Sister Missionaries!

Our family has been so blessed with the  opportunity to know and work with these two awesome and amazing sister missionaries. They truly are some of the Lord's most valiant servants!  They are beautiful, fun, talented, silly, and so inspiring.   

Sister Bowie is from Australia and taught us much about her home country. Some of the tradition, customs, and food.   Her family would send candy and other  food items for her to share with companions and families that feed them. Which we did about once a week for  several months. She was so loving to our children,  so tender and playful with them.    The kids especially loved to listen to her talk. 

Sister Skillings is a Utah home grown girl with many wonderful talents. She wrote, sang, and played the guitar with grace and skill.  If they came to eat, she knew she had to sing and play for us. We are so grateful for this talent and the wonderful spirit it brought into our home. We could sit and listen to her for hours. 

We will miss both of them dearly and will be keeping contact with them for sure. Can't wait to see what life brings them when they get  home and the many wonderful things they will accomplish!

We love you girls! You're in our hearts forever!

Easter Blessings

Easter was wonderful this year. We were able to stay home with our family and watch General conference on TV. It was so nice not having anywhere to go. The kids were able to get up and have a great Easter morning, take their time going through their bucket of goodies, have an egg hunt and enjoy a  lovely breakfast un-rushed.  This was one of the best holidays we have enjoyed. Plus we were blessed to have the sister missionaries come over for the second conference and have dinner with us too.

I really wanted Easter to be special this year. I didn't want it to be all about the candy. So I poured over blog after blog in search for the perfect ideas. I found a wonderful blog  by: https://fhelessons.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/christ-centered-easter-baskets/  

Christ Centered Easter Baskets.

There were few a candy items, but each gift had something to do with Chirst  and the Resurrection. It gave a scripture or quote for each item.  Each item was something useful for them to have. I also put together a basket for each of the sister missionaries and they loved it. I was a great surprise for them.

As you can see there were items like a stuffed lamb, flashlight, flip flops, note book, hand soap, scarves, and then a few colored eggs for the candy. I think my favorite item was the scarf. I found a lovely story that talks about the folded linens and napkins found in the tomb  after Christ's resurrection.

Here they are checking out their goodies.  We got to sleep in a bit before having to get up.  Ethen slept up stair so that he would not catch the Easter Bunny leaving his eggs around the house. He loves camping out with the girls, too bad they don't really enjoy having him up there with  them.

The kids didn't seem to miss all the candy.  They enjoyed reading each of the scriptures or quotes to see what the item meant. I think they really had a better understanding of what this holiday means.

We wish we could have been able to see family. We miss having all those family dinner and egg hunts with the cousins.

Happy spring! Spring has finally come and the flowers are out and the leaves are coming on the trees. The weather is warming up and  we will be able to spend more time outside. We have lots of yard work to do, raking leaves, burning piles of down sticks and branches, planting new flowers to spruce things up.  

I bought the kids some rain boots and they have had so much fun tromping around in the creek.  I  have been looking for some boots too to do yard work in and finally found these really cute ones.  I am excited to get out there and get some work done and look cute doing it!