April's gone; replaced with many memories.

To those of you who still check this blog. Please enjoy

Nighly routine for bedtime.  

Nice weather, time to play at Rock Canyon Park. 

Thomas was a great soccer player. They look like little bees buzzing around hive that someone kicked a soccer ball at. 

After a week of nice weather, we got to have winter again. April has never been this wet and after all the precip that has fallen, the mountains have over 190% of normal. It's so great and beautiful though and not too hot.

My wonderful Nationals team. They are amazing college kids.

Our trip to St.George with a stop to visit the only bear we spotted.

The treasured red hill. A playground heaven.

Yep, we still fit through the "crack". As Matthew refers to it "the Earth's Crack" so as to not get confused with any other "cracks" we may know of.

Grandma filling Grandpa Mc's shoes. She's amazing.

Lana's fam is so fun to be with. I love this shot because there is actually GREEN grass growing in the middle of the red rocks. Such a beautiful time to visit Dixie.

My Matthew is so coordinated and brave. I sure hope he has as many guardian angels watching over him as were watching over me. Please!

Mom turned 60 this past month and we were supposed to send a picture of our family with her in them. I had lots of my kids and her but I didn't have ANY of me and my mom! So I got my rear in gear and took care of that.

Matthew smelling a flower. Gosh this boy is unique. I LOVE him. He makes me smile every day. 

Aurora tried her hand at soccer. She is a tough girl and I have hopes for her in sports afterall. Lovely, lovely fun girl.

Coloring eggs at the in-laws. It was actually warm enough this year to hide them outside.

My traditional "eye" egg.

Girls doing my hair. It felt sooooo good and they loved doing it. Bonus.

My Beautiful, Beautiful Young Women at the Provo Temple. What a wonderful group of ladies.

March Madness

March Madness-such a great title for a month that flies in and flies out. My goal for the year was to post one blog post per month. So far I'm only 50%. Not bad for a bowler or 3-point shooter, but horrible for offensive racquetball shots.
I'll add a few picts and call this my March post:

Practicing our preschool letters in shaving cream. Kids love it and the table smells nice afterwords.

 Not one of Matthew's better days. His parents were having a go of it and after all other resources were exhausted, we resorted to our preschool shaving cream. It's looks like we're quite the abusive parents. But really, we just didn't know what else to do but to add humor to our repertoire. Matthew ended up laughing with us so all is well. 

 Thom-bomb turns 5!! We had an Army Boot camp for his birthday party. So fun!

 Thom's new fighting get-up. Loves it and will now be protected from all those "bad guys".

 My birthday at P.F. Chang's. Yes, we braved the crowds on a Friday night and waited for one hour with the kids just so I didn't have to cook or clean on this day of hearts. Shouldn't it be him kissing me?!

 My birthday gift! New bosch mixer/blender and I love, love, love it. I've never had such smooth dough and lovely kale smoothies. 

 Even though my little bro will probably never see this post, we wanted to publicly thank him for the amazingly warm p.j.s he and Colbi gave us for Christmas. We keep our home pretty cold because it's so darn expensive to heat a home, but we have no worries with these wonderful p.j.'s because they do their job splendidly. And such lovely designs. I have sugar and spice and everything nice on mine and my hubby has breakfast foods. 

 Good-bye long hair! Rora-girl had her hair cut by my good friend. She's never had her hair cut before, but found out about Locks of Love and decided she wanted to donate her hair. So my friend cut one foot off of her hair and we mailed it in. Rora even took the package in and had them weigh it and she paid for it all by herself. She's a beautiful, giving young lady. What a sweety. I will miss her long hair but it's still long enough to braid and play with so I'm not too sad. And it's a million-billion times easier to brush so all of us are happier here at home. 

 Thom and Daniel spending some fun times at the waterfall place on BYU campus. Just loving the warm spring days. So many rocks to throw, water to play in and bugs to investigate.

 My weird children and their hilarious ways. 

 Ditto with the hubby.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANG!!!

So, my great true-blue friend, Angela Timothy Passey, has had yet another birthday. She has made me a better person by her example and her faith in me. I promised her an update of my blog for her birthday. So, I picked out some photo's of my family and other things to post. Now let's see what this blog is capable of....

Grandma making our Thanksgiving stuffing with the "help" of Daniel and Robbie.

Beautiful hair-do's by Paige, Aurora and Emry.

Braving the Sugar City cold. We went to the hill and everyone got frostbite on their cheeks. I believe it was about 7 degrees on this day. Not cold in Alaska standards, but freezing for us wimpy Utahans.

Thanksgiving 2010 Feast. Kids are at two other tables in Front room and Washroom. 

Playing sports at the church is our favorite! Grandma and Grandpa Woodbury posing with my 4 yeahoos. We had some great dodgeball games and ladder races this day. 

Grandpa and Daniel. I love this photo!

Baby Aria and her favorite Aunt Val. I got to hold her so much and I still didn't get enough of babies. I LOVE babies and Aria is a doll and so sweet.

Great brothers, Thomas and Daniel playing in the snow.

Ijantje and Rora posing with our snowman. Cute stuff.

Caroling with my YW and the YM. Great kids and leaders!

My preschool kids. I LOVE teaching these sweet kids. What little gems they are. And they come up with the greatest sayings. Thomas is my child(blue paper). He loves preschool. 

The Day of the BIG Snow! The day before school got out for Christmas break, we got dumped on. It was heaven! Christijan stayed home from school and work and we played, played, played in this great stuff. The air was clear of smog and full of smiles.

Mr. Snowman with Valorie, Thomas and Daniel. And Lora's great snowman kit we use every snow day.

We built a snow cave. It was about 12 feet long, with air holes and stability. We loved digging it out and crawling through it. The kids did too.

Ijantje and his sculptures. This one is of me. 

Almost every day, but Sunday, Thomas will have a sword fight with anyone willing to sword fight with him. We turn the song "Turkish March" up really loud and go for it. Here, Aurora is holding her own. Ever since watching "How to train your Dragon", she is very set on being Astrid. She just needs to learn how to throw an ax now. 

My great children. We took them out x-country skiing to the park and after some skiing down the hills and sledding down the hills, we spent some time climbing the trees. They love the snow. Thomas fell out of the tree and hit almost every branch below him, sort of like in the movies. He survived because he was so bundled up in snow clothes. The last branch caught him and he laid there trying to get his lungs to work again after getting the wind knocked out of him. Tough kid. 

My great racquetball team. 4 team members aren't pictured. I spend a lot of time with these kids. They are good and beautiful. I appreciate their hard work and coachability. I do love being a coach. 

During a service project for the Youth in our ward, I found a very beautiful Black Widow and brought it home for our pet. She became our Vanessa.

It was a large one and during the course of her stay in our home, she produced 3 egg sacks, holding 300 to 500 spiders in each one.

Vanessa was an awesome sight to watch in her stalking and catching insects. Her fights against preying mantis's were so neat to watch.

However, having something like this in our home was pretty stupid. She could wreak major havoc on my sweet children. We only had her for a few weeks and the kids came to love Vanessa.

We did talk about the dangers of these types of spiders and they came to respect her powers as well. We had many talks about Great Grandpa McArthur and his Rattlesnake episodes.

Finally, we did get rid of Vanessa in the kindest way possible. Here in the first picture, Matthew is extremely sad once we decided to "do Vanessa in". He would have kept her forever.

The Sunday before we lost our Vanessa, Christijan taught a lesson in Priesthood. He related this danger in our home to other, spiritual dangers we allow in our homes or in our lives. It was a great correlation to think about. We have loved not having t.v. or bad music in our home. It's helped tremendously in keeping the spirit in our lives. We still make mistakes and seem to have more bickering than we'd like, but we sure know that "there is One Who smiles on High, when there's love at home".

Matthew by the Provo Temple, preparing for his baptism. He's a great boy.

We spent a short night at Aunt Wendy's home. We were able to see Grandpa and Grandma Woodbury there.

Our family preparing our tents to hear the words of the prophets. We tried turning the door towards the "tower" but the "tower" wasn't getting good reception so they had to listen through the tent sides. Even so, the kids loved the tent and Mom and Dad got to focus solely on the words of the prophets for most of the 4 sessions. It was amazing and very, very inspiring to hear the words of the prophets. We love general conference.