April Catch-Up

I realized now that it is May that I blogged nothing whatsoever in April! So now I am playing catch-up! I need to make a mental note to not get behind again - it's been crazy going through the pictures and trying to select a few to include in the catch-up marathon! So here we go! April was a busy month, the girls competed in their last dance competition in Logan, Utah, we had few nice days and capitalized on them and we experienced our first snow day of the year - in April!! We tried to get a cute photo of the kids in their Easter clothes, Jonas was a sabotaging force! We had a play date with the Keppners, we miss them so much and it was so fun to see them! So here we go - catching up marathon style!!



Here is the best we could get of all the kids together in their Easter outfits - Jonas will not sit still for anything - love this wild age so this is pretty good considering our little man!

They loved walking back and forth across this bridge, not great for a picture but they loved looking at the river below!

Jonas on the bridge - such a handsome boy!

We had to go check out the zoo on the first nice day we had, this is the new lioness - we just love going to our little zoo!

Audrey and Savannah in their Ice Cream Freeze costumes - this is their hip hop dance - is is really adorable and it's been fun to watch them perform it this year!

Genie costumes - this is their jazz dance - really cute too!

More genies!

Lunch in Logan with another dance family, we are really good friends with them, we have kids similar ages and the wives and the husbands all get along - it is fun to hang out with the Hansens!

The girls finished up their dances and wanted to watch some of the performances of the older girls and Jonas had completely had it with dance for the day, so Larren took him on a drive for a nap. This is what he looked like when he woke up! This competition stuff may be the absolute hardest on him! Poor thing!

Cruising the streets of Logan we come upon this odd sight, I can still hear the girls' giggling in my mind when they looked out the window and saw this sight in the other lane - we have no idea what it was about, but what a funny sight!

Enjoying drawing on the driveway on a sunny day!

The Keppners and the Coverts!! Savannah, TJ, Hyrum, Jonas, Jerrico, Jorie, McKadee, Audrey and Grace! What a group! It was so fun to see them! They were here visiting family for spring break, we were so lucky they had an afternoon for us! Their two girls are to this day Savannah and Audrey's best friends, it was so sad when they moved, but so nice that they still come to Idaho Falls a couple times a year to visit family! Can't wait to see them again in July!

Jerrico and Savannah and just like true best friends they both got glasses this year!

Audrey and McKadee!

Here is naughty Grace in time out - obviously she takes this process very seriously!

Ronan and our cat Avery! Avery is the sweetest most patient animal ever!

Our first picnic in the park with daddy - hopefully many more to come this summer! Audrey had been to the dentist that morning and was still totally numb so she didn't return to school, her lucky day and fun picnic in the park!

Jonas loves hats, cowboy hats, baseball caps even an occasional crown! So cute!

Homemade pizza night! Grace and Savannah getting their dough just right!

Grace getting saucy!

A SNOW DAY on April 7th! No school today due to heavy snow! Unbelievable! Of course it was melted by noon and the girls spent the rest of the day outside riding bikes!

Savannah slept over in the little girls bedroom one weekend in April and when I went to check on them in the morning this is what I found! I just love that they have each other! What sweet sisters!

A spring break outing to Blast Off! What kids doesn't just LOVE a ball pit! Grace couldn't get enough!

This is actually a picture taken at the end of March at the Camas Prairie Bird Refuge. We took a drive out there on a Sunday afternoon with Bryan, Jamie and company and Emily and Ronie. It was a fun afternoon and I captured this awesome picture of Grace and Mckade! These two are three weeks apart in age and are inseparable at every family gathering. I love watching them play together, one of their favorites surprisingly is house, they have the perfect set up for a mom and a dad. One time at a family event at my house I went down to check on them in the playroom and they had drug out a bunch of grocery items from the storage room and had the play grocery cart and were shopping together! What an amazing blessing to grow up with your cousins!

Easter

Easter was so nice this year, it feel on conference weekend so it was so wonderful to just be home together and have family over for dinner! We colored eggs on Saturday with the kids, Grace was big enough this year to do it all by herself, so she felt pretty proud of herself - it was really sweet. Jonas still needed a lot of help and even with help almost created a huge disaster, he was fascinated with the process though, just wanted to be more hands on than he could be at the ripe age of one!! The kit I bought this year came with glitter paint, so after the eggs dried the girls got to paint on them, they really enjoyed jazzing their eggs up!

The kids got a lot of fun things in their Easter baskets this year, but the hit was the butterfly nets or according to Grace, "catcher flies." They also got new summer outfits and some fun new dishes, place mats and of course way too much candy - it was a fun Easter morning! Later we had Bryan and Jamie and their family over for Easter dinner, it was so nice to spend time with them.

The best part though was being able to listen to conference throughout the weekend, I just love conference weekends and look forward to hearing the words of the prophet. It was a wonderful and inspiring weekend and so special to celebrate the resurrection of the Savior and have my cup truly filled by the teachings of our leaders!

Grace coloring an egg - she loved it!

Jonas with help from daddy coloring his egg.

Savannah working on a beautiful yellow egg, she has grown so much, I remember when she was Jonas' age and coloring eggs and now look at her all grown up! Time goes by so amazingly fast - incredible!

The finished product! The kids glitzed them all up with glitter paint, a traditional fun messy project - gotta love it!

Look at all those goodies, movies, clothes, toys, candy and more! The Easter Bunny was kind of out of control this year! The kids got a lot of fun things and they enjoyed their sugar high - trust me on that one!!

The look on Jonas' face when he realized what was in all those eggs that trailed down the hall from his bedroom was priceless and he couldn't gather them up fast enough! He went to town on the candy and the fact that no one stopped him was such a surprise to him that he hardly knew what to do - it was really cute!

Playing with the "catcher flies" - they will have so much fun with these outside this summer, just think of the bug collection we will have in canning jars!

Grace going through all her treasures in her basket.

INFESTATION!! and a project

So one day I was downstairs doing the laundry and I heard strange noise coming from our walls, they were definitely noises of the creature variety! I wasn't sure if they were mice or birds, is one really better than the other when they are living in your walls - uh no!! I also didn't stick around to find out which, so after running from the laundry room screaming and finally recovering from my heart attack, I decided to go back into the laundry room and listen more carefully to determine exactly what we were dealing with. So I ventured back in with Grace for protection! After listening for a while, I determined we were dealing with birds and what's worse it sounded like several inside the walls, or more accurately the dryer vent. I called Larren and told him the good news, he tried for several days to hear them at various times but never heard a peep! Which was quite strange because I heard peeps, scratching and full on wing flapping going on in there!! I repeatedly assured him I wasn't crazy and finally a few days later he heard the ruckus first hand. By this point I was hearing it in the bathrooms too, because there were nests in both the dryer vent and the exhaust vents from the bathrooms. Seriously unbelievable. So Larren went outside and took the covers off the dryer vents and sure enough you could see nesting material. He was just home from work on his lunch hour at that time so removal would have to wait. So that afternoon I googled "removing birds from dryer vent," to my surprise there were like a zillion hits! Evidently this is not that unusual. The metal clothes hanger seemed like our best bet so Larren took on the challenge! I felt only slightly bad for the poor birds, I am sure they were so pleased with the snugly warm spot they had found - but no thank you, not in my vents, so they were evicted! Larren then installed bird proof vent covers, to keep them from returning! I tell you there is never a dull moment with home ownership!

Here is what we saw when he took off the vent cover, the previous covers were just some little slats, they seemed too small for anything to fit through but apparently not, really amazing that the birds were able to get in, but they did!

Larren on the ladder with the wire hanger, I was really relieved that no little bird eggs came out with all of that nesting material, all the girls were in the backyard with us, we would have had tears for sure if we had eggs, but none whatsoever, thank heavens!

Can you believe this! There was so much nesting stuff, it was incredible, no wonder my clothes were taking forever to dry. And talk about heebie geebies watching Larren remove all that junk was a little gross me out situation! YUCK with a capital YUCK!!

Fool proof! I hope anyway, these covers were $10 each, best $20 ever spent as evidenced by the bird dropping already on the cover, looks like they tried to return home and found out they were unwelcome! Infestation over and done with, what a week!

The girls building a sandcastle in their sandbox. They play so well together and just love being outside. This castle however, was no small feat, they spent most of their time trying to fend off their little brother. He was like Godzilla traipsing through anything they had finished smashing it all, so when they were successful at having this much standing, they wanted me to photograph it quick!

The same week of the birds, Larren built a new picnic table for the backyard. Two years ago he built a big 8ft. picnic table and it has been so fantastic when we have had BBQ's in the summer. But I also wanted some sort of child size table for all the kids too. So this little project actually began with that umbrella I got at work for $5.00. We had this little umbrella from Pottery Barn kicking around at work but the table never came in that goes with it, so after it being there for months, I bought it and thought, "now Larren can build a kid picnic table to go with this." He loves and I mean really LOVES how I buy one little thing usually really cheap and then come up with this whole other usually expensive project built around it! Not that I do this often of course! :) So Larren being Larren of course says he'll figure something out, well all the plans he found online were for toddler size tables and I wanted more of a child size that the bigger kids could sit at too. Of course that's what I would want, so no plans worked as designed so Larren had to come up with it from scratch, he kept having Savannah come over and sit at it and measure how to make it work, I did feel a little bad that it ended up being so complicated and took so much time! But isn't it great! It's fabulous and will be awesome this summer! So thanks to Larren for putting up with my crazy projects and ideas, my mom got one for Mother's Day for her backyard too! It was much easier to make the second time since he had figured out all the measurements, but how fun for me and my mom to have these tables in our backyards for summer! Now if summer will just show up - that would be great! Oh and Larren needn't worry either I have a few other cheap finds hiding in the garage just waiting for me to spring on him - of course they'll require a project to become exactly what I have in mind! :)