Weekend Wrap

Addie turned three. For weeks she has been obsessed with her birthday. After all the hype I felt we had to be sure to deliver. Her birthday consisted of a primary Easter party she was convinced had been organized just for her and a family trip to Chuck E. Cheese. All in all a super fun (her words) day.











She wanted a Dora the Explorer birthday cake. I'm still without water in my kitchen so the idea of baking and decorating a cake seemed more complicated than usual. My friends kindly offered their places to decorate, but I eventually settled on store-bought cupcakes atop Dora plates. In the end Addie didn't seem to mind.

Our bedazzled 3-year-old sporting all her birthday-won PLING
(term coined by Randal for plastic bling)

As if a birthday sugar high wasn't enough, we had Easter the following day. Thankfully the Easter bunny hid more Play-doh than candy. He must have known our kids would still be buzzed.Sacrament meeting was wonderful. The music and talks were excellent. The primary took great care to teach the children about the Savior's resurrection. Ethan had so much to tell us about what he had learned. As a parent I am so grateful. There was even show-and-tell with an adorable baby duckling.We spent the evening with our friends the Wilcoxes and the Becks for Easter dinner. Randal and I consider ourselves very blessed/lucky to have made such great friends. In fact, I may not even tell our friends when our kitchen is done so that we can continue to receive such generous invites!

We had a wonderful weekend. Because of the non-stop fun, both my kids are napping right now so I continue to consider the weekend a huge success.

Lastly let me say, I am so grateful to a loving Savior who would condescend to come to earth and sacrifice His life on my behalf. I love the springtime. Every year it seems to awaken in me a renewed desire to live the gospel. I'm thankful for this sacred time of year.

Happy Easter

Redbox Rocks

Randal's been out of town 10 days. This has left me many quiet nights to fill. With the help of Redbox I've managed to be entertained...most nights.

Australia
Loved it.
Bedtime Stories
Didn't love it.
Harry Potter #1
Finally read the book so I had to watch the movie again.
The Secret Life of Bees.
Better suited as a book than a screenplay.
Jane Eyre.
Madly, madly love it. I own a copy and pull this movie out just about every time Randal is traveling. Forget sparkling vampires--this is my kind of Edward!

Life Slowly Goes On

Nothing much blog worthy has been happening.

Conference was inspiring. Although a number of talks involved stories of children dying. I bawled like a baby through most of the sessions.

The Cutler's invited us over for breakfast Sunday morning. Delicious French toast. Thank you. We had such a great time I'm thinking we will adopt the tradition of having a family over from the ward next Conference Sunday. (Hopefully, the kitchen will be done by then.)

Randal has been in Japan the past week. We're just getting by until he comes home.

Our kitchen cabinets were installed. Beautiful. New appliances arrived Saturday. Fabulous. Now we're waiting out the two weeks until the counter tops arrive--that means no sink or dishwasher until then. Interesting.

It snowed today. Blah.

The kids have been getting along really well which is a blessing. The photo (above) was taken after Ethan helped Addie repeat a talk the two had written for FHE.

Their talk (including spelling):

My famly is nise.
My famly is good to me.
I love my famly.
My famly lets me play videyo games.

(I cannot even tell you how proud I am of the fact that of the four sentences they could have chosen to describe our family one contained video games. I'm throwing the Wii in the garbage!)

ER ended last week. I'm still sad.

Super Freak

Adelaide has added two adjectives to her vocabulary. Everything is now super. Granola bars are super good. Playdough is super fun. Her nursery teacher is super nice. But my favorite: [said with angry fists at her side:] "Mom, I'm super, super mad at you!" Now that's just... super.

Although being super angry with me is much better than the observation she loudly made in the grocery store, "Mom, that lady is super big." I would have crawled behind the meat counter if I could.

Her other expression of choice: "My bath is freakin' cold!"

Super I blame on Randal. But we're a long way from the BYU campus so I'm stumped as to her exposure to anything described as freaking.

Hell's Kitchen

My kitchen has been reduced to this:We're making progress don't you think? Who needs anything more that an old stove anyway? Running water is highly overrated. And...walls schmalls.

It may not seem so, but we made incredible progress this weekend. Randal took a few vacation days to get the kitchen ready for cabinet installation tomorrow. Some issues were resolved and we were able to sneak in time to finish enough of the wood floor to make way for the kitchen professionals. Thanks to Andy and Patrick for all their help Saturday. Tomorrow the kitchen will begin to be a kitchen again. I cannot wait!Many of you have asked for pictures. I haven't wanted to post the mayhem until I have great after shots to show we don't actually live in a shack. Soon.

In the meantime, let me wet your appetite with these:

old door

new door

What will we be doing for food in the meantime? Well, McDonald's changed their happy meal toys. I consider our slate wiped clean when new toys are offered thus erasing my shame. Yet another bonus to get us through the next few weeks!

(Addie with TWO McDonald's watches. Oh there's a third one kicking around here somewhere. See what I mean by shame.)

Slogan Central

I'm worried. My son has a new past time--advertising sponge. He excitedly tells me the of the latest and greatest products he has seen advertised on TV, even repeating phrases right out of the commercials. For example, the other day he asked if I was aware that Sketchers "feel like you're walking on air." For weeks he has been explaining the key points of the rather extensive Wii fit campaign. (I think he's got me sold on that one.) And his latest--cereal straws where, he says, you can "dip, sip and munch." He is on an all-out campaign to get me to buy them.

For the most part his interests have remained with children's products. But last night, in the car, he noticed a billboard for Progressive car insurance. He launched into a HUGE explanation about how we could save on our car insurance if we were safe drivers. He figured I could probably save but Dad wasn't a safe driver on account of his speeding tickets. "So Mom," he finished, "You can 'call or click today' and save some money."

Let me just emphatically mention my kid does not watch that much TV. We were, in fact, driving home from the library when this conversation took place. He happens to have his dad's uncanny ability to accurately memorize lines from movies, television and music extremely well. (At least that's what I tell myself to justify any bad habits.)