Early Easter Egg Hunt

The Bloomington Lions Club had their Easter Egg hunt and breakfast a week early this year. Probably because of General Conference. The day was beautiful so we took Emily to the park to let her search for eggs.

Get the eggs Emily. I think Russell had more fun gathering eggs than Emily did.

Emily found one egg and was perfectly content, but Russell wanted her to gather more!

What a cute girl with her Easter basket and egg!

Emily's favorite part of the whole Easter Egg Hunt was playing on the slide afterward. She loves climbing up the steps and sliding down the slide. "WEEEEE!!" She also loves swinging on the swings especially when I push her high. She gets so mad when we have to leave the park because she loves it so much. The poor thing cries every time we have to leave. :(

But she was much happier when we gave her some Easter candy! What a nut!

Planting Our Garden

We decided to try our hand at provident living, so last Wednesday we planted a garden. We planted one last year but we didn't really get much from it. Our peas and a few of our tomatoes grew and that was all. This year we are hoping we get more out of our garden. So we prayed over it!

This is what our garden looked like before we planted.

Emily loved helping us plant. We even bought her her own shovel. I think she mostly liked playing in the dirt!

Yep those are worms in Emily's hands. While we were digging and planting we found these worms so we gave them to Emily to play with and she LOVED them! I was so surprised, I thought she would be scared of them. She took the worms to the sidewalk and played with them, petted them, and stretched them. Then when she was done playing she threw them back into the garden. It was funny to watch.

Here's our garden!! Last summer one of our friend's made the best homemade salsa from all of the vegetables in her garden so we wanted to do the same. Our garden consists of vegetables to make salsa. We planted onions, garlic, peppers, and about 24 tomato plants! We will be salsa making fools this summer and having tomato sandwiches everyday! We also planted potatoes from some old potatoes we had that had started to grow in the fridge so I don't know if they will actually produce potatoes.

We also planted spaghetti squash, zucchini, and honeydew melon.

We are excited about our garden and hoping we get a good crop and that the weather doesn't hurt it this year. If we get a good crop, we will make everyone some salsa!! So wish us luck!

Fun Emily Pictures and Update

Emily is growing up so fast! She is definitely getting her own personality and becoming a little girl instead of my baby! She loves playing with her cousins and cries when we have to go home. Here are a few cute cousins. Emily knows she is as big as Taylor and Tyrel. She had to set at the bar to eat her lunch just like her cousins. There was no way she was getting into her high chair.

Emily has a fetish with pens, pencils and markers pretty much any writing instrument. As you can see from this picture she likes to write on everything including her face. She was being unusually quiet at the moment and when I went to find her, this is what I found!! Russell has to be careful not to leave is homework and textbooks within her reach because she will write all over his papers. Its pretty funny actually and Russell can't even get mad at her.

The other night Emily found her baby bouncer and Boppy so she climbed in and said, "Nite Nite Mama!" No matter how many times I tried to take her out of the bouncer, she kept climbing back in. She likes that thing more now than she did when she was a baby. She hated it as a baby. She is silly!

Good morning Emily! This is what she looks like when she wakes up! I laugh everyday!!

She loves watching Winnie-the-Pooh. She has to watch it at least twice a day. She points at the TV and says "Pooh! Pooh!" She also loves watching Dora the Explorer at Aunt Terral's house. When I take her to Terral's house when I go to work at 7: 00am she has to set on Terral's lap with her blanket and watch Dora. She can spot Dora and Pooh anywhere she goes. If she sees either one of them, she yells and points "DORA!" or "POOH!" Then Russell and I have to search to find what she is looking at.

Emily is also getting a little attitude. If we ask her to do something she doesn't want to do, she yells "NOOOO!" I think that is her favorite word. She is starting to talk all the time and learning new words all everyday. She is very friendly and will say Hi and wave whenever anyone walks by us. She is such a cute kid if I do say so myself.

Emily also loves singing "Jesus" songs (primary songs). I have to sing her to sleep every night. When I stop singing she sits up and says "Jesus?" So I sing her another song. I just taught her "Popcorn Popping on the Apricot Tree" and "Daddy's Homecoming" I have also been trying to teach her the sign language to the new Primary song "I Know My Savior Loves Me" She knows "I, Know, and Love" so far.

Got any Potty Training Advice?

With the price of diapers reaching $25 a box and a box only lasting 2-3 weeks, I can no longer afford to have a child in diapers! So it is time for Emily to be potty trained. She has actually been doing really well at it. I just take her to the bathroom about every 30 minutes and let her get used to the idea of sitting on the toilet. Then when she goes, we cheer and give high-five's and she does a little "Big Girl" dance and gets a treat. It is so funny. She loves flushing the toilet, which I don't know if that is a good thing. She also loves washing her hands (or playing in the water).

She has had some accidents though which is expected. When that happened we gave her a cold shower which she hated so she hasn't had any accidents since then. I want to get to the point where she tells me when she needs to go without me reminding her or taking her into the bathroom. I guess that will just come with time though. We have been working with her for a little over a week now and today she wore her big girl panties all day with no accidents!! YEAH EMILY!!

If any of you have any advice or tips on what worked for your kids, please let me know.

Spectrum 10K

This weekend I ran the Spectrum 10K. It was a really good race and there were a lot of participants because it is one of the qualifying races for the St. George Marathon. The race started in the Snow Canyon State Park and we ran 3 miles in the park through the beautiful red rocks. We watched the sun rise over the scenery as we ran. It was breathtaking. For the next three miles, we ran through the city and neighborhoods in Ivins and then finished at the Ivins City Park. The course was really nice and mostly down hill, which is always good. The weather was great too! It was a perfect day for a race.

My goal for this race was to do it under an hour. My time was 54:55 which is a 8:51 min/mile! So I made my goal!! This race was different in that we wore running chips on our shoes so that our time only started when we crossed the starting line instead of when the start gun fired. I was 342 overall and 11th in my age group. I think I did pretty good.

Because we used the running chips, we didn't get individual cards with our results on it, instead we just had to find our times on the results board. Here are my results (if you can read that small of print!) The first person across the finish line ran the race in less that 30 minutes! Can you believe that? That is less than 5 min/mile! All I can say is AMAZING!

Well I had planned on doing other fun runs this year but I think this will be my last race for a while. An explanation is coming soon.

Babylon Trails

Our spring break was quickly fading away so we had to do something about it. Thursday we took our four wheelers out to the Babylon trails near Leeds. We went with Russell's parents and little brother. We had a great time until it started getting cold on the ride back to the truck.

The trails were great and the scenery was beautiful.
Emily loved riding the four wheelers and playing with Grandma and Grandpa.

The trails led us to the river. Normally this river is so clear and clean you can swim in it but this day it was so muddy because of the rain and weather the previous days.

Because it had rained the day before, there were a lot of mud puddles in the trails. Russell's brother Tyler was riding our little 80 and there was one big puddle in the middle of the trail that he couldn't drive around so he had to drive through it. It was so funny because the puddle was really deep and he almost got stuck. We just kept yelling "Go Tyler go faster!" and he made it through covered in mud! Even Russell's mom got a wild hair and sped right through the mud puddles and got covered in mud! It was really fun.

It was so nice to get outside and enjoy the sunshine. I am looking forward to spring and summer so we can do more activities like these everyday.

The Maiden Voyage

It had been almost two months since we bought our four-wheelers and we still hadn't taken them out for a ride yet. We decided that needed to change so we last Wednesday we took them out for their maiden voyage. Russell called me at work that morning and told me to hurry home because he had packed a picnic and we were going riding. When I got home from work, we loaded the four-wheeler and were off. We went to the trails behind Green Valley. I did not realize how many trails were out there. We had a lot of fun.

The weather was great! The sun was shining and it was much warmer than it has been. It was a great day for a ride.
Here we are enjoying our picnic and the sunshine.

Russell taught Emily how to throw rocks. She loved it.

"Hi Mama!"

Emily loved riding the four-wheeler until she fell asleep. While she was sleeping we took turns driving and we had a great time. I was kind of leery about buying the four-wheelers but after riding them I am so glad we got them. This summer will be so much fun because we will go riding a lot and we will finally be able to go with our families on their rides.

Another good thing is that we are getting a great tax refund this year so we can pay off the 4-wheeler loan and be DEBT FREE!!! (well except for the deferred school loans) YEAH! We even have some of our refund left over. Any suggestions on what we should do with it?