Hiking, hunting, and hallelujah

Hiking: The morning started with the drive out to Gold Canyon to try out a new hike. It was a wonderful time, a bit longer than we anticipated but well worth it. We may have some sore legs tomorrow but that may just be because we are a little out of shape. There were so many photo opps and I took advantage of almost all of them but I did select a few of my favorites to share.
Hunting: Here a a few pictures of our Easter egg hunt we had this afternoon. After we did some much needed yard work we hid some easter eggs and special treats for the kids. I am not sure if there will be an age when they will outgrow the easter egg hunts, but they all were eager to look for their treats.
Hallelujah: We actually have a family picture of us all dressed up and ready for church. We went to the 4:30 service being offered at our church, it was one of nine services this weekend and it was fantastic! I am so thankful to know Jesus and celebrate the fact that He is Risen!
We hope your family will have a very special Easter!

It's been a Good Friday..

today. Yes, it's Good Friday. I've always wondered why we call this day "GOOD Friday." Don't get me wrong, I understand the good that came from the death of Jesus but to think of my Jesus being beaten, spit upon, insulted, and eventually dying the worse death ever in the history of mankind, I have a hard time with calling it "good." Seems like it should be called dark Friday or sad Friday. But I know that Sunday is coming and we will celebrate the best day of all, the day our Savior was raised from the dead! Halleluhua! Praise His name!
Our family has a tradition of hiking on good Friday. We have done it the past several years and it is always a great teaching opportunity to tie into the Easter story. But we postponed our hike until tomorrow since we are doing a longer hike than usual and didn't want to rush home this morning to get Michael off to work. So we are all really looking forward to it, I will post about that tomorrow. So this morning we decided to dye Easter eggs and we had a great time.











After our Easter eggs were complete we spent some time working on a homeschool science project. We just finished our science unit on the solar system. We have been studying the solar system since August and man have we learned a lot! So our big project is to create a replica of the international space station. Anna finished hers but Jadon being the detail oriented kid he is will be working on his for quite some time. It looks awesome so far though, I can't wait to see the finished product. So here is a picture of the picture they are working off of and here is Anna's international space station.


Miss Anna decided to have a tea party today so since the camera was out, I snapped some pictures from that as well. I love her imagination, she sat out on the patio for a good 30 minutes having fun!




I can't leave this post withhout talking about Spike and the trouble he has caused lately. This is one of his not so finest moments. Jadon was holding him in our room and he jumped onto our window screen and found his way in between the screen and the window and then puffed himself up so we couldn't get him out. I am sure he was laughing at us but we are smarter than him and with a little team work between Michael and Jadon, Spike was removed and placed back in his cage right where he belongs. I won't even mention how we had to remove the baseboard and piece of wood from underneath the bathroom vanity after Spike found his way underneath it. I guess I just mentioned it so why not explain it further. It was my idea to let Spike have his run around time in the bathroom. There was no way for him to escape (or so I thought) and would give him some freedom to run around. Well, he found about a 1/2 inch space between the bottom of the vanity and the baseboard and crawled up and over and ended up beneath the vanity. The only way to get him out was to remove the baseboard and saw a piece of the wood that holds it to the ground so we could reach in and grab him. Of course Jadon was so concerned about Spike but he once again was placed back in his cage WHERE HE BELONGS. Someday we will come up with a creative way of letting him run around without having to remodel our house.


So that sums up our Good Friday, tomorrow we look forward to our hike and an Easter Egg hunt followed by church tomorro evening. Sunday we will have a relaxing moring at home and then have a family gathering to celebrate Easter. Happy Easter everyone!

Michael took the kids on a drive...

...While I got a few hours at home by myself. I would say one of my most favorite things is to be home alone in my house. I start to get bored after a few hours but there is just something to be said about peace and quiet with no distractions. So last Sunday, Michael took the kids to see the beautiful spring wildflowers and then they ended up in Superior. They took my camera along and took these pretty pictures.



We decided to do some spring cleaning in our backyard and maybe bit off more than we could chew but we persevered and won the battle with the cat claw. Everyone got in on the action. We had SO MUCH catclaw to remove. Our neighbors are adding two more bricks to the fence we share so we (along with our neighbors) decided to take the catclaw down. It starts on our side and then flows over onto their side. I have never been a fan of it, it takes a few feet away from our backyard space and I don't find it very pleasing to the eye. I like more of a clean look myself. So after two days of really hard work, the task is complete except for the fact that we need to power wash the brick wall and figure out how to get all of this

into our green barrell. Of course it will take several weeks to get it all in there but it will get done.

And while I had my camera out, I couldn't help but take a picture of these pretty bushes. I just love it when they have pretty purple flowers in bloom.

Then today the kids were plalying outside so I decided to grab my camera and capture a few pictures of the kids. But Anna was the only one to pose, the boys were too fast and too busy to stop for a picture. These pics are keepers, I love the black and white one. Why is the black and white picture so big you ask, well I am trying to figure out how to get my pictures to be bigger on my blog. I have done a little research and so far I have only figured out how to do it with vertical pictures, the horizontal ones won't work unless I change my entire blog layout which I am not willing to do right now. I still need to fiddle with this some more because it is too skinny. Oh well, I will keep working on it.



Well, it is 7:15 on a Saturday night. The kids are still playing outside. I just love their imaginations. I hear them saying things like, "put your spacesuits on" and "your turn to pilot" and then Camden says "An orphan gave this to me, here you take it!" Alrighty then, I guess they all understand each other cause that orphan comment sort of threw me off a bit. My darlings sure make me giggle. Michael is watching TV, I am blogging and couting down the minutes to bedtime because I am really tired tonight and ready to climb into bed and go night night.

Mini golf

Today Michael and I spent some special time with just the boys. They had each earned a mini golf game in homeschool this past semester for completing a master reader program (Jadon) and a spelling program (Camden). We were finally able to reward them today and we had a great time. Anna had just as much fun even though she was not with us, she got to have one of her favorite people over to hang out with her. Heather is 14 years old and has babysat Anna for a long time now. Anna made a list of things she wanted to do with Heather today. Her list included: 1. Playing the Wii 2. Going to the playground 3. Jumping on Heather's trampoline 4. Playing games.
I can say that Heather is amazing because they did everything on Anna's list. And as far as mini golfing with the boys, I think you can tell from the pictures, we had a great time too!