April 2011

April seemed to be over in a flash this year.  General Conference was amazing.  I still have a few talks floating in my head. Two of my favorites were the talks by Elder Scott and Elder Robbins.  What an uplifting and fulfilling weekend!

My little ladies, or probably just Reagan, decided to try their hand at mascara.  Quite honestly, I was impressed at how well Reagan applied it to Ainsley AND herself. 

 This is the best picture I could get showing the mascara. 

Next we had a visit from Grandma Darrington. We are always up for any visitors and especially Grandparent visits. Grandma worked on our dreaded rock landscaping for several hours and also helped me start on recovering my kitchen stools.  The girls had just received their dance costumes so they were able to put on a fashion show for Grandma. 

 Will did NOT want to be left out.  It is funny because it didn't bother me at all to put this on him so he would be happy but I think Grandma wasn't so sure.  Even better was a few days later when Marcus was watching Will and Will kept grabbing the bee costume and saying "Mine, Mine."  Marcus said it is time to get some boy dress up clothes.  Poor Will in his house of girls.  It thought he made an adorable Bee! he he

 We decided to go to MOA and the Aquarium place they have their.  It was cool... the whole 10 minutes it lasted.  Probably not something we will do again.  It is fun to walk around the MOA.

Easter 2011

Will was all about tasting the dye.  I figured he would stop after one taste but apparently he likes vinegar? Yuck!

 Coloring eggs is always a little stress full.  I do love it though.  The kids had a great time.

I also found a recipe online for vibrant egg colors and it worked like magic!  The eggs in the bottom of Ainsley's bowl are from that recipe.  My mom loves vibrant eggs and when I was a kid she would leave the eggs in the dye for hours trying to get the deepest colors. 

 This is Will saying "cheese".  You can almost hear it when you look at the picture.  Cracks me up.

This spring also brought the reality that our family had finally outgrown our inherited metal swing set (from our house in Indiana).  All three kids would be on the swings and the poor thing looked like it would break in two.  I was hoping it would last one more summer but nope.  So I started looking online, than at Craigslist, and finally at plans to build our own.  I happened to see one online late one evening (as I was looking for ideas on how to build our own) and then woke up the next morning and called.  This set was super cheap (first bonus), they disassembled it (second plus), and delivered it (are you kidding me!).  We were thrilled.  We also ended up with a trampoline out of the transaction. 

The set isn't super fancy but just what we were looking for.  We are hoping to build off of it a little bit.  Add our own flare.  For now I am thrilled to have something the kids can safely play on and especially happy that it has a glider (Ainsley's favorite from the last set). 

Easter weekend, setting up the new swing set.

 Reagan was super excited and had to try it out the moment we got a swing put up.

After church on Sunday we had a little Easter egg hunt in the yard.  We haven't done this in the past but it was so nice to hang out as a family, outside, doing something fun.  Holidays in Minnesota are always a huge reminder to us that we are far from family so this helped take some of the sting away.

 We also had a family in the ward over for dinner and another family joined us for dessert and brought a cool cake bunny.  The kids had a great day!  Happy Easter.