Easter and Spring

I hope everyone had a great Easter weekend; I know we did! We celebrated over several days and had a lot of fun. First we did the annual Easter egg hunt at Gramma & Grampa Terry’s house last weekend, then Tess had a hunt on Tuesday at Preschool, then Hooper City hosted a hunt on Saturday morning, then of course the Easter Bunny visited our house Sunday morning. I think Tess was actually a little tired of the whole thing by the time it was all done. And now the post-Easter candy fest… Just like the post-Halloween candy fest and the post-Christmas candy fest, I’m always a little stressed out by the post-Easter candy fest. I get tired of always rationing out the candy so Tess only has a little at a time for several days. Honestly I think what I’m going to do is just let her eat it ALL, at one sitting, and just get it over with! Then maybe she’ll get a bellyache and then life can just get back to normal.

As part of Tess’s Preschool Easter party, she and Bryan (OK, it was basically all Bryan) designed an egg-holder for an egg drop contest at school. We met at the fire station and the firemen took all the containers up to their roof and dropped them off. Out of 7 kids, only 2 eggs broke! The kids were all very excited and had fun with it. I think Bryan also had a good time designing the container.

We love to see any signs of Spring and so we were very happy to hear birds chirping often outside our back door. We thought that a nice little family of birds loved to visit us. Then, Saturday we noticed the birds flew to our back deck and into the lid of our grill (there is a little hole on each side of our grill’s lid where they could squeeze under.) So, when we went out and lifted the lid of the grill, we were surprised to see that they were building their nest in there! Bryan was pretty ticked because the grill was all dirty with bird doodoo, but I thought it was kind of cute to see the nest stuff there, and I really felt bad that we kicked them out of their house! But, alas, we had some steaks waiting to be cooked, so the squatters had to go. (And, the nest wasn’t finished by any means; mostly they were just leaving their nest-building-items in there—I guess they would come back to fashion all the stuff into a nest later?)

Friday was a wonderful day for us. We have decided that we need to have a date once a month; just the two of us. Usually we do “date night” by going to a restaurant with the kids (we always try to choose a noisy place so that the kids can blend in) and then renting a DVD to watch at home. It’s pretty fun, and it’s certainly better than nothing, but it’s also not a real date. So, once a month, we’re going to have a real date with just the two of us, doing something fun. So, Friday we drove to Tooele and dropped the kiddos off with my dad and then went to lunch and a movie together. It was wonderful! We also got to see Blake & Aleisha’s sweet new little girl, Brooklyn, who was born Wednesday. She is darling and so tiny!

That’s about it. Here’s a “Tess”ellation: Tess to Miles, when he screamed after not getting something he wanted: “Do you think that screaming is going to help, Miles? No, I don’t think so!” And a “Miles”stone: Miles is at the age where he mimics everything we do, and he’s trying to learn new words and sounds. So if we cough, he coughs; if we stretch and yawn, he stretches and yawns; and (my favorite) if we sneeze, he sneezes too with a cute little high-pitched “ptoo” sound.