Helper

The other day, Eli was able to have a daddy-son date.  Jesse took him to his construction job and then they browsed a few stores and had some lunch.  Eli came home proudly holding a brand new tool box just for him.  We filled it up with our "kid tools" and then he went to town helping us "fix" our backyard.  My favorite part:  seeing him proudly wear Jesse's hat the entire time he was outside "working"!

Happy {Late} Easter All!!**UPDATED**

Easter Morning:

The Easter left us a note with rhymes to figure out where our Easter Baskets were hidden.  Miss M was up for the challenge and even put her Ugg boots on to go hunting for the goodies :)

{nice hair Mr E}

My New Home***Updated***

I have delayed this post for quite some time, but now that we have officially paid our deposit for the fall semester tuition as well as a deposit for our townhouse to rent I feel like it is official!!  In less than fourteen weeks we are MOVING!!  Not just down the street, or to "the other side of town" in Mesa, but instead we are headed to New Hampshire.  My husband has been planning on going back to school for quite awhile now, but finally the timing is right.  For the past year or so, he has spend countless hours studying, taking the GMAT, writing essays, and applying for MBA school at some of the best universities in the country.  All of his hard work has payed off, and he ended up getting accepted to 3 top ten business schools: Kellogg (Chicago), Wharton (Phildelphia) and Dartmouth (Hanover NH).  It has been a difficult decision for him in narrowing down his options and picking one, after all they are all such great schools. In the end, Dartmouth won out and I don't think we could be more thrilled.  Several weeks ago we attended the schools "Admitted Students Weekend" and were able to meet lots of new people, including three other fabulous LDS couples.  We all really connected and I think that was the clincher on our decision.  Even though this will be a BIG change in our lives, we cannot wait!  We will be trading the desert and cactuses for the forest and fishing (as well as LOTS of snow).  Yeah for being "Tuckies for Life"!!

ASW: "Admitted Student's Weekend" April 15-17, 2011

Jesse and I went on a trip ALL BY OURSELVES for student weekend at Dartmouth.  It was sooo much fun! I cannot believe it has been 4+ years since our last vacation together ALONE.  After having such a blast together, we promised ourselves that we won't let another four years go by without going somewhere alone again.

Some of the fun things we did together include:

 **Red eye plane ride the first night out.  Jesse somehow convinced me to take a small (1/4) tablet of his Ambien to "help me sleep on the plane".  End result:  feeling horrible, like I was going to pass out/throw up/etc.  Got up to use the restroom, became dizzy and sweaty, somehow stumbled my way to the back of the plane probably looking like I was completely intoxicated, leaning my head on someone's seat and asking them for "help" {luckily they were asleep}, and finally managing to pull myself together enough to practically fall into the restroom.  HORRIBLE experience let me tell you.  I used the restroom, splashed my face, put my head in between my knees for awhile, until I finally felt good enough to make it back to my seat.  I don't think I will EVER take Ambien again.

**Taking a 3 hour nap together once we arrived in our hotel room.  It was delicious.  I cannot even remember the last time we took a nap together for that long.  Probably not since our overnight flight back from Hawaii four years ago. 

**The first night meeting our "new family" in New Hampshire.  We had so much fun going to dinner with some other couples attending Dartmouth in the fall and it was relieving to see how quickly we all bonded.  It totally relieved some of the stress I felt about moving.

**Bachelor pad dinner on Friday night.  We were paired up with several guys that are first year students at Darmouth and they had several of us over to dinner.  They were all OBVIOUSLY single/dating scene era.  They spent a good portion of the time talking about drunk memories until they realized that Jesse and I were married with THREE kids.  Then they quickly began to reassure us that Hanover is "a great place to have a family".  It was pretty funny :)

**Touring Sachem Village {ie: graduate student townhouses} and knowing that "I had to get in there".  Luckily we ended up securing a three bedroom townhouse there, and just found out that all the other LDS families are also going to be living there!!

**Late nights at cocktail parties with dancing, live music, lots of laughter, and of course people watching.  We have not stayed out late in years together, so we felt so young and free again staying out late and then sleeping in every morning. 

**Going to church on Sunday and meeting some of the people we will be getting to know when we move there in the fall.  I was excited to see a good portion of young children at church.....new friends for my kids of course.

**Going to the birthplace of Joseph Smith and taking pictures at the Memorial.

**Getting lost in the Upper Valley on our way back to Boston and finally being so exhausted that we stayed overnight in Manchester.

**And finally, missing our children A LOT and looking forward to coming home and spending some time with them.

Me with Andrea, Maren, and Michelle--aka Ms. Holbrook :)

Miss M's elementary school complete with an open field next door to play in.

(and yes that IS a cemetary you see)

Sachem Village:

This is what our backyard will look like!

Handsome Husband:

Nerdy Wife:

Joseph Smith Memorial:

Pretty Gorge???

Love this Man so much!!

Easter Egg Hunt/School Fall Festival

My cute pictures from Easter day and a "fun special trip" with the hubs will not download onto my computer, sooo until that happens I will update on some of our other events recently.

Easter Egg Hunt:

First off the day before Easter, we had a fun breakfast at Cortina's "island park" (a small part of our neighborhood that is separated from the rest of us by Rittenhouse) and then an Easter egg hunt for the kids. The kids had Easter baskets in hand and were seriously prepared to find themselves some eggs :)

Robby and his buddy Jude crack me up with this running picture while still holding hands!  Robby is such our "friend" kid.  He is always on the look-out for a playmate at the park, constantly asks me when he gets to play with our street friends {aka: Jack, Tyler, Matthew and especially Luke}, asks me repeatedly when he gets to have his playgroup with Asa, Peyton and Jude, etc... so of course he was glued to Jude's side during the entire morning. They played Monster Trucks together {and lost yet another of our Monster Trucks}, ran around the playground like Superheroes, and of course ganged up together for the egg hunt. 

 Maddie on the other hand is such a free-spirited little girl.  Although she loves friends as well, she is perfectly content to hang out and do her own thing.  She constantly amuses herself with make believe in her mind, imaginary friends, playing gymnastics alone, and coloring pictures and making her own story books.  So she was bound and determined to go out on the Easter egg hunt all on her own and conquer as many as possible.

 Eli has faithfully remained the baby of the family.  He loves being "babied", cuddled, hugged and played with.  Faith (one of our neighborhood babysitters) loves him and is always coming over at ward get togethers and adopting him for a brief time.  He loves the attention and was happy to let her help him with finding his treats.

{Funny story: the other day Robby was in time out and I was talking to him about his behavior.  When I asked him if big boys throw tantrums where they kick and hit, Robby replied that only babies do indeed exhibit these traits.  Eli was in the background and immediately piped in with "Mommy, I baby Eli."  Took the seriousness to our conversation immediately away and I couldn't help but bust out laughing and reply with "Yes you are."  Which begs the question: If your child is old enough to tell you something like that, is he really considered a baby?

Yes I think he still is......

 After the kids were done finding there alloted sixteen eggs, or a few more if your name starts with R or M, they started a fun game of egg tosses.  Jesse and Br Taylor did pretty darn good with theirs, until the egg broke on J's shoe....gross. 

Cortina Fall Festival:

Every year our neighborhood school has a huge carnival complete with snow cones, rides, petting zoo's, bounce houses, you name it.  For years I have avoided going, because none of the kids knew anything about it.  This year was different.  Miss M knew ALL ABOUT the carnival and reminded me the entire week about it.  So when Friday night hit, off to the carnival we went.  We played on bounce houses, rode the teacups one time (Miss M and Robbs), visited the adorable petting zoo, rode the trackless train (boys), played a few games and of course stopped for snow cones before heading home.  We had some tired but very pleased children that night :)

{Robby looks so grown up in this picture.....he just recently grew into size 13.5 shoes}

My Entrepreneur

 This past Saturday we had a garage sale with our neighbors.  It was a LOT of work (more than I initially anticipated).  But it turned out to have two huge bonuses: First we made quite a bit more money than we thought and second Miss M learned how to have her very first lemonade stand.  I brought up the idea to her a few days before and she was more than willing to try it out.  At that point I don't think she really knew what she was doing.  On Saturday morning she came out fully dressed with a big smile on her face ready to sell some yummy lemonade and chocolate chip cookies.  She ended up having soo much fun and made a killing as well.  She now walks around telling everyone that she has more money than her Mommy and Daddy :)

We both {Miss M and I} cannot wait until the final garage sale we host in a month or so!!

Easter Pageant

 Maddie had fun pushing Eli in the stroller most of the way to the temple, she LOVES being the big sister!

 Robby was so proud of himself for carrying our pizza the "whole way" from the car to the temple grounds.  The end result: cheese completely shifted one side of the pizza and some lopsided dough but in exchange a ridiculously happy little boy!

Even though it was a little wild bringing all three kids with us, we had a lot of fun.  We actually haven't been in several years and this was the first any of the kids had seen the Easter Pageant (they each took their turns going as infants).  We thought it was the perfect way to start our Easter weekend celebration--especially since we won't be going next year to this.

Top Ten of Easter 2011

So as I sit at work (shhh) exhausted as can be, I thought back over this weekend on some of the real life funny things that happened.  Before I put up all the cute, fun Easter pictures showing what a "perfect" family we are, I figured I would come up with a real top ten of our Easter weekend fun:

10. Getting only four hours of sleep--blech, and having the kids come running into our room screaming "it's Easter" over and over until we finally had to respond to their incessant shouting. very happily I might add :)

9.  Going to the Easter pageant with THREE kids five and under.  Fun. Yes. Wild at times. Yes. During the scene where Jesus was crucified Eli began to yell loudly "Look Momma, Jesus died" and Robby chimed in with "Did Heavenly Father die tooo?"

8. Robby was equally perplexed at the end of the pageant when everyone came back out on the stage.  He couldn't understand why the bad men (aka Roman soldiers) were allowed to come back on the stage.  Papa reassured him that Jesus had risen and now all the people were good, even the mean ones.......nice

7. Going to church today at 10am as a family.  What did I get out of sacrament meeting today you may ask?  Well, I learned that Jesse's shoulder is the perfect place to rest my head, Robby can successfully dump an entire tray of bread quite easily because he can pass the tray "all by myself", the kids are fantastic at making messes pretty much anywhere we go, and I think my husband may have told me I was beautiful somewhere in my haze between sleep and reality. bliss right?!

6. I think I may have yelled at my son when he was trying to help a pretend rubber fishy swim back to the ocean through the toilet.  yep, that's right, up to his elbows in potty water and flushing with all his might.  The best part {not} is that earlier in the day Jesse was joking around to Robby about flushing the same fish down the toilet.

5. "Baby Scared": the phrase that Eli told me when I tried to make him practice swimming in the big pool at Grandma and Grandpa Sheffields on Friday.  He seriously cracks me up and somehow finagled is

4. Going super simple with Easter baskets this year. As in using dollar store Easter buckets for the kids, a broken basket for me from years past, and a small wood basket for Jesse that I am pretty sure was used at our wedding years ago.  Each basket had a very limited amount of candy inside and that was it folks.  At first I felt kind of bad when I was putting them together.  But then when I watched their cute little faces this morning, I realized they really don't care.  I think I may continue to keep baskets simple next year as well!

3. Egg Dying party that included Robby taking a nice sip of the green dye because "it looked yummy".  On the bright side, he now knows he does NOT like the taste of vinegar.  We only had about 3 mishaps with broken/cracked eggs, otherwise it egg dying went surprisingly well.

2. Making delicious Cadbery Mini Egg Cookies courtesy of Mrs Budge and her shared recipe.  All went well other than slightly burning the first two batches {I am the worlds worst baker...I swear I have ADD and cannot sit long enough to wait for the darn cookies to finish cooking}.  Luckily the hubby happily ate all those semi-burnt ones without a complaint!

1.  Crabbiness by this wifey at having to work yet another Easter.  I hate working holidays. There I said it.  Now that I got that out there, let me just say that I do appreciate having a job, I do appreciate being able to work 12 hours at a time thus allowing me to only work three days a week,  I do appreciate that I work a swing shift and don't have to be in to work until 1pm which allowed me to spend Easter morning with the kids, and I actually do enjoy working as a nurse; I just don't like feeling like I am constantly missing out on extended family get togethers, I don't like being so tired I can hardly function, let alone enjoy the Holidays, and I don't like being unable to make the Holiday's cute/special for my kids due to lack of time and energy.  All in all I look forward to the day that I can be home on Holidays and pick up shifts here and there and not depend on it as an income.  And there I said it and got it out of me :-)

Flashback to 2009

Just found these beauties on one of our old SD cards that I found in a pile of stuff.  I cannot believe how blonde my hair was that summer, how tiny little Eli was, how much the same Robby is and yet so much more mature.....

I still remember this day like it was yesterday.  We were invited over to swim at the house next door to my in-laws.  I remember thinking that it was the first time I had EVER been swimming with my in-laws at a regular pool [other than in Rocky Point].  It was super duper hot outside that day {a typical Arizona July summer day}, and my kids were literally stripping off their clothes in a rush to see who could get in the pool first.  Nona was pretty worried when both of the kids made it into the pool before any adults, and I gently reassured her that there was a reason why my kids took ISR survival swim lessons.  Maddie and Robby were such fishies and were swimming to and from people over and over again.  Eli was timid as always and did NOT like when he was dunked under water.  He was however extremely content in Papa's arms splashing at the water with his overactive little hands.  Robby loved sitting in the little blue swim chair and used it like his own personal boat, paddling to and fro with his hands.  I'm sure there were some fights and tears entwined into this swim date, but like always those moments are quickly forgotten.  The things I remember most were the togetherness that was felt as we splashed around, laughed and loved that day. 

{Below: a couple of pictures that were take the end of July 2009 on Papa's birthday.  I love that pretty much every year on Papa's bday, all the pics taken feature him with multiple children on his lap.  He truly is that kind of Grandpa that all the kids immediately latch onto and love....he has such a gentle heart and for that I am forever grateful!}