Glasses and Nose Bleeds

 

My girls are obsessed with my glasses. To distract them from my glasses I showed Rose that they could ware the Mr Potatohead glasses. It worked for about 5 minutes. 

I haven't figured out what Al is doing but he has started getting nose bleeds. In the last week its happened 3 times. I think he got hurt once and then has been picking it. Whatever it is he has been getting blood all over the place because he won't tell me  when it happens.

Sowards Family Vacation

I wish I had more picture from the weekend. I didn't get out my camera.
These photos of my daughters were taken by my brother with his awesome camera.

These girls are just so cute and are natural hams in front of a camera.

This creepy wood guy was on the outside of the cabin we were staying in, looking inside the cabin- it was just creepy.

Pioneer Day Celebration

The Saturday prior to Pioneer Day our stake had a celebration/fair. It was fun. We volunteered to help inform the stake about Indexing for the church's family history, mostly the 1940 census (which  is now completed). Our stake wanted to raise interest and recruit. We brought both of our laptops and our desktop monitor. My husband connected the monitor to his laptop so that passers by could see what he was doing. We weren't the only ones with our laptops there were about 10 others in our section, all of us indexing.

There were lots of soups of every kind and then pies. I brought two pies. (I was only asked to bring one but I ended up making three, so I brought two). One was a sugar-free, chocolate banana cream pie, the other was an Almond Pie (pecan pie but made with almonds). The chocolate banana cream pie was gone before I even got to try a bite. Wish I took photos of both of them.

I had two reasons for making an Almond pie, 1- oh my goodness nuts are expensive. I always buy my nuts at Costco and I thought they were expensive there. We were out of pecans and all I had were Almonds. I thought I'd just buy a bag at the local grocery store until I saw the price. I couldn't stop thinking about that carmelly goodness. I wondered if I could use my almonds and sure enough I found a recipe on the internet for almond pie 2- I shouldn't be eating pecans because I'm sort of allergic. Its not an immunological reaction (which to be a true allergy it has to be immunological reaction- meaning your immune system is reacting like its a virus or bacteria something to threaten your health.) My reaction is mostly to walnuts but I sometimes have a reaction to pecans. What happens to me is I get welts all over my tongue. I've been told it has to do with the acidity of the nut. But all nuts produce acidity and the ONLY nuts I have a problem with are walnuts and pecans. So I normal substitute almonds in everything: oatmeal, cookies, brownies, desserts, jello. Anywhere you'd use walnuts or pecans I use almonds exclusively. Now I will be making almond pies too.

It was a beautiful day. The weather was nice, it wasn't too hot, the clouds coming in gave a nice cover (although I still go seriously sunburned), the clouds also brought a cool breeze. It was a bit on the humid side, but the rain held off just long enough for all the activities to be over (line dancing, butter making, stick pulls and other games). As we packed up the car it started to pour.

We all had fun including the cutest twins on the block

Awesome MONSOONS

It is so hard to capture rain in a photo. We've been getting A LOT of rain this Monsoon season. Good thing too because we NEED it. Our last few years winter rain season has been super dry and the last two monsoon seasons have been a little less than stellar. So we've been thrilled with the day after day rain. It seemed like it was starting to slow down, not everyday, and then we had three days in a row again. This is part of the reason we've decided to have our girls one year bday party at our house. We're not taking any chances with rain changing our venue. 

Singing Time Olympics- (Subbing)

Yes I was released over a year ago, but I was asked to sub for the next few weeks. The current chorister gave me her plans to teach "I'm Trying to be Like Jesus" starting on Sunday, and left the rest of it to me.
Since the Olympics in London are on going I wanted to find a way to teach the song, work hard on the song (not take a lot of time away from singing), and incorporate something to do with the Olympics.
I found this blog post on singingasongisfun2do about her Olympic Singing Time. I liked her visuals and the idea of using the actions, but I was having trouble mashing it with teaching the song. I finally came up with the idea that after making through the whole song once, I'd have 3 children come up and do the action for one of the sporting events while we all sing through the song. Then at the end of the song, I'd award a medal to each of the three children. I am going to preface that anyone who cries or complains about which medal they get will get no medal at all. Although if they don't want the 1,2,3rd place medals they can quickly exchange it for a colored one. (They say wow, great job, awesome, singing champ, you're a star...) We will do this until the time is up.
I'm using the visuals of the Olympics from the above mentioned blog post plus one of my own Kayaking. For the action we'll row, two on each side, I guess it could also be rowing. You're welcome to use it.

I created my own medals by cutting circles out of construction paper and writing on them with permanent marker. 

For the ribbon I used cheap curling wrapping ribbon. I was stingy on my tape because I was almost out. I wouldn't recommend it, use enough tape.

Each one says Sing Time on it, The fun colored ones say "Singing Time Olympics" on each one.

After I made these I quickly made up some that ya'll can print off. Download as an image and it should print in a 8.5 x 11 paper.  Or click on these links to download from box.net 

OLYMPIC MEDALS1 

ColoredMEDALS2

Personally I don't have a color printer so my construction paper will work just fine.

Good Luck Hope this helps ya'll. Happy Singing.

Breakfast with Justin

We met up with Justin for breakfast while we were in Mesa.

Justin suggested this cute place with excellent breakfast food (they only do breakfast and lunch), called T C Eggingtons.

I had their french toast, Justin and my husband both had one of their omelets.  

We had a delicious breakfast and it was great to see Justin again.

Family Date Night

Since my husband getting home, we haven't had the opportunities to have alone time. This post isn't about of of those times. Its about when we decided to go out to dinner and take our children with us for a family date. Our son seemed like he needed some daddy time.  With daddy going back to work he has been having a harder time when daddy's gone. We just need to get to a *new* normal again. Its hard that normal keeps changing to find a normal.

We went out to Applebee's (we had a gift card).  Our children are very well behaved when eating out. I believe that all children have their "bad" days when eating out. But if you never take your children out with you, they don't learn how to behave themselves. You have to train them. Too bad taking them gets more expensive the older they get and the more they eat. At least right now, Al doesn't need a whole lot yet, and I can still bring the girls' dinner with us.