Mothers Day....

For those of you that know me well know that Mother's Day is my least favorite holiday. I use the word holiday loosely. For me, Mother's Day is a reminder that as a mother, I do not have all my children with me. Mother's Day at church is even worse since most of the block revolves around mother's and daughter's. I LOVE being a mother but ever since loosing Chandler I have had rough time during Mother's Day. To remedy this, we have spent probably 7 of the past 10 Mother's day's out of town, just our nuclear family, together. This past weekend we spent in Kansas City. We drove down to Liberty Mo. and Independence Mo. which both have church history sites to visit. We visited the Independence visitor Center, which was small but nice to learn more about what the saints went through during the time they spent there. Then we headed up to Liberty jail. We had recently been learning about what happened there during Relief Society and talking about it with the boy's. For those of you who don't know much about Joseph Smith's time there, he was wrongly charged and jailed with 4 other saints for 4 months. They spent from Dec. 1st and the 4 coldest months following in the basement of this jail, which by the way after it was a jail they used as an ice house because it stays so cold!!! The spirit was strong and testified to all of us the truthfulness of the gospel. The things that the saints went threw so that we could have the restored truth was amazing!


Here are the boys outside of the Independence Mo. visitor center.


Ian and Carter pretending to drive the wagon in the kids play area.


A nice family picture in front of the Chirstus.


Preston checking out all the different Books of Mormon, written in all different languages. He even found the one that his cousin would be using on his mission in Peru.


Here are the boy's helping the Sister missionary by holding pictures of what the jail looked like before it was restored.
I didn't take any pictures of the actual jail. I kinda felt like it was such a special place that it was not appropriate to take pictures of it, even though they wouldn't have minded. If you even get the chance to visit, GO! It is so worth it!

My Square foot Gardern

I decided that I wanted to plant a garden. I researched on the web what the best way to do it was and found the square foot garden. The concept is to not row plant but to plant things per square foot. The onions I planted could have 9-12 per square where as the tomatoe plants are 1 per square. Anyway lets pray I get my money out of this! :) Check out these websites here and here to learn more abot square foot gardening.

Wheat Bread Yummy Yummy!

So I have had a new obsession! It is getting my food storage together and learning how to use it. Today I went to my moms house and for the first time we ground wheat. Then we actually used the wheat flour to make bread!!!! We used an awesome recipe that didn't take too long to do. They aren't the prettiest to look at but they taste oh so good!

Here is my mom with the finished loaves!


Here I am with Carter, he was our "helper", actually he did really good waiting for us to figure it all out.

Look how pretty the inside is!

Let's go fly a kite.....

Today we flew kites. It was such a relaxing enjoyable evening! The kids had a blast and I loved seeing them have fun with something that doesn't plug in!

We tried to fly our kites the other night but it wasn't windy enough.


Here is Parker trying to get his kite up.


Run Carter Run!

Happy 5th Birthday Ian!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY IAN!!! April 16th Ian turned 5! He has grown up so much and as Ricks sister says he is our "angel baby!" He is innocent and sweet and kind. He has a few little issues that makes it a little harder for him to keep up with other kids but he had a rough start. He rarely throws fits and is always good for a hug and a kiss. I can't believe he is going to kindergarten next year. He had his kindergarten check up and didn't shed one tear when he got his 3 shots. Everyone who meets him loves him. He is such a joy in our family and is such a blessing in our home!


Here is the first picture of Ian with his eyes open! Ian spent 10 days in the NICU so here he is before he had a vent in.



Here is an awful picture of me but it is the first time that I was able to hold him. He was all connected to tubes and wires and he was about 2 days old but he was so sweet.

> Happy 1st Bday

Here he is on his 5th bday

A birthday message from Carter!

Feel good video of the day!!!!

Okay so here is a video that you have to watch! It really made me smile! It is almost 7 min. long but so worth it! It teaches all of us not to judge a book by its cover! This is for all you lovers of t.v. talent shows!

Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent
Uploaded by dwarthy

The world needs a little more of this!!!!!