some other random pictures from april

actually, this one was in march... sliding down the stairs in a sleeping bag. can you beat that grin?!

afton's artwork. self-portrait with rocks and shadows.

can you tell the letter of the day? gimme-a--K!

not much to do with anything, but we took this pic of my irises the day before the hail. good timing for the pics!

the best thing about the saturday morning session of general conference cinnamon rolls! (and they get to eat them on mom and dad's bed while we watch on the computer)

throwing things in the creek with grandma

sleepy kids. and yes, rayna picked those socks out on her own, and on purpose!

pretty easter dresses poses

clearly, the girls LOVED their new easter dresses from maggie (thank you!!!), and they loved posing in them too:

perhaps malachi wasn't quite so happy to pose... he was doing his level best to hide from the camera (and my battery was almost dead so i couldn't chase after him too much)

we went on a little walk before church, just around our little block, but malachi still wasn't interested in pictures. i do like this one though. note his cookie monster socks?! those are from my mom, and he LOVED them, he kept them on the whole day, he usually rips his shoes and socks off by the time we get to church, then again as soon as we sit down, on easter he lost the shoes a couple times, but kept the socks :) it kinda cracks me up :)

rayna is clearly NOT camera shy, i love how she's been posing and big smiles lately for (almost) all her pictures, she's got such a pretty smile :)

an almost-family shot:

and just to show i was there too... and yes, malachi was deliberately closing his eyes, until he heard paul turn the camera off, then he jumped down and ran inside... goober!

easter part 1

we went up to grandma's this easter-saturday for egg hunting and company. we got a pretty good haul, considering easter totally snuck up on me this year and i was absolutely not prepared (hooray for the teenaged easter bunnies!!!). malachi had no trouble figuring out that eggs have candy in them, the only part that was hard for him was not eating the contents of each egg as he found it. i liked how seriously he took the egg hunting though:

he was also happier to find grandma's water bottle than some of the eggs he found. he had to give that back though.

this may just be my favorite easter hunting picture of all... afton was finding eggs so fast we had to stop her a couple times so the others could get some too... then there's this picture where she clearly missed that bright pink one in search of something else...  i believe rayna got to that pink one before afton ever realized she missed it :)

rayna had a blast. and yes... she dresses herself!



this is as close as we got to easter baskets this year too, thanks grandma for the chocolate bunnies and the slippers!!! they love those slippers!



we were also super excited to play with the bubbles from maggie! that package was the nicest surprise we've had in a long time! it totally made our day. here the little stairstep kiddos were blowing bubbles as fast as they could for alpha-dog. that is one crazy dog (of naomi's) that LOVES bubbles!

i have a bunch of cute pics from easter too, with their cute little outfits, but i think i'm going to have to make that a second post cause this one's already longer than i meant it to be :) i love sharing pictures of my adorable kids--and yes, i'm biased, but they sure can be adorable!

bluebonnerts

for those of you non-texans that read my blog, perhaps you aren't yet aware of the bluebonnets. they're the state flower of texas, and there's a long-standing tradition of trying to get a picture of your children in the bluebonnets every spring looking angelic and adorable... i figured since we've been in tx four springs already, it was time to get some good pictures. there also happened to be a field of bluebonnets really close to our house that bloomed really nicely this year. these are some of my favorites (there are a couple more on FB for those that need to see some more). please comment and let me know which are your favorites, as i think some of these might be going on my wall, and i need more opinions before i can print them out.

play nice. . .

so my girls don't often play with toys at all, we have about a million of them, but only rarely do they actually play with them, usually they just hoarde them and follow me around telling me how bored they are (or how "boring" they are, as rayna says). they also play quite happily outside for as long as they can, but the moral here is that they don't often play with toys in their games. rayna can be found brushing the life out of anything hairy --including her own head, but that's generally it.
this is a rough breakdown of a game yesterday though that made me take note:

'mom, can i have 2 strings?'
'i suppose so, what do you need them for?'
'we're tying up the ponies.'
. . .(thinking) *ooookay. . .*
a little time passes, and i come to see what the quiet girls are up to (you know what i mean, that quiet play where something has to be going wrong), this is what i saw:

'that (pointing to yellow block) is the fire mom'

'ummmmm. . . oooo-kay'

few minutes later, 'mom we need scissors!'

'how about i help you untie them?' --i don't want the girls using scissors that close to my nice wooden gougable chairs, and ps, i hope all they wanted the scissors for was to untie the ponies, i did NOT ask!

me listening:

'they're good and dead now'  'lets feed them to the giants'  'yum, ponies'  'belle's my favorite'  'grumm'

etc. . .

anybody else want to try telling me little girls are always sweet, or how they play so nicely or anything?

running update

my last running update was here, and it wasn't very helpful, so i need to add to it now...
feb 4 i ran 5 miles in 53.19
march 3 i ran 10K in 60.20
april 7 was 5K in 29.20

so no new records or anything, but it looks like i'm at least maintaining my ability, and that feels like a lot right now. i've been frustrated by some rather painful shin splints and i've been limiting my practice runs to about once/week, and i could tell this morning that i wasn't in top form. i feel like i should have done my last mile better, but considering my weaknesses, i'm still happy with my time :)

st patricks day in downtown

for st. paddy's day this year, we decided to try the dallas art walk . i know, it has nothing to do with st patrick, the color green, or the parade, which we carefully missed ;) --such party animals! we rode the train in to town, and like wendy mentioned, that was a very popular idea, and evidentally the parades weren't enough of a reason for the dart people to run extra trains... fortunatley, we'd decided to go to downtown garland to catch the train so we were some of the first people on (we could even park the stroller in the wheelchair area and i got to sit down--with kids on my lap--and everything). there was a lot of green and a lot of beer on that train! we skipped a few stops as we got closer to downtown, until suddenly everyone else got off, we went a little farther and found a great quiet part of the city to explore. we did about a mile from the middle of the art walk, and we really had fun, though i must admit, i looked at it more as a fun family activity than a holiday party, but since i don't drink or believe in pots of gold at the end of the rainbow, it worked great for me, and i think the kids had fun too ;). anyways, enough chit-chat i'm sure those of you that read my blog mostly just look at the pictures anyways!

Thanksgiving Square

we spent quite a lot of time at Thanksgiving Square, it was part memorial, part church, part park... and it is a triangle. we liked a large mural here by rockwell, and these bells represented something that i have since forgotten and don't care quite enough to look up, but i am fairly sure one was for God, one for us the people and one for something like remembering others... it was a slightly odd group, but pretty just the same, and still a good message, to be thankful.

this stained glass spiral was inside the church, the man in charge encouraged us to lay down on the floor to get the full effect. it was really pretty, though somewhat reminiscent of the RLDS temple in nauvoo. and of course some other people walked in as i was laying on the middle of the floor... they left quickly -hehe...



look, a family photo!!! *gasp* and most of us are smiling :D

paul took this picture at the Dallas city hall, i just thought it was pretty

Dallas City Hall, designed by IM Pei. those red spherical things are floating statuary, it was fun to sit here and have a snack while we watched them float and blow

another view or our little city, we walked through the middle there



to be honest, i'm not even sure what these longhorns are doing running through the middle of downtown, but there were a TON of them, and i let the kids play a bit, we were getting tired and hungry by this time, so it was a good place to get some energy out



malachi actually freaked out once we got him up there, though he was trying to climb up himself first...

and one more, can you ever have enough pics of the longhorns?!

you can see in this photo how they keep going back and around, they also went up the hill and around the corner, quite a herd all together.

as i said, by this time we were getting tired, rayna needed a little lift back to the trains

malachi was having a blast on the train ride home, first off, it wasn't super-crowded, second, he got to stand up a bit, and look out the window, so cool!



afton also LOVES the train, and she loves her daddy


just fyi, we were all wearing green, and afton's even being the rainbow, so we were following enough tradition for something :) and now we know a little more about the big D, so if you want to come visit we can show you!

spring break re-cap

well i was planning on doing a slower style day-by-day breakdown of spring break, just so i could post a million pictures, but since it's been almost a month and i still haven't done it, i think i'll just put a few things together and see what happens:

silly kids playing around one morning, i just love the smiles :D

 we did spend one day with our friends at the arboretum. we love that place! so green and living, and not so crowded that you can't let the kids run free a little bit. and they have these cute little houses that change each year, this year they represent painters, so this bridge was over a little pond by a cottage, and it all represented monet, cute huh?



i think this table was behind the surat house, but i can't remember for sure

 

kung fu pose anyone?

i can't for anything get these kids to pose in a normal smiling all together pose, but if i say 'kung fu' i get a great pic... go figure ;)
let's see, we also went to a special library day about the magic tree house books, anna recommended them for afton a few months ago, and she's devoured them (we'd heard about them from a few other friends too, but i love that we can occasionally get the books on cd so she can listen to them at bedtime when i'm getting rayna to bed and trying to calm malachi down too, handy!). it was a fun little hour, with all kinds of activities: digging for dinosaur bones (which isn't much like any of the books, but still exciting), wrapping eachother in TP to be mummies, writing in code (backwards letters) like di vinci, making a sundial, etc... the girls had a great time, and i was sorry i'd forgotten the camera, afton made a great mummy!

 we also played and picniced at the park a couple times, again with friends, everything's better with friends!



i just love this picture of rayna and joshua, great smiles! joshua is actually afton's 'boyfriend' but really all the kids play great together.

i wish i could say every day of spring break was exciting and special, but it was mostly a normal week, with the added excitement of no school. we did try to do some extra things like this with friends, and we did still have our normal library story time and such, but the only really exciting thing we did was st. patricks day. more on that soon!