I forgot.....

I was looking at my sis-in-law's blog yesterday and she was "finally" updating her blog with their Easter pictures, and it made me realize, I forgot to put up our Easter pictures!! :)

We had a super fun Easter this year. The Friday before Easter, Chad's Dad and his wife invited us down to their house to have dinner and dye Easter eggs. This was the first experience the girls have ever had in dying eggs (I know, I am an awesome mom!) Anyhoo, they absolutely LOVED it!!

On Saturday we went to my parents annual Easter egg hunt. It is so much fun to see how excited the kids get when they have SO much anticipation built up in them. The hunt didn't last too long, but they played with the empty eggs for HOURS! Who knew that there were so many games that could be played with garbage :)

As you can see, Chad is TOTALLY into the Easter egg hunt :)

On Sunday we were able to just relax and enjoy the day. Of course, the Easter bunny had come, so the girls were entertained by their new books and stuff. And, church was actually pleasant.... Surprisingly!!! Usually I hardly hear any of what is being said because I am shushing 5 little girls:) Overall it was a wonderful weekend!! I hope all of your Easter weekends were great!!

Our New Addition

For those of you who don't know, Chad has been working up in Morgan County for quite awhile now, and he will continue to work up there or at Hill Air Force Base for a really long time. The reason that this is such a big deal is because he drives our Expedition to and from work every day costing us anywhere from $400-$500 a MONTH in gas! Quite frankly it has been putting a big dent in our income. So, we decided to invest in a car. We ended up buying a 2006 Honda Accord Coupe, 30,000 miles, and we got it for an AMAZING price. I know, I know....we only have 2 drivers in our little family and now we have 3 cars. BUT, we own our Expedition, so we really didn't want to get rid of it, plus, Chad will still need to use it occasionally to tow the trailer for work. So, we are hoping that this will be a good investment for us. It is kind of weird driving such a small car after driving something big/bigger for the last 6-7 years :) Here is a picture of our new little car :) You can't really tell in this picture, but it is a bluish/gray color.

I'm terrible at this!

I am really bad at this whole blogging thing. I am lucky if I blog maybe once every couple of months. So, since it has been awhile alot has been going on, and I think it will take way to long to write about all of it, so, I decided that I would just post a whole bunch of pictures of some of the fun things that we have been up to.

This picture was actually taken this morning. I forgot that Easter was over conference, so I was planning on giving these dresses to the girls from the Easter Bunny, but oh well. Nevermind the fact that McKinzley is all red-faced because she had just thrown a fit like a 2 year old, Oaklee looks like she has to go to the bathroom, and Brexlyn eyes are closed. I guess it is just real life :)

These next few pictures are just some random pictures:





For McKinzley's birthday we were going to go to Pirate's Island, but it didn't turn out to be what we thought it was. So we headed on over to Chucky Cheese and had a blast!












For Oaklee's birthday she decided that she wanted to go to the dinosaur museum. They had SO much fun playing in the water/sand and digging for the dinosaur bones. If it wasn't so expensive, I might think about getting a year pass. That place can entertain them for hours!

I hope you enjoyed the pictures. I would like to say that I will update my blog more often, but then I would be lying :)

SURPRISE!!!!!!

Everyone knows how life gets crazy sometimes, and for the past year that is all that mine and Chad's life has been, CRAZY!! So I decided that I wanted to do something special for Chad. I started planning about 5 months ago to take him on a trip to San Diego. There wasn't any specific reason why I chose San Diego, I was just thinking that it was close enough, but far enough away, warm, and had lots of fun things that we could do. So I started planning. First, I found out when my girls and my mom would be off track and asked her to watch my girls. Then as the months went by I slowly took a little money out of each pay check so that I could pay for the trip without Chad noticing anything (it helps that I am the one that does the finances :) ). I got the hotel, flight, car rental and everything set up. So, it was mostly a waiting game for me, which was UNBELIEVABLY hard!! My biggest thing was that I wanted it to be a surprise for Chad, so I didn't tell hardly anyone about it because I didn't want it to get back to him. I also had to set up the story so that I could make my plan work. My mom has to write down things in her planner or she will plan stuff over it, which makes sense. The only problem was that she keeps her planner out on the counter where everyone can see it so we know what is going on. Obviously this wouldn't work if there was a whole weekend where it said she was watching my kids. So, I had her put that my dad was going on a business trip that weekend. This actually helped me out because our suitcase was in storage, so I had my dad ask us, when Chad was around, if he could borrow one of our suitcases. Perfect! So I was able to go down and get the suitcase without any questions being asked. I cleared everything through Chad's boss, and then I just waited.

The night before we left I told Chad that I had cleared it through his boss, and that we were taking the next day and spending the whole day together. I told him that we just had to drop my dad off at the airport so that we could take my parents car so that my mom could have our van just in case she needed to go somewhere. I said that we had from 6:00am until midnight to do whatever we wanted to. He was pretty excited. The whole time I was just laughing inside. ha ha ha. So, the next morning we got up early to take my dad to the airport. ( I had packed our suitcase the day before and put it up in my parents room. I bought all new shampoo, toothbrushes, deoderant etc. so that he wouldn't notice that anything was missing). So we get to the airport and my dad pulls up to the curb and gets out, and I get out and Chad gets out. Chad pulls the suitcase out of the trunk and my dad says "Well, you guys have a fun time!" And gets back in the car and starts to drive away. At this point Chad is like "What??" And he looks over at me and I am like "Come on, we are going on a trip!!!" He was SO confused!! It was probably one of the best parts of the trip for me. All of my planning had paid off and he was COMPLETELY surprised! The next half hour he just kept laughing. He couldn't believe it :) Unfortunately for him since I had been holding all of this information in for 5 months he had to listen to me blabber about everything that had got us to that point :) One exciting thing that happened at the airport, I went through the full body scanner, and they thought that I was hiding something in my pants pocket, so I had to step aside and have someone come and frisk me and ask me questions like "Whats in your pocket?" I told them it was nothing, just my pocket, but they didn't seem to believe me. So I had to turn my pockets inside-out to show them. I felt like a criminal.

So, we got to San Diego at about 9:30am and we decided to go to the San Diego Zoo. I had decided before we went that I wasn't going to plan anything specific and we would just do whatever we felt like. We ended up going to the zoo, Sea World, Wild Animal Park, the beach, a bunch of little shops and much, much more. It was SO much fun to be together and forget our worries for a couple of days. I definitely feel rejuventated!

So as a recap, my plan worked and we had an AMAZING time!!! I love my husband!!!

A Goal I Want To Stick With

Even though it is February now, I have been thinking about goals that I not only want to accomplish this year, but goals that I want to make a part of me. I want them to become habits for me. The most important one to me can be summed up in the following words to this song:

"Have I done any good in the world today? Have I helped anyone in need? Have I cheered up the sad and made someone feel glad? If not, I have failed indeed. Has anyone's burden been lighter today because I was willing to share? Have the sick and the weary been helped on their way? When they needed my help was I there?"

I would really like to be able to say "YES!" to all of the questions in this song. And that is my goal for the year. I have heard of people that pray every day to know one person that they can help that day, and then they do it. I really want to try this, and I am hoping that it will make me a better person, and improve the relationships that I have in my life with friends and family.

The New Year

I tend to not make New Years resolutions, but this year I decided that I wanted to. One of the goals that I set for myself was to be more organized and to not procrastinate things. Well, we are half-way through January and I still haven't blogged about Christmas. I'm off to a GREAT start!!! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday!!

P.S. If you want to see our pictures of Christmas, I put them on Facebook. It is just so much easier and faster then putting them on here :)