Delilah

Miles' car got a new and improved name (it used to be "The boat," which is so typical of a name Miles would pick . . .). The name is Delilah. His YM's leader came up with it from, of course, the story in the bible of Samson and Delilah. Miles is the Samson who got a hair cut for his Delilah. Awesome.

Ben has been busy and so there hasn't been too much time to work on the car. But they did change the fuel injector (or something like that!) the other day and so that's a start!

Emmy's YW projects . . .

As I've mentioned, Emmy is working on earning her YW Personal Progress award. I just want to post a few pictures from the projects she's worked on so I don't forget and so we have documentation on her as well.

She started with the value Faith. After doing the required activities, Emmy began her 10-hour project. She decided to write down all the scriptures about faith in the Book of Mormon. It took her almost exactly 10-hours to complete! She would wake up earlier on school-days to work on it. What a gal.

Divine Nature was next. For Emmy's project, she attended a babysitting class and also planned and prepared a dinner and dessert for the family. She had to decide what to cook ("It's so hard, mom!" "I know, welcome to my life."  :) ), write down everything she needed, go shopping with me, and help make it all. It was a lot of work, she realized. But she liked it, too, of course.

 Emmy at her babysitting class - Safe Sitter. It was put on by our library. It was a lot of lecturing, but some hands-on, too. They got to learn and practice the Heimlich on each other (Emmy's good friend Holly did it with her), plus they worked on baby mannequins as well. They practiced what to do if an infant chokes and some other things (which I can't remember . . .). Emmy said it was fun!

 Emmy received an official certificate - awesome.

Here she is busy peeling butternut squash.  Emmy made tilapia, rice, butternut squash bake, and a strawberry-pretzel thing for dessert. It was all delicious!

Go, Emmy, go!

Easter Saturday and Sunday (with some Friday stuff thrown in!)

 The kids were out of school on Friday and so we had time to dye some eggs. Wren got to join us for the fun and the day.

On Friday we met up with friends and played at the park for a couple of hours. Then we walked down to the theater for a matinee showing of Dumbo (which turned out to be kind of dumb . . .). On their mutual activity earlier in the week, the boys got in to the back of their leader's trunk - 5 of them. Miles showed him up with getting 7 kids in his trunk.  :)

 Due to a super-crazy busy Saturday, the only time we had for the Easter-egg hunt was at 6am!  No sleeping in for any of us . . . Lucy was excited about it all and found the first egg.  :)

 

Lucy was also the last one to collect her five eggs . . . we had to give her hints where the last egg was hidden (in the bird-house hole).

Lucy was also the first to find her basket - full of candy, socks, swimsuit, squishy, etc.!

Our Saturday consisted of Jonas' track meet from 7am - 12:45pm (Ben and I were in and out - but we did see him in both of his events - the 1600 and 800.) Emmy had a babysitting class from 9-2. Lucy had a birthday party at 10. Miles and Jonas had a mountain-biking clinic from 1-4 (Miles as a team volunteer and Jonas as an interested middle-schooler). Whew, what a day!

On Sunday I had to give a talk. After church we made yummy resurrection rolls. Ben prepared our delicious Easter feast. It was a good day.

 Our beautiful Easter-day girls!

Update on Happenings Around Here . . .

What we've been up to lately:

Ben - 

 He went to Florida (a first for him!) for a work conference. I don't know if it was a conference, but I don't know what else to call it. Basically a company, Arthrex, shows off its medical orthopedic devices to docs and medical reps in hopes of their usage of their equipment. Ben was invited to go. He felt out of place there for many reasons, but I think it was a good, overall experience for him! It definitely was beautiful.

Me -

I found excellent deals on chacos for all the kids - here are we girls showing ours off.  :) Awesome. I've just been busy with the same-old things I'm always busy with: grocery shopping, cooking meals, putting together lunches, exercising, an itty-bitty of working, PAC'ing, giving talks in church (my second one in just 6 weeks - two different wards, though - is this Sunday), etc.

Miles -

Miles has been doing some driving . . . not a ton, but some. He really likes it. He's an okay driver.  :)  He just needs more experience. He loves his car, "the boat." He loves showing it to his friends. He loves honking its horn (sounds more like a train toot). He bought a manual for it and is anxious to get it working great.

He is doing well with his schooling and hopefully will finally finish his first semester of English very soon (second semester will be done this summer - lucky him).

He had his first job interview - with the forest service. He did not get it, but it was a good experience in filling out an application, working on his resume, and actually interviewing. It would have been the *perfect* job for him - but he had one big strike against him: it's a 10-week job and Miles would have only been available for the first 8 weeks, due to family reunions. The lady called to tell him he didn't get the job, but that he interviewed very well (Ummm, even with responding to, "What is your biggest weakness," with "Sometimes I get distracted. . . " Yikes!), and that she hopes he'll apply again next year. He definitely will!

Jonas - 

He decided to do lacrosse and track this spring. Two sports he's never done before. He likes them both and it definitely keeps him very busy! He has track every day after school. Lacrosse is Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday - pretty much after track. He's managing it well!

 On Jonas' first lacrosse game, he got to play for like 2 minutes, at most. It was kind of disappointing, but Jonas wasn't too upset by it (probably Ben and I were more so!).

 The second game (it was a "tournament" and his team had two games on Saturday and two games on Sunday - which Jonas didn't participate in) Jonas saw a little more action. We told him if he got a hold of the ball, we would buy him some Dippin' Dots after the game. Luckily he did - for a brief moment!  :)

Then this past Tuesday I spent my day in Olathe at a track meet. It was chilly and windy and sort of miserable up there, but oh well. Track meets go on forever - or at least 4 hours. But it was kind of fun (it would have been way more fun without the chill and wind) and I got to visit with my friend Sarah the whole time.

For some unclear reason to me, Jonas chose to do "long-distance" running in track. He hates running and he doesn't have good endurance. But he did just fine at the meet!

 Jonas had two events - the 1600m (1 mile) and the 800m (1/2 mile). First up, the 1600!

 And he's off!

 Go, Jonas, go!

 He wasn't first, but he wasn't last either. :) I was proud of him. His time was 7:19. He ran the whole thing and had a great sprint at the end.

My camera didn't like me during the 800m, so I don't have any pictures from that. But pretty much the same thing: not first, not last. He liked the 800 much better - actually, he felt a little sick after the mile run. I think it's more than he's ever really exerted himself. His 800m time was 3:34. There were two kids on his heels but when one of the kids' mothers cheered on her son and told him to get ahead of Jonas, Jonas kicked it up a bit and didn't let that happen.  :) He realized he doesn't want people passing him.

 Awesome Jonas.

The Girls -
Ha, I'll just link them together. Emmy is working on her Personal Progress program in YWs as it will end this year. There is a slight modification for new beehives that will help them in finishing it up in one year - although it will still be quite a challenge! She completed her Faith project and is now working on Divine Nature. It's awesome that she's doing it! We are doing our 5k training while Lucy has piano lessons and that's really fun for me to run with her.

Lucy continues to love school, friends, sugar, and gymnastics. Both girls are working on their fly-aways from the bar. Oh, I think I have some videos . . .

(These videos were taken a couple of weeks ago. Emmy has told me she has greatly improved and that Coach is hardly spotting her now . . .)

I was nominated by one of the girls' teammates to make a cake for their Easter party they were planning for during one of their practices.

 It wasn't quite as picture-perfect as the one online, but cute enough. Oh, and delicious, too - a homemade coconut vanilla cake. The girls had a fun night at gym with cake, egg hunts, veggie trays, etc.

Okay, that's enough for now!

Just Add Magic

It was our turn for book club and we (we, meaning me) chose the book Just Add Magic. I read about it online and saw it had a fun series on Amazon, so I thought we'd give it a try (the plot sounded perfect, too - a few friends, a magic cookbook, hexes, crushes, etc.).

It was a fun read and lent to a great book club!

Here are some pictures of the evening:

 We started out by having the girls tell each other's fortunes. One girl would hold her candle and let the wax drop into a bowl of cold water. The "fortune teller" would look at the wax and tell the girl's fortune. :)

 Emmy was a weird fortune teller . . .

 Lucy thought she was pretty funny. . .

 After that, we made some chili for the "Annual Alfred Nobel chili cook-off." (All ideas came from the book, of course.) By this time, Holly (in yellow) was suffering from burning-of-the-lips from chopping jalapenos and then touching her lips - the rest of the girls were crying due to chopping onions.  It was great fun.  :)  Actually, it was totally chaotic and super messy!  But the girls enjoyed it.

We walked down to our local Mexicn Meat Market - Carniceria Sonora (in the book it was called La Cocina). It was fun looking at the weird food (cactus anyone? plus a whole lot of "I have no idea what that is and can't read what it is either . . . ").

 The girls picked out some food and snacked on the bench outside. Jillian (in the light green shirt) had to leave early for volleyball, so her mom met us here and took Jillian.

We walked back home and tried the two chilis. There was definitely a favorite . . . So we ate chili and cornbread. The girls did more wax fortune-telling (including to Jonas), etc.

Then they got to go and watch a few episodes of Just Add Magic. Apparently it's pretty good - my boys even really liked it.  :)

 Of course I had to make them each a "Swirley." Those were eaten all the time in the book!  (Oh, the book has recipes at the end of it. We used those for the two chilis we made and the Swirley's.) This was some Rocket Launcher Rainbow Swirley and consisted of strawberry ice cream blended up with skittles, next layer of banana ice cream drizzled with caramel, then topped with pistachio ice cream. Earlier I dipped the cups in melted white-chocolate chips and nerds.  I think they all approved.  :)

The kids also did "M.A.S.H." to each other. They thought it was quite funny - and it was.  :)

 What a fun book and book club night!  (We had a "late over" as the girls were there until about 9 - that's late for us!)