April Happenings

Some random happenings for April were:  

Crazy Hair Day at school!  I wanted to put tiny pony tails all over Miles's head, but he said the rubber bands hurt too bad (it IS kind of hard to put an elastic in 1-inch-long hair!), so he tried a reverse mohawk with the sides poking up and the middle slicked down.  Tess did her hair all by herself and it looked awesome!  She had a small wooden dowel in there.  And of course they did crazy faces for the picture to match their crazy hair.

One thing that Bryan's dad used to do when Bryan was little was to bring home electronics from the DI for Bryan to take apart (like old VCRs, alarm clocks, etc.)  Bryan said that that was one of the best things he did as a kid because he could completely destroy the thing by taking it apart, piece by piece to figure out how it worked.  I think that's partly why Bryan is so mechanically knowledgeable now--he learned that you can just look at and study something and figure out how it works.  (I do NOT have that mechanical brain at all...it's all overwhelming to me when I see all those wires and bolts, but Bryan is genius at it.)  Anyway, Bryan has let our kids take apart a few things lately and the kids are loving it!  Here they are dissecting a laptop computer and a VCR.

Bryan has had to travel a lot for work lately and I'll tell ya, I really hate to make dinner when he's gone.  Honestly, I hate to make dinner any day, but it's especially hard to motivate myself when he's gone.  So we eat cereal a lot, pancakes, fast food, etc. (not good, I know...)  I happened to have a coupon for Buy 1 Get 1 free at Coldstone Creamery, and those ice creams are always so big that we just got 2 and shared them all together.  They were delicious, and yes, that was our entire dinner!

One last thing was the Junior Authors' & Artists' Night at the school.  We got to see some of the writing and artwork that the kids did this year.  Here is a picture by Tess's story and illustration about a time she got hurt.  I thought she might write about her tooth getting chipped, but she wrote about a time she fell in the road and hurt her elbow.

 For Miles's story he talked about what he wants to be when he grows up.  It says "I would like to be a car designer or an astronaut when I grow up.  If I chose a car designer, I would make a car with jet packs and I would go to Mars."  Sounds pretty cool!

Haircuts

(Bree's hair is EXTRA curly from being braided...)

When my mom began losing her hair to chemotherapy we knew it was time to go shopping for a wig.  My sister and I joined her and I’ll never forget what she said to us when she picked the wig that looked the best (and let’s be honest, most of the wigs—including that one—didn’t look fantastic.)  She said to us, “how will this look on me, laying down in my coffin?”  It broke our hearts to hear her say that.  She had a very aggressive Stage 4 cancer and was given 6 months to live.  She knew it would take her, but she still wanted to look beautiful. 

And she WAS beautiful, every day of her life.  I wanted to donate my hair and my sweet beautiful daughters wanted to join me.  We donated to Pantene Beautiful Lengths which uses all of their donations to make wigs for women with cancer.  We hope that our hair can help someone feel a little bit more beautiful. 

 

Bree wanted to go first!  She did super great and wasn't scared at all.  She just sat there with a smile on her face the whole time.  I'm sure she was just so thrilled that it won't hurt nearly as much when we brush out her hair.

Tess's hair is so thick that our stylist put it in 4 different ponytails to cut it!  She has donated once before and I'm so proud of her for being willing to do it again!

 Here's all the clippings.  Mine is in 2 pieces (since I have highlights on the top section of my hair we did that separately, just in case they won't take colored hair), Tess's is in 4, and Bree's curls are in 3 pieces.  I don't know if she'll have any curls now that we cut them off!  It will be interesting to see if it's still curly (our stylist blew it straight today, so I'll have to wait and see.)

(Bryan is just happy that there will be less hair around the house...in the vacuum, on the rugs, on his clothes, etc!)

2015 Family Pictures

It was time for some new family pictures!  Our last ones were when Bree had barely turned 1 year old, so we definitely needed new ones.  I was really happy with the way they turned out.  I was so nervous because the weather was rainy, cold, and even a little bit snowy the day before these pictures, but thankfully the day of was warm and they turned out fine.  Here are a few of our favorites:

Field Trips

I've been able to go on some fun field trips with the kids lately.  Here we are with Bree's Joy School group at the Hill Air Force Base museum in March.  Bree is on the left, then Ali, Kamdyn, Alex, Luke, Amelia, Andrew, Josh, and Elsa.

For our April Joy School field trip we went to Annette Fielding's farm and had a blast!  She has lots of amazing animals to look at.  The main thing she has at her farm is Clydesdale horses and they are so cool!

Bree is at least 2 steps up on a ladder in this picture and she still barely touches the horse's belly.  They are so tall!

There were also baby bunnies to hold and snuggle, which Bree loved.

The kids got to gather eggs from the hens.  It was neat to see all the various colors of eggs; each type of hen can lay a different color, so we got white, brown, green, and cream colored eggs.  We also got to see new baby chicks and a cute little pony.  What a fun field trip!

I got to chaperone Miles's 1st grade class on Friday at the Discovery Gateway children's museum in Salt Lake.  We've been there several times before, but it's been more than 3 years since we went so Miles didn't remember much about it.  He was really excited by all the fun things there.  At the beginning is the "beehive" area with lots of balls and vacuum tubes to shoot them up. (Miles is the tall one on the right, looking up at his ball zooming up the tube.)

Here's Miles doing the climbing wall.

And here we are at the farm area, picking peaches.

I thought the neatest thing was up with the LifeFlight helicopter.  The helicopter has been there for years, but they have added something new up there which is really cool....

...it's a surgery area with pictures of bodies to operate on.  There are iPads attached to the bodies that help walk the kids through a surgery and they are pretty involved!  There is a brain surgery where the kids cut the scalp, then saw open the skull and suction out a blood clot from the brain, then screw the skull part back on, then suture up the scalp!  Really interesting.  Another surgery was for a broken femur where they had to drill down through the bone and add a metal rod, etc.  Anyway, it's pretty involved and super interesting for the kids.

At the end we went outside on the grass for our picnic lunch.  It was such a fun day with my little buddy Miles.

Easter 2015

We had a super fun Easter this year.  We started out by attending the Hooper Easter Egg Hunt.  Bree had her own section with the little kids and Bryan took Miles & Tess to their area.  Bree wasn't super aggressive to grab many eggs but she seemed happy with the few things she got, including this cute bunny headband.

Tess got a fun "Cat in the Hat" hat and I love to see her and Miles wear it around the house.

For our Easter Egg dyeing this year we decided to try something new.  Instead of the standard PAAS dye kit with all the cups of vinegar we did a new technique...you put a big blob of shaving cream on a plate and drop different colors of food coloring throughout and stir it up to create swirl effects.  Then just roll the egg around it and let it set.  It ended up with a cool tye-dye look to it.  I liked this a lot!

Easter morning the kids looked around for hidden eggs and had to find their hidden Easter baskets too.

(I just noticed that Miles blends in with all his stuff...his jammies match his basket and his new swim shirt!)

Easter Sunday was General Conference so the kids had to wait a week to wear their cute new Easter clothes.  Here they are after church on this beautiful sunny day.