For their birthdays, I got the boys tickets to go see Monster Jam in Austin this weekend. William and Alex have wanted to go for years, but it comes to Dallas in February, which is always a crazy month. They had a great time!They even got to watch Grave Digger get stuck in a wheelie. He needed a forklift to get him righted. While they were have fun, the girls and I went out to dinner and to the mall. Natalie even overcame her teenager “Too Cool” pride and jumped on the carousel with me and Lucy.Thank goodness we were able to eventually convince Lucy to get off to see something else. That could have gotten really ugly. 😬She found her happy place in the Disney Store. Everything was loads of excitement for her! Too bad they were closing when we made it there.Lucy found a Belle doll and an Olaf that she would NOT let us put back.We were so fortunate to have an amazing cast member offer her an Ana, Elsa, and Olaf sticker instead, to trade for the dolls. She was So incredibly sweet, Lucy gave in and turned over Belle and Olaf. Now we have a good idea of a birthday gift. 😏

I am beginning to wonder if Lucy’s hair is EVER going to grow longer! It seems like we have been at this length forever! Today, I just gave up trying to make her headbands look less ridiculous and attempted to pull up her hair on top. What little bit she had made a cute little sprig. 🤣We got to show it off at storytime. Roger and Ms. Debbie even noticed. 😊I LOVE how Lucy is beginning to smile when I ask her to now. Sometimes it is the total “Cheese!” smile, but that is better than her running away, or the back of her head.

We sure have great luck of bringing the rain to the Arboretum! I have really wanted to take my mom to the Arboretum since we bought our season passes. Since the kids were off of school today, I was hoping for great weather. We took a gamble with rain in the forecast. It didn’t end quite in our favor, but we still had fun for the short time we were there. We went to mist gardens first.At first Lu tried to jump right into the flowers. 😱 (She still had bluebonnet fields on her mind! 😜) We had to explain to her that these were special gardens and we had to stay on the paths. Lucy loved all the squirrels darting in and out of the flowers. She kept making Natalie stop to watch them.The boys loved looking for evidence of bugs, minus mosquitoes, bees, wasps, or spiders for William. Alex found a beautiful spider’s web, coated in raindrops. William found a spider’s molt.I guess William couldn’t escape the spiders completely. 😜

Lucy ran off into the vegetable garden area, and discovered multiple squirrels munching away. It was like her little piece of squirrel chasing heaven. Poor things.

We came out of the vegetable area to the reflection pools. Luckily we were able to keep Lu from going in head first. She sure tried! We also had to keep her from trying to sit on the flowers that lined the pools. She thought they were meant for sitting IN! 😳Lucy shared the water with me and my pant legs, and Nana shared pennies with her and the other kids.She was amazed at how they splashed. (Proud of myself for getting it in the photo. 😁)When we left the pools, that is when the skies opened! It wasn’t long before we were pretty drenched! Reminds me of our trip with the Taylers last summer. 😂 We will go back soon though. The Arboretum is fabulous!“What? I didn’t do anything!” 😏

Today was such a wonderful Easter! Probably one of my favorites. We have church fairly early in the morning. So even though the kids got their Easter baskets before church, they were forbidden to eat any Easter candy until after lunch. Sitting through 3 hours of church is hard enough without sugar. Sacrament was really nice. I missed the first bit because I forgot to wash the nursery cups this past week. Natalie helped me in the kitchen when we first arrived. The Waltmans both gave beautiful talks. Brother Waltman’s dad just passed away. It was very neat to see how they related his death to importance of Easter, and how Easter is for EVERYONE! Not only those that are living, but those that have died, and also those that have yet to come. Life on Earth is but a short moment in the big scheme of things. In nursery, we had a FABULOUS time! The kids are WONDERFUL! We had 9 today! We had an excellent lesson on Jesus, and it was so wonderful to see how interested the kids were in the lesson. And people say toddlers have no patience! So not true! Rachel did a great job with singing too. These kids LOVE to sing! After church, we came home, quickly changed our clothes, and dyed Easter eggs. We did it outdoors this year. (Great idea because Lu sure knows how to make a mess! 😉)

Once all our eggs were colored ( ☹️ I forgot to take a picture of our finished eggs!) , the kids played with the Cascarones eggs, celebration eggs for new life, Jesus’ resurrection!

Lucy really got into throwing confetti all over herself. Khaliyah enjoyed catching it, or running off with the broken eggs. After celebrations at home, it was time to go to Grandma and Grandpa’s. The kids had been asking for weeks when it was time to go visit again! They were soooooo excited! We were sad that the Heaths were not able to make it. The kids really love as much time with their cousins as they can get. Hopefully we will get to see them soon! Grandma cooked a delicious dinner for us all, and then had an Easter egg hunt. Boy the kids are fast! It takes a half an hour to hide eggs, but only a few minutes for them to find them.

Natalie ended up with both golden eggs. Alex got all the other sparkle eggs with dollars in them. I think the kids have enough treats to last them the rest of the year! Before the mosquitoes made dinner of us all, Alex and Lu swung on the swings. This dolphin swing was Brianna’s 6mo birthday gift. It is still in fabulous condition, and all of our other kids have loved swinging in it at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Who knows! Maybe Brianna or Nate’s kids will swing in it too. Grandpa just repainted the set, and rebuilt the glider. The swingset was his from when he was a little boy. You can definitely say that they built things better, and to last, years ago. Everything nowadays is so disposable and breaks in no time! So glad we have these few special things to make generations of memories with!

We ended our evening with ice cream and treats, then playing games inside. It was a wonderful way to finish a very special day. Happy Happy Easter!

Saturdays can truly get crazy around our house. Today we started off bright and early with gymnastics for Lucy, Alex had a soccer game (in which he scored the first of only 2 goals for the game 😁🎉), and Sean came to get William for a fishing trip at Lake Texoma. I am so glad William was able to do something just for him. He had a blast! Even though they only caught 1 fish, he swam, dug sandpits, had a cookout, ate s’mores, made fires, exploded things, and so much more. He was just able to be a boy and have fun!While Wii was out living the life at the lake, Natalie visited her friends, and Lucy enjoyed chips. She’s such a character!She took a two hour nap on my lap, and woke sporadically and asked for chips. She must dream a lot about food, because she talks about it in her sleep, and asks for it RIGHT when she wakes up. 🤣 (I promise we feed the kid!) After Lucy’s chip enjoyment, she decided to get temperamental and throw a one hour temper tantrum about going potty! I don’t know what gets into her around 6pm every day, but she often turns into the demon child! We were trying to go deliver some Easter surprises to some friends and go to the park, but Lucy had not been potty for a very long time. 4 1/2 hours! We tell all our kids that they need to go before we leave the house. She, however, was NOT going to. She told Sam she needed to go, but when he took her in there, she changed her mind. Then she started screaming. I tried to help out, but she wanted nothing to do with it for me either. It was as though she was teasing us about it, but also screaming about it, throwing things, slamming the door to keep us IN the bathroom, yet refusing to actually go. After about an hour, and everyone in the house trying to take multiple turns to keep sane and “take her potty”, she tells Alex that she needs to go potty, he takes her, and she does! He did nothing different than anyone else of us were doing. It was like there was no problem after that. 😳 She can be SO stubborn! By the time we delivered treats and made it to the park, it was after 9:00! The temperature had also dropped quite a bit. We only stayed for about 45minutes, long enough to enjoy some crazy swinging. After such a day, it felt GREAT to hit the bed!

Some days just call for a little bit of silence. The kids are all home today for Good Friday. No activities due to the holiday, so everyone wanted friend time. While all the big kids were out and about, Lu played hard with me, then crashed. Still treasuring these quiet snuggly moments. ☺️

Wow! Photographing a toddler is hard enough! Putting her in a field of flowers to do so, is darn near impossible! Crazy Lu! The bluebonnets are quickly disappearing. With all the rain we have had, and more to come in the days ahead, the grasses and other weeds are growing in around them so quickly! I found this amazing spot to do pictures last Saturday on the way to Brinlee’s birthday party. Just since Saturday, many of the bluebonnets were already hidden. I still managed to find an adequate spot to shoot though. I just needed a more cooperative subject. The instant Lucy saw all the flowers, she was in heaven! It was absolutely precious! She kept shrieking and caressing the flowers. My mistake was I, for some reason, thought she was just going to stay by me until I told her what to do. Yeah right! She bolted off long before I had any equipment ready or my settings put in. I so wish I could have captured her sheer bliss.😞 Next time, I think I am just going to switch to video mode, if something like that happens, and edit from there. At least I won’t miss the moment that way. I loved how much she loved seeing all the flowers.

The nice things about the location we were in was that there was absolutely no one else there in the flowers, Lucy had a huge area to move, and the lighting was almost perfect. (Only a few times did the sun peek through and give some awkward blares of light.)

There were hardly any ants, no poison ivy, and no snakes. We’ll find out about chiggers in the next few days. I’m hoping we escaped those too!

Lucy found a ladybug in the flowers and loved just watching it go in and out of the leaves. The main challenge I had, aside from toddler on speed, was that there was a cemetery behind the area we were in, with an iron fence going around it. Any shots I wanted to get of Lucy in the sunset had the fence behind her. I kept trying to lure her another direction, but that didn’t persuade her desires in the slightest. Toddler mind made up is usually what stays. Luckily she realized that her boots had mud on them, so she sat down in some of the flowers. That helped in cutting out the fence.

There was a really nice man visiting the cemetery, who stopped to watch Lucy run through the flowers. Once she noticed him watching her, I managed to get quite a few good shots. She stopped long enough to say hi and listen to him tell her how much she looked like a little flower angel. It was really sweet. At least she had a wonderful time. I heard all about it the whole way home. 😊❤️

April was my month to host STEM Club. For our challenge today, the kids had to build their own bird’s nest. We took a hike to the nature trails to gather supplies, and then the kids had to come back and construct their nest in a tree to hold an egg with their group.In the end, we had some pretty spectacular nests put all in my trees. I was really impressed with their creativity and willingness to get messy! 

I love these sweet moments of Lucy. She can be so challenging at times! But moments, like just enjoying the rain just falling on her head, make it SO worth all the hard times!She played in the rain for over a half an hour. It was an ultimate struggle when she had to come inside. Oh the joys of being young. ☺️

I finally had a few hours this afternoon to take Alex to get his 7 year photos. Boy, you would have thought I was ripping his arm out of the socket by making him wear a nice shirt though. He is so funny, because he had just gone to church this morning, and never complains about a button up shirt then. I even let him wear shorts and flip flops! Once we got to our location, all was forgotten, and he had a blast! Natalie wanted me to take a few more of her, even though she has had a lot of pictures taken lately. I figured why not, since we were making a special trip for it. William came along too for the fun. His birthday is still a month and a half off, so I’ll get his official photos closer to his actual birthday. I think my shots came out FABULOUS!

The sun was a bit tricky this afternoon though. It was beautiful and overcast, until we arrived at the falls. Then, the clouds broke up a bit. I had some shots of bright sun, or splotchy shadows, but luckily they worked. I was very pleased. I LOVE these kiddos of mine! ❤️😊