Easter 2015

Easter this year was very relaxing and enjoyable.  We went to three egg hunts, dyed eggs, and did a daily scripture devotional the week leading up to Easter.

Our first egg hunt was with friends from our old neighborhood.  We miss them and love when we have the chance to see them!

Our current ward does an annual egg hunt in the park behind our house.  It was so fun to walk through our gate and be there.  I love the succession of pictures here.  The first is just after they said go for the kids to take off and find the eggs.  Brian's true competitive spirit shines during these kind of activities.  That is anything where candy or sweets are involved and he potentially has a chance to get a lot of it.  He is the one with both the blue and white shirt and the blue and white bucket in the very front there. Timmy is on the right with a green striped shirt.

The last and best egg hunt of the Easter season was with my family at Grandma Joyce's.  The kids enjoyed the time with cousins and the food and candy.  The weather was beautiful!

General Conference landed on Easter Weekend so we spent much of our time attempting to watch it.  I wish I could say that all four sessions looked like the one below, with the boys quietly listening and pondering on the words and music.

The reality of it was that most of the time they were messing around with my phone, bugging each other and their parents, and wrestling with Mark.  I still got to listen to most of it this year though, and I loved watching it in our new house for the first time.

This year was the first year that dying, coloring, and painting eggs was a huge hit.  The kids spent so long with their eggs and wished I had cooked even more for them to do.

I hope everyone's Easter was as lovely as ours.

Brian Turns Seven!

Last month this guy turned 7 years old!  I say it every year, but I can't believe he is already this old!  Seven years ago our lives were changed forever when he was born.  I love him with with all the love a mother can have for her son.

Brian is such a good kid.  He wants to follow the rules and he is really good at listening to his teachers and parents.  He loves school and is doing well.  He says his favorite part about school is recess where he plays soccer, plays with friends, and sometimes "just runs around like crazy."  He likes to run and is really fast for his size.  Brian is in first grade in the Chinese Immersion program.  I love that he's learning Chinese as he learns all the regular first grade stuff.  The last few months his reading has finally gotten to a level where he actually enjoys it.  Right now Brian says he wants to be an artist when he grows up, but his favorite subject in school is math.  He also loves learning about space, geography, history, and animals.  He has lots of friends at school, but spends his time out of school with Timmy.  Our family is so blessed that Brian and Timmy get along so well.  Of course they have little arguments and fights, but in general they really love each other's company and have similar interests and ideas for spending their play time.  They each have a built in best friend with sleepovers every night.

Brian had a big birthday celebration weekend.  My parents took him to the Tracy Aviary at Brian's request.  He is into birds, especially bald eagles, right now and was in heaven at the aviary when he got to open a present full of bald eagle toys from Grandma and Grandpa.  They gave him a bald eagle Lego set, a bald eagle glider, and a balancing bald eagle which Timmy loves and wants for himself.  He got to open his present right in front of the real bald eagles.

The boys loved the aviary and besides the birthday presents, the highlight was feeding the Sun Conures.  We had them all to ourselves.

It was a really hot day for March and Timmy took Grandpa Tim's hat and Brian drank all the water.

Brian asked to go to our favorite Chinese restaurant, Sweet Ginger, for his birthday dinner.  My parents treated us and Mark's parents for Brian's birthday and for a farewell dinner before Mark's parents left for their mission.  It was delicious and so fun for Brian to have both sets of Grandparents to dote on him.

Brian's actual birthday landed on a Sunday.  So after opening a present we went to church.

Then to Nai Nai's house for special birthday noodles and cupcakes.  Brian was one happy boy.

Because I had broken my thumb the day before, I wasn't very good at decorating cupcakes.  Brian and Timmy had fun decorating them though like eggs in bird nests.

Happy Birthday Brian!  We love you so much!

Addition: At seven years old, Brian weighs 42 lbs. and is 46 inches tall.

March Madness

 March madness really does describe our March this year. Most of it was good madness. Between trips to urgent care, we had a whole lot of fun!

Mark taught the boys how to play chess.  They (Brian) were super interested, but decided to stick with checkers for a while longer.  They've been really into playing checkers, Chinese checkers and monopoly this month.

We finally finished the outside of the renter's yard.  All except for the grass. We'll hopefully get that in next week. We found a nice couple to rent the basement and they moved in and all is working out better than we hoped.  I love that all of the space in this big house has a purpose and is being used.  We don't even notice the renters at all.

Timmy helped me paint the old weathered door to the renter's storage room and here's a view of their patio.

Mark finished up the inside of the storage room with the help of a friend.  It is way better than the scary nasty room it was before, and the best part is that no rats will be living under the floor.

Pete the cat has been particularly friendly and wants to become an indoor cat after 15 years of living in the barn.  I'm trying to convince him the barn is the best place to live, which may be a futile effort with the kids and Mark letting him in the house so often.

The kids discovered how awesome our backyard is for playing basketball, soccer and street hockey.  We need to buy some goals.

The sand area became even more entertaining this month when the boys realized they could use the hose water to make lakes and rivers.

This hidden sand corner is full of toys and it looks like a junkyard.  But it is seriously the boy's paradise. They are so happy there imagining up games and designing roads and buildings to make cities.  All that sand was here when we bought the house.  I could not have asked for a better sand and play area. 

We spent an afternoon at Wheeler Farm just down the street.

One beautiful March evening we barbecued and ate on the porch.

The first urgent care visit of the month was for Timmy.  One Sunday afternoon he was walking through the living room and somehow fell and hit his eyebrow directly on the corner of the ottoman.  Even though the ottoman was padded it split his face right open.  He screamed for a few minutes and then he was very brave after that.  Mark and I took a look and knew he needed stitches.  Before we went to the doctor, Timmy had to see in the mirror what it looked like.

The doctor put some numbing gel on it and we waited.  By this point Timmy was enjoying the attention.

He ended up getting three stitches and was super still and brave while the doctor sewed him up.  He loved telling everyone he about it and was super happy about all the attention.  He's one cute kid even with a cut on his face.  Now it is healed and the scar is right in his eyebrow.  You wouldn't even notice it if you didn't look for it.

Mark bought a bocce ball set and the boys love playing in the field.  It has been the perfect Family Home Evening activity.

Take a good look in the above picture at all the ugly Russian Olive trees along the fence line in the field, because ripping all those and more out was Mark's next big project in March.  Again, with the help of his parents and his Land Cruiser, he pulled them out roots and all.

We got a few bids on hauling those trees away and they were all insanely expensive.  So we got another city green dumpster for $40 and decided to cut up all the trees, burn the small branches, and put the rest in the dumpster ourselves.  Mark's parents spent days here helping cut and burn.  My parents came one day to help load in into the dumpster.  We used the old rusted out water trough as the containment for the fire.  It worked out very well.

I was able to help for one evening, and then I was out of commission because of a hand injury.  We had a ward basketball tournament in which I was pretty much forced to play because they just needed one more lady to play.  I played the first night in my street clothes because I wasn't planning on playing to begin with.  Everything was fine on that first night, and then on the night of the final game that darn ball came down hard on my left thumb.

It hurt so bad that I went and bawled like a baby in the bathroom during halftime and I could not muster up the courage to play the second half.  I felt like such a wimp for bowing out over what I thought was a sprain.  Mark needed to play in the men's game so I took the kids home and got them to bed.  Then I sat there with tears running down my face wondering why my thumb hurt so much.  Mark got home in time for me to head over to urgent care for the second time this month.  Only this time it was for myself.  Sure enough, it is fractured.  It's what they call a burst fracture.  My first broken bone ever.  After all those times I fell out of trees and off horses growing up and I have to get my first broken bone playing a game of basketball that I didn't even want to play.  I am instructed to keep it in a brace for six weeks or there might be a possibility of surgery.  I think it is healing up and it sure makes me appreciate my left thumb when it is working, because everything is hard without it.

This is just a cute picture of Timmy.

St. Patrick's Day came and went in March.  We don't do much for that day, but we did wear green and I loved what Brian brought home from school.  It says "I think I'm lucky because I get to go to school.  I have a good mom.  I am smart. I have frens (friends).  I have food."  It gave me a little opportunity to talk to him about how in our family we call all those things blessings.  He is so cute and reminded me to be grateful for my blessings too.

We went one evening to the fundraiser at Brian's school.  He loves participating in school activities and seeing his friends.

Mark's huge multi-company ping pong tournament was in March.  He played hard all day long to finally win the title!  His company, his friends, his dad, and his wife are all so proud!

He won some pretty cool stuff too.  Trophies, medals, a huge nice safe for the house and a stay at a resort in Park City among other things.  Nice work Mark!

Timmy's favorite thing to do with me is go shopping at Target when I let him get a pretzel with cheese sauce.  He asks almost everyday if I need to go to Target. It won't be much longer that he will be with me running errands, so I give in and get him a pretzel every time we go to Target.

One day my parents took Brian and Timmy to the zoo while I spent the day cleaning my house.  It was the cleanest my house has ever been since moving in.  Thanks Mom and Dad!

One Sunday afternoon our friends came and we played in the park behind our house.

After Timmy got his stitches out, we stopped at the mall to see the Lego exhibit.  We got to see all the U.S. national monuments and buildings built from Legos!  The kid's favorite was the Old North Church in Boston.  They recognized it immediately from Brian's favorite book, an illustrated version of Longfellow's poem Paul Revere's Ride.  Brian even quoted some of the poem from memory as we admired the church built of Lego bricks.s

Saturdays in March were spent going to Brian and Timmy's indoor soccer games.  They have really enjoyed playing soccer.

Brian is so fast I haven't gotten any great pictures of him yet.

We celebrated Mark's Dad's birthday.

Then we ended the month by celebrating Brian's 7th birthday and saying goodbye to Mark's parents who finally got their Visas and left on their mission!