Sunshine

The last few weekends we have had some incredible weather. Unfortunately, last weekend consisted of a lot of this:

Addison had a high fever and was throwing up. Hailey was sick a day or two later. Not so fun.

Luckily, this weekend was much better. Saturday, we were home all day, mostly working on building the kids play area outside. The kids played with friends/cousins most of the day, and tried out the new swing. Well, not new swing, but new ladder that takes the swing to a whole new level. A little scary, but super fun.

For us, too… sorry kids, you’ll have to wait.

Most of the day, Derek was actually doing this:

It was a pretty great day at home:)

Sunday, the girls and I headed to Green Lake for the day. Saw Megan, Paul and girls, ate some Spuds, played, had some ice cream, and completely appreciated the sunshine.

I love it.

April ten on ten

A great day for ten on ten.

Spring break, sunshine, and all sorts of fun. I love it.

Spring break = lazy morning. Who can guess my book?

Planting seeds

And then, “Do they need water, Mom?” or, “When are they going to grow?”

Ortho appt. with new purple bands

Spinning at the park until she was sick – literally. She didn’t feel good for quite a while after this.

Picking out the new pets at the pet store. Quite a process.

Spring flowers

More fun outside at home

A nice walk

See more ten on ten fun here

Easter in the sun

It was SO nice to actually have an Easter where it was not freezing or pouring down rain. What a great day in the sunshine, celebrating at church and having family over throughout the day.  Here are some of my favorites.

  

  

March 10 on 10

Hey, at least I posted this in the month of March. Just barely. I probably would have skipped it altogether, but the tenth of March happened to be the day we were whisking my mom away to Lake Chelan for a girl’s getaway. It gave me some more unique ten on ten shots, and hold some pretty funny memories for us. I loved having my sisters help me look for something to take a picture of at one point in the afternoon – we were largely unsuccessful, but some of the ideas were funny! Here goes…

Bath time before I left

Daddy’s on for the weekend

Meeting up to head to Chelan

Megan created a playlist of all sorts of old songs we used to listen to and it was a dance party in the back seat.

Wet drive over the pass

Light at the end of the tunnel

Dance party over, Mom was out most of the way

Finally there, visitors at our door

Shopping in town

Missed a pic of dinner, and barely caught dessert. You gotta be quick in our family or the food will be gone.

I laughed a whole lot throughout this day and had a super fun time. Even if we were at Lake Chelan in the middle of winter when no one goes there. Thankful for my mom and sisters!!

The variety show experience

Symantha and two of her friends had been talking about being in the school variety show since last year. When the time for auditions finally arrived, they were so excited. They had some practices at our house, coached by Aunt Stephanie the “professional singer”. This was SO helpful in getting them prepared, and we were all singing Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” for weeks before the show. As if we hadn’t already heard that song more times than we could count.

They did great on the audition. I shouldn’t really call it an audition, since all the kids make it in:). But it is still great practice. The only bummer is that it was possibly the least organized thing I have ever been a part of. There were rehearsals set up for weeks before the show, but they were pretty much a waste of time. We had some of our own rehearsals instead. However, there were all sorts of microphone issues, and it wasn’t all figured out by the night of the show. More on that later.

We took the girls shopping for matching shirts, which was fun. They found the perfect glittery outfits and were so cute together.

There was a lot of disorganized chaos the night of the show, so the girls weren’t able to use the track we had practiced to. Since there was another girl doing the same song (awesome, right?), they ended up using her version. The problem was, our version had a very quiet track of the words in it, so if the girls lost their place, they would be able to find it quickly again. Since we had done it so many times, I figured they would be fine if we used the other version, and there wasn’t really another option anyways.

So, they began their performance well, smiling and doing exactly as they had practiced. Except that Symantha’s microphone wasn’t turned on until I began to notice and pointed it to her from the crowd. She turned it on just in time for her solo… and then half way through her part she completely lost the words. They all kind of looked at each other blankly, and after some awkward moments, caught on to the chorus and finished the song. Symantha was faking a smile at the end with tears in her eyes. I was SO proud of how she held it together! She went back to her seat with the performers and started crying, but her friends were so encouraging. I went over to check on her and they were totally building her up. She bounced back after a bit, and her aunts and I told her helpful stories about how things like this have happened to all of us at one time or another. It will give her a great story to tell her own kids one day:)

We celebrated the whole experience with ice cream at Dairy Queen after the show. It seemed to make everything much better.

She is already talking about what she might want to do for the talent show next year. Which, fortunately, will be run by a completely different person and not be the chaotic mess that it was this year. The good thing is that most of the chaos went right over the girls’ heads and they didn’t really notice it. It provided some good experience and life lessons for Symantha, so I am still glad she did it. And I am thankful she had some great friends to go through the process with. They even prayed together before the show, with one of their grandparents. Pretty cool:)