Spring Break

 During Spring Break this year we made the trek to UT - we had a late break this year - Maggie got Good Friday off and the week after Easter.  Spring Break Highlights:
• We got to be there "THE" Easter Egg Hunt.  My Aunt Tina puts an egg hunt together every year for willing participants - everybody has an assigned color and certain number of eggs, and then we got to hide eggs for each other (younger "hunters" have to wait inside)  The older participants were sure to have some extremely difficult/hard to reach/hard to find eggs. And, it was surprising how easy it was to forget where you put the eggs. It was  so fun, and I was  happy to be there with the girls to participate in this  tradition that we have only ever heard about over the phone.

• We used real eggs to stuff with candy this year, it was fun.

• We did some stuff - children's museum, Thanksgiving Point, BYU for the Karl Bloch exhibit, seeing cousins, grandma, etc. etc.

•After insisting, getting grumpy, insisting some more, my dad still flew out to help  me with the drive and then helped me drive back and flew home again.  I'm thankful for great parents.

 Our eggs, I thought they were so pretty this year.










Beckam - he wants to live outside.

Ashlee had almost the whole month of April off - our elementary school is on a modified year round schedule.  In fact, Maggie is done with school now (her last day was Friday) but Ashlee will be in school until the end of June.  Paige is in HEAVEN when her sisters are home.  That last picture is one day that Paige and Ashlee spent the morning making mud food - behold a mud ice cream cone.  Our dirt is so full of clay, it feels like you could just throw it on a wheel and make a lovely mug... :)

Updating

 My parents came to visit in April - the first weekend of the month.  Some of our activities included: April Fooling - plain glazed donuts covered with a mix of cocoa powder and olive oil.  We almost had both girls, but the "icing" was runny and they licked their fingers first.  Ashlee is doing a re-enactment for us.

 We went to the Beach - I just want to note for the record once again that I really want to live near the beach, like really near, close enough to bike ride/walk near (I need a few more years to work on Christopher for this to even be a possibility) - that bottom beach shot is with my dad's fancy camera, and even though I can't imagine carrying something so big around and taking it out to snap pictures, I covet the kinds of pictures that you can take with it. 

We also went back to my mom and dad's old apartment where they lived with 3 small kids - and then 4.    It was really cute still, I would live there now.   Like always, my parents really lifted my spirits (sometimes I get low, low, low when Christopher is gone) and did lots of projects - pulling weeds, about a million of them out  of our mostly clay dirt, and sewing a bottom panel on the curtain in our kitchen. The trade-off of not living close is that we get un-interrupted time with them when they come to visit.