Monday, April 27, 2009

26 April 2009 - More Emily B-Day

The week-long Emily birthday celebration has drawn to a close. The grand finale was a slumber party -- our first ever -- with some friends from church and from the neighborhood. It was warm and sunny, so they all played outside for a while.More presents arrived. She's been opening presents all week!They played Piggly Wiggly, which consisted of hiding in one another's sleeping bags and having each other say "oink, oink" in funny voices so they could guess who was in there.And no girls sleep over would be complete without an evening of makeovers.All in all, it wasn't too bad. And she even got us to sing to her one more time, until next year.



Matt

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

19 April 2009 - Grandma's Visit

For family home evening this week, we went to Phil and Beth Conklin's farm. Phil and Beth are the Gospel Principles teachers in our ward.They have two baby calves that need to be bottle fed. Emily did it, but she wasn't too crazy about it.
Jessica did fine with it, she even pushed their heads out of the way if they got a little too bossy.
The word sounds cheesy, but Madeline was genuinely delighted by the whole experience.
Since Grandma was in town, we had an early mini birthday party for Emily. She was pleased to have early gifts and lots of attention.
We made it official, with a bunny cake, hand decorated in a most painstaking way by Joanne.And after all that work, we just set it on fire and then cut it into pieces.On Saturday, we had a baptism for twin girls in the ward who just turned 8, followed by a birthday party in the gym.
We also, finally, filled the sand box in the bottom of the playhouse that I built last summer. It took 800 pounds of sand to fill it.
As you can see from the sandbox picture, we have been fortunate enough to have a couple of sunny days recently. The rain and gray have returned now, but we were grateful for the warm and bright days we had for the weekend.

Matt

Monday, April 13, 2009

12 April 2009 - Easter

We were excited to have Grandma Fails come for Easter week/Spring Break. She got here on Saturday, and the girls were very anxious to color Easter Eggs.
They all worked diligently on getting the eggs ready to roll.On Easter morning, there were a few token offerings.The girls helped mommy make chocolate suckers.Joanne got the girls Easter dresses in Mexico a couple of weeks ago.Grandma with the Easter dress girls.On Saturday we also had a primary activity (Easter egg hunt), a wedding, and a baptism. I didn't get any pictures of the wedding or baptism. It was the second wedding I've performed as a bishop. I don't have as much practice with wedding as I have with funerals. We did get this shot of the girls with the bunny crafts they made at the primary activity.

Happy Easter!

Matt

5 April 2009 - Singing Program

Hello,

The only highlight this week was the girls' singing program at school. Emily did songs from Peter Pan (the musical, which she did not like), and Jessica did songs from Grease and one from Les Miserables. As usual, the lighting in the elementary school gym was terrible and it was uncomfortably crowded, so the A/V for this week's update is decidedly low resolution:

Emily's little head is poking up in the middle here.

Here are a couple videos of them singing. Emily's song:



Jessica's song:



Enjoy spring,

Matt