Community Easter Egg Hunt

Last year and this year, we have gone to a community Easter egg hunt sponsored by the Rec center by our house. I thought it might be a fun tradition, but this may be our last year doing it. It's overwhelming instead of fun. A large square of the park is sectioned off and divided into quarters, with each quarter being a different age group. There is wrapped candy everywhere and a few prize eggs in each section, and random other things like frisbees and stuffed animals. When they signal the start, everyone goes crazy. Parents are allowed in the 2-3 year old section and some of them are very competitive! The whole thing is over in under 5 minutes. Our kids got about 5-10 pieces of candy each, which was perfect, and we left!

Ward/Neighborhood Easter Egg Hunt

The Friday before Easter, our ward/neighborhood has a small hunt at the church, everyone brings 10 filled eggs per kid and it's fun. This was the beginning of our sugar-filled weekend. Lydia goes crazy for candy and immediately eats as much as she can before it gets taken away. Elise has learned the concept of saving some for later, so we kinda let her manage her own candy consumption. Luckily she is good about sharing when she has candy and Lydia does not. :)

Disney on Ice

One of our recent highlights was going to the Disney on Ice "Princess Wishes" show. I managed to get free tickets, and we made it a girls' night out with my mom, sister, 3 sisters-in-law, and 1 cousin.

The day of the show opening, there was supposed to be a free "meet and greet" outside the stadium at noon. They had this elaborate event set up, for a total of 15 minutes! Here are Lydia and Elise on the red carpet. A radio station gave them free Minnie Mouse dolls, isn't that nice?There were three princess-inspired cakes set up to look at. They were really well done, I thought. Here is Belle's cake:

Here is Snow White's Cake: And this is Elise's favorite, Cinderella's cake:
The princesses were not really "meeting-and-greeting" anyone except the news media, but Elise was thrilled to see them up close anyway. About 15 minutes into the event, the "handlers" announced that the princesses needed to go inside and put their ice skates on.

After they left, we used their backdrop for a photo-op.

This is my niece and sister-in-law with Elise at the show that night.

And here is me with Lydia at the show. It was actually very entertaining and well done, the best Disney on Ice that I've seen.

Just Ducky

This is Lydia's Duck. It is very important to her and she rarely will sleep or nap without it. Elise was a thumb-sucker, and never seemed to need a blankie or some thing to be attached to. Lydia on the other hand, was not a great self-soother. When she was a few months old I started putting this in her crib with her as part of the bedtime routine, and she has definitely become attached to it. It's not the softest stuffed animal in the world, but I picked it with a purpose in mind. It's terry cloth and machine washable (bonus!).

Lydia requests the Duck by name every time we put her in the crib. She also has several other words that sound like "Duck", so it can get confusing at times. Once we were having lunch with some friends at a restaurant, and Lydia kept insisting that she wanted her "Duck" (or so I thought). Turns out her foot was "stuck" in the upholstery of the booth.

Sometimes while driving, when her Duck is nowhere around, she will say "Duck" over and over until I realize that she saw or heard a "truck".

The other one that sometimes gets me is when she will point at her drink of milk and say "Dock". I say "Duck?" and she shakes her head, saying "Dock," and brings me to the pantry where she points at the chocolate milk powder. "Oh, chocolate! You want chocolate in your milk?" (Emphatic head-nodding). She is going to be great at charades someday.

The Red Team

I just had to post this cute picture of our girls and their 2 girl cousins on Mike's side. The cousins came over one day to be tended, and all 4 girls were matching. I took about 20 pictures trying to get them too all look at the camera and smile (and not pick their noses, etc.).

A very snowy winter

Is is just me, or has this been an exceptionally snowy year? I swear in years past we hardly ever had to shovel because the small amounts of snow on the driveway would melt by day's end. This year we actually contemplated buying a snow-blower, but didn't. Mike did make a good point though, men with snow blowers make better home teachers, haha.

In January, Elise and I built this snowman, isn't he cute? The day we built it, the snow was very melty and compressed, so he was really solid. Within a couple days, though, it rained and he became 50% of his original size. His head pretty much melted away, so we took all the parts and moved them to the next section down. I should have taken a pic of that, it was pretty funny.

Christmas Day 2007

I know, I know, I'm three months late posting this but here goes!
Christmas day was so fun. I made a yummy dessert-I mean breakfast, with frozen Rhodes rolls and butterscotch pudding mix and like a week's worth of butter. I think it may become a family tradition!
The girls loved Christmas morning and checking out their stockings. Lydia immediately ate every Hershey's Kiss she found in her stocking, it was so funny (but messy). Here is her favorite present, a rocking horse that sings and clip-clops! She loves musical toys, and rocking chairs, so this was right up her alley.


Here is Elise with the gift she imagined up and requested of Santa, a "pink baby with pink hair" (aka Strawberry Shortcake). It's hard to tell exactly what she had in mind, but this definitely fit the bill and she loves it.

The girls' other big gift was this cute playhouse. See that one-of-a-kind "Cinderella's work dress" that Elise is wearing? She loves to pretend she is Cinderella and always asks to wear dresses and aprons, so I got the idea to make her a costume. I stayed up late Christmas Eve finishing it (of course Mike rolled his eyes at me), but she loves it and insisted on wearing it all day! And in case you were wondering, Lydia's diaper leaked so that explains her lack of clothing in this picture.

Later that day we went to Mike's dad and step-mom's. Here are the girls with McKenna and Savannah playing Ring-around-the-rosies on their new mini-trampoline.

That afternoon we ended up back at my parents' house. They had cleared a "road" in the snow so the grandkids could drive their new kid-sized jeeps! We had such a fun Christmas season, and loved celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ with so many of our extended family.

Christmas Eve 2007

Santa dropped in on the Christmas Eve celebration at my parents' house.

Lydia actually sat on his lap and didn't cry!

Elise told him she would like a "pink baby with pink hair" (try to guess her favorite color...)

After dinner, the girls and their cousins played the parts in the Nativity story. Drew bravely played the part of baby Jesus, despite the threat of eye-poking angels. Luckily he came out of it unscathed.

After the Nativity, all the little kids (including Chris and Alan, haha) got new pajamas from Grandma. This is a tradition that started with my Grandma and Grandpa Grow, who would give new pajamas to us and our cousins at their annual Christmas party. We would immediately change into the pjs and pose for a group picture in our (usually matching) pajamas. After several pictures had been taken, we would beg for the parents to take a "silly" picture, and we would pull funny faces.

Instead of funny faces, our girls opted for an "ouch, she bumped me on the head" pose:

Our Christmas Card

Here is this year's Christmas card. I had the address of this blog printed on the back of them, so that may be why you're reading this!

For anyone who is wondering what we've been up to this year:

Lydia is so much fun these days. She's a tiny little thing, but she is so confident on her feet (as she should be at almost 18 months) that she draws comments from strangers everywhere we go. Her vocabulary grows all the time, and she has several words that are fairly clear. Her favorites are baby, ball, duck, dada, ooshes (shoes), -ilk (milk), and -ock (sock). I don't know what's with dropping the first consonant sound of some words, but it sure is cute sounding.
Lydia loves music and is a really great little dancer. Maybe someday I'll try to post some video of all her different dance moves. Lydia also loves to blow kisses and give hugs. She's a very affectionate child.


Elise is now 3, and started preschool this fall, at a home in our neighborhood. She loves it. She can write a few of her letters, and she loves to draw cute little pictures (see below). Elise is currently very interested in the concept of big and little, and when she sees groupings of different sized anything, she assigns them titles like mommy, daddy, baby, big kid etc. We're so proud of the way she acts with Lydia. She is a wonderful big sister. Elise also has been doing a dance/tumbling class with her cousin McKenna at AED (where Cindy works). Her class performed a Christmas dance last weekend at their recital. She was so pretty in her little blue costume. Lately I've begun to wonder if Elise grasps the concept of buttering people up (for Christmas?), because she has just recently been showering Mike and I with praise like "You're the best best best mommy/daddy anyone ever had!" I would love to know where she learned this!


Mike is still working at Progeny Systems in downtown Salt Lake. When I try to describe what he does, I always get it wrong, but it has something to do with designing FPGA chip thingys for underwater acoustic kinda thingys. Very technical, I know. Sometimes he gets to travel to Rhode Island and Connecticut for his job, but it's not very often, so that's nice for us.

Mike spends his Tuesday nights developing his patience, as he leads the 8-year-old cub scouts. Seriously, I helped him last week, and I know why they call 'em Wolves. They are just like a pack of wild animals, ha ha.

I was just recently "promoted" from Beehive advisor to YW second counselor. I was about to be super disappointed as I was released from my calling, and then I was relieved to learn that I would be working with the same great Beehive class, just in a slightly different calling. It has been so fun being a leader of youth, and I'm looking forward to continuing it.

I am enjoying my role as wife and mother, and working on the "homemaker" part of it, ha ha. Speaking of which, maybe I should wrap this up and go do some laundry!

Our Disneyland Trip in October

In October we took a really fun family vacation to California. We spent an afternoon on the beach, and 5 days in the Disney parks. Our friends the Murdocks were there for part of the same time, so it was fun to see them as well. Here are some of our cute pictures:

Here we are at the beach, our first afternoon in California. We thought it would be fun to have a picnic lunch on the sand. Bad idea. It was not very warm, and it was super WINDY! We ended up having a pretty good time (despite the sand in our eyes and food), playing in the sand and wading in the water. Elise especially liked that part of our trip.

King Arthur's Carousel was probably Lydia's second favorite ride. It was the first thing she tried, and she loved it. And then it stopped moving and she had a fit, lol.

Lydia's favorite ride of all was probably the new Nemo submarine ride. This was my view throughout most of our first voyage:

Elise claimed that her favorite rides were Monsters, Inc. and "the mountain ride" (Matterhorn). She was just a hair over the height requirement for that one, woohoo!

The other highlight of Elise's Disneyland experience was the new Princess Fantasy Faire. She got to meet a "real princess" (we did not wait in the 90 min. line to meet the princesses fom the movies, but we did meet the "princess" who was passing out these crowns.) Elise was just starstruck, it was so cute.

This is us on Main Street. I made the Mickey Mouse tie dye shirts we are all wearing. It was my first experience with tie dye, but they turned out pretty nice. We got a lot of comments on them!