Moving Week

Good Bye

We are counting down the days now until we move to our new house. It's exciting to own our first home and be moving to such a nice place, but it's also really sad to leave. We moved into this house as newly weds and it has been such a wonderful place to live! I have a hard time with change and I really don't want to go! I'm sure I'll feel the same way about our new house when its time to leave there also.

We've still got so much to do in the next few days. Between being sick, Jared being really busy at work, and all my pregnancy related back problems we're a bit behind schedule. And of course, with perfect timing, I also have jury duty this week. We're so glad our rescue squad (Dad and Mom Jones) will be here Thursday night to help us finish up and move.

We've been promising Mackayla we'd go to the Bean Museum for FHE, and we took a few minutes tonight to run up there. The big Elephant is back - if anyone wants to go check it out. Bradley loves elephants in general, and he LOVED seeing this one.

Happy Spring!

We are enjoying a beautiful April day in the SNOW! It has already snowed a few times this month but the later it gets the more suprising it is. This is what we woke up to this morning.

Once it started to melt down a little I took the kids out and they of course loved it.

Mackayla was raking the snow and told me she was "snow gardening...because that's what you do when it's winter and spring."

Happy Easter!

We had a wonderful Easter including finally getting a nice sunny day. Holidays are so fun and I've decided to throw all of our pictures into this blog for the sake of our family albumn. The kids looked so cute in their new little green church outfits. Mackayla was so excited to wear her hat. We had a hard time getting a good picture, as you can see in the second picture below.

Mom and the kids


Daddy and his pretty girl.

Blowing bubbles after church.

This is one of Bradley's favorite pastimes

Cute kids!

I had intentions of trying to make one of those bunny bread things and making a lemon meringue pie, but things have been so busy and I was tired so that didn't happen. The pie will come later this week because I still want one, but the bunny bread will have to wait until next year :) I did manage to put together a decent Easter meal, though, that we enjoyed as a family.

The following pictures are from Easter morning.

M & B checking out their baskets. Mackayla was so excited to get her favorite book "Pinkalicious" since we can never find it in the library anymore. Jared spent a good portion of his day reading her that book over and over. Bradley was just so excited about all the candy.

This was a particularly good morning since we didn't hear a peep from either of the kids all night until 7am!

Easter Baskets ready and waiting (the night before). My old bunny, Easter, got to join the festivities as well.

Coloring eggs Saturday night. We didn't do all that many eggs because I always seem to end up eating them all by myself but this year the kids loved them and I definitly could have done more. Jared likes hard boiled eggs but he will only eat them if I peel it for him.

Saturday morning we had the annual neighborhood Easter egg hunt to go to. The kids had a blast, and got a lot of candy!

The one thing about moving to a new house that Mackayla has been excited about is getting to paint her room pink. She was DELIGHTED to get to help Dad yesterday. We spent the afternoon yesterday, between festivities, working over there. They painted a little blue in the boys' room as well.

We set up a little bed place in the house and Bradley enjoyed a good nap while they painted and I cleaned.

We've spent a few evenings over at the house this last week working on things. This is how we've done dinner; sitting on a blanket where our table will be. Mackayla and Bradley love having picnic dinners.

We hope you all had a wonderful Easter!

April

We had a pretty uneventful April fools Day. Poor Jared not only had to work on this nice holiday, but even had to work late! Since he didn't make it home for dinner we saved our special drinks (jello) for a bedtime snack after he got home. Mackayla didn't remember it from last year and thought it was great. Jared informed me later that he knew all along what our special drink was going to be....as if I thought he had forgotten and would really be fooled. I tried all day to get Mackayla to help me play a trick or joke on Daddy, but they only joke she would tell him was "why did the chicken cross the road?" She said that was her favorite joke and she didn't want to do anything else. The real highlight of the day was that I made our bed funny so that when Jared got in bed he didn't have a sheet. I don't think he was that amused, but I laughed HARD for a LONG time!

The kids have loved our new furniture collection in the middle of our family room.

Bradley often gets Mackayla and requests "Elmo Game!" She turns it on the computer herself and plays games while he happily sits next to her and watches.

I think that last month I was bragging too much about how we never get sick because now we seem to be having a hard time staying healthy around here. Thursday night Bradley and I both ended up with some kind of stomach flu and were throwing up all night. It was horrible! Thankfully, Jared was able to take care of us and had to clean up a lot of fun messes from our sick little boy. We're finally feeling better from that, but now Mackayla, Bradley and I have all developed a cough. I'm certainly not going to complain about a cough, though, when at least no one is throwing up anymore!

We enjoyed a nice conference weekend. We didn't get much done off our big "to-do" list since we weren't feeling good, but still enjoyed all four sessions of general conference.

~Jared and the kids listening to the prophet~

They of course, talked a lot about temples at conference and since we'll be moving very soon I started realizing how much we'll miss living in walking distance of the temple. We still won't be very far, but it was so nice to be able to take the kids on a walk to the temple or just to pass by as we're running errands. Since we finally had a nice day today, we decided to go walk around the temple for family home evening tonight. It was so much easier to teach Mackayla a little more about the temple as we walked around it rather than try to keep her sitting long enough in our house to hear anything.

During conference someone mentioned letting your children actually touch the temple. I hadn't ever thought of that, but since we were there we thought we'd give it a try.

QUOTE

Jared and I were talking about our upcoming move when Mackayla said, "When our new house gets old could we get one thats a bit smaller?" I'm a little nervous about living in such a big house too! :)