Sunny lunch in Legacy Park. A quick walk from the house - on a beautiful spring day - and sack lunches in the park. This is the life! I love my sunshine. Cade ran on the grass and played on the slides (and peed behind the locked bathroom doors) - and I read the newspaper with David. A great day. 
Even though I have managed to kill a cactus - and can't keep a houseplant or flower alive for the life of me - I still like gardening. This is only the second attempt at a garden so we will see if there are any fruits to our labors. We have two square foot gardening box kits and we've been planting lots. Maybe too soon? I don't know. We have lettuce, tomatoes, kohlrabi, peas, peppers, zucchini, and many more squares left to fill. Two years ago we actually got some veggies out of our garden. It was so exciting to me to grow some edible food. I was just floored every time something grew. I just didn't think it would work. I guess I don't have very good faith in soil, water, and sunshine. Since we didn't weed our last garden, I think we made out like bandits. Only time will tell if this year will be another success. (Oh yeah, by the way those are COATS we are wearing to plant the garden. I think it snowed just the day before we decided to plant....grrrr....) 
What kind of pics do you get when you ask your five year old what you should take pictures of? Well, pics of mom with a free Kikoman spoon rest of course!!! I was at a loss for trying to remember last week. So at Cade's advice and skills - I landed these pics of my free spoon rest. I actually have little use for it because I rarely indulge in cooking, but since it is my first spoon rest ever and it came for free in a really neat Styrofoam package I am partial to it. I might even say I adore my first spoon rest. Okay, I admit it. I am in love with my nearly worthless contraption :) 
Meet Zoomer and Swimmee. No they are not the waffle and whip cream, or the wallet and the tablecloth - they are the pets in the jar on the table. These are Cade's pet frogs. These are our recent acquisition from Baby Animal Days. I am not a pet person. I don't think I ever will be. Before I get accused of being cold and heartless, maybe I can explain myself. I do care about things, and that is part of why I am not a pet person. I get a little too attached. I hated my dog King Nick whilst he was living, but I mourned his death and his loyal patronage under my piano bench after he was gone. I feared taking care of my pet crab that I inherited when I couldn't say no to a friend who was moving. After thinking he was dead for months, but being too afraid to look, when he finally resurrected himself I realized I wasn't taking adequate care of Crabby, so I gave him to a better home. I still think about Crabby, though....and don't get me started on our fish Faymetta Hortense, and Edgar -RIP. On the flip side I LOATHE dog hair like no other, laugh at the thought of microwaving cats (not really, PETA don't get me for even joking please) - and generally am just annoyed with pets overall. So far these are pretty tame. They sit in the jar, they will only live about two years, you change the water about once a month, and feed them Brine Shrimp. Eric changed the water and Cade feeds the frogs. So....they can stay. They are exactly my kind of pet. 
Now you see him.....now you don't. Before we were able to mow our lawn/weed garden we took the opportunity to run and jump and play in the weeds. David loved hiding in all of them, and Cade picked me some pretty awesome weed flower boquets. I've got to be honest, the little weedy flowers melted me. No one has ever picked purple weed flowers just for ME before. I felt pretty special. 
Saturday was hairct night! My friend Marcy came over and chopped all three of my boys hair! Yippee! They all look as handsome as ever. David danced around with a broom and Sponge Bob bandaids plastered to his nose, whilst my friend Annie provided background music. I think I like this haircutter that comes to the house business. Very convenient - and much better results than my fuzzling attempts.
Remember the Breadinator? (Crazy apple/peanut butter/asparagus/banana masher dude?) Well, it looks like Cade and I'd little food creation played off. We may not know how to cook - but we know how to win. We won two free boxes of produce from Green Bee Produce! Yahoo! Thanks to anyone who voted for our creation. We are still enjoying the fruits (pun intended) of our labors! I'm in artichoke/plum/carrot/asparagus/etc.etc.etc. heaven!!!!
Just in case you weren't completely baby animaled out.....here are three more pics that I didn't fit on the previous post. I just discovered how to do a collage. (This may or may not be a good thing.) I take pictures - tons of pictures AND I never delete any of them. No not one. I have some of the most miserable pictures ever (crazy faces from me, blurred, completely black - you name it.) I just can't bring myself to delete it. It's like picture abortion in my mind, and I can't do it. I can't help but feel like a two year old child attached to a lovey....if I delete my picture it will go away forever, and even if it was a bad picture, it had personality, it had SOMETHING to say. Okay, I am messed up. So I take lots of pictures, and I try to love all of them. Sifting through and trying to find just one or two is not my forte. It is something I am trying to work on, though. Hence my resolution to post a Picture a Day. Please forgive me for picture overload. I just can't help myself sometimes. (oh and there are probably two more posts of Baby Animal Days yet to come.....)
So I don't really remember last Wednesday now...but I do remember lots of Thursday. So, I hope you can humor me while I post the next several days all about Thursday as if they happened on Wed. and Fri. and Sun. etc. On a spontaneous whim I drove the boys down to Baby Animal Days just outside of Logan. It was pretty spontaneous - as in I picked Cade up from preschool, realized it was cold and windy, and I had been to the gym and only had on shorts and a t-shirt so I went and snagged a pair of pants so I didn't have to go home and change - spontaneous. (More on my 97 cent pants later, though.) Anyhow... PROUD MAMA MOMENT!!!! One of the things we did at Baby Animal Days was eat bugs. Seriously. Everyone was gathered around a table where the students from USU were handing out free flavored bug treats. No one would try them. I told my boys they could have some bug candy that tasted like potato chips. So....they both ate them up. Cade really liked them. It made me proud to be their mom. My boys won't touch bugs, freak out at the sight of an ant in the kitchen...BUT they will EAT BUGS with no problem?????? They must be my children. If you would like to order some of these delicacies then check out their website: http://www.hotlix.com/ They look like ideal diet food...only 9 calories for the entire box, and who'd be hungry after that? We were privileged to sample the larvettes (worm larva) in the BBQ flavor. They also have some in Cheddar Cheese and Mexican Spice. I must admit the Sour Cream and Onion Crick-ettes almost got me. The packaging is hysterical to me - since they are made in California, I had to snap a pic of the dig on the back of the box. (Just in case you can't read the writing on the pic it says: Top 5 reasons to enjoy Larvets: 
So I belong to this singing group called the A'Olian Modes. It is a sextet plus two, and more often than not I sing baritone (yes, baritone) - or play for the group to sing what isn't a cappela. So crazy, I never pictured myself singing again, but somehow I got roped into it. It has been fun. We are getting ready to do some shows with lots of songs from the King Singers, and we are putting together a "Popera" that will debut with the Village Grill (dinner and a show.) Anyhow, we were supposed to have a rehearsal on Tuesday night for an upcoming show, but things got crazy. Instead of rehearsing, we spontaneously put together a game night. I volunteered my house, and Marcy and Annie came with the pizza and Kent and Lara brought one of their sons. We chatted about Chicago with our recently returned traveling friends, we played Discombobulation and Annie put the pizza in the oven. We started smelling smoke, so we checked on the pizza. Eric opened the stove and smoke billowed out. Some of the girls started screaming, I ran to the kitchen to grab my camera....yes my camera. My camera was out of memory, and by the time I deleted enough pictures most of the fun was gone. Grrrr. Eric picked up the flaming pizza and ran it out the back door and chucked in the weeds. My response, "What did you do that for? I wanted a picture of the pizza on fire!" Eric: "I wasn't going to wait!" So that was our pizza fire. Eric saved the day, and I didn't get my flaming picture, but I did get some great pics of the aftermath. I also learned that if my house were burning down I might grab my camera and pictures before I grab the fire extinguisher....so I hope that doesn't happen! Oh, and in case you were wondering how this happened.... don't cook two Papa Murphy Pizza's too close to the heating element, because they might burn. And this one wasn't actually my fault, but it sounds just like something I would do. Annie thank you for being like crazy cooking me! It was a fun memory. 
One of the things I have loved about my kids getting older, is that I get to read bigger books with them! Yahoo!!!! This is the last book that Cade and I read together. It is called the Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brain Selznick. I absolutely adored it. A few stats on this book: 511 PAGES! (Yes that is correct.) It is 26,159 WORDS.....and it has 158 PICTURES. It looks like a massively huge Harry Potter novel. It is a much easier read, though. It is very loosely a historical fiction (with lots of liberty taken) about a French filmmaker namedGeorges Mieles and two new invented sidekicks. The book starts out with 45 pages of pictures, and then you get to the first text. The art is simple, engaging, and delightful black and white sketch art. It made me feel like I was watching an old black and white movie. I enjoyed reading this book, and it even appealed to the five year old of the house. It was such a fun read! My favorite part was the Credits in the back of the book with links to websites and books to learn more about the history and research the author did for this book. Thanks to Eric for randomly picking this book up from the library and giving us all a delightful little family read. 
Happy Easter! So I didn't actually take any pictures on Easter. I wanted to be going outside all weekend long. Eric had arranged to take time off work so we could do yard work. The weather - freezing and snowing and everything else kept us trapped inside. We also didn't go anywhere because we had planned to stay home to yarden. So, we spent Easter quietly at home watching conference and enjoying each other's company. I didn't do Easter baskets or anything, but we did watch The Lamb of God and talked a lot about the Ressurection. My kids got an Easter hunt at grandma's house a few weeks ago, and a candy hunt at Smith's the day before...and I think they are spoiled enough. I didn't get Easter baskets very many years growing up, and I didn't really miss them. I don't think my kids will either.....I hope. Anyhow, here is a pic of the sky about 4 days later when I finally got my Easter walk that I wanted to do so badly, but couldn't. 
Another free Home Depot workshop completed- Build a butterfly house. I only bent and ruined three nails and two screws this time! Better luck next month for me! 
I actually dyed some Easter Eggs this year! Sad to say, but this might be the first time I have actually done that with my kids. It is always just seems too messy, but I broke down and did it this year. Eric boiled the eggs about a week ago, and I finally got around to dying them. The kids were going crazy, and so we did something fun. I let them color the eggs, and then pick which colors to dip them into, but I did all the dipping. It went off smoothly. Not a spill of vinegar staining dye anywhere, and 12 beautiful eggs we later cracked open and ate with salt. I might just have to try dying the eggs again.
It's raining, no it's snowing, no it's hailing, no that's lightning, no that's thunder. No April Fool's Day jokes here - these are pictures taken on April 1st. We got some crazy weather for April Fool's Day. Eric had planned to take off some work to reseed our yard, and I wanted to plant some stuff in our garden. Well, our April showers are keeping me from planting any May flowers. I think I am officially sick of the snow. Cade did tell me an April Fool's Day joke, "If you sleep too long, your hair will fall out." And, we did play a trick on David. We stuffed his socks in his shoes so that he couldn't get them on. I did also serve up breakfast toast with giant spoons. So, a mild April Fools covered in snow/rain/hail/sleet/all of the above rounded out our day. 
Holy Smokes! I can't believe it is time already. I had to register Cade for Kindergarten this week. Yikes! We enjoyed the short walk to Bluffridge to turn in half the paperwork. (Mom still hasn't got the immunizations done, yet....those come next Tuesday.) The Kindergarten here is year round. I'm not sure how I feel about that. There are four tracks, and three of them start mid-July! There goes half the summer camp enrichments I had planned to send Cade to. There is a chance he might go to another school. I entered him in a lottery for a charter school equidistant from our house. I love the idea that it has uniforms and traditional school year, but we probably won't get in. I am excited for Cade. I'm afraid I won't shed a tear when he goes to Kindergarten. I'm one of those cold-hearted moms, I guess. I love my children, but I honestly love watching them grow and mature and become hopefully more independent. Anyhow, when we went to register Cade I saw this huge welcome sign and the mascot of the buffalo greeted us. I thought he'd love the buffalo. Instead - he turns around and looks on the wall behind us at some pictures of George Washington and Ben Franklin and just can't contain himself. He was so excited about the pictures of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, etc. etc. etc. So while the ten or so other kids registering oogled over the Buffalo, Cade delved into his money talk inspired by the pictures. My little money man is obsessed with coins and bills and who is on what bill and I think I may have a little accountant on my hand. I suppose it isn't all bad, he is learning a lot about history and numbers, but I'm afraid if I get asked one more time, "What do 13 nickels and 4 dimes and 2 half dollars make? And which President is on the Silver Dollar? And How many weeks will it take me to earn a Ben Franklin dollar bill?" I just might lose it!
This is a new preschool/music/tumbling/dance/daycare/etc/etc/etc school they are opening up not too far from me. It should be open in August. They offer group and private piano lessons amongst a plethora of other things. From what I know about them, I am highy impressed. I first heard of them because I got some transfer piano students who were trained there, and just didn't want to drive that distance anymore. So I interviewed for a position there. I was pretty much told I could have as many students, classes, days, etc. that I wanted. Yay! The only problem is that I couldn't teach privately anymore. It would be written in my contract as a conflict of interest. So now I am at a crossroads and have to decide what to do. I wouldn't make nearly as much per student as I do privately teaching, but I would surely have more students....and my kids could take music/karate/tumbling classes or go to the daycare while I taught until Eric got off work. It would solve the babysitter issue. Right now I give out exchanges for babysitting, and I only am getting paid for five private students. That is after a year of referrals and advertising. So.....I just might take the lesser paying job. I think I'd love having all my students found for me, having all the recitals taken care of, not having my kids to distract me, and I get to pursue an outlet that I simply must have in my life - regardless of financial benefits/etc. I'm still waffling though. I wouldn't have as much freedom, and probably not as many advanced students to start with. Decisions. Decisions. Decisions. I'm just glad that I have the option. I was an HOUR and A HALF late to my interview! YIKES!!! To my rescue, I-15 was closed that day due to a fuel spill and it took me 2 hours to drive somewhere that has never taken me more than 30 minutes. Grrr. So the jury is still out, but it might be a great thing for me. 
Here are my cute Hoodlum Children who are so often sleepless. Their escapade for this day was to play with shoes. Cade put on Eric's and David put on mine. They waltzed and jumped and skidded across the floor pretending to be mommy and daddy. They were pretty funny imitating us actually. Eric commented that some of his earliest memories are waltzing around in his Dad's shoes. I tried to remember doing that as a little kid, and frankly, though I'm sure I did do it, I don't remember it. However, I do remember waltzing around in my dad's shoes all the time as a teenager. My dad and I actually have the exact same size foot! I would borrow his shoes to get the mail, I would mow the lawn on his shoes, much to his shagrin. Those are my wearing my daddy's shoes memories. 
Eyebrow Threading. On impulse, I was at the mall spending a birthday gift certificate and I saw this lady in a booth wearing her country's traditional outfit, and a sign advertising eyebrow threading. I stopped and got this massive handout paper touting the benefits of eyebrow threading vs. waxing. Now, I could really care less about all the supposed "benefits." I've had my brows sugared, plucked, waxed. I will use anything - whatever works - as long as it takes the hair away. The biggest benefit that I saw to threading is that I was somewhere without my kids for a few minutes. There was a big comfy chair in front of me, a lady willing to pamper me, the price wasn't too exhorbitant, and I didn't have to wait in any line or make any appointment. I decided to have my eyebrows threaded. 
