Christa's Chocolates

Today on my business blog, I blogged about a photo shoot I did for Christa's Chocolates.  If you haven't ordered your Easter chocolate yet, you should seriously order from Christa.  Her chocolates are AMAZING!

I will tantalize you with a few images here:

Now you must go to my business blog here and read more about how amazing the chocolates are, and how to order them.

Carving our Pumpkin

We carved a pumpkin, this is what it looked like:

Lilly was more interested in coloring than carving.

 

Lilly was momentarily interested in the pumpkin.

I had Bart draw the face on with a Sharpie before he cut it.  He hates it when we do that because he says you can see the sharpie after it's carved.

He's right.

 

And she's back to coloring.

Voila, our pumpkin.

Addison's Baptism Day

Another big thing that happened right after my last blog post was Addison's Baptism day.  Which just happened to be on her 8th birthday.

She woke up that morning to a bike from grandma and grandpa.

Then it was off to the church to be baptized.

Our stake has each child's baptism separately, so we were able to do our own program and it was only family, close friends, and a few ward members.  It was so beautifully intimate, and the spirit was so strong, I can't imagine how it could have been more wonderful.

We gave each person there (and some family that wasn't there) note cards to write their testimony or a little note for Addison, and I later compiled them into a little memory book with her baptism pictures (which I posted on my business site here...I decided I wasn't going to worry about blogging that again, if you want to see the pictures you can just check them out there.). 

After the baptism, we had a little dinner get together at our house where we all got to visit.

That picture reminds me, poor Hannah had a really rough time at the baptism.  When Addison went back into the little room with me to go down into the baptismal font, Hannah suddenly decided that she wanted to be baptized too....like right then and there.  I explained to her that she could be baptized as soon as she was eight, but she wasn't having it.  She cried really hard for quite a while.  It took a lot of soothing to calm her down.  Poor little thing.  Sometimes it's hard being the second child.

After dinner we had cake and sang happy birthday. 

It was such an eventful day that we almost forgot that earlier that week I had refused to let her open the package from her aunt (who is serving a mission in Korea) until her birthday.

 

 

Fortunately, we remembered before she went to bed and got the stickers and journal just in time for her to write about her big day in it.  She wanted her first entry to be a response to her Aunt's letter to her. 



I'm going to have to talk to her about the proper spelling of my maiden name.  ;)

The Twins First Day of Preschool

So I was trying to get caught up with organizing all my pictures from last year in the hopes that I could keep up with blogging a little better this year (I'm still working on September...I think the odds are stacked against me).  I was debating whether to try to catch up or just start fresh, but when I realized that I left off right before the twins first day of preschool I decided I had to do at least a little bit of catch up.

So here it is, the twin's first day of preschool:

As I mentioned in my other two posts, we had three different start dates for school this year and the poor twins were last.  Once Hannah left, every single day they asked if it was time for them to go to preschool yet.  When the waiting was finally over, they were pretty dang excited.  The older girls were pretty excited for them too.

For the record, I must say that I did not encourage them to wear the same thing that day.  I do my best to not be matchy-matchy with them.  But my mom had gotten them a bunch of different outfits and they both really wanted to wear this one for their first day.  I figured it was their first day and they had the right to wear whatever they wanted, even if that meant they would match.

They certainly didn't seem to mind.

Addison went to school at 8:00 and the twins had to wait a whole nother hour before their school started.  To complicate things a bit, Hannah starts Kindergarten 15 minutes after the twins start preschool.  Fortunately my mom was there so she took care of getting Hannah to school that day so I could get pictures of the twin's classroom.

We headed out a little early to get said pictures.

 They hung up their backpacks on the backpack hooks just outside the classroom door.

When the girls went into the classroom, Miss Renee (by Maya) and Miss Abrea (by Lilly) greeted them, and told them to find the bus with their name on it and put it up on the door.

I have to interject here, the way Lilly's pants are happens ALL THE TIME!  I have no idea how.  I haven't figured if she pulls them up or one just hikes up somehow.  It seriously cracks me up though.  I love it!

At the open house they were pretty excited when they saw these all-things-a-preschooler-could-possibly-want bins.

They grabbed a pencil and got right to work on their first worksheet.  

And after that I felt a lot like I did dropping off Hannah at her first day of Kindergarten.   Like they were just fine and wondering why the heck I was still there.  So I finally left and took this picture on my way out.

They have been loving preschool ever since.