Pictures of April

Our Easter Eggs, Addy was the photographer

Maren loves wrapping paper

Sydnee opening her b-day presents

I didn't know how to play this game, but one push of a button and it shot out 350 tickets

I hope this isn't an indication of a future career

My cute friend Jamie and her kids

Addy, Sydnee, Garrett and Rylie

The waterfall as you enter Pirate Island

The view from our table

The Captain

Me and the birthday girl

The kracken, our 2 ft. wide pizza, it was huge!

Sleepy baby

The cake, those are our candyland playing pieces being used as decorations

playing together, I think Addy was a little jealous

Maren's first spaghetti dinner

The stinker climbing the stairs, this is her new favorite place to play

Maren's 9 month photo, she hams it up when the camera comes out

Spring Break and Such

I feel like I'm always trying to catch up, so here is the events of the first week of April...

• April 1st Sydnee had her pre-school Easter egg hunt and I attended the general young women workshops. I'm really excited about the new personal progress website they announced.
• April 2nd I got to help with Addy's class Easter party. 1st graders are so funny! We decorated bags that look like bunnies. The boys made their cute little bunnies into vampires and added horns and blood. So funny! It was great, the egg hunt lasted about 5 minutes and then it was over. Sydnee went shopping with G&G Yancey for her birthday. Grandma Yancey let Sydnee pick out lots of stuff from Big Lots. We have lots of great toys now!
• April 3rd Saturday general conference was great! I love conference. We missed the second session so that we could go the Ben's parents for Easter dinner/birthday party for Sydnee and Hope. Afterwards, we rushed home so Ben could go to priesthood and me and my girls could go to Grandma Williams house for our traditional Girls Night In party. It was a busy, but great day.
  
• April 4th Easter Sunday! I love having conference on Easter, it was such a beautiful day full of reminders of the atonement and true reason for Easter. We colored eggs in between sessions, After conference we went to my parents house for Easter dinner with the whole family and more birthday celebrating.
• April 5th Ben and I celebrated our 9th wedding anniversary in style! We went to Wal-Mart to shop for Sydnee's birthday and we had lunch at a little Mexican dive called Maria Bonitas. We had fun just being together. After 9 years, we still love each other! That night we had a FHE lesson on the temple and told the girls about the day we were married and how special it was.
  
• April 6th the weather was yucky and so we did laundry and vegetated.
• April 7th Sydnee's 5th Birthday. We celebrated by going to Pirate Island Pizza. We were joined by Grandma Williams, Aunt Camille and my friend Jamie and her two kids Garrett and Rylie. Jamie and I have been friends forever, it has been fun seeing our kids play together. We had a huge 2 foot wide pizza and the kids played games in the aarghcade and rode on the merry- go -round. Sydnee kept dumping tokens into the merry-go-round, after a while she started to stand up and hang on the poles. It looked like she was doing a pole dance. It was lots of fun, so much fun that Maren fell asleep. We had birthday cake and presents and Maren sprouted her 5th tooth.
• April 8th we had our Fancy Nancy party part deux. Deux is a fancy word for saying two. Aunt Camille and I gave Addy and Sydnee pedicures and then we made cute little headbands and ate fancy food with our pinkies up. The butler wasn't feeling well, but all 5 of us girls had a wonderful time! Thank You Grandma for a fun party!
• April 9th Maren came down with a cold during the night and so she wasn't too happy. Addy went to play at my friend Marie's house while I took Sydnee in for her kindergarten checkup. Sydnee was too shy to talk to the nurse and so she failed her hearing test. I spent the whole visit wrestling Maren to wipe her nose and trying to keep Sydnee calm for her shots. Sydnee did well with her shots, she flinched a good bit and cried for a while. Her Barbie sticker and sparkly pencil helped a little, but I think her smoothie from McDonalds helped her feel better. Have you had their smoothies, yummy!!! I'm glad I don't go to Old McDonald's very often, those things could become very addicting.
  
• The rest of the weekend is kind of a blur. Maren got sick, Sydnee ran a fever and didn't feel good after all of her shots. Both kids were up during the night which means that I was up too. I got a cold and so the rest of our month has been spent not feeling well. This cold has lasted for several weeks. I'll be really glad when Maren's nose stops running. We're all finally feeling better, so hopefully we can do a few fun things this last week of the month.
  

Taking My Own Advice

Last Sunday I taught my Mia Maid class the lesson on keeping a journal. I'm feeling a little guilty right now. Funny, I taught the same lesson last year and thought, hey, I'm blogging that's my journal. Somehow I had child number three and I'm lucky if I can find the time to go to the bathroom during the day, let alone blog. So, I encouraged my young women to take time once a week to write about their lives and the events in their lives. Today I am going to take the challenge and write for a few minutes. To start off, today was our stake conference. It was awesome! I hate going to the tabernacle, so we went to our church building where it was broadcast. The camerawork was pretty bad and it was blurry the whole time, but that didn't matter. The theme was "Come take your place". That is also the theme for our youth conference/pioneer trek this summer. I was very impressed with all of the talks, but especially by the youth they had speak. One young woman was from the Ukraine and was adopted by a family in our stake not long ago. She talked about a school teacher she had who taught her about Jesus Christ and how to pray. Soon after she was adopted and later received the missionary discussions and joined the church. She talked about the meaning of the word pioneer, meaning to go before and prepare the way. She had a sweet testimony. The next youth who spoke told about his trek experience 4 years ago. He talked about not wanting to go at first and thought it would be lame. He had a change of heart and had a great experience. He talked about my ancestor Margaret Campbell Kirkwood (my fourth great-grandmother) She came here from Scotland with the Willie handcart company. She was a widow who had 4 sons. She lost her husband and 2 daughters to the flu several years earlier. She had a 19 year old son, Robert, who helped her pull their handcart. They had to pull her 16 year old son Thomas who was crippled and she had two sons, James and Joseph. James was 11 and Joseph was 4. They had many hardships along the way. The temperature was so low one night that Margaret's eye froze and broke. In the picture I have of her, you can see where she is missing her eye. While crossing Rocky Ridge, James and Joseph fell behind. Joseph was too tired to go any further so his brother James carried him over Rocky Ridge. When James reached the camp he set Joseph down and he died. I have always felt close to Margaret and love her story. I was so pleased to hear this young man speak of her and how much faith he gained from learning about her and her trials. The rest of the talks were all great and I truly felt the spirit. Every speaker said something that I needed to hear. It was truly a spiritual feast.