Our blessings

For FHE tonight, we read the First Presidency message from this month's Friend magazine. Then we took our camera on a blessings hunt. This is what we came up with!

Some of Madeline's blessings:


 
 
 

Some of Caleb's blessings:
 




Some of Mom's blessings:




We have so much to be thankful for! The Lord is good to us.

Kindergarten.

Caleb. MY Caleb. Left me for another woman. Her name is Mrs. Thomas. And she gets him for 2 1/2 hours, 5 days a week. That's a lot to swallow as a mother!!!  But I survived.


We're definitely at a "me too" stage with this little girl.

 
 I contemplated emailing this photo to Caleb's teacher as a warning.
 But, she's been teaching for over 20 years. 



 An enthusiastic Caleb with his tired daddy. My men are so handsome!

 He asked for monkey brains for breakfast. 
Other kids grew up calling it monkey bread, I'm sure. But I had an awesomely creative mom :)

 
Pouting. It happened a lot this morning. At one point, I took her hands in mine and said dramatically, "Madeline! OH, my Madeline!" She yanked her hands back before I could continue and said, 
"I'm not dead Mom."

 
We managed to cheer her up a little.

 
We picked up our neighbor on the way to school 
(his younger brother ended up with afternoon kindergarten. Bummer).

 
He WOULD NOT let us accompany him into the school today. (Perhaps it has something to do with taking him in yesterday after school to practice finding the different places he needed to go?) So we settled for a photo outside...and then I watched my baby gallop away from me with his friend.

We entertained ourselves by making mini banana muffins and visiting teaching.

 
Such a glorious sight! 

 
Caleb and a girl from the ward
 (one of the 4 or 5 other kids from our ward who happen to be in his class...
yeah, only in Utah. 1/4 of his class is in our ward...). 
They had to line up and touch the fence before being allowed to run to their parents. 
You could totally tell which of us parents were doing this for the first time! 

 
We surprised Caleb with a picnic lunch and playing an hour and a half at the park. 
(Had to wind down his excitement somehow!)
 
She's all smiles now that we have our Caleb back, 
and she understands that she has a lot of work and learning to do when he goes away each day!

First real haircut!

Before:





After:




5 minutes...

in the office, with dry erase markers. They even attacked poor Caleb.


Easter

A year ago, we decided that Easter should be more important. So just like last year, we ended each day this month with a scripture and a mini lesson about Jesus - either learning another name for Him or something about Him from The Living Christ. We also started our countdown 12 days ago. We learned about the last days of Christ's earthly life starting with instituting the sacrament and ending with His glorious resurrection. It has been wonderful learning together as a family about the reason we celebrate this sacred holiday, and why it is that we are blessed with the gift of being together forever.

We also did some other fun things...

The Easter bunny has agreed to visit our house on the day before 
Easter so that we can focus on Jesus better on Sunday.


Did you know that with the magic of Easter, if you plant jelly beans....



and go away for a little while (over night is best...if you remember...)


...they grow into lollipops?!





And the fun wouldn't be complete with out the annual Easter egg roll!  I was out right away. Madeline cracked soon after. It was down to Dad and Caleb....


And Caleb won for a third consecutive year! 


We finished our night by watching some of the new bible videos while Dad was at a choir practice, and then another few scriptures. 10 more days of Jesus focused learning before we go back to the Book of Mormon!

Celebrating Caleb

How does one celebrate the 5 glorious and challenging years of your child?

Birthday donuts, helium balloons, going bowling and playing arcade games, opening presents....

(Our gifts to Caleb were mostly on the practical side - aka, not particularly photo worthy. We left the fun and frivolous to his fantastic grandparents!)




Then we ate out at...Subway (bet you didn't know that was his favorite restaurant!). 
The next day was party day with friends!
Caleb asked for a

Rescue Bot!
 themed birthday party.

 We played "douse the house" with water shaped bean bags

 and had a bucket brigade race for Heatwave, the fire truck.

Then keep the balloon up, duck duck goose, and "simon says."

After a lunch of pizza and opening presents, 
there was cake and ice cream for everyone.
Victoria really approved of that cupcake!




Our big guy had a great day. Thanks for the love everyone!

Somehow, it's been 5 years already!

Newborn Caleb


1 year old Caleb


2 year old Caleb


 3 year old Caleb


4 year old Caleb


Current Caleb!
 

St. Patrick's Day

Pancakes with green tinted cream cheese topping. 
Caleb thoroughly enjoyed seeing so much of his favorite color!

 Caleb did his Hulk impression
 while the girls chatted and patiently waited to start the fun.
 

You see, the night before St. Patrick's Day, a little leprechaun came to visit our home....
Starting the scavenger hunt:


They figured out the party blowers pretty quickly!

Green blocks are fun!


 Doing a jig of their own
(Maddie really enjoyed the music!)

 Working some magic!


All the clues put together spelled "Happy St. Patrick's Day"
Caleb showed off by identifying each letter for the girls again.
Unfortunately, they weren't impressed.


The clues led to leprechaun portions of pistachio pudding.

Maddie and Victoria had their finger nails painted
silver with green sparkles...

...while Caleb colored a picture.
 
Then they all did some rainbow paintings!
(I think this was Victoria's favorite part.)

After Victoria went home, we had a lunch 
of pureed spinach alfredo over leprechaun bow ties
 while watching The Secret of Kells.

And for a touch of authenticity, we had fish and colcannon for dinner. 
That...didn't go over as well with the kids.


Stay tuned for Caleb's birthday post!