In case you were wondering.

The answer is no. I am not pregnant. (Even though you wouldn't believe me if you got a good look at my mid-section... I sometimes secretly wish that I would discover I am pregnant so that I wouldn't have to be self-conscious about my gut anymore. But I digress.)

Anyway, after seeing this picture in our last post, I had a couple of people ask if we were expecting...

I was in a hurry after making all of those collages, but perhaps I should have taken a moment and cropped it so that it looked a little less suspicious.

Is that better?

Beach Weekend in Collages & Videos

Warning: this is a long post, which contains several collages.
Please click on any collage you would like to see in greater detail.

We spent Easter weekend with *all* of Ben's family at a beach house on beautiful St. George Island, FL. This was a wonderful place to hang out, and it really felt like we were "Over the Rainbow" for a few days. Jack settled right in when we found our room (on the third floor, near the elevator) and told me that he would like to sleep in this chair.

There was plenty of fun to be had on the beach...

Papa fished as much as he could, and most of us got in on the fishing action as well. (Yep, even yours truly. I managed to set a record for the most tangled line on Ben's pole. No pictures to prove it.)

We got to know some native islanders a little better. (One of the highlights of the weekend was when we saw a pod of dolphins jumping out of the water for several minutes. If I'd realized it was going to last that long, I would have tried to take a picture! We see dolphins most of the time when we got to the beach, but for some reason it's still so exciting to me. Love those guys.) The night-time crab viewing was so fun for all of us. Those little (and big) guys were everywhere!

It was so fun to get to hang out with Mema & Papa,
as well as aunts, uncles, and cousins for a few days.

We were also lucky enough to spend a day with Tim & Cassie, some good friends from Tallahassee. They drove over on Friday and the kids loved being together! Tim and Ben have been close since they were very young, and it is so fun that our kids are all around the same ages. Here are a few pictures from this year and past visits to the beach with T&C's family:

Ben taught Cat all about boogie boarding.

Then she practiced with Lana. They had fun boogie-ing together.

Jack didn't get in the ocean at all during the weekend, and he only spent a few minutes in the pool. Funny, considering how fearless he was at the beach when he was 13 months old:

One fun thing that happened was that there was a wedding reception at the neighborhood pool on Friday night. So the girls danced as they swam, during DJ Porkchop's sound check. Just before I started recording this video, he'd been playing upbeat dance music.



They also danced on the balcony during the reception itself.

We had a little Easter Egg hunt on Saturday evening, followed by a great Easter FHE. We loved getting to celebrate this special holiday with extended family.

We attended a tiny little branch (when we showed up, we more than doubled the attendance from the previous week) for Sacrament Meeting on Easter Sunday. It was a great reminder that the gospel is the same everywhere, and that a unit does not need to be strong in number in order to be strong in spirit. I was also reminded of how loud my children are in Church. They somehow seem quieter when we're in a big chapel full of people.

And here is one last collage, full of pictures that didn't make it into other collages.

Thank you for the fun weekend, Mema and Papa!
And thank you for sharing your pictures, Keturah!

Also, congratulations to anyone still reading this loooooong post.
Way to endure to the end!

Walkin' and other stuff

Here are a few signs that Eliza is growin' up:

1. Accessorizing

She was cracking me up one Saturday morning by putting on
as many necklaces as she could find from Cat's dress-up box.

Now... to try to get this necklace off.

Yes, sometimes removing them is the hardest part.

Sparkly clutch to match.


Will this purse fit over my head? Not quite.

How do I look?



2. Front-Facing
Eliza didn't "turn" 20 pounds until she was 13 1/2 months old. It was so nice to be able to turn her around! And I think we are both enjoying car rides more now.



3. Curls
Aren't they great?!?! The best is times like this, when she just woke up from
a nap where she was a little warm, so she got a little sweaty, and the curls are
even curlier and crazier. Love it.



4. Practicing Walking
We were all in the living room one night a couple of weeks ago when Cat said, "Look! Eliza is walking!" So we got out our little phone camera and captured it just in time.


Because, believe it or not, this is the most steps she's ever taken. Apparently, this girl just doesn't like to walk. Now we know that she's capable, though!


Other things that have been going on with E recently:

• She SCREAMS when you take something away from her (or do anything else she thinks is unfair, unkind, or unjust). This makes it much easier to police Jack when the two of them are anywhere near each other, but it makes times-when-children-should-be-seen-and-not-heard much more challenging. There is no doubt in anyone's mind the emotion that Eliza is experiencing during church when she finds my phone in my purse and I take it away from her. In fact, I think everyone in all of the other churches in the entire county probably knows that Eliza is mad when that happens. Yes, she screams that loud.
  

• She loves giving kisses now. If she's nearby when someone gets a kiss, she will lean in for one of her own.

• She has learned to climb ladders. I'm not sure if she figured this out on her own or if her older siblings taught her, but either way, she can now climb from the floor into Cat's lofted bed, and from the ground into the playhouse on our swing set.

• She is trying to use utensils. This is one that I am definitely not ready for, but I guess if she wants to learn, then I should let her. She does manage to get some food in her mouth when she uses a spoon, so that's good!

• She has been playing more with her brother and sister, and laughing with them, instead of just at them.
  

Hard to believe my baby is 14 months old now.
Time flies, I tell you.

Easter Baking

We decided to try a new cookie recipe before Easter. I got the recipe from here and the idea is that you use pastel colored M&Ms on top of green-dyed oatmeal cookies so that it looks like Easter eggs hiding in the grass. I found egg-shaped pastel M&Ms and thought I'd hit the jackpot. They were pretty fun and very yummy.

Cat was an enthusiastic helper, as always.

Jack was an enthusiastic sampler, as always.
Eliza had a good time hanging out with us in the kitchen.

And when the older two got bored, they helped out by washing dishes. Er... sort of. At least, there was water and dishes involved.

Do they look like Easter eggs hiding in the grass?

Who cares. At least they tasted good.


A couple of weeks later we made Resurrection Rolls for the first time (I used the top recipe on this page). I'm sure most of you have heard of these, but just in case... you use prepared dough (I happened to have some biscuit dough in the fridge and it worked fine) or you make your own dough, and wrap it around a marshmallow. The marshmallow represents Christ's body in a tomb, and when you bake the roll, the marshmallow "disappears." The roll is hollow when you bite into it, just like Christ's tomb was empty on Easter morning.


While I made the rolls with Cat and Jack, Ben kept Eliza happy by making silly faces.


And, for the record, these were pretty yummy too. (But next time I think I'd rather make my own dough. I'll probably try biscuit dough before anything else. My friend Paula Deen gave me a really good and easy recipe.)

We went twice in one week.

We've lived 30 minutes from Fort Frederica National Monument for the last 4 1/2 years. We finally visited at the beginning of April.


Fort Frederica has a really interesting history. It was established in 1736 by James Oglethorpe, the founder of the colony of Georgia. At the time, Georgia was considered debatable land between England and Spain, so Fort Frederica was built to protect the English from the Spanish in Florida. It never got very big - only about 500 colonial residents - but it had two notable residents in addition to James Oglethorpe.


John and Charles Wesley, eventual founders of the Methodist Church, led a movement for people to seek to have a personal experience with Jesus Christ.

Here is a depiction of what Fort Frederica probably looked like in the 1730s-1740s...


And this is what it looks like today...


My sister, Megan, brought her family down for a few days during Spring Break hoping to spend some time at the beach. But it ended up being too cool for the beach, so we took a trip out to see the Fort instead.


Ben was working when I went with our kids and Megan's family, and it turned out that our admission was good for 7 days, so our whole family went back that weekend for free. Awesome!

I thought the history of the settlement was really interesting - I always try to imagine living in a time and place like the one I'm visiting, but I can never really see myself doing it. They were in a tiny town an ocean away from everything familiar to them. They lived under constant fear of attack. The houses were tiny. And knowing how bad the bugs are now, living as close to the marsh as these folks did, I can only imagine how bad they were before pest control existed. Life must have been tough! But at least they could enjoy these views every day. I think that would have helped me.


Yep, the beauty of the landscape was the most impressive thing to me about our visit. These pictures do NOT do it justice.

Sorry, I feel like I'm rambling. What's this blog about again? Oh yeah. Our kids. So... they had a great time. Cat was somewhat interested in the history. Jack was very interested in walking on the ruins and, well, you're actually not supposed to do that. Eliza was happy just to hang out with Mom and/or Dad. It was a great place to visit. Twice.

Visiting Great Grandpa

We took a couple of days at the beginning of Spring Break to drive down to South Florida to visit my Grandpa. Here are my kids + my cousin's daughter, Nancy (same age as Jack) + my Grandpa.

My Dad (known 'round these parts as Pops) and Kyle were visiting too, so we all had a good time together. Of course, the pool was Cat's favorite! And we spent as much time outside as we could... let's just say the kids couldn't do as much damage out there as they could in the house!

Grandpa and Pops gave the kids little Easter baskets with some fun surprises in them. The bubbles were a big hit!
One of my goals during the visit was to find out more about some old photos that belong to my Grandpa. We spent a lot of time doing this...

Here are a few of the pictures we talked about. Most of the pictures we looked at were over 70 years old... and some were 90 or more!
I brought the photos home with me and I took notes on what Grandpa told me about them. Hopefully I can put that together into a book or something. We'll see what happens...

General Conference Weekend

I've really come a long way in how I approach General Conference with children. I still really love General Conference - the talks, the stories, the music, just the Spirit of listening to the Lord's chosen leaders of His Church. But because I want my children to enjoy conference as well, but I don't expect them to enjoy the same things I enjoy, I focus more on making it a positive experience for them when it's broadcast live than I do on listening and understanding everything that's said. I hear some things and benefit from the broadcast itself, but I plan on learning a lot more after it's over and I'm not with my children - I read the talks in the Ensign and I listen to them on my iPod. No, my kids don't love Conference, but still. This approach seems to work for us right now.

So I had an idea this time to get a spiral bound book of index cards and have Cat find pictures of certain items to glue on each page. We have tons of Friend and Ensign magazines that we will not move to UT with us, so I thought it was the perfect opportunity for her to have a free-for-all cut-it-up magazine scavenger hunt. And I planned to use the book as a Sacrament Meeting entertainment item in the future. She enjoyed making the book. For about 10 minutes on Saturday. And about 20 minutes on Sunday. Haha. But the large stack of magazines provided fun for all the children, the entire weekend.


Of course we made our traditional crepes for breakfast on Saturday and donuts for breakfast on Sunday.
Side note: I really do love donuts. But this is the first time I'd had them in a while. Then, on Tuesday I was hanging out with my Dad in Florida and he took us out to Dunkin Donuts for breakfast. And on Thursday my sister was visiting us at our house and wanted to make donuts so she made some cut-a-hole-out-of-premade-biscuit-dough-and-fry-it-up donuts that were pretty yummy too. Donuts 3 times in one week?? Yes!!


Here are some glimpses of our living room on Sunday of conference weekend. I'll let you decide which pictures were taken during the sessions and which were not. :-)