Happy Birthday My Sweet Boy!

Happy 2nd Birthday to my sweet Isaac!

A few special things about Isaac:

* He LOVES to sing and play the piano. He is constantly walking around our house singing a song. Even if you can't understand the words you can always pick out the tune of what he is singing.

* He absolutely loves his baby sister Jenna. I wondered what would happen when we brought the baby home because he can be very rough with Samuel and Bella, but he is very sweet and gentle with Jenna.

* He is such a delightful little guy. He definately has his moments where he can throw giant fits, but for the most part he is such a joy. He is one of the reasons we decided to have our 4th baby - why wouldn't we want another little bundle of joy running around the house making us laugh!

* We all love you Isaac!


These are Isaac's 18 month pictures.

(I still need to take a few 2 year pictures.)

He just has the best smile!

I Love Spring!

I love this time of year!

The warm weather and beautiful wildflowers, or in this case the beautiful weeds.

(Bella absolutely loves purple flowers. After I took a few pictures of Trina in the purple weed field near our home I knew I needed to get some pictures of the girls. Bella has been asking me every day for a week if we were going to the purple flowers. I finally got around to getting the girls ready and over to the field only to find all the weeds mowed down! I was so sad. Luckily Chuck drove us all around until we found another field that would work. Bella was having so much fun running around gathering flowers. Poor Samuel's eyes were all red by the time we got home, he must have allergies. I got so many fun pictures of the girls in the weeds. I'll post more on my photo blog one of these days.)

More Easter Happenings

We loved having my family stay with us over Easter Weekend.

This is what happens to the house when the family is here. I once heard someone say that when she sees a big mess like this it just means people are having a lot of fun. And it's true the kids were having a lot of fun!


Saturday morning we had an Easter egg hunt at the house.

This was Isaac's first year actually gathering eggs since he wasn't yet walking last year. He was having a great time and kept saying, "Easter bunny" over and over.

The Easter bunny has always brought the kids a new game, but this year the bunny couldn't find the outdoor game we wanted so the bunny just wasn't going to bring a game. Then the night before Samuel said, "Oh I can't wait to see what game the Easter bunny brings us this year." The kid has an amazing memory. Luckily we just happened to have an unopened game that we were saving and so we pulled it out to give to the kids. It's a boxing game and they all really enjoyed trying to have their player hit the other player in the nose.

Later that morning we went to the park for the city Easter egg hunt. Samuel had to go to the older age division this year. Bella really got a lot of eggs this year with the help of Grandma Jerri Lynn doing a little blocking for her.

On Sunday we watched Conference and had a nice Easter dinner. I even pulled out the table cloth and nice dishes that usually only get used for Thanksgiving.

Easter Activities

I love making holiday treats with the kids. I guess it's because I love almost any kind of treat and this just gives me an excuse to make something fun and tasty! I decided we would make the rice ball recipe and squish it into the bunny cake pan mold (my mom always makes rice balls and I haven't heard of anyone else that makes this crazy treat).

The kids love treats as much as I do. They were busy scraping out the bowl while I was trying to mold the bunny.

The finished product. I thought this turned out so adorable I didn't actually want to eat it. In fact I just let the kids have the left overs out of the bowl and then we saved the bunny for a few days before I let them dig in and eat it. Before then, Isaac pulled off the nose and ate it while Bella just decided to lick one of the eyes.

Coloring Eggs

On Friday night we colored eggs. My mom, dad, sister and her family were staying with us. Coloring eggs with this many young kids was crazy, but fun. Samuel, however, was really upset that Isaac dropped two colored tablets into one container - especially since it involved his favorite colors of blue and green.

Gingerbread Easter House

My mom bought this Easter gingerbread house for the kids while she was here, but we didn't get around to decorating before Easter. We actually did this for our family home evening activity the day after Easter. The kids didn't care, they just loved decorating the house and eating a few of the candies in the process.

I finally threw the house away twice today. I threw it away once and then had to throw it away again because Isaac spotted it in the garbage and retrieved it. I should have taken another picture of it after a week of the kids prying the candy off!

Isaac's Early Bday

We had an early birthday celebration for Isaac over Easter Weekend while my family was in town.

This is officially the ugliest cake I have ever made!

It's supposed to be a dragon. I wasn't going to make a cake until his actual birthday because I was a little burnt out from making Samuel's birthday cake just a few days before. Then I got feeling guilty after I talked to my mom and told her I wasn't making a cake for the birthday party so I decided I would just throw something quick together. As I got going on this cake I realized this was going to be a hard one to salvage. I kept asking every one, "do you think this looks alright" hoping someone would say yeah it's great, but Chuck let me know it really was as ugly as I thought. Trina and my mom both said, "oh it looks fine" - key word for it's ugly. But Isaac actually really did think it was great so that's all that matters!!

Since the theme of the birthday was dragons my parents took the kids to see the new movie How To Train Your Dragon. Samuel said the movie was really loud and scary, but they all liked it. My mom also got Isaac a little walking dinosaur (we called it a dragon) for his birthday gift. When he pushed the button and it started to move and growl he quickly climbed off the chair and was trying to get away. Eventually he warmed up to it and now we can't wait for the batteries to die!

Grandma gave Samuel his birthday present - figures from the Clone Wars and because she didn't want Bella and Kambree to feel left out she also got each of them a princess toy.

Joy School Bday Party

I was not going to have a birthday party for Samuel this year because he had a friend party last year, parties are a lot of work and with the new baby I just feel like I don't accomplish very much. Samuel, however, really wanted to have a Jedi Training party and has been talking about it for weeks. I decided we wouldn't have a friend party but would instead do a little something when it was our turn for Joy School.

I was going to make very simple Jedi costumes for the 4 Joy School boys, but Chuck told me unless they were robes that had hoods it would just be lame. Luckily my friend Shelley had a Jedi robe that I borrowed and from looking at it I was able to sew my own. I told Chuck if he wanted the hoods so bad he was going to have to help - the poor guy always gets sucked into my crazy projects. So he cut out all the robes and hoods and pined them together while I sewed. Between the two of us it actually went fairly quickly.

This was me the night I was making Samuel's birthday cake. I was moving the bowl and managed to drop it. When it hit the concrete floor cake batter splattered everywhere. It was all over me and even splashed onto the upper cabinets. What a mess! I thought about making another cake, but decided I would just use what batter was left. This actually worked out really well because the cake was not as thick.

The R2D2 birthday cake. My mom had this cake pan and a Darth Vader pan from birthdays she had for my brother when he was young. Samuel choose to have the R2D2 cake. Even though I had lots of "help" while I was trying to decorate, it actually didn't take very long to finish and turned out better than I expected.

We had our Joy School lesson then we started the party.

The boys in their Jedi robes.

Chuck training the boys on Jedi moves.

The next part of their training was to knock down "robots" they built with the big blocks. Then we turned them loose and let them practice for awhile on each other.

Blowing up fighters by tossing water balloons.

Blaster training on a storm trooper.

The boys then turned their attention to using their blasters on Chuck. I was laughing watching Chuck run around in his work clothes with a black cape trailing behind as the boys were chasing wildly after him.

Each boy took a turn fighting Darth Vader.

Then they all gained up on him. Chuck was a great sport and really made this party fun for the boys!

Samuel's Birthday

For Samuel's family birthday celebration he wanted to go fishing, but it was a little too chilly that day for taking a new baby outside for several hours so he choose to go to Jumping Jacks instead. The kids love this place and had a great time!

For his birthday dinner he choose to go to Marv's for chicken fingers, fries and of course an oreo shake.

Later that evening we watched a movie. This is Samuel's typical pose when he gets nervous that a part of the show may be a little scary.

Our house is overloaded with toys so we decided to get a swing set for the kids birthdays this year and then one simple present. Samuel was really excited about his clone wars robot that shoots missiles.

Getting measured. The kids love to see how much they've grown over the year.