Saturday Fun

Russell needed some time off from studying on Saturday so we packed a picnic and headed to the park to enjoy the great weather. I love springs in St. George. I wish it would stay like this all year round.

"Oh Yeah! Oh Yeah!" That is what we say every time we put on our cool sunglasses.
We love taking Emily to the park because she gets so excited and happy. As you can tell, she loves the swings.

And the slides...

She thinks she is so big. She tried to climb up this ladder...

...I only had to help her a little!

She made it to the top!

"BOO!" She likes to scary us anytime she can. She will hide behind things and then jump out at us and say "BOO!" It is so funny. That is what she is doing now, scaring us.

After the park, we went to my sister's house and played with cousins.

These cute kids liked playing in the ice cold pool.

Emily especially liked splashing. She didn't care that the water was cold. She was having a good time.

Yeah those are big girl panties Emily is wearing. She is doing so well with potty training, she even tells us when she needs to go and we only have to remind her once in a while. We were rewarding her with cookies but then she started saying she needed to go potty whenever she wanted a cookie whether she really needed to go or not. Now we reward her with stickers which she thinks is just as good. I can't believe how big she is getting!

Anyway we had a great Saturday and Russell said it was nice to take a breather before finals!

Dixie Escalante Kite Festival

April 17th was the annual Dixie Escalante Kite Festival. Russell had to go volunteer for the EMS so we made a day out of it. We even bought a kite!

There were so many people at the festival. I had only been to the festival once before in high school so I didn't really know what to expect. First we we walked around all of the booths and all of the vendors tried to sucker us into everything they were selling. The Living Scripture guy was the worst. All we wanted was our free movie and he wanted to sign us up for an eternal contract with them. After his half hour speech, we kindly declined and took our free movie. The guy was pretty mad but oh well!

Emily's favorite booth was the balloon animals. She loved her dogie balloon.

We even got Emily's face painted. Surprisingly, the flower stayed all day. I think it was because Emily couldn't see it!

And of course we flew our kite. or at least tried to. There was absolutely no wind so it was hard to fly the kite. Here is Emily trying to fly the kite. She was so cute, she would run so fast dragging the kite behind her.

Russell was able to get it up in the air for a little while which made Emily jump up and down with excitement!

Then I tried my hand at it. I had about as much luck as Emily!

While we were flying our kite, Emily saw the cow train driving around and she had to have a ride so I took her on it. She loved it! She kept yelling "WEEE!" It was fun except for the fact that the carts were made for kids not me! It was a little tight.

Here we are on the ride. Wave at Dad, Emily.

After a fun, hot day at the festival, we enjoyed a good treat of Otter Pops, Emily's favorite!

The End of Tax Season = Blog Update

Now that tax season is finally over and I am not working 60+ hours a week like I have been for the past two weeks, I decided I should probably catch up on some of the things I let slide over the past few weeks. Some of those things include grocery shopping (All I can say is it is a good thing the church encourages us to have food storage or we would have starved!), cleaning the house (I don't know how long it had been since the floor had been swept!) and updating our blog! Well I will happily report that the fridge is now full and the cupboards no longer look like Mother Hubbard. And, after a day of cleaning, I finally got the house looking like it should! And now... here is our blog update on the adventures we have been having. It has been a busy two weeks, with Easter and races and having fun. Below are 4 new posts. Enjoy!

Run 4 Kids 5k

April 10th was the Run 4 Kids 10K/5K/1K. It was held in Coral Canyon. All of the proceeds from this race went to The Learning Center. I participated in the 5K. It was a really good race. It ran through the neighborhood of Coral Canyon and then ended at the Holiday Inn Express. I wanted to run this race in 24 minutes but I ended up getting 25:24 minutes. I was kind of bummed about my time because I knew I could have done better. Then when I got my Runner Card with my results on it, I found out that I came in second place in my age group! So that made me feel better. I have never place in a race before so I was excited to win a medal!

Here I am sporting my new T-shirt and my 2nd Place Medal!!! Wahoo! I turned out to be a good race after all!

Easter...Sunday

Easter Sunday was really nice this year because it was also General Conference. What a better way to celebrate the true meaning of Easter than to listen to the prophet and apostles talk to us and give us the council the Lord wants us to hear. Here are a few pictures of our Easter Sunday activities:

While we listened to General Conference, we made Easter cookies. Emily wanted to help so I decided it couldn't hurt to have a couple little hands helping.

She loved rolling the dough and pressing the cookie cutters into the dough.

After Conference and after we decorated all of our cookies, we headed over to my parent's house for our annual Easter Egg Hunt and dinner.

Emily found all of the eggs even this hard one in the planter box.

She put all of them in her basket and went to find more.

Baby Tyler didn't know what to think about the hunt but he did like playing with the eggs.

Tyrel was a pro at gathering eggs.

Go girls! Get the eggs!

Here come the older kids! Keep gathering!

After all of the kids were out looking, the eggs were gathered up quickly.

Time to see what we got! Emily's favorite part of the hunt was opening the eggs and watching the candy fly everywhere. She laughed every time it happened. I apologize for blinding everyone with my white legs. Hopefully they will darken a little before summer.

Here are all 18 cousins ranging from 10 months to 20 years old! (Plus one significant other)

Here I am with all of my brothers and sisters. Aren't we a good looking bunch!? We had to take like 10 pictures to get one that we actually looked OK in. If you don't know, we hate pictures!

We had a great time with our family and it was really nice to be with everyone.

HAPPY EASTER!

Easter...Saturday

We had a great Easter this year. It was so nice to be with family, relaxing and just having fun. Here are a few pictures of our Saturday Easter adventures: First we had to see what the Easter Bunny had brought us! Emily's favorite gift was the BUBBLES! She loves blowing bubbles and she also loves spilling them!

Here she is with her new "Pooh" outfit and her bubbles. I don't know why she has the silly face!

Then we went to the Beat the Banker 4.01K to run our race. It was a lot of fun. (See the post below)

After the race in Hurricane, we rushed over the Washington City Easter Egg Hunt.

We actually missed the Hunt by one minute. When we got there, they said "Go" and by the time we got out of the car and to Emily's age group, the candy was gone! We were bummed but then we found my sister and her kids and they had gotten a lot of candy so they threw some on the ground and Emily had her own little Easter Egg hunt and that was good enough for her.


"TaDa!" She is showing off her favorite candy...SUCKERS!


Emily liked putting all of her candy in her basket. Thanks for helping Uncle Chad.

That is one happy family!

Here are some cute cousins after the Easter Egg Hunt.

When we got home, it was time for lunch. We decided it was time to teach Emily how to make her own peanut butter sandwich. She loved helping!

"WEEEEE!!!"

Each year all of the Morwood's get together for an Easter picnic. This year we had it at the Santa Clara Elementary where my aunt works. Emily loved playing on the slides and swings.

She especially loved playing with her cousins!

Here are some of my family members enjoying our Sloppy Joe's and potato salad.

The highlight of the picnic is the BASEBALL GAME! We don't play with teams, and we don't keep score. Every time we get someone out, we rotate positions until we are up to bat and the person that got out heads to the outfield to get into the rotation. If we catch a fly ball, the person that catches it automatically gets to bat and the batter switches positions with the one who caught it. It is so fun!

After the picnic, we went home and colored Easter Eggs. Emily loved coloring eggs. She would pick up the eggs and throw them in the color making it splash every where! She thought that was great. Needless to say, some of the eggs ended up broken but that was okay.

Then she would try to get them out with the scoop. When she couldn't do it, she would hand the scoop to me and say "HELP!" It is a good thing our counter top is dark because it would have been stained but we had fun.

Here are our finished products, aren't they pretty!

Here is Emily loving hard boiled eggs, her new favorite snack!

It was a great day, but very long. We were tired that night.

Beat the Banker 4.01 K

April 3 was the Beat the Banker 4.01K sponsored by Sun First Bank. This was Russell's first race ever and he did a great job! We even took Emily on this run in her jogging stroller. Here we are before the race.

Here is Emily helping Dad warm up for the race. She loved running up and down the road. She thought she was going to run with us so while we were stretching, she sat down by us and stretched too. She makes the funniest noises when she stretches; she grunts and groans and reaches so far!

Then the race began! We ran so fast! Our goal was to run the 2.5 mile race in 21 minutes and I did it in 19:45 and Russell was right behind me with a time of 20 minutes exactly! We did great. I felt bad because Russell would have come in at the same time as me but at about the 1.5 mile mark, Emily dropped her snacks and because I was pushing the stroller at that time, Russell had to go back and get the snacks. Then he never quite caught back up with us. I feel bad because I should have waited for him but he said it was okay because he still got a good time.

Here we are at the finish line. We made it!

This race was fun because there were about 25 bankers that ran the race too and for every banker we beat, (hence the name of the race) we got 25 cents! We both beat 20 bankers so we each won $5 for a total of $10!! We were excited! We had a good race and Russell even said he liked races and would do more with me. Yeah!

Then we had to rush over to Washington to make it to the City Easter Egg Hunt at 10:00.