Ward Party

Well this week has mostly been sucked up by the ward party that has now come and gone. Phew! I really don't like being in charge of things. I am a work horse so I don't even mind the work as much as having to be the one to make the decisions and figure everything out. That is super stressful. It's really hard to figure out amounts and make sure people are following through with their assignments without micromanaging too much. Anyway it's done and that's a relief!

On Tuesday night our Relief Society meeting was all about cooking with beans, lentils, and quinoa. They had samples and recipes. I definitely want to incorporate some meatless meals. They were pretty good. After the class I decided I would save some money from the ward party (so I could buy avocados) and use dry beans instead of canned beans. It totally worked so I might start trying to use dry beans more.

On Wednesday I bought most of the fresh ingredients for the party. I decided to make a few more batches of tortillas that day just in case. On Thursday I cooked beans in my oven all day and was chopping lettuce into the night. While I was chopping lettuce I got the inspiration to put chips and salsa on all the tables. Brilliant! I was planning on skipping my early morning workout Friday morning so I wouldn't be so tired but I wasn't sleeping anyway so I got up and went. Afterwards I headed over to the store for more lettuce and chips and salsa. I came home and fed my kids a bowl of cereal and made my first trip to the store to unload most of the food. Most of my committee works so I didn't have any help putting up the decorations but I was able to snag a couple of friends last minute to help me put them up. Thank goodness! By that time it was time for lunch. I actually had time to take a decent nap. I then got up and started heating up the pork and cooking the beans. I did that until it was time to take it up to the church to start setting things up. I didn't take any pictures though darn it. I just reused my decorations from my sister's wedding. Each of the tables had a wrapping paper table topper and a mason jar with pinwheels in them. There was also chips and salsa at every table. When it was time to eat we had one table come up at a time and I heated up the homemade tortilla on the grill and gave it to them. They then went through the line and had sweet pulled pork, black beans, lime cilantro rice, homemade pico from my friend Jen, avacados, sour cream, and homemade cilantro ranch dressing. It was legit! After dinner a committee member was in charge of minute to win it games. She had tons of games planned and it was really fun. Afterwards we had homemade strawberry shortcake made by another committee member. It was an adult only party so one committee member stayed in the nursery all night with some of the young women to babysit. Then it was time to tear down and clean up. And like that it was done! I think over 80 people came so all in all it was a huge success! Victory.

In other news I taught Gabby how to ride a bike without training wheels this week. Scott is having a good month and he is really close to getting a bonus. Hopefully this week he will get what he needs to earn his bonus. That would be sweet!

Gabby quotes: "Mom, I like Jesus."
"It would be crazy if I was three and was so nice and I listened to everything you told me to do." That would be the craziest thing." Oh my gosh kids are so funny! (Oh and seriously Gabby doing everything I told her to do WOULD be crazy).

Nice scowl Ryan.

Janet gave me some gym bucks she had earned at gymboree and I bought some clothes their yesterday. The girls love their new swimming suits. Piper is sleeping in hers right now. Gabby loves hers and thinks it looks really good with her haircut.

Gabby's bike helmet was the only one we couldn't find. Classic.

My New Favorite Thing

My early morning class didn't make me die as bad this week. I even went by myself almost the whole week. My friends had different stuff going on last week and hardly came to the 6:00 am class. I'm still not looking forward to my alarm going off in the morning though that's for sure.

Gabby had her kinder chicks this week. Once a month they have incoming kindergartners come in for an hour for various things. This last time they met the librarian who read them a story and then each of the kindergartner teachers. They did an activity while the teachers talked to us about what kids need to know coming into Kindergarten, which is a lot more now because of the common core standards. She is pretty shy and I think she will have a harder time initially than Corbin but I know she will love it. She looked so cute with her little backpack going to school.

Scott and I went on a date again Friday night. Two Friday's in a row must be a new record. We are going to my brother's wedding in a couple of weeks and we are leaving the kids here with a young single mom in our ward. We decided it would be good if the kids got a little more acquainted with her before being left with her for 2 days. So she came over during the week and hung out for awhile and I decided it would be good if she babysat by herself as well. So Scott and I went to the movie Selma with our friends the Hunters. Afterwards they came over to play games but we ended up just talking instead. We really liked the movie. We didn't know a lot of the details portrayed in the movie. It's super crazy to think all of that happened and not very long ago. Crazy.

Scott's busy and he's adjusting to working 6 days a week. He was gone all night at a the Boise Green Festival downtown, there were all kinds of hippies down there. Ha.

Ok so let me tell you about my new favorite thing. We have a pretty small backyard and we are stuck in our house for a while more possibly forever, who knows. Anyway our fence backs up to a church parking lot. I have often thought how great it would be if we had access to the parking lot through our fence. It makes it a straight shot for Corbin to get to school, it's a great short cut. I also thought it would be a great place for the kids to fly their kites and ride their bikes. I seriously talked to Scott about it recently and got him on board. He even called my brother who's a realtor asking about permission verses forgiveness and we all learned toward forgiveness. I still felt like Scott getting around to putting a gate in the fence would take a long time. I tried to think if I could Nicole Curtis it but wasn't feeling confident in my skills or lack there of. Anyway I talked to Scott about how I wanted the gate put in yesterday. He went right out and just sawed a hole in the fence. A few days later he drilled in a couple of eye hook and latches and we are good to go. He may put in a legit gate someday but I don't even care. We have access to our huge playground now and I am STOKED! One annoying thing is the kids can't go back there without me but it's still a lot easier than going to the park. The other annoying thing is there's tons of goat heads back there. I hate goat heads. I tend to let my kids roam barefoot all the time but we can't back there. We talked to the kids about how they could never go back there without Scott or I and we explained some of the dangers. Today Corbin really wanted to go eat his otter pop back there and I told him I was busy and didn't want to go out there so he couldn't. Then Piper said, "you can't go back there, there's bad guys back there." Ha.

Primary is good. I enjoy teaching. I like that my class are 10-12 year old girls. That would probably be my ideal primary class. I'm not too sure about teaching the wee little ones.

As soon as I get Ryan out of his high chair he climbs on to the table and starts in on the kid's leftovers.

Gabby going to Kinder Chicks.

New backyard playground

Update

First off getting up at 5:15 during the weekday its KILLING me. I am burning out already. My friend Jen has been doing it for 3 months and I've only been doing it for one month. She just finished her 90 day challenge and she lost 21 pounds and 44 inches. We think she is going to win the challenge and win a cruise, which would be amazing. She and her husband haven't been anywhere. We find out in a few weeks. Fingers crossed. I'm tempted to go by myself to the 7:00 class at a different location. I can't decide. I would love an extra hour of sleep but part of the reason I signed up was for the time with my friends. We'll see. All my friends have middle schoolers that need to get off early. Corbin doesn't have to be at school until 9:00 so the 7:00 class definitely works for me. I can't decide. Anyway we'll see what happens this week. I am still really liking the fitness class itself. I am getting stronger. Physical strength is empowering. 

The kids had several play dates this week. I was busy cooking pork all week for the ward party and made a few batches of tortillas. I also made an apron for a charity that FitMania is putting on.

Gabby asked to get a haircut and I decided that would be a really good idea. Her hair is really thin and scraggly. She never lets me fix her hair and when she does she pulls it out within an hour, or it falls out because of her curly hair. My friend Lexie gave her an adorable A-line haircut and I am in love. Gabby's bed hair looks better than her hair has looked in years. LOVE!

Scott and I got to go on a date Friday night. Date nights are the best!

I got to wear contacts and make up for the first time in 8 days. I love contacts and make up. I HATE wearing glasses. My eye seems to have healed right up. It took quite a few days. I think I really hurt myself. Glad to be back to my old self.

Gabby went to bed several nights in Corbin's jammies and underwear. Whatever dude.

Cutes

My charity apron. One of these days I'm going to make an apron for myself...maybe, probably not. Ha. Notice the glasses and no make up. LOVE THAT. Actually I'm glad my glasses are really dark framed, it really distracted from the no eye make up thing.

I made my primary girls "chournals" AKA church journals. I mod podged some cute paper on composition notebooks. This way they glue on my handouts and write down weekly assignments and take notes and all kinds of things. We'll see how many of them actually bring them back next week. Treat incentives may have been involved. 

Lucky me Gabby let me curl her hair for church. You just never really know what Gabby is going to let you talk her into.

LOVE!

Church selfies! Ha. Don't ask, we don't know why. 

For the most part my house is really LOUD, messy, and chaotic. Holy Smokes 4 kids under 7. Enough said!

Easter

This week has been busy and waking up at 5:15 isn't may favorite. After sleeping in all weekend tomorrow's wake up call is going to make me die. I do really like the workouts and seeing my friends but the early mornings are killers. On Thursday night I was pretty exhausted and didn't feel very good so I decided I wasn't going to go. I didn't set my alarm but after waking up at 5:00 and again at 5:40 I decided to just get up and go.

The ward party is in three weeks so I'm trying to figure out the details of that. We are having Cafe Rio for the dinner and I fed the missionaries that on Friday night. It kind of gave me an idea of how much I need to make for the ward party and how much it will cost. I figured out how I can cook all the meat and make all the homemade tortillas myself because I'm a little crazy like that. I hope everyone else follows through with their assignments (fingers crossed) and I'll be excited when it's done.

Nothing too exciting happening with the kids. Things are same old same old. On Monday night Scott's appointment rescheduled so we were able to go to the park as a family and have FHE as a family that night so that was pretty special. When he is busy he is gone most nights.

Somehow I scratched my cornea. I don't know if it was because of old contacts or what. My eye started hurting me Friday night like I had something caught in my eye and I just kept rubbing it. I thought it would feel better by morning but it didn't. My eye was KILLING me all day long. I was in a lot of pain all day and my eye was getting more and more blood shot as the day went on. I finally at least got smart enough to take some ib profin and I haven't stopped taking it since then. I can't remember the last time I was in so much pain. I finally broke down and went to urgent care Saturday night. He confirmed that it was a scratched cornea and prescribed some drugs and told me I need to go to my regular eye doctor on Monday. Well the eye drops he prescribed me cost $128 out of pocket and I don't have vision insurance so I'm not sure if I feel like dropping another $100 dollars to have my eye doctor check it out. So at this point I think I'm just going to monitor how my eye does with the meds and decide from there. Good thing I bought new glasses last month because I can't have contacts or wear make up for a week. Boo.

Conference and Easter weekend were good. I just love how relaxing conference is. Having church at home every 6 months is such a treat. On Saturday the kids did a little Easter egg hunt and then this morning the Easter bunny had filled their baskets again. We ended up having Easter dinner at our friends house. The food was delicious and Scott and I didn't stop eating although I had seconds and I think Scott had fourths? Maybe? Haha.

Piper quote (I was telling her I was a primary teacher now) "Mom, I don't want you to become a teacher." Me: "Why," P: Because I want you to still be my mom."

Climbing Baby

Oh baby don't die! Scott put this chair on the table so he could fix it and then stupid me forgot it was up there and I walked into the kitchen to see Ryan like this. Ryan is a dare devil and it's frightening. Also he perfectly knows how to crawl down stairs backwards but he now wants to walk down them like a big person. Of course that's a disaster. Please don't die baby.

Piper's bunny ears she colored at story time.

The girls had a friend over and painted their tree house again.

We decided we would dress up 80's on April 1st. It was hilarious! By the way working out in a swimsuit is not awesome.

Scott made me a patch so my eye would heal faster but I think I wore it for like 2 minutes. Oh the misery.