Spring!

 

My tulips were absolutely gorgeous this year.  What a beautiful show!  I'm so glad God made colors.

Maren's invitation

 

Kids are so creative now about asking each other to dances.  Maren got a balloon on her desk at school, and when she blew it up it had a website written on it.  She looked it up as soon as she got home and found a fun series of pictures that ended with an invitation to go to the prom with her friend, Kayd Meldrum, who knows how much she loves Captain America! If you look closely, you can see that she's even wearing her Captain America t-shirt.

It looks grammatically incorrect, but if you read the earlier screens it makes sense.

 Then Maren had to come up with a fun way to answer Kayd, so she invited some friends over to help her.   

Lauren Holmstead, Maren, Kyleigh Hatch, and Sarah Reddish

 They had lots of fun making a Captain America shield fruit pizza that looked delicious.

 Maren also made a comic book for Kayd, Prom Edition.

 She found a vintage comic strip online and put her own picture and words in it.

 It turned out pretty cute, and Captain Kayd seems pretty excited in this picture!

A "Super" birthday for Chris and Liam

Our family has a lot of April birthdays!

Liam and Chris have birthdays just four days apart, and this year they celebrated them together with an amazing Superhero party. Karen made tons of fun food and decorations to go along with the theme, and some people wore superhero clothes.  I think it may have been Chris's coolest birthday party ever (sad to say at age 20!).

Liam loves hanging out with his boy cousins, so he didn't seem to mind sharing his big day.

Two handsome guys modeling their birthday ties.

Emma's concert

Emma was so excited to make it into Franklin Singers this year.  It's a brand new show choir with boys and girls performing together.  

They sang old standards, like "Misty," upbeat jazz, and a fun medley of Queen hits.

 I thought they sounded fantastic, but apparently not everyone agreed.  This little girl plugged her ears throughout most of the concert.  Oh, well.  You can't please them all!

Several of Emma's friends are in choir with her.  From left, Anna Sanford, Emma, Jessica Tolman, Sadie Gardner, Rachel Brown, Addy Bailey, and Hannah Keating.

Some things I love about Del--A Valentine's Tribute to My Honey

I married a really wonderful guy!  Look at this beautiful shelf he built me!

 

I didn't like my boring dining room window and wanted a place to display some of my favorite vintage bowls and things, so he built me exactly what I wanted.  In fact, he built it twice because I changed my mind on what I thought I wanted, and he didn't even complain (the first one looks great in the girls' room, so it wasn't a waste). 

Del does great work and made this one look like the one we built in our living room.  Notice I said "we" because he lets me design it and then he builds it.

Here's another thing I love about Del:  He is always willing to help me with chores that I don't like to do.  Our freezer frosts up at least two or three times a year, and I HATE defrosting it!  He did it for me last time without any asking or nagging on my part.  He just saw that it needed to be done and pitched in.

He also makes our sandwiches every morning for lunches and breakfast on Sundays.  He's a pretty great pancake and waffle maker.  I'm afraid to admit that he may even be better than I am!

 

Another thing I love about Del is that he reads in bed with me now.  I've always loved the idea of reading together at night, and now I've got him hooked on books!  Lately, he reads as much as I do.

Yep!  I got a keeper.  I love you, Honey!  Happy Valentine's Day!

My Passion: Organizing and Dejunking

 I really, really love to organize closets and drawers and make every little corner of my life a little tidier.  I like neat little rows of toilet paper in my storage room, and neatly rolled socks in a drawer just make my heart go thump, thump!  I don't like cleaning at all, though, so most people have no idea that I have really neat cupboards underneath a counter top covered in crumbs and dishes.  Oh, well, we each have our own interests and scrubbing isn't mine.

I recently decided to tackle our food storage, which was a monumental task!  We try to follow the prophet's counsel and have a year's supply of food and personal products in case of emergency, and I think we've done a pretty good job.  Our biggest problem is where to store it all!  We had food in the storage room downstairs and wheat buckets, canned goods, and paper products out in the garage, and the kids never knew where to go to find it all. 

 In order to organize, we had to take everything out of the storage room so we could add more shelves.  The extra shelves held so much more and made everything much easier to find. We also have a wall of shelves to the right of Del and in front of him, so it holds quite a bit.  Big improvement!

In my organizing phase I also decided it was time to get rid of some books.  We have book shelves in every room in our house except the bathrooms, so needless to say, we have a lot of books! We ended up with over 200 books for family and DI (which left some space on my shelves for new ones!).

Next, I tackled my drawer of tights.  I love patterned pantyhose, but it can be hard to find the pair I want for each outfit, so I put them in ziplock bags labeled with a description.  Now they fit better and I can find them easily.  

I have so many more projects to do, so many messy corners in my life, but this was a nice start!

Winter 2013

  

I can't decide if Emma's snowman is cute or creepy, but either way I'm glad we got a picture of it!  What a masterpiece!

 Here's a quick picture of the favorite Christmas gifts and new clothes (over pjs--quite stylish!).  Frozen theme for Emma because she can't get enough of that Disney movie!  Superheroes for Maren and guitar book and bow tie for Chris, Duck Dynasty for Del and new sheets for Devin.  I'm glad they're all so easy to please!