"Say goodbye to scared Emma and Hello to brave Emma"

Yesterday, this was what Emma told Paul: "Say goodbye to scared Emma and Hello to brave Emma!"

Hooray Emma, we are so proud of you!

The neighbor kids were even all cheering for her from their driveway.  She was just beaming!

Easter Traditions

We are working on making and continuing some family traditions, especially around the holidays.  Check out some of our traditions for Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.

We have some fun ones for Easter as well.  Each day this week we have talked about one of the events of the last week of Jesus Christ's life and made a picture time line.

  

We have put in a request to the Easter Bunny for a Saturday delivery and so we have our hunt for baskets and eggs on Saturday mornings. 

Then our neighborhood has a wonderful egg hunt and pot luck breakfast down the street.  This year the Easter Bunny himself made an appearance!

We save Easter Sunday for our celebrations of the true meaning of Easter.  This afternoon, we watched two videos "He is Risen" from Living Scriptures, and "The Testaments" which is produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints.  We then had our traditional "Resurrection Eggs" hunt.  The children are blindfolded (3 days of darkness in the Americas) and taken to various parts of the house.  They must then find their way to "Bountiful" (the family room) while overcoming obstacles and destruction (overturned chairs etc) that happened at Jesus' death.  As they make their way to Bountiful, they must also find the 12 eggs and bring them with them.  We then take turns opening the eggs in order and discussing the symbolism.

After dinner we then made "Resurrection Rolls" which the kids love and ask about every year. 

As a final Easter gift, inspired by this talk in General Conference, Paul and I presented the kids with large framed prints of a temple to hang in their rooms.

All in all, it was a wonderful day.  Though we had some squables and consequences as on any other day, it turned out to be special and memorable.

Christian's testimony

A few weeks ago, at church, Christian decided to bear his testimony during sacrament meeting.  He began by stating his goal to bear his testimony more often, which we can assume probably means every month.  I always have mixed feelings of pride and trepidation as he walks to the front of the chapel.  We never know what he will say.  From the time Christian was 5 or 6 years old he has borne very thought filled testimonies.  Never once have we heard him bear the typical, predictable testimony.  Never once has he wanted help or suggestions for topics.  With the exception of the time when he was about 6 1/2.  He decided to get up while Paul was changing Emma's diaper and I was in the hall with Jenna.  He said a few words and then looked back at the bishop and said, "Well, I'm gonna need a little help."  Now, he doesn't even want to give us a preview of what he might be thinking about!  Needless to say we have had some humbling revelations of his perspective of our family.
His last testimony he began talking about how our family was working together to get out of debt.  At that point I looked over at Paul and saw that he had sunk down in his seat as low as I had and his face was as purple as mine.  I began to wonder how long it would be before the bishop called us in to discuss our finances. :)  Not that we have any outrageous debt.

As we continued to listen, he then compared our earthly debt with a spiritual debt that we all owe.  The difference being that our spiritual debt cannot be repaid no matter how hard we try.  There are always blessings that accompany our efforts.  He then expressed gratitude for our Savior and closed his testimony.
That week there was a visiting area authority on the stand.  He stood at the end of the meeting to share a few thoughts.  He began by complimenting Christian by name on his wonderful testimony and declared that the prophet couldn't have said it better!  Wow, that's a compliment to remember!

Latest projects

I have completed quite a few projects lately and have many in the works!
Here is a project that I have been working on since January.  I found some dressers and night stands on KSL.com that were just right for the boys' room.  They had remodeled the Marriott in Park City and a man bought the furniture to resell.  They were a golden colored pine and had holes drilled into the top where the T.V.s were mounted, but otherwise good sturdy solid wood pieces.
I sanded and sanded and sanded and sanded....
Then filled holes and dings, and finally painted them.  Three coats of primer paint some distressing and a little stain on the distressed areas (because I knew our two boys would do some distressing of their own) got them looking pretty good.  Then two coats of polyurethane finished them off. 

 Here are the finished dressers.  (Sorry, I never seem to remember to take before pictures.)

If you look closely, you will notice the red one is missing a knob.  I know I painted and finished it but when I went to get them and put them on, one was missing.  I keep waiting for it to show up but I guess I will have to get a new one.  *Sigh*
The boys really like them and it sure beats trying to cram all of their clothes into one dresser!  I figure I spent about a third of what I would have spent to buy them at a furniture store and I got to choose the style and color I wanted.

Arabic to French to English

A couple of days ago Jenna was playing with the computer and managed to somehow translate my blog into Arabic.  I could not figure out what to do because not only did I not even recognize the alphabet but it seemed to be reading and writing right to left and possibly bottom to top.  I couldn't even find the settings button let alone figure out how to translate everything back.  I finally posted a question on the Blogger help page and a kind person counted and wrote down how many buttons over and how many languages down on the drop down list.  Unfortunately, the drop down list is in alphabetical order and in Arabic, evidently English doesn't start with E!  Through trial and error I was finally able to get it translated into French and with my little knowledge of French and my knowledge of Spanish I was able to finally get everything back to English!
What I can't figure out was how she managed to translate it so thoroughly that I had to change it on the dashboard as well as in the settings!  Who knew my 3 year old was more tech-savvy than I am?