland Temple.  We talked about what it means for a temple to be dedicated and why it is a big deal.  Then we had our first breakfast of yogurt, fruit, and granola while watching "Music and the Spoken Word" together.

Once the broadcast was over we made resurrection rolls together, in preparation for Easter coming up.  They were yummy as usual and it's always fun to see the center completely hollow.

Soon after we finished our second breakfast, our friends arrived.  The kids kept busy for a while building temples out of blocks.  I was impressed that Cat's was so well thought-out, with a baptismal font ("but there aren't 12 oxen") and parking places and more.  The one that the younger girls worked on was complete with an Angel Moroni.

Then I took all of the younger girls and we cut up old church magazines to make collages of temple pictures, which they enjoyed as well.  Soon after lunch our visitors went back to their house and Ben, Cat and I got ready to go to the next dedicatory session.  Since the last session was during Luke's nap time, the older sister of the girls who had been at our house came over to take care of our younger kids.  Together they played with play dough, watched a Sunday movie, played a board game, and had a snack (after they found where Emma had hidden the crackers).

Ben, Cat, and I had a great time at the dedication.  The talks were centered on the temple and three people mentioned the concept of rededicating ourselves to the Lord in the way that this temple was being dedicated.  We were also instructed to work patiently to build up ourselves until we become a temple (1 Corinthians 3:16-17), just as this temple was only finished after a painstakingly long process.

When we got home from the dedication session, we went on a walk in our neighborhood to get everyone out of the house, then we had dinner.  It turned out to be a really nice day and I was pleased with how well the kids behaved and observed the Sabbath.

Tea Party Lunch

The other morning Luke found Eliza's tea sets and wanted to play with them.  I needed to help Eliza with her piano practice and reading time and didn't want to leave Luke unattended with the porcelain dishes, and since Eliza was inclined to have a tea party with Luke instead of practicing piano and reading, the only suitable solution was to propose a tea party lunch once Eliza was finished with her morning tasks.

And then we had an encore tea party lunch the next day.  Because, why not?

A St. Patrick's Day Video

More Nobleness

Jack's been doing a little better in school lately and I was pleased to receive this email from his teacher about a week ago:

I just wanted to send a quick email letting you know how much I enjoy having Jack in class. This week he has participated so much in class. I can tell he has been listening during instruction time. He has been doing so well at following directions in my class and it has been amazing! Way to go Jack!

And then on Thursday I received another email from his teacher saying that she'd chosen him as the Noble Knight Scholar of the Week from her class.  Exciting!  Jack was completely surprised, and very happy to be announced during the weekly school-wide morning meeting on Friday.

Sparkle Dancing Book Club

We now have a third book club going on in our family!  Eliza wanted to start a book club with her friend, who is the daughter of my good friend who I do a Skype book club with once a month.  The girls love talking over the computer, giggling and doing funny things, reading to each other, and talking about the books they chose.  And I love that they're having a good, book-centered, time.

So far they've read Fancy Nancy, Giraffes Can't Dance, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, and The Cat in the Hat.

Another Dose of Kindergarten Cuteness

On Teenagers and Tantrums

Public Tantrum in Action

I was talking to the parent of older children recently and he was saying that it's hard to have teenagers and he wishes he could go back to the stage of toddlers having tantrums.  I completely understood what he meant.  When the biggest fight we have during the day happens because the toddler doesn't want to be buckled into the shopping cart, things aren't so bad.  Teenagers deal with a whole host of other problems, and so much of their lives are away from their parents that it must be very hard to parent them at times.  I need to be diligent about building up the relationships I have with my kids while we still have so much time together so that the relationships will be more likely to endure the challenges of The Teenage Years.

I'm still a couple of years away from that, but I feel like I've entered the "tween" phase, so we're getting closer.  It sure gives me a new appreciation for the sweet little things my younger kids do, and helps me to have patience with their littleness when a part of me is saying, "Just grow up already!"

3rd Bike Rider

Since Cat and Jack received bikes from Santa last year, Jack's old bike has been handed down to Eliza.  She gave it a try on Christmas, then again a few weeks later (because it was so cold...), and then at the beginning of March.  That last time, she took to it as if she was born on a bike and hasn't looked back.  She's great at stopping, starting, and turning.

Now she asks to go for a bike ride all the time.  I see a summer full of bike rides in our future...

Will we or won't we? A story in which Cat saves the day.

The kids didn't have school on Monday because it was a teacher work day.  We saw that "The Good Dinosaur" was showing at a little dollar theater about 15 minutes away, where we could get in free with passes we got for Christmas, so we decided it would be a fun way to spend the afternoon.  Unfortunately, because of a variety of unfortunate events, mostly having to do with kids not getting things done when they were supposed to, we didn't make it to the 3:00 show as originally planned.  We went back and forth about going to the 5:00 show, because I refused to make dinner when we got home.  The kids would have to be okay with having popcorn for dinner (Mom of the year, right?) with some healthy snacks afterward.

With lots of excitement on Jack and Eliza's part and a good amount of feet-dragging on Cat's part, we went to the movie.  Unfortunately, we found out at the ticket office that instead of getting in free, we had to pay $.25 for each ticket and would receive a voucher for $.25 toward concessions per ticket we bought.  And, even more unfortunately, I'd accidentally left my wallet at home and didn't have any money in the car.  So we sadly walked back to the car (except Cat, who was already asking about which Redbox movie we would rent).

As I was getting Luke buckled in his car seat, Cat held up a roll of nickels she found in the car, which I'd been meaning to take to the bank.  She also found some spare change I'd forgotten about.  Woohoo!  We had enough to get into the movie and buy our dinner-popcorn, plus a few cups of water.  Cat saved the day, even though she didn't want to see the movie in the first place.

The kids liked the movie, except for Luke who was pretty bored, ironically.  My favorite thing about the movie was that it was absolutely beautiful.  It did have a nice story, too, though.

A Little Glimpse

Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children's minds.  It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day.

If you could keep awake (but of course you can't) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her.  It is quite like tidying up drawers.  You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly storing that out of sight.  When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.

      -Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie (excerpt from chapter 1)

I love the sentiment expressed here.  I imagine most parents wish they could get a good look at all of the things going on in their children's minds.  But the nice thing is that there are times when kids do give us a peek, whether they mean to or not.  Here are a couple of things I've found in the house that I think have given me a little glimpse inside Cat's mind.

FHE outlines.  There are multiple copies of each page,
with each page receiving its own folder.

After writing these, Cat told me that she thinks she might like to go
into "the quoting business."  And I think she would be pretty good at it!

I don't have a picture of it, but in Cat's room she's made a big collage of scriptures and church quotes too.  When I get worried about her, I need to remind myself of these little things that demonstrate her natural inclination toward righteousness.

If only I could tuck that other stuff away somehow...

Until I figure that out I'll do what I can to feed the good.

Thawing Out

We've had some teasingly warm weather the last few weeks and I decided it was time to break out the grill last weekend.  Ben didn't argue, and even spent a good amount of time on Saturday cleaning the grill out and getting it ready to be used again.  We had yummy burgers, corn on the cob, and potato salad, plus Ben's soda prize, and even ate out in the back yard.  Hooray for warmer weather!

That night Ben took Jack out on a Daddy Date to go see "The Good Dinosaur" and the girls and I twisted Luke's arm until he agreed to watch the new "Cinderella" with us.  At least he enjoyed seeing the various animals in the movie, sporadic as they are...

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss

We had some Dr. Seuss-themed fun to celebrate this great man's birthday last week.  First it was a Dr. Seuss sibling sleepover on Saturday night.  The kids watched our DVD of "Green Eggs and Ham and other Dr. Seuss stories" and had a treat of Swedish Fish (you know, as in one fish, two fish, RED fish...)

On March 2nd we had green eggs for breakfast (sadly, we were out of ham, and Jack was very bothered about it).

Since the weather was nice, Eliza, Luke and I had a picnic with some friends after Eliza's dance class and we brought along some Cat in the Hat cheese sticks.

If I'd been as smart as my good friend, we would have had Who-ville's famous Roast Beast for dinner, but at least now I have an idea for next year.  We did have some fun with dessert, though.  We had "pink ink" (you know, the Yink who likes to drink pink ink from One Fish, Two Fish), which were strawberry smoothies, with Truffula Trees (from The Lorax), which were balls of cotton candy plopped on a straw.  While the kids enjoyed their smoothies and cotton candy I read them a Dr. Seuss book I'd checked out from the library that morning: Bartholomew and the Oobleck.

I printed out some Dr. Seuss coloring pages for the kids to color that week, and I liked these cute Thing One and Thing Two papers I found online.  I thought I'd do something fun with them on the bday but didn't get around to it.  A few days ago I finally played around with them a little.

Not bad, right?  And once in a while I feel like my kids might actually be trying to impersonate Thing One and Thing Two, so it's fitting, haha.

Hooray for Dr. Seuss!  What a positive impact he's made on our world.

Leap Day

I thought about doing something really special for Leap Day last week but ended up keeping it pretty simple.  I put out some things for the kids to find when they woke up in the morning: a green table cloth with lily pads (found here), and some little bags of Haribo gummy frogs (labels printed out from here).  We had a couple more bags of gummy frogs that we gave to some friends as well.

Ben was out of town on Leap Day but we challenged him to send us a leap frog video in commemoration of the big day.  He was a good sport and sent us a great video of himself leaping around his hotel room like a frog.  I'm not putting the video on the blog so you'll have to use your imagination.  Of course he had to have a prize for completing the challenge, and the kids came up with a good one: SODA.

Solo Festival for Three

After our early-morning walk through the temple yesterday we stopped at home for a bit and gave the kids a chance to run through their piano pieces before leaving again to attend a local Solo Festival for piano students.  Here is Eliza's run through:

Jack and Eliza went first and both did a very good job.  Cat's time was a little later in the morning and while we were waiting for her turn to play for the judge, I received a phone call from our piano teacher that Jack had been chosen as a winner and would play in the winners' recital later that afternoon.  I laughed out loud because Jack hadn't been playing his pieces very well in the days leading up to the festival, while Eliza had been so careful and diligent in playing her pieces well.  When she found out that Jack was a winner and she wasn't, she was aghast.  "Are you KIDDING me?" was her response.  After that, she was pretty much okay about the whole thing though.

So Jack was chosen as one of the 3 winners from his division, and he did a great job in the recital and was quite pleased to receive his $15 cash prize too.

Cat played very well for the judge but I was able to listen to her perform in person and I wasn't sure that she had done quite well enough to be a winner.  Imagine our delight when I later received the phone call that she was a winner also.  She'd competed with Chopin's Valse no. 17 and an excerpt from the Rondo of Beethoven's Concerto no. 2 and chose to play the Chopin for the recital.  The piece is so beautiful.  I have loved starting my day listening to her practice it and I told her that she needs to just continue to play Chopin all the time but I don't think I'll be that lucky.  She did a great job at the recital.

We'd promised the kids that we would get them a treat after the festival, so as a consolation prize for Eliza we let her choose where we would go.  She chose Sonic and we all enjoyed a little something yummy after the recital.

I'm so proud of all of my pianists.

Provo City Center Temple

This morning we were finally able to attend the Provo City Center Temple open house as a family. We had an early reservation - 7:15 - so everyone was up by 6:30.  We arrived a few minutes early, waited in line for a bit, then watched a video about the purpose of temples.

When we walked into the temple from the parking garage, I asked the kids to pay attention to how they feel, not just what they see.  The tour took us through most of the temple and the kids were very interested, though tired from all of the walking and going up and down so many stairs.  They asked questions, made meaningful connections to previous discussions, and appreciated the beauty of the building.

Once we had finished the tour and were back outside, a kind stranger offered to take a family picture for us.  Then we found a bench and talked to the kids about what they'd just felt.  Jack said, "comfort" and Eliza said, "the spirit."  When I asked them what those things felt like, Jack said, "It felt like home."  I love that.

And then Luke ran off and the other kids followed him and just like that, the moment had passed.  But it was sweet and beautiful, and I hope the kids will remember that moment and the feelings they felt in the temple when they think back on this day.  I'm so thankful that we had the opportunity to walk through this amazing temple, to experience it as a family, and to feel the spirit there.  It was a touching reminder that it's because of ordinances that take place in buildings such as this one that my family can be together forever, and what an incredible blessing that is.

Another Lukism

"I can hear two crabs!"

Four Reasons to Love Kindergarten

It's hard to tell, but this is a George Washington-esque tricorn hat.
Eliza told me that George Washington had corn in his hat.
Where did she hear that?  From her friend.

Snowliza.

Eliza brought home several pictures reminding us about
how to be environmentally responsible and taped them up at appropriate
locations in the house.

I saved the best for last.