Zoo Pack Meeting

We visited the zoo a couple weeks ago, where a pack of wild animals Cub Scouts were on the loose. Actually, we brought them with us, and it was really fun. Mike, as cub master, helped them earn the Hogle Zoo trails patch by identifying animals and picking up litter. Elise and Lydia had fun, too. We need to get back to the zoo more often!

Lydia really liked this gorilla, or as she called it: "monkey - hoo hoo hah!"
Elise and Mike, as tall as the giraffe!

Elise and her little friend Nathan, aren't they cute?

Great Grandparents

Elise and Lydia are so lucky and blessed to have some living great-grandparents. Quite a few, actually.

We see my mom's dad almost once a week, at Sunday dinner. He also invites us to gymnastics meets which Elise just LOVES. She sometimes says she wants to be a "gymnastics girl" (recently corrected to "gymnast") when she grows up. One day I asked her what she thought she would need to do to be a gymnast, and she has it all figured out. All she needs is to "wear a leotard with no tights" :).

My dad's parents are fun to visit too, and Elise often suggests we call them when we're bored and want to get out of the house. They are so great, they always let us drop in on very short notice. They get out the special grandkid-sized chairs, feed the girls Kissables candies, and make them feel special. One recent time we visited, Elise pulled a plastic BB out of her pocket, a "treasure" she had collected while walking home from school. She knew it was called a BB, but she had never seen what they are used for. Grandpa was happy to show her his spring powered BB gun and even set up a little target in the house for her to try!

Mike's grandma, his mom's mom, lives a little further away, but we still see her a few times a year. Recently we got to visit because she needed a new hard drive in her computer. I think Elise and Lydia ate every cracker in her cupboard, and she was happy to let them.

In an effort to keep things chronological...

I'm reserving this space for pictures and stuff about our trip to Hawaii. I kept putting it off because I knew it would take a while, so I just decided to make a space for it and move on!

Easter Morning

Easter was great this year. I had an 8am youth fireside to attend, so we all got dressed first thing instead of keeping the girls in their pjs for our little Easter egg hunt and baskets. They were so excited about their baskets. For Lydia, our little sweet tooth, the big thrill was the candy. She immediatedly grabbed some marshmallow peeps and wouldn't put them down!

For Elise, the big thrill was a personalized Book of Mormon that she can take to primary.They loved their Easter dresses, especially Elise, because it's light blue just like Cinderella's ball gown. :) We're planning to do a family picture soon with these dresses. Because it was Stake Conference, and we needed to keep our girls relatively quiet during the 2 hour meeting, their baskets had all sorts of quiet busy toys. In Lydia's hand is something that I made, using an idea that my sister-in-law Krista thought of. It's a lacing card made with a church-related picture. Krista found some cute bible story flashcards to use, but I couldn't find any so I went to the Distribution Center and bought some inexpensive 5x7 prints. I just punched holes around the pictures and tied on a shoelace.
Our other quiet "secret weapon" was a special Easter sunday treat mix, made with Pepperidge Farm pretzel goldfish, and Honeycomb cereal. We taught Elise that it represents the fish and honeycomb that the resurrected Savior ate, to show the people that He was actually resurrected and not just a spirit.

Egg-Dyeing and Kite-Flying

We have a recent tradition of dyeing hard-boiled eggs and flying kites with my family on the Saturday before Easter. We had lots of fun dying eggs. Elise's were all pink with one purple exception. Lydia did about 2 before she got frustrated about me hovering and trying to keep her from spilling the dye. I tried a technique that I found in Family Fun magazine. You find leaves or flowers with interesting edges and place them against the egg, and then tie the egg in a piece of old nylons (or swipe some disposable nylon footies from a shoe store like I did). When you dye the egg, it leaves the leaf-covered part white or lighter than the rest of the egg.

After the dyeing, we went down to the nearby school grounds to fly kites. It hardly ever works out on the day we plan it. My cute Grandma says that kite-flying should be spontaneous, decide to do it when the wind starts blowing. Maybe she's right, but we still have fun trying to make the kites fly on our schedule!

Here is Lydia pulling her cousin Mackenzie in a little wagon. They were good about taking turns. Here is Elise playing in the dirt with Owen and Watson. With all her pink-dyeing, princess-acting, dress-wearing, girly-girlness, it's nice to see her enjoying a pile of dirt!
My awesome dad is helping Mackenzie fly a kite:

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.).