across five years and a day

attempts at capturing our fifth wedding anniversary on camera with the self timer. after randy humoring me for quite some time and still not getting it right, i gave up. 

yesterday was our fifth wedding anniversary.  best described with the cliche that in some ways, it feels like much longer, and in some ways it feels like it was just yesterday. i guess many things become cliche because they are true or universally understood.

in general, randy and i don't do much for anniversaries. we usually go out to dinner. perhaps we decided to do a little more this year because it was our fifth anniversary, but i don't generally identify particular meaning with randomly assigned odd-numbered intervals. i think that number five just happened to coincide with us being a little burnt out at the end of a long semester and having two kids at the stage that they are at.

yesterday, we sent our girls up to my parents house for the night (thank you mom and dad) and then headed up to a family cabin in heber. it is the first time that randy and i have both been away from the kids for a night.

it was glorious.

we splurged and treated ourselves to an amazing meal at the stein eriksen lodge. randy says it is the best meal he as ever had and it rivals my favorites. as we risked our lives driving down the snowy roads heading away from the lodge, i noted that at least if we died, we would have had a really good final meal.

i had the first good, uninterrupted night's sleep that i've had in a long time. and even though i still woke up naturally at 7:30 in the morning when i could have slept in as long as i wanted, i felt rested (it is hard to sleep in much later than that when you are used to waking up around 5:00 most mornings).

after 24 hours all to ourselves, we headed back and picked up the girls. after excited greetings, they acted pretty nonchalant about our return. my mom must have taken good care of them.

it was a wonderful weekend with my favorite.

spring again

we woke up to snow a few days ago. snow. it's not that i hate snow, i just hate it on april 25th.

fortunately, today was much better and the girls and i enjoyed a nice morning in the front yard.

and in case you haven't noticed from the pictures on this blog, madeleine loves balloons. we usually get one on wednesdays at BYU craft and floral when we drop randy off and then madeleine totes it around with her wherever i will let her until it pops.

diane decided to eat some dirt. getting in touch with the earth.

happy easter

easter was a bit of a flop this year. but not for my usual lack of holiday trying. i had plans for this easter. i was going to post cute pictures of my girls with their easter baskets in their sunday dresses on easter. i had even put the candy in the eggs, loaded up the fabric bunny baskets that i made last year and fully intended to do an easter egg hunt.

but then, diane had a terrible night. and randy was gone all morning before church at rehearsals for choir and we didn't have any family time before church. after church, diane was so ridiculously tired from skipping her morning nap that she wouldn't even eat lunch and we put her straight to bed. randy played with madeleine outside during diane's nap, but as soon as diane woke up, madeleine and i took a nap. and randy let me sleep as long as possible, so when i woke up, we rushed straight to my parents for easter dinner. all four of our schedules never aligned to allow for the easter festivities. part of those festivities were supposed to include a lesson with madeleine about why we celebrate easter.

as it actually happened, madeleine found the baskets (they weren't really hidden) during diane's nap and snacked on them until randy found her passed out in a sugar coma. well, something like that. 

one of these days, my children will sleep, randy won't be the choir pianist and always be gone on sundays at the most inopportune times, and things will come together just how i planned (and i really don't even have that elaborate of plans or expectations. maybe that's the problem). maybe next year. 

as it was, i still had a great easter. i actually spent a lot of time last week reading about the last week of the savior's life and about his resurrection. so i really did feel like i was spiritually prepared to celebrate easter. i did an easter egg hunt on thursday with my activity days girls that focused on the savior and madeleine participated in on that, so hopefully she got a tiny glimpse of what the day is really about. even if it seems like all she took home from church on easter was candy. 

and even though i was wrangling two rambunctious children alone during the easter program while randy played the piano, i was reminded of the real meaning of the holiday myself. the music and spoken word testified of the the glorious resurrection of our savior. 

byu graduation

my brother-in-law graduated this weekend and randy and i couldn't make it to the university commencement exercises (big giant graduation with everyone), so we decided to brave his convocation (grouped by smaller colleges, everyone walks across the stage and gets their diploma) the next day.

i'm not sure what we were thinking (aside from the obvious reason of supporting bruce). after it took twenty minutes just for the procession of the graduates into the marriott center, madeleine leaned over to me and said, "i want to go home." i knew we were in trouble. we toughed it out through the speakers, but when they started passing out diplomas, randy and i decided to head into the halls with the girls. 

we quickly realized that handing out diplomas was going to take even longer than we anticipated and decided to go outside with the girls. unfortunately, we hadn't brought the girls' coats into the halls with us or anything and it was pretty chilly. i was freezing and felt like a negligent mother letting madeleine run around in a t-shirt, capris, and sandals. she didn't seem to mind.

even though we missed bruce walking across the stage, we did have some fun family time. we saw ducks, rolled down hills, climbed in trees, and found some easters eggs, apparently undiscovered in a hunt. randy found some pods that had fallen out of a tree that made pretty good makeshift maracas and entertained the girls and me for quite a while with those.

so, even though we did attend (some of) bruce's convocation, pictures of the girls outside the marriott center are the only proof of it we have. congratulations, bruce.

first forays into feeding oneself yogurt

i have never loved sitting down and spoon feeding my children, but diane is clearly a second child in this respect. if she can't get it in her mouth with her own two hands, she most likely will not get to eat it. this morning, she wanted yogurt and i was running around doing something else, so i decided to let her try her hand with yogurt and a spoon.

this is the result. about a quarter of the yogurt ended up in her mouth, about a quarter ended up on her face, arms, bib, pajamas, the highchair, you name it. if it was in the general vicinity, it was smeared with yogurt. and the remaining half stayed in the cup after she was clearly finished and it became a fun, messy toy. at which point i quickly removed the yogurt from the high chair before it became even more of a mess.

the mildly obsessive compulsive woman in me has a hard time with this mess, which you would think would mean that i would actually be better about spoon feeding my children. mostly it just means that my babies eat neat finger foods. but i let loose today.

i think that my favorite part is the yogurt goatee.

diane is the queen of the self-satisfied grin. and she was pretty proud of herself after her first independent yogurt encounter. i can't guarantee it is going to happen again any time soon.

bike riding

bike rides are an almost daily occurrence at our  house these days. even with the rain this week, we have managed to squeeze a couple in between storms. over the past few weeks, madeleine has really started to get the hang of her strider bike that we got her for her birthday and she goes at a good enough pace that i can walk with diane in the stroller and maintain a decent pace myself. a month ago, i would have to walk a few steps, pause, then walk a few more steps. repeat for a walk that is long in duration and short in distance.

in general, madeleine begs to keep going longer and longer until i finally have to make her turn around and head home. during these rainy days though, the sight of a worm is enough to make her scream and between sobs, yell, "i want to go HOME!" i try not to laugh. dogs have a similar effect, but i don't really laugh with that one because i can sympathize.

bike riding makes her seem so old.

i've got my love to keep me warm

on gloomy days like this, when snow isn't so far behind us and there's no end in sight for the rainy forecast, i find comfort in my little army of green sprouting on my kitchen table. round two of planting is just starting to surface and i can't tell you how many times i go over to the table to poke, prod and see if anything new is popping up. i am amazed at how much seems to change every few hours.

garden prep/planning is my sanity in the transition between winter and spring.

dying to color eggs

randy's parents came to town for a quick visit this weekend and one of the things that madeleine requested to do with her grammy was to dye easter eggs. she has been begging to do it since the easter paraphernalia made its debut at the grocery store and i kept telling her she had to wait until it was closer to easter. 

this was the perfect arrangement in my mind. randy's mom helps with the messy process and i sit back and take pictures. 

i should have thought ahead and did this while diane was sleeping. she wanted to touch everything so bad. 

randy finally got her her own cup and let her stir the dye around and even grab the egg out of the cup and put it in the carton. she was in heaven.

 rachel also joined us. in fact, beth provided the dye for us. so really, i suppose that we joined them. she kept saying, "cool," whenever she lifted the egg out of the cup.

the finish product.

a trip to the park with my new camera

aside from both diane and me being sick (again) and just being lazy, i haven't really felt like posting much lately because i was fed up with our camera. not a good reason, i know, but it's true. i was sick of trying to take pictures of our kids and having them turn out blurry because our camera doesn't respond quick enough, the flash makes you look sickly, etc.

and since i can't have johnny depp staring at you forever, i decided to get a new camera. well, a used camera off of ksl. but new to us. and nicer than our old one. so we did it and i am thrilled.

i haven't had too much time to sit down and really play with it, but we did take it out for a spin yesterday. the weather was cooperating and my friend and i walked to the park.

i can't promise that having this new camera won't result in an even more ridiculous amount of pictures appearing on this blog. but at least they'll be better quality. and maybe i won't have to have as many because i won't be compensating for lower quality photos.

but probably not.