Scorpions

So you have company visiting from Idaho... what "Arizona Experience" do you provide for them while here... besides swimming in April....

Since one of them is a 10 year old boy, how about...

Scorpion hunting along the wall behind the church, Br. Jones caught a few for the boys:

oooo, this even creeped me out... nasty little things, but Keaton was pretty excited, he had never seen a scorpion before, after the pictures were taken, he squashed them!

They're not the kind of pets I want around here.

Easter

Easter Weekend

We had such a wonderful Easter weekend. Saturday night we went to the Easter Pageant at the Mesa temple. It was so beautiful to sit out in the beautiful weather and see the life of Christ dramatized. At the end the feelings in my heart were so powerful, and I knew once again, that Jesus lives. I loved it.

Then for a WONDERFUL EASTER TREAT we got to stay home from church and watch General Conference on TV. This happens twice a year, where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, instead of meeting at church, has a world wide conference where we watch via satellite broadcasts at church, or at home on TV if you have cable the Prophet of the world and the apostles speak to us. It is my favorite weekend of the year. When that ended I cried, for real. And then I told each of my kids with tears streaming down my face how thankful I am to have a prophet of God living on the earth today. The messages shared were so inspiring, so poignant for us today, and oh how much they made me want to be a better person. I especially loved how many talks were on the importance of family and the importance of loving and teaching our children.

Prophet Thomas S. Monson above

Prophet and some of the 12 apostles below:

Then our tradition of recent years, since the week before Easter is so busy.... we dye Easter eggs on Easter.

We look like retards, #1 because we didn't have to leave our house for church everyone is still in pajamas... and #2 it was so bright outside everyone went and got sunglasses to wear while dying easter eggs.

You see Bruce, he's so funny.... he made up this little cute game, that after you put an egg in the mug to color, you would run over to the trampoline and do 10 "bronco kicks" before you could get your egg out... you can see Logan in the background below doing his kicks...

Sophie in her 'Horton hears a Who' Onesie

60 Easter eggs were boiled, thats 5 dozen... my kids love hard boiled eggs. They're almost all gone too. They eat them for days. Tonight, seriously, for our Family Home Evening treat they each had a hard boiled egg... aren't they wierd. I had frozen yogurt.

I think the surprising Easter basket slam dunk for the Easter Bunny this year was:

Seriously, who knew. I am pretty sure the Easter Bunny threw this in as a last minute item.... and my kids played with them for HOURS and HOURS... Dallin, my almost 12 year old, is begging for a thousand boxes of these for his birthday next week.

They made cool stuff all day. Here is just one example.

And then ofcourse an

EASTER EGG HUNT

My sister Chrissy is getting married this week, and her fiance is here with his 4 children, so now we have 14 cousins.... they are lined up here waiting to be let out for the hunt:

Look at all the cousins now! 14. How fun.

My heart was so full of gratitude this Easter for the gospel of Jesus Christ in my life and family (and beautiful weather)

HaPPy EasteR

Garden

Hey Everyone... It's not too late to plant a garden!!

Bruce and I had to go to a nursery yesterday with a tree question and while there I saw the vegetable garden stuff, and was like, SWEEEEEEET, lets plant a garden today.

The weather was as beautiful as it gets.

Introducing my 2 biggest helpers, my son Dallin and his buddy DJ:

I purposely didn't try again for a happy photo of Bruce... poor Bruce, he always gets roped in to "my" projects... all he had to do was turn in the fertilizer, he's buff that way. We did the rest.


Now Logan did show up at the beginning, smiled and loooooved finding the cute little wormies in the soil......

.... but mostly he was doing this:

We hadn't planted a garden in a few years, and I had FORGOTTEN how FUN it is to play in the moist, cool, dirt!!! Seriously, such a neat feeling.

Oh and Sophie LOVED the weather, she sat out on the grass watching us and eating her shovel.

It is better the "Sim City"... building your own empire of little plants. I was telling the boys how fun it is to make little "moats" around each plant, then connecting them with little roads so the water flows through your garden like so.....

they loved it.

OH and you DONT even need fancy equipment, all we had to dig our holes for plants was Lily's old broken pink plastic shovel.

and what are THESE blossoms, mmmmmm, my backyard smells like orange blossoms right now! We were busy like the bees today.

Well, okay, a little bit of fun.

My Dallin is such a science man, he LOVES getting in to any experiment, and already has had a potatoe bush growing in our garden that he planted, and you know he loved getting dirty in the garden.
(See the "tree" behind me below, it's oregano, I planted it years ago in my garden, the only herb that lasted more then 1 season, and has grown in to this tree without even being watered regularly, yum, fresh oregano always around here, we could sell it by the bushel)

Thanks boys! Such a fun afternoon.

It's a little baby garden, but it's still fun, can't wait to get

tomatoes, grape tomatoes, cilantro, chives, green onions, zuchini, and cucumbers.