8 is Great!

Happy birthday Elizabeth! She turned 8 and had a wonderful time celebrating her birthday.

Presents came in the mail  and  they were opened pretty quickly. 

 Here is grandma Pam's birthday card. 

 

I think she loves it. Now if i can get her to  save it, or spend it on something reasonable and not squander it away like she always seems to do. 

She was finally able to open her other gift from nana, but not without the help of Ethen. Her first cookbook. she is very excited to start making  some of these recipes  I need to look through it and find something really easy for  her to do. 

 On April 2nd we were able to have her birthday party at the roller skating rink. It was a Tuesday night and we had  the whole place to our selves for the most part. She had 9 friends come and they had a really fun time. This is Elizabeth's 3rd time skating.  she goes pretty slow and hangs on to the wall most of the time.

Elizabeth asked her dad for a special present.

 Scott- " What do you want me to get you Elizabeth?"

Elizabeth-" I just want you to come to my birthday party!"

Scott was able to come that night and it was a wonderful time for all of us to spend with him.

He even put on some skates and went out on the floor with the girls. Too bad my camera battery died  during the party. I didn't get any of him with Elizabeth or Joce. 

 This was Jocelyn's 2nd time skating and she too had a great time. Only a few falls, but got back up and kept going.  She  doesn't use the wall and ventures right out onto the floor. she's pretty brave.

This is Connor, the only boy that was invited to her party. He is in our ward and they are both in the 2nd grade together at the same school. They are pals to say the least.  He is a really cute kid and  wants to marry Elizabeth when they grow up. He tells him mom all the time that he will go on his mission and come home and marry her. 

Here are the girls from school and from church.  They were a lot of fun and very silly. I'm glad she was able to have her friends come.  It made for a great evening.

 We went to Wal-mart and picked out a Barbie cake for the party. We had cake, ice cream, and lemonade  before opening presents

  Some of the present she received where books, Barbies, jewelry, and a pair of craft color your own flip flops (which turned out pretty cool). the only thing she didn't get were a pair of roller skates. But maybe she can start saving her money up to buy a pair.

Now that Elizabeth is 8 she can attend "Activity days" at church.  All the primary age girls ages 8 to 11 get together twice a month to have fun activities. Her first one was last week and she loved it. They  learned about being healthy. they learned some yoga, did sit-up and ran in the gym. After they  made smoothies for refreshments  They each made a goal for the month. Elizabeth's goal was no sugar for a month.  That lasted for about 4 days!      That's a hard goal. maybe we should start with something a little smaller like cut out fruit snacks or only one glass of juice a day.    8 is going to be a great year!

Easter Day

Happy Easter!

This Easter we made the kids go to church first before getting their Easter baskets and egg hunt. I wrote a note to the Easter bunny to hide the baskets in my room so that we could have them for later. they were all tucked away in my room until after church.  some of my pictures  disappeared so i don't  have the one of Scott and the kids on the couch and kids all in their Easter clothes. 

They found coloring books, pencils, stickers, notebooks, hot wheels and  two little chocolate bunnies.

 The girls also  received some things that they needed. Joce got some hello Kitty socks and Elizabeth got some new hair bands.

 I love Elizabeth's new birthday dress we found at Kohls. So springy!   It was 30% off to start with, then I had a $10 Kohl's cash and while we were in line a really nice lady handed us another $10 off on children's clothing. Making her dress only $4.oo   That's a $50.00 saving, Awesome!!  It looks great on her.

 Ethen found his candy and ate that first things. This kids loves chocolate and will  devour it in seconds.  Then we found his cars. He really likes these little cars.

We did our own Easter Dinner this year. we did  get an invite, but   Scott  wanted to study and we also wanted to have some leftovers for the rest of the week.    

We had a brown sugar ham, mashed potatoes, green beans, deviled eggs,  olives, broccoli and cauliflower.

For dessert we had raspberry crunch.   It's so good, but it has soo much sugar. Raspberries in jello on a layer of cream cheese and cool whip, over a layer of crunchy pretzels   And I made way too much. We'll  be having that for days!   It was a great day to spend some time Scott.  He took a break and really didn't do much studying. Crossing our fingers he does okay on his big test this Tuesday!

We hope all our family and friends were able to enjoy their Easter. We miss you and love you all very much.

Happy Easter

Here are the girls dying eggs for our ward Easter party. The girls wanted Ethen to help makes some  eggs with them, but there was no way that was going to happen.  They had to wait till he went down for a nap to get started. Dye looked great, but we didn't get the really bright colors that we were hoping for. But they worked.

 We went with a monster type  kit. They made some pretty crazy looking charactors. Elizabeth even made one to look like the Lorax. got to love the stache!

  The kids were very excited for the  party and getting to hunt for eggs. We were hoping  to hunt for eggs outside. It was a beautiful sunny day and almost 60 degrees  But all the snow had melted and made the grass really muddy and mucky so we were stuck with an indoor egg hunt.  We were one of the first to arrive. Each table had coloring pages to keep busy  them while members arrived.  I brought Almond Flavored Sinckerdoodles  and they were so good.  There were a lot of other cookies, mostly store bought, mine didn't last very long. Scott was disappointed that we didn't have any left for him.

 all of the eggs were gathered by the missionaries, we have 3 sets, and they littered the hallways and classrooms with all sorts of colored, plastic, candy filled eggs. Each family had to bring 10 filled eggs per child. So we brought 30 and brought  30 back home.    Once everyone was there we had a prayer and then we're off on the hunt. Ethen took his time gathering eggs. Mostly because he wold find one and then open it and eat the candy before moving on to find the next one.  Jocelyn was quick to find her 10 eggs and came to show me her findings. Elizabeth was gone and on the run with the other girls in her class and I didn't see her till we were all back in the gym for lunch.

There was an egg  decorating contest and the girls brought their monster eggs.  I too decorated some blown out eggs.  I wanted to do something black and white and hand drawn.  I have always loved the Hennah tattoo's, so I found some really awesome patterns to copy on my eggs. They were a lot of work, but they turned out really great.   I enjoyed the challenge of drawing on a curved and bumpy surface.  There were 3 winners and i was one of them.  They gave us this over sized chocolate rabbit as our award.  Should be tasty.

Easter is almost here and the kids will get their baskets for Easter and have another egg hunt. But this year is a non- candy basket year.  They eat too much sugar stuff as it is.