Emily's Baptism

Yesterday Emily was baptized. It was a great day. Chris baptized her and my dad confirmed her.

Here she is, fresh out of the water.

After the baptism, my parents agreed to let us crash their house for a party which included food

and cupcakes

and the best decorations this lame mom could muster.

It also included some kite flying (Lucy and Jane were inseparable all weekend)

and light saber fighting (Thanks, Ami for making the light sabers. The kids had a great time with them)

and lots of wildflower picking.

Emily was thrilled to get her own scriptures and wanted to check them out right away. 

 It was a great weekend with family and a wonderful experience for Emily and for us. Good job Emily! We are proud of you!

May so Far

May is a crazy month here at our house.

It all starts with Mother's day, which was lovely because it involved flowers and my favorite Perr Bear Chocolates along with some touching cards from all my family members.

It also involved The Great Mother's Day Snowstorm, which shut down church on Sunday and school on Monday. I'm told it was worse outside the city limits, explaining the cancellations. 

Despite the snowstorm, Chris still braved the weather to grill some pork chops for the woman who bore his children. Classy move, Chris. 

The kids looked on from a distance. 

Four days later, it was Emily's birthday and, by then, the weather was warm and lovely. We had a small scale family party that involved presents.

Most notably a Nintendo DS. I may live to regret this. Serious limits have already been set on account of the nonstop Mario Kart action happening in our house. 

After an ample dinner of Emily's favorite ribs at Texas Roadhouse,

we ate cake. 

All of this was a lead-up to this coming weekend, when we will hold Emily's baptism and have a big party. 

And since this project may never be totally done, I will share a sneak peak of our bedroom remodel. In April Chris and I painted the walls and laid bamboo flooring. Yesterday, he finished the closet he has been working on for several weeks as a birthday present for me. 

It's pretty awesome. 

This guy makes some seriously classy moves. 

Hippity Hoppity

Happy Easter!

Despite a pretty large ongoing home improvement project (more on that at a future date) and a diet bet Chris and I bought into, we still managed to have a pretty decent Easter.

Eggs were dyed:

and baskets were loaded.

The Elsa doll on the right set us back quite a bit. But you can't play "Frozen" without Elsa. 

Jane appreciated it accordingly. She even shared it with a little girl at church who had been longing for an Elsa doll and whose parents wouldn't give in to the doll scalpers as easily as we did. I was proud of her for sharing. Soon thereafter she got the doll taken away for bad behavior. It's these ups and downs that make parenting so delightful. 

This is as close as you get to a fancy Easter dress picture when you have early church. Church was lovely. Great talks about the atonement and a couple of songs by the primary. 

After church they hunted Easter eggs. 

And then we had a scaled down Easter dinner with no funeral potatoes, thanks to that stupid diet bet. My body will thank me tomorrow, but right now my mouth wants some funeral potatoes. 

Happy Easter! 

Springy

Happy Spring. It has been one heck of a Winter and Spring didn't come a moment too soon. It's still occasionally snowing and the windy season hasn't slowed down yet, but every day I feel a little bit less like chucking everything and becoming a homeless person on a beach in Mexico. So that's progress.

My Asiatic lilies are just starting to poke up. They may yet freeze solid and have to start again, but at least they've made a showing.

Another sure sign of spring: the chicks are at Murdoch's.

Sometimes I feel like a bit of a poser, going in to gawk at chicks when there are people who actually buy them and use them for egg laying/eating. Or, as my elderly Jordanian coworker tells me in his heavily accented English, that he used to buy chicks for his children and they would run around the yard bringing smiles to the children's faces, but every year, the #$%@ dog would kill them (the chicks, not the children). 

Perhaps it's fine to just look. 

I also let the kids talk me into something that seldom goes down in our house: sugar cookie decorating. Spring cookies are better than Christmas cookies anyway. 

Yeah, that's an embarrassing amount of sprinkles.

In other news, Jane has started gymnastics. Her school loads up the kiddos on Fridays and drives them to a gymnastics studio (or gym? or arena? or colosseum? I'm not sure) and they learn how to balance and jump. She loves it. Mainly because she gets to wear a leotard. It's all about the costume.

A sidenote: Jane is doing really, really well at her new school. I love it so much I want to quit my job and get Montessori certified. Or maybe not. Kids are hard.

Speaking of being about costumes, the girls have started watching at least some Frozen on an almost daily basis. Got 15 minutes? It's Frozen time! 

They have to act out all the parts and they watch it in as much costume as they can muster. Has anyone tried to buy an actual Frozen costume lately? Yeah, it's insane. Not that I would buy them yet, because the girls are going to be Anna and Elsa for the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique this summer. Let's hope they get the dresses in stock by then. In the meantime, every time they get the DVD player rolling, Emily pleads for two braids and Jane for one. Because Emily is Anna and Jane is Elsa, on account of her slightly more golden locks.

We won't buy costumes, but, we did pay nearly triple retail price for a Frozen piece of merchandise lately. But let's not ruin the surprise. It's for Easter... coming soon. 

Turn and Face the Strange Ch-Ch-Changes

There have been some big changes lately around the old homestead. I'm out of that period in life where I get to make life altering announcements, so our "big" changes may not be big to people with exciting lives, but they are big to us.

The first thing is Chris' job. In two weeks, he will be leaving the Military Department behind and going back to work for the Department of Transportation in the Traffic program. (I just read that as someone from the outside and it seems so boring, but to us it is HUGE exciting news). Let me rephrase that: Chris got a job in a program he's wanted to work in forever with people whom he respects and whose company he enjoys immensely. It also came with a promotion. And the most minuscule raise you could actually imagine. As a matter of fact we plan on spending a quarter of the first month's bounty on a celebratory pizza tomorrow night. But money doesn't buy happiness. What buys happiness is getting to spend 8 hours of your day in a place you enjoy doing a job you love. And Chris has landed that. I am super happy for him. 

The second big change is that Jane started at a new preschool. When I first went back to work this school had a wait list as long as the Hobbit trilogy. But miraculously, we gave them a Hail Mary phone call a week ago and they had an opening. 

I am in love with this school. She has been going for a week and already we are seeing a different Jane. She is happier and more confident and she is learning concepts I didn't know it was possible for a five year old to learn. We were worried the transition would be rough, but she has slipped seamlessly into her new environment. She's made new friends and gotten into a new routine. She even discovered an old friend there whom she immediately re-bonded with. Her teachers are amazing. They are well educated and patient and kind. Her head teacher has been at the school for over a decade. 

The children are treated with such respect and they behave incredibly well with very little discipline. During class time, they are quiet and engaged. Class time and class space are organized down to the smallest detail. It is unbelievable. But we now have a problem. Jane's sticker chart. She gets a sticker for every day of good behavior. 9 stickers = 1 leap pad app. She has been getting a sticker every day. We had to cough up an app this week and I expect we'll have to do the same next week. It's a good thing Chris got a raise that made us affluent enough to afford 4 apps a month. Make that 3 after the celebratory pizza. 

There's one more big change to the household: 

this box. 

I don't know what it does or its significance, but Chris seems to love it. And he is important to me, so this box is important to me as well. I do know that it just got slightly more complicated to turn on the TV. 

In other news, winter refuses to die. The kids don't mind. They would mind even less if they weren't always fighting over this tiny orange snow shovel. I think it was intended for emergency vehicular use. I have a cell phone and such things as tow trucks exist so it has proved unnecessary to me but invaluable to the kids. 

 Still, I am sick of this endless winter. The quicker it goes, the happier I will be. But still, I have very little to complain about right now. Very little. So little that it can be summarized by one of my favorite words in my profession: negligible. 

It's going to be cold, it's going to be dark and it's going to last you for the rest of your lives.

I haven't yet posted this year and there are some very good reasons for that, but I don't want the memories of early 2014 to go unrecorded, so here we are.

January went by in a huge blur of work, work and more work. Thanks to a great deal of procrastination (not my own), I ended up working a lot of overtime. I know there are people who work a lot more, but when you are a mother of small children, rushing through the door at bedtime doesn't cut it. And once the kids were in bed, Chris was left with a tired, fried and stressed out wife. It hasn't been pretty. I would say the paycheck helped if a third of my OT pay didn't go to taxes. But it does. So OT is pretty much suckville.

Last week was my first week post-OT and it was also Chris' first week-long work trip out of town since we had kids, thus extending our time in suckville. But on the bright side, the temperatures were sub-zero all week, so at least we had that going for us.

Needless to say, I am ready to put the last several weeks behind me and maybe get a bit of rest and have some time that isn't spoken for.

Here are a few shots from the highlights reel. Thanks to Chris for taking some of the pictures I wasn't around for.

We've had a lot of snow this winter. Or maybe it's more correct to say that the snow we've gotten has stuck around longer than usual. Because it's been cold and miserable. 

But luckily the kids enjoy it.

They do get cold from time to time and that's when they come in and do stuff like build roller coasters for their dolls. 

Since we felt like Jane had reached some relatively calm waters, we decided to work on the blanket habit. I made half a dozen mini-blankets that she could keep in her pocket. They worked brilliantly at home. Then, the next day at daycare, I discovered that she wasn't sailing as smoothly as I had thought so we abandoned project "mini-blanket" to work on other things. The blanket may go in the backpack to kindergarten. It wouldn't be the worst thing that ever happened.

Emily made her Valentine's box yesterday. The effort of wrapping this box required two adults and one hour to wrap. Chris ended up rescuing me half an hour in and pretty much restarting entirely. He is a fabulous husband. Then Emily spent 5 minutes covering it with stickers. 

A Valentine's box to be proud of. Although it could use another couple unicorns. That's just my humble opinion.

Yesterday we spent our first day as a family in a long time watching the Lego Movie. It was fantastic. Now I just have to get the kids to stop running around the house like maniacs singing "Everything is Awesome". Only a couple short months until they can start running around outside like maniacs. Then it just becomes good healthy exercise. It can't come soon enough.