Well....

...at least she likes shoes.

The Royal Wedding

My friend Somer invited Karen and I to attend a party...in honor of The Royal Wedding. I surprised her by asking what wedding? She caught me up real quick, sending me links to interviews and such. So I got to "know" them a little bit. After doing some research Somer decided that 3:00 a.m. was the right time. It started at 2:00, but the actual ceremony was at 4:00 with some fun pre-stuff...so we got our invite...

And headed over in the wee hours of the morning. This was on the front door. Her husband made it, replicating the real invitations!

When we got there this was waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs. Cute Somer had our table set up with her MIL's fancy china.
Karen and I were in charge of decorations, and drinks. Karen did these cute cupcake toppers, napkin rings,
And pictures. Look how cute the happy couple is. (She also brought deliciously warm hot chocolate)
I was in charge of the banner and O.J.

Somer hosted and made a delicious brakfast. Blueberry muffins, fresh fruit and breakfast enchiladas. Delicious.

I was surprised how in to it I got. With Karen and Somer educating me I felt like I knew what was going on, and felt the magic of it. I ended up staying until 5:30 (I needed to be home by 6 and nothing exciting was going on...) But we had a BLAST. It's probably the only chance we had to do something like this, and I'm so happy Somer invited us! Cheers.

Guess what?

Just a sneak peek of what I did this morning. E.A.R.L.Y. this morning. But first...I need to catch up on Easter.

Easter

I love holidays, and love celebrating with my family. It makes it even more special when there's meaning behind the day.

The girls woke up, and this is what they found coming from their doors. Aubs was a little sad that they were all empty (whoops) but they had fun following the trail to find....


The Easter bunny had paid them a visit....(Soph's basket)
(Aub's)
And to share...
I kind of failed this year with Easter. I didn't get to teach them about the Savior as I had wanted. We talked about the real meaning, of course. But I really wanted to FOCUS on it....

I have some fun plans for next year. Hopefully they will feel the real spirit behind it all....but for now they simply had fun, and that is still rewarding. My cute Easter girls:

After Church (and nap) we went up to my in-laws for dinner. My MIL is the cutest and has an egg hunt set up for the kids in the basement every year. This year she had basket almost filled with goodies, and eggs scattered around. Brody was all about finding the hidden eggs. My girls were all about looking at what was already in their basket!

Aubree did join after a little coaxing...

But then went right back to her basket.
Later we found them playing together in the basement under the garage. They were being SO cute, we quietly backed away and let them continue.
In their eggs they got $2.00 bills. I asked Aubree what she wanted to do with her money. If she wanted to save it to buy a big toy later, buy a small toy now...and her response was that she wanted to go to Arctic Circle for lunch with all of us! (And we did) It was a great Easter.

Dying eggs

My Saturday was c.r.a.z.y. and I really wanted to dye eggs with the girls. I even put them down for an early nap so that we would have time to, before dinner. After dinner I was off to my last wedding gig. The open House in Utah, so the only time left was right after nap....The girls got up around 4:20 so we had plenty of time before dinner. Only...neither of them wanted to! :( Aubree wouldn't come out of her room. (She is very much me when she wakes up. Grumpy bear, who needs time to really get up and be up...) So I tried to show Sophie how fun it is...she wasn't so sure, but followed along..
Then when I took the eggs out of their "bath" to dry, this was her reaction.
Apparently I am failing at creating memories with my kids....

thankfully she calmed down, and did end up having fun with the stickers.

The final product.
Aubree never did end up making any, but I guess if it's not fun, why do it? Maybe next year.

The reception was fun, cute Cha took some pic's for them since they didn't have Utah photographer. I'm excited to see how they turn out!

Battle wounds

Sophie's knee after the birthday party. She scratched up both of them. But you'd've never known. She didn't even complain!

Aubree's poor little head the morning after her fall. You can see that it's not too terrible and the swelling isn't too bad. So thankfully it really did go down a lot!

Satan is a tricky one.

After watching conference, we got motivated to go back to the temple weekly. Where we live we feel like this is very manageable for us to do. Once a month we'll go together and the other weeks we'll do work on our own. Inititories are my favorite, so that's what I do. But when we go together we'll switch between Endowments and Sealings. We got out of the habit after his work schedule changed and made it impossible to keep our current (at the time ) routine. Well my new time is Tuesday nights. And tonight was the first. Let me just tell you how many things "came up" that could have easily deterred me from going. About 7 different instances happened to prevent me from keeping my commitment. The last one actually being a little traumatic. I was literally walking down the stairs with 7 minuets until the temple closed. We heard a big crash followed by a loud scream. Aubree had fell and hit her head H.A.R.D. instantly a HUGE black goose egg on her forehead appeared...what do I do? What's more important? The others were a lot more clear to me. But luckily she was willing to have Daddy comfort her, and he was willing to deal so I could go. He told me it went down a lot and she seemed fine after. So I did get to go and it was amazing. It has been WAY to long. And all I have to say is, take that Satan. Nice try but it didn't work.

Dave's Birthday

I had already orchestrated his birthday so that it ended up being great. But I wanted a chance to celebrate with him, and make sure that I really have made up for ditching him on his 30th birthday. So I had in store a surprise party for him and his friends. I had sent out an email invite the week before and a reminder one the day before. I had it all planned out so that I could be cooking for 30, at times when he wouldn't see. He always goes to the gym in the morning. So I scrubbed all 29 potatoes and placed them in the oven. I cooked all the bacon (that could easily be explained, as it was morning) and both his birthday cakes, and took it all over to Karen's with the bottled water and soda to chill in her fridge. By the time he got home in the morning I was done with almost all I had to do to prep the food...and he didn't even suspect. I even explained away the cake smell with making cookies for Zenny who had helped me out a lot with my plane ticket to California! Anyway, we had a normal day and around 4:30 I acted like I forgot to pick up a picture at Costco that I NEEDED for tomorrow. (I was going to send him for pictures AND diapers but he found my stash of diapers I was hiding so it looked like we were out. I played it off on the kids :) Anyway. I told him he had to go NOW so that he would be home in time for dinner. And then we would have family night so he couldn't go after. Like a good husband he consented to go. I gave him $0.50 for the picture, and he was off. I forgot to tell him to look at the picture when he picked it to make sure it looked good. And after he picked it up he went to the mall to buy new basketball shoes. It gave me plenty of time to get the house set up, and the dinner ready. People started showing up around 5:30 and I texted him to look at the picture. This is what it was...

He called me and said "celebrate what?" He didn't even think of his birthday 'cause he had already celebrated with his fam! When he got home, this was waiting on the door for him. I didn't want to try to do the lights off, "SURPRISE" when he walked in the door. So this was how I did it. He was VERY surprised and we still said "Happy Birthday" and "Surprise" just a little more low key.
This was on the front door. Which made it hard to keep Aubree and Soph inside. They escaped a few times, but returned safely each time.
I designed all the decorations by my self using pages on my mac (after Karen showed me how) and I was pretty proud ....until I saw it all come together, and realized that it looked like an "over the hill" birthday. In fact I even had one friend comment about that! I was just trying to make it not look girly so I went with blacks and gray's and by the time I realized my mistake it was too late to change it.


Sadly I forgot to take pictures of it all set up...and it looked really cute..but theses flags were on individual slices of his b-day cake.
And I had a banner set up with similar display arrangements like I did at Sophie's party.

I also forgot to set out the potato chips and ice cream. I guess I can't remember it all! But I did remember to take some candids. After about 3/4 of the people had left. Here they are.








To end the night. Sophie had spilled her orange soda all over the floor in front of the stove. But she wasn't about to let that stop her from drinking it!