Spring Break

We are heading off on our Spring Break adventures. Yippee!!!

See you in a week.

Visitors

On Thursday, Jason’s sister, Stacie, and her family came to stay with us. We had a great time with them.

We showed them all of the Cortez highlights – Mesa Verde, the bowling alley, the two-plex movie theater, and us. ☺ They even stayed and celebrated Easter with us. It was wonderful!

The Hunt

The Easter Bunny did a good job this year. We had a good hunt.

We have adopted my family's tradition of hiding the Easter baskets and not letting anyone begin the hunt until everyone has found their basket. Jason gets just as into that as my Dad did. One year he hid my basket up in the chimney!

The kids loved the hunt and their Easter gifts. Skyler got an itunes gift card. Shaylin got a sock monkey (that she fell in love with when she saw Mr. Magorium’s Magic Emporium). Sawyer got a BLUE Lightning McQueen and Chick Hicks – very exciting. And little Macey got a toy puppy that moves and barks. She is both fascinated and freaked out by it.

Easter Sunday

We have incorporated Jason’s family’s tradition of doing the Easter bunny part of Easter on Saturday and concentrating on the Savior and His resurrection on Sunday. I love that. Today has been peaceful, spirit-filled and sugarless. It has been a good Easter.

For all of my friends and sisters in Young Womens

On Wednesday, we had New Beginnings and introduced the new theme for the year. This year’s theme is “Be steadfast and immovable, always abounding in good works, that Christ, the Lord God Omnipotent, may seal you his” (Mosiah 5:15). So cool.

We had a fairy tale theme. The girls dressed up as princesses and we decorated the room like an enchanted forest (fake trees, twinkling lights, a big cardboard castle, etc.). Then we read the girls a fairy tale. Here is part of it;

Once upon a time in a far away land, lived the young women of the Cortez 4th ward. The high King of the land made a proclamation that was to be given out to every young woman. “Hear ye, hear ye. All young women are to be steadfast and immovable, always abounding in good works.” The King also added that those who followed this proclamation would become the fairest in the land.

The young women of the Cortez 4th ward took this proclamation from their King to heart.”

Also in this kingdom lived a dark and terrible prince. This prince of darkness saw the good works and faith of the young women of the high King. He saw how fair and beautiful and good they were. They were the fairest in the entire world, and they were spreading light and joy to mankind, and it made him very mad.

So the prince of darkness jumped on to his dark horse and came to the fair young women with magazines and TV images of women of a different type of beauty. “This is beauty,” he whispered and shouted and wrote everywhere. “It is your bodies and your clothes that make you beautiful.”

But the fair young women were “steadfast & immovable” in their faith. They knew that the true beauty in them came from their faith and good works. It came from their desire to follow their King.”

We had songs and videos (put out by the church) that went along with the story and were absolutely amazing. Then our bishop talked to the girls about the reality of that fairy tale and their King. It was such a fun and spiritual night. It think that our princesses had a good time.

Why You Never Take Your Kids to IFA

Our biggest news of the week, is that Skyler and Shaylin got baby chicks. They are completely in love with them. They named them Alvin and Chuck. They have them living in a box in their room with a heat light, food and water, and lots of toys.



The deal is that the kids can keep them for three weeks, and then the chicks have to go live with our friends who raise chickens. I am hoping that by then the kids will see that having a chicken in your room is messy, loud and a lot of work.



Right now, Skyler and Shaylin are so enamored with their pets that they are constantly holding them, playing with them and talking about how our family should stop eating chicken.



We’ll see what happens in three weeks. I’m a little nervous.

Cars

Lately, Sawyer has been earning toy cars from us (by staying in his own bed at night), and he finally has every car from the movie Cars that he wanted. All he does now is carry around his bucket of cars and play with them.

His favorite thing is to turn on the movie Cars and act it out with his toys. He tries to let us play along, but we can’t say the lines perfectly and that really annoys him.