March

Josh has been trying out snowboarding a little with one of his friends from our last neighborhood.  He went a couple of times last year, and a couple of more this year.  In March, he took Parker with him to give snowboarding a try.  (Isaac didn't want to - not his thing at all)  Parker went to the snowboarding class for a little while, then went out to practice with Josh and his friend Billy.  He did a great job!

One Sunday morning, Josh got a phone call from a lady in our church asking him if he would dress up like King Benjamin from the Book of Mormon and visit her class.  This was our quickly thrown together version of King Benjamin with a couple of sheets, a belt and some batting. Haha!  He was a hit, and he even came into our Sunday School class wearing the costume afterward.  It was funny to see the teachers' reactions to seeing King Benjamin walk into their class.  :)

Quinn went shopping with us one day and we got some of the coconut popsicles that Josh and I used to buy when we were dating.  Quinn got a strawberry one.  Yum!

For St. Patrick's day we had green pasta carbonara with salad.  I usually use the already-green spinach noodles, but forgot to buy them, so I just used a little food coloring this time. :)

Quinn really wanted to help Dad take out the garbage and recycling. :)  So cute!

One day I was watching my friend's daughter.  I found her and Quinn sitting on the steps looking at books.

I made little Mickey Mouse biscuits for dinner one night!  They were fun and yummy!

Isaac's fourth grade put on a play called "Going West".  Not a great picture.  Isaac stepped behind another boy right as I snapped it, then I had to quickly switch to video.
 

The Rest of February

In February, at the recommendation of Bryce's cleft palate team, we took him to the ENT to have a nasaloscopy.  They put a little camera up through his nose, and then pretty much watched how things moved when he said certain sounds.  They also used the machine in the picture below to measure how much air came out of Bryces nose when he spoke.  They determined that he would be a good candidate for a surgery they had been considering, and it would really help his speech.

Josh and the boys played Headbandz after church one Sunday.

One weekend we decided to ride the Frontrunner train up to Salt Lake.

Quinn had so much fun riding the "choo choo train" (even though those kinds of trains don't really say chop-choo) :).  We rode the Frontrunner up to Murray, then rode one of the other trains into SLC.  Every time a train would come into our station, Quinn would say "Choo-CHOO!"  It was too cute.

Isaac and Parker playing UNO on the train.

Once in SLC, we went to lunch at a Chinese food restaurant, looked around the library for a bit, and then we rode the train over to the Clark Planetarium.  While we were there, we ended up realizing that we weren't going to have much time to look around before we had to catch our train to head back home!  So we didn't end up getting to look at everything.  It was to see what we had time to see though.

We had homemade sushi one night!  It was yummy and lots of fun.  We took turns choosing what to put in each roll.  This was mine:  smoked salmon, cream cheese, avocado, and green onion.  My favorite combo.

At school they had an optional art contest with the theme "Trees are Terrific".  Isaac drew and colored this great picture for it, although he didn't end up winning.

Snow Canyon in February

In February we went down to St. George to visit Josh's parents.  We went on a couple of hikes in Snow Canyon while we were there.

The first time we just hiked up this dirt road a ways.  It was getting late, so we didn't have a whole lot of time.  It was a really pretty area and we enjoyed it.  February in St. George is like spring time where we are, so it was such a nice break from the winter for us.

Quinn thought it was so funny that he could feed treats

to Grandma & Grandpa's dog Murphy:

The second hike was much longer.  We hiked up to the Scout Caves in Snow Canyon.

Quinn hiked almost all of the way without being carried.  He had to stop and jump off of every rock and stop to pick up rocks to carry along the way.  :)

We made it to the scout caves!

They were really big and cool looking inside!

Josh's parents were there for the hike too, but they headed back before

we made it to the caves, so they aren't in this picture:

Josh was yodeling in the caves. Haha!

A view from the inside - out.

Christmas Eve and Christmas 2012

Christmas was a interesting for us this year.  On the 23rd, Josh and Bryce came down with a fever.  It was Influenza.  Christmas Eve morning, Isaac and Quinn came down with it.  I was praying and praying that I could stay well long enough to get everything ready for Christmas.  By the night of Christmas Eve, Parker wasn't feeling well either.  We originally had planned to make cookies for Santa and have our traditional cheese and fruit tray Christmas Eve dinner.  We decided to skip the cookies and half-heartedly ate our dinner.  We managed to read the Christmas story from the bible and got all our sick kids to bed.  By the time they were in bed I started getting sick too!  I was wrapping last minute presents and getting everything ready for Christmas while burning up with fever.  Oh the things a mom does for her kids! :)  But everything got done and we all survived.

Christmas morning everyone was super sick, but we got up and found stockings and gifts left from Santa!  We opened our gifts and pretty much spent the day relaxing and enjoying our time together.  We ended up canceling our trips to visit our families.  We even skipped our Christmas dinner since none of us felt like eating much.  We were sick for the entire week!  In the end, we were somewhat grateful that we got sick when we did.  We had the whole week to recover and not have to worry about school or work.  Other than messing up some of our plans, it ended up being a good time to have to be sick. :)

Sick baby and daddy:

Josh's gifts:

Parker's gifts:

Isaac's gifts:

Quinn's gifts:

Bryce's gifts

My gifts:

Gifts to share:

Poor sick Isaac fell asleep reading his book:

Had to add this for memory's sake.  I found this in our Christmas decorations.  

The first Christmas after Josh and I were married we didn't have a lot of money for 

Christmas decorations, but we really wanted a Nativity.  We took paper, and made 

oragami figurines!  The top row is an angel and two shepherds.  In the middle is Mary and Joseph 

and along the bottom are the Three Wisemen.  We had some sort of baby Jesus, but I guess we don't have that one anymore.   A neat memory and keepsake. :)