Easter Sunday

Easter morning was a lot of fun at our house! The Easter bunny came and hid the eggs that the kids colored and as a long standing tradition in the Brown family he also hid jelly beans all over the place. The jelly bean thing cracks me up because Ryan's mother has video of one of his sisters spilling her jelly beans and Ryan, taking his duties of older brother very seriously, descends and steals as many as he possibly can. His poor sisters! We didn't have any drama like that. Half the time we had to convince James to keep looking. He doesn't understand why you would go hunting for candy when you have a whole basket full of goodies sitting on the couch!  

In the Kid's Easter baskets they of course get a a chocolate bunny and other candy and they also receive a book about the savior. This is a tradition that we started when Kaylie was born. Ryan and I enjoy picking out a book each year that is meant especially for them.   

After church we went up to Grandma Jo's house and made a yummy dinner with Lamb and barley, potatoes, greens, and other foods similar to our Jerusalem dinner. That evening we went to Grandma Brown's for family home evening. The quick version of this day sounds so nice and peaceful, maybe it was the hours of 9 am to 12 pm (church) that did most of the exhaustion that you can see on my face.  

The kids played outside in the sunshine with Uncle Eric a bit. We sure are gonna miss him (6 days left until he reports to the MTC)! 

         

Jerusalem Dinner

Last year I picked up A Christ Centered Easter and have been excited to utilize some of the fun ideas this year to help teach Kaylie and James about easter. It has brought a wonderful spirit into the home centered on Christ. We have a done a few different activities earlier in the week and tonight had a "Jerusalem Dinner". It was so fun. In the book it lists many many things that Savior probably ate in his time. I picked a few and items from the list some familiar and other not familiar and invited some friends over to share our new experience. It was really yummy and lots of fun. We hope to make it somewhat of a tradition and the fun part is that you can mix it up and try different things and mix and match so that each year is a little different. 

Front to Back /Left to Right: Unleavened bread, black olives, green olives, yogurt, goat cheese (not pictured), various other cheeses, grapes, cantaloupe, pistachios, apricots, figs, dates, homemade grape juice (brought by a friend). You may notice the PBJ in the back... it was there just in case dinner was a flop.

The fish was  Dover Sole marinated in lemon juice, butter and dill.

Open Season

Egg hunting season that is! MSA (A group for people crazy enough to love medical students kind of like AA you get support for your problem except you have a ton of fun doing it!) Anyway MSA play group put on an easter hunt that was a great success. Everyone brought a bag of candy, the moms tossed it around the field of a park near the medical school and the kids, who were for the most part preschool or younger, went around and picked it up! It was a really undramatic hunt and nice for the small kids! James didn't quite get the idea of getting more candy he wanted to eat the one he had in his hand, and Kaylie was content to hang close to Mom and James and get what she could get. 

Bubbles

A few more pictures from our long weekend with my siblings. Logan my baby brother still has plenty of kid left in him and took Kaylie and James out to do some bubbles in the freezing cold. James is just really getting into bubbles and it was fun to watch them play together. 

LEt ThE GaMes BeGiN!!!

Yay! It's March Madness! If you don't have your brackets done yet you better hurry and for some of you it's probably too late. You'll find my widget bracket on my left hand column. I don't study out much for my bracket and some of my upsets are in there just to make it interesting and others are because Ryan picked the other team. Some of my picks are made simply because some one has to win even if they are both awesome teams. Kaylie's bracket picked one hundred percent by Kaylie is pretty amazing, she may beat Ryan and I. When we would ask her why she picked some of the teams that she did it was because she liked their name (ex. "Missi Missi State" and "I want Memphis to be my last"). FYI - Her daddy also went with Memphis as his champion pick. I am the lone rider with UNC taking it all the way for no imparticular reason although that pretty boy Hansbrough makes a good argument. 

Princess Wishes Come True!

Girls night out was so much fun! Hillary Kaylie and I went to the Disney on Ice Princesses on Friday night. We had the best time. All 3 of us were really excited to go and the show was better than I could have imagined. We had fun riding the train to downtown and seeing all of the little princesses of Salt Lake City!

This picture was taken moments after the show started. I thought her face was going to break she was so excited. I can't blame her I was pretty excited myself. 

We're PLAYING Basketball... We LOVE that basketball!

My 3 younger siblings came out for a long weekend getaway! We did a few things and did some good old fashion teenage hangin' out. The boys of course played lots of basketball. Ryan and Cameron went to elder's quorum bball practice on thursday night, All the boys went and just shot around on friday night and then Saturday morning Ryan played in the Stake championship (which they won... Yay them!) and Cameron refereed. I don't know if he's ever really done that before, lucky for him the Elder's Quorum president has refereed professionally and kept him in check! Ryan was on top of his game and took the camera with them on friday night. 

Stank you

Kaylie is a really intelligent girl and speaks very well with a huge vocabulary, but like most kids she has a sound or two that she struggles with. TH being number 1 on the list. Tonight at dinner she very excitedly asked if she could say the prayer. She proceeded to do so in a very strong voice and listed everything she could think of that she was "stankful" for: 

"Stank you for our friends, Stank you for my brother, stank you for our food..."

 

On that note life has been pretty ordinary around here lately and thus the lack of posts to the blog. James has recovered well from his ear tube surgery and goes in for a check up on the 20th. The kids and I have spent hours on end out at the playground which doesn't usually make for interesting posts. So, as life has just been going on as life, and hoping that I don't jinks myself horribly, I realized I am having too much fun with my somewhat simple life. Everything isn't perfect and we have our share of stress and worry but overall life's been good. Well, now that I have not only thought it but shared it, let's see what the fates have to dish out!

James' Big Day

Today was the day! James had tubes placed in his ears. Everything went amazingly well, not that I expected anything less, but I am a mom who worries. We were in and out of the hospital in 2 1/2 hours and 45 minutes of that was waiting to get checked in! He looked soo... cute in his hospital jammies!

Recovery went well. He was kind of crying and moaning in his little hospital bed. The nurse had tried to give him a pedialyte bottle before we got in there and he wouldn't take it. Not a big surprise since he has never had a bottle. He still nurses before he goes to bed at night. (He goes to Colorado for the big weaning trip next month) Anyways I am done making excuses and defenses. He nursed for several minutes while waking up. We got him dresses and then decided he liked the idea of the bottle. I didn't catch him downing the thing but he's still clutching his new found novelty. 

At home he has had instant relief! He has been babbling and making loads of sounds. He can hear so much better and you can tell he is excited to test out his new ears. He will mimic your sounds (which most babies do at a much younger age). I am excited to watch his vocabulary grow! He has been playing and dancing all day. The test now is will he sleep? He could sleep better, but he actually had adjusted pretty well to sleeping in discomfort. I hope we don't have to start over with sleeping through the night, but the boys who live above us are very loud at night so he could hear that better now and wake up. I suppose we'll find out soon enough.