Busy Busy

Last week was pretty busy for us! We started out with Jannika's 7th birthday. Her favorite gift was a butterfly garden (don't ya LOVE those commercials that make kids beg you for bumpits or a shoes-under? :) This was actually a very cool (and educational) gift!

She had a "J" birthday party where the girls had to wear things that started with J (jeans, jackets, etc), we had a jump-rope competition, learned to play jacks, guessed how many jelly beans were in a jar and had a J shaped cake! (This is one of those times when the horseshoe cake pan your family has had since 1972 comes in handy!)

Notice the girl second from the right wearing Jammies, a jumprope around her waist, a jacket, jacks and jack-o-lanterns for a necklace. She definitely won the prize!
The rest of the week included having about 15 young men crash our house for an activity on Tuesday, some friends over for dinner on Wednesday, crazy cleaning and baking for a baby shower at my house on Thursday and then making lunch for the faculty of the school on Friday. Whew. I know some of you are going "Is that all?" Well, that's kind of a busy week for me. Then on Friday afternoon, we packed up and headed for the desert for our first camping trip in our new camp trailer.
And what is this odd picture, you might ask? Well, it is a real live dinosaur dig. On our way to our camp spot, we stopped to see this dinosaur dig site. I think what you are looking at is a vertebre and a rib.

I just thought this picture was pretty funny of Claire drinking her 50th Capri Sun. She was absolutely in HEAVEN while we were camping. She loves being outside, getting dirty and riding her bike.

It was a great week!

Easter and a Birthday

4 dozen eggs colored+ 7 cousins that visited+ 6 Easter egg hunts+ lots of candy= tons of fun!


We had Easter egg hunts at Megan's house and out on the desert. Isn't it supposed to be hot out on the desert? It obviously was not this time. Oh well, the kids loved it anyway. It's a tradition in Kyle's family to do a hike with a bandana on a stick with your lunch in it so we carried on the tradition.

We watched a wonderful conference on Saturday and Sunday. I didn't know that the speakers are not assigned topics or themes and don't even coordinate with each other on their topics. That makes it even more interesting and inspired that they seem to talk a lot about the same things. This time I noticed a lot of talks about teaching our children and reading the scriptures with them. What a neat conference!
Claire's birthday is today so we celebrated yesterday with a bunny cake. She loved it and loved her new presents.
Here she is with two grandmas and below with mom and her new piggy bank toy.

What's going on...

So, I feel like I've been really busy but I guess I just haven't been taking pictures of everything I have been doing. These are some pics of our big Relief Society Birthday Enrichment last week. I'm on the enrichment board and we worked super hard to pull of this Around the World dinner. We had Japanese lanterns and colorful tablecloths and yummy stir fry and chicken. The food and decor were great but our speakers were a little off the topic, but what can ya do?

My bro and sis-in-law welcomed this little baby boy two weeks ago and we went up to see them.

These two cousins had great fun splashing and eating popsicles in the tub.

This is just a cute picture of Kyle reading to the girls. Jannika has also started to love to read. She sits on her bed and reads or draws sometimes before she goes to bed. She is still in piano and we are going to sign her up for swimming lessons this spring.
Kirsten and Claire have been playing a lot in their playhouse (that they got for Christmas). Kirsten is also into doing worksheets. She loves all kinds of school worksheets, especially mazes. She still says something every day that makes me crack up. The other day we were driving in the car and she randomly said, "you're right, mom, we do have bones!"
My little almost 2 year old is getting smarter every day but still doesn't want to talk a whole lot. We have taught her some sign language and we know she can understand everything we say but she just doesn't have the desire to talk. She does say mom, dad, uh huh and uh uh and uh oh (did those make sense?)

Aloha!

Aloha! My awsome, wonderful husband surprised me on my birthday a few months ago with tickets to Hawaii. I totally thought they were fake but slowly realized he really had booked a trip to Hawaii! He is so smart too because we flew out on our anniversary. He got a couple of birds with that stone:) Our friends, Robert and Heather, live in Honolulu and this beautiful picture above is right outside their front door. It's like an island paradise right in the middle of the city. They were so awesome and picked us up at the airport with fresh flower leis, let us stay a few nights with them and let us use their car! Aren't they awesome?! We had so much fun chatting with them every night until midnight and hanging out on the beach with them. Thanks you guys:) And thanks to my sister, LeAnne, Kyle's sister, Megan and his mom for watching our kids. You are wonderful!
We stayed on the North Shore for a few days and the waves were really big. We saw lots of surfers and Kyle tried a little boogie boarding but the waves were kind of kicking him around so we mostly stayed on the beach. We did find a little reef where we scuba dived, though. I had never done the scuba thing so it was cool once I convinced myself to actually put my head under the water!
This was a cool fence in Laie (where the temple and the Polynesian Cultural Center are).
We both got some killer tatoos at the PCC. Mine was--I mean, it still IS-- on my ankle. Ha ha.

It rained and was a little windy the first 3 days we were there but by the fourth day it was beautiful and I even got sunburned.


We visited Pearl Harbor on our last day and it was really neat and sad to see the ship and learn about what happened there.

Here's us and Robert and Heather on Waikiki beach on our last day. We flew out that night at 11:00. Here's the sun going down on our trip. Sniff* I'm so glad we got to go. Thanks, honey!

Happy 2010!

Wow, get ready for a truckload of pictures! Here's a synopsis of our December. It was wonderful! It started with my last post about going to the "Vegetable," in which the ride home was not wonderful...but it did mean that we would not be sick on Christmas DAY like Kirsten and I were last year. Blah. I was excited to have a good Christmas this year! We definitely decked the halls this year starting with the lovely wreath above. Can I say I am totally in LOVE with this wreath. After I hung it up, I went outside several times just to admire it. I know, I'm a nerd but I really do love it!
We cut this lovely tree on our mountain property and it was a really nice tree. Good job finding it, husband:)
Then we decorated it and undecorated it (see the undecorator below) simultaneously!

We also went to our ward Christmas party, sat on the big guy's lap, built snow forts in the mountains of snow in front of our house and went sledding with some of our friends.


Claire made this funny face and then I told Kirst to make a funny face too and this is what I got!


After sledding we met Judd and Keiauni at a Pirate place in Provo where the kids had hours of fun playing on the rides, slides, arcade games etc.

The week of Christmas we had Jannika's class program (I'll have to post pics later) where she sang really well and played "Jolly Old St. Nicholas" on the piano with her teacher. On Christmas eve we made a gingerbread house and watched the movie Luke II (one of our favorites).
Christmas morning was wonderful and although Claire was a little ornery because she had to wake up early...she was still pretty excited about the playhouse the kids got and her other new toys.