March and April

 We have had a pretty busy Spring so far!    I'll try to recap as best I can.

The kids had Spring Break in March and we really didn't plan much.  But one day I decided to take them all to see Raya and the Last Dragon at the theater!  They all had fun and it was a pretty cute movie.  

Mia loves makeup.  I think it won't be long before she's better at putting it on than I am.

I was making lunch for us and they wanted me to take their picture.

Look at that cute little face!

My family in the Idaho Falls/Rexburg area decided to start doing a science day once a month!  This experiment was to simulate clouds getting heavy with rain.  My kids loved it!  I hosted for the month of April and I set the bar a little lower.  We got dry-erase marker drawings to float on water and then made ice cream in ziploc bags!  Both super easy and fun.  It's pretty much just an excuse for everyone to get together and have fun!

My mom hatched some chicks!  These chicks were only about an hour old.  My kids love seeing all the stuff at her house!  She has chickens, bees, and a ginormous greenhouse that uses geothermal heating!

Asher is seriously an amazing brother.  Most of the time.  He loves to read to the girls and help put them to bed.  The other night for dinner I had salad on the table that had some spinach leaves in it.  Ava said it was gross and Asher took it upon himself to get her to eat a whole bunch of them!  All three of my kids probably ate 15 spinach leaves each (which if you know my kids, it's pretty amazing!)  Asher is a pretty good kid.

Brian, Brittany, Henry, and Eli came to visit!  We did lots of stuff and the kids all played a ton and it was lots of fun!  On Sunday, we went to church, dyed Easter eggs, and did an Easter egg hunt at the park near our house!  There was a lot of Hungry Hippos, Legos, and Transformers that got played with.

On Monday we went to a trampoline park and a kids art museum!  I did my best to stay out of the foam pits because they were SOOOO hard to get out of!

This is how all of the pictures of my kids turn out.  One of them will be looking at the camera and the other two get distracted or making a weird face.

The other Clay fam!

This place was made for Ava.  Lots of running and jumping and playing!

Spiderman pose!

At the Artitorium!  Mia loved the butterfly wings!

And so did Ava!

Henry and Asher playing with Legos.

This picture kind of cracks me up. ;)

You're obligated to take pictures with these when you see them, right?

When we were all Wal-Mart one day we saw this Tesla.  Asher was SUPER impressed!

The Friday after Brian and Brittany left and the day before General Conference weekend, Asher woke up puking.  My kids haven't been sick for about the last year (yay for masks and everyone washing their hands more!) so I thought maybe it was food poisoning.  He didn't have a fever or chills or anything else, just lots and lots of puking.  I kept him home from school and spent lots of time disinfecting everything and washing my hands to try to keep everyone else in the family from getting it.  The next day (Saturday) we watched General Conference!  Asher was feeling a lot better and the kids were all coloring and playing with Legos and doing General Conference Bingo.  After the second session Mia started throwing up.  And then Ava.  I tried to take care of them as best I could so David could watch the Priesthood session, but I started to feel a pain in my stomach and knew it wasn't long before it came for me.  Saturday night was full of so much puke from all three of us.  David and Asher tried to help us as well as they could, but I think only Asher got any kind of restful sleep that night.  Around 5am David started throwing up, but by then the rest of us had mostly got past it.  It was horrible and we all slept through both sessions of Conference on Sunday.  And we missed an Easter egg hunt/dinner with my family that day.  And it took about a week before any of us got our appetites back.  Not one of our better Easters.  

Asher was the only one feeling pretty good on Sunday!

On Sunday I eventually felt well enough to do a little Easter egg hunt in our yard.  Asher kept asking why the Easter Bunny didn't have our baskets out in the morning (um...because she spent all night throwing up...) so he basically figured out that the Easter Bunny isn't real.  So that made me feel guilty.  Also, all the kids were still recovering so they barely touched any Easter candy for the next few days.  But they did have fun looking for eggs!

Looking for eggs!  At 5pm!  In our PJ's!

All we had were Halloween baskets.

But I think they still enjoyed it!

Since we got a nice bit check from the government (Thanks Joe!), we decided to finally put in an egress window.  We didn't have any in the basement and will maybe eventually use this room as Asher's bedroom, so we wanted a window.  Also is raises our house value a ton.  When we took the wood paneling off the wall we found that there was a window there, but they had cemented over it.  No idea why.

Here's the window!  I don't have a picture of the finished product because the wall is still just studs and concrete.  It's too expensive to finish the room right now because the price of wood is so high.  But it's a big step in the right direction!  And it makes that room feel so much better.  

David wanted me to send him a picture of Millie one day (I'm assuming to show his students).  She has been a pretty good dog.  When I do Wal-Mart grocery pickup once a week, I always have 4 or 5 associates around my car because they all love petting her and giving her cookies.  She gets very excited when I say we're going to get groceries!

We decided that money was burning too big of a hole in our pockets so we also had people come and take down our big pine trees!  We had two 60 ft pine trees on our tiny lot, right next to ours and our neighbors houses, and the back one was right next to the power line.  This is the first tree!  They stopped for about 2 hours because it started snowing and blowing, but got it done the first day and then came back the second day to get the other tree!

                                            Our house the day we moved in!

This is after the first tree was cut!  I haven't taken a picture of what it look like now that the other tree is gone.  We hated those trees because it made it so hard for the grass to grow and they dropped sap everywhere and every time there was a big windstorm I was afraid they would fall on our house.  So now we have to research nice little trees to put in our yard instead!  They still have to come grind the stumps, but our yard already feels so much bigger.  We had them leave the cut up trunk so we could split them and use them for firewood.  They're too green to split right now so we moved them to the corners of the yard until the fall when they'll hopefully be ready.  I have really not loved having strange men and lots of really loud noise and all sorts of chaos with these house projects, but it feel much nicer to have them done!  Getting the window and taking out the trees have been on our list since we bought the place.  Now on to the next project! 

Things To Remember

 There are some things I just want to remember so I need to write them down!

Mia

• Loves makeup and princesses.  She always wants me to put makeup on her if she sees me putting it on.  She will also try to find my makeup and put it on herself.  She has a toy crown she always wears and would wear her Aurora dress every day if I let her.  But she HATES when I do her hair!  She will (usually) let me brush it but nothing else.  She doesn't even like it when I put her hair behind her ears.
• If she thinks I'm not paying enough attention to her she'll yell at the top of her lungs "MOM, SEE ME!!!"  I always feel very chastised after this and make sure I give her my full attention.  
• When she gets excited about something she'll throw her fist in the air and yell "YAY!"  Even if it's something like she got her shoes on first.  It makes me smile every time. 
• She has gotten so giggly.  She loves to tell me things that she thinks are silly and then giggles about it.  It is pretty adorable.
• Has picked up on a couple of phrases that I use a lot, including "Oh geez!" 
  

Ava

• This girl gives me the most laughs!  She is so hilarious and quirky.  She loves to wear her snow boots and Asher's bike helmet.  When she plays Mario Kart with Asher she likes to yell things like "I'm gonna get you!" and "Hey, get back here!"  If Asher crashes she'll say "Asher, are you ok?" and if she crashes she'll say "Eba (that's how she pronounces her name), are you ok?  Asher, say that!"  It makes me laugh so hard.
• She has become Asher's little buddy.  She wants to do everything he does, which you  think would annoy him but he loves it!  She loves to watch him play video games and wrestle with him and play his pretend games.  She also loves to copy whatever he says while they're playing their pretend games.
• Still giggles at just about everything.  I'm glad that hasn't changed! She also loves to have people chase her and that's how I get her in a good mood most of the time.
  

Asher

• He is such a good brother.  When Ava and he play Mario Kart, he'll let Mia pick his character and car so that she feels included.  That means he ends up playing as some kind of princess, but he never complains about it!  Mia is happy that she gets to watch her princess race, Ava loves playing the game, and Asher likes to keep his sisters happy.  He spends half his day doing everything to make the girls laugh and play with them, and the other half doing everything he can to drive them insane.  Pretty standard brother-ing, if you ask me. 
• Loves reading!  He is pretty good at it too.  He usually reads a few verses when we read scriptures and does well with them!  Some of the books we have read recently are Dog Man, Magic Treehouse, How To Train Your Dragon, and (of course) Captain Underpants.  I'm pretty sure Captain Underpants is standard reading for all 2nd grade boys.
  

Lots of Pictures

Wow, it's been a minute since I've written.  There are so many things I want to remember, but there are also so many things going on that keep me busy!  So I'm going to write things down as best I can. 

 

Christmas church day!  I actually really enjoyed this Sacrament Meeting.  David and I did a musical number, but I didn't have to direct the choir in any songs! (thank you Covid...I guess?  I don't really love being choir director - I'm more of a behind the scenes type person)  But look how cute these girlies are!

Mia sometimes has trouble giving me a natural smile for the camera.  But I thought this one actually turned out pretty cute!

Ava does not have trouble smiling for the camera.  She has the opposite problem where she goes super cheesy.  But this was also a pretty cute picture!

I love my little babies!

I appreciate very much that Asher will actually give me a good smile almost every time I take a picture!

Decorating sugar cookies on Christmas Eve!  Someday I'll think ahead and make the cookies the day before to cut down a little on the craziness.  I love this tradition mainly because I love baking with my kids.  It was a semi-late night for me after this, but all totally worth it!

It's hard to get them all to smile and look at me on Christmas morning.  But they were all so excited!  Our Christmas is nothing to brag about, but it's fun and the kids all had a great time.

Seriously, so hard to get them to smile.

Mia has worn this dress about 75 times since Christmas.  It was a good purchase, IMO, as it was a clearance dress at Wal-Mart for $4.  It's the dress Anna wears at the end of Frozen 2.  And has a cape.  And Mia loves it.

Our house was a mess for a few days...

A few days after Christmas my mom had all the grand-kids come to her house for an art project!  They were painting gnomes.  Kind of.  Asher wanted to make his gnomes into different characters like Pikachu and a Minecraft Zombie and the girls just wanted to cover their pages in as much paint as they could.  But everyone had fun!  This was my mom giving instructions.

Having fun painting!

Cute little boy.

After the art project my mom pulled sleds behind her 4-wheeler!  And Mia got a little ride in front.  I love this picture. ;)

Millie is a spoiled dog.  She hates sleeping on the floor and waits for any opportunity to jump on the couch.

One of David's private cello students made these for my girls for Christmas!  They are so cute and I know were a ton of work to make!  They have been played with plenty.

She also made Asher these cute Star Wars figures.

One trip we took during the break was to Utah.  But for some reason my family is now allergic to Utah because the last 2 trips we have taken there have ended with us leaving early because somebody is puking.  And as soon as we get in the car to go home they stop.  This time it was Mia.  Since we came home early from the trip, I told Asher we would go to a trampoline park as long as no one threw up.  No one threw up so we went!  Asher was in heaven!  That is one of his favorite places to go!

The girls were old enough this time to enjoy the whole thing.  They had a blast!

This place was made for Ava.  Lots of things to do and places to explore!

We were all exhausted by the time we got home.

New Years Eve!  We have kind of made a tradition of getting party supplies and glow sticks from the dollar store and having a dance party.  Which we do at 7:00 because I still want my kids to go to bed.  Asher doesn't know yet that staying up until midnight is a thing, and I'm not sure I'm going to be the one to break it to him.  But we have so much fun anyways!

Party time!  David doesn't like this picture because he thinks he look mad.  But he had that face in all the pictures....so...I guess it's hard to smile when you're blowing on a noise maker!

They love the glow sticks!

On New Years Day I took the kids sledding and they had a blast!  We went to an elementary school near us and there was hardly anyone there.  We came back a couple days later too. 

Asher by far liked sledding the most!  The girls liked walking around playing in the snow or on the playground, and Millie liked chasing everyone.

Good start to our new year!

They are ridiculous.

All year Asher has been in school 4 days a week and does Friday online school.  We both hate it.  Remote learning really strains our relationship.  But the girls think it's great and will usually sit right next to him the whole time he's doing anything on the Chromebook!  I bribe Asher with snacks to get him through homework.  But starting next week they will be full time, 5 days a week!

Since I moved them into this room and their bed are completely separated, I don't usually see this anymore.  It was very sweet to find them like this one night!

I'm convinced Millie is the most patient dog in the world.  My girls have never been easy on her but she still lets them do whatever they want around her.

I was a little worried that as Ava grew up she would lose a little of her spunky spark.  That has not proved to be the case, and I love it!  One morning when we were taking Asher to school she insisted on wearing this in the car.  And in the gas station after we dropped Asher off.  ;)

There is a ballet show on Netflix that Mia loves to watch and sometimes after watching it she wants to watch real ballet.  This time she wanted to put shoes on like the ballerinas and yelled out "I need to get my slippers!" and Ava yelled out "I need to get my snow boots!"  Mia is such a princess and Ava is such a quirky child and I'm legit going to be sad when I don't get to spend as much time with them!

They love the snow.  Ava wanted to bury herself.

Asher wanted to show the girls a big snow hill at his school so one weekend we went and played on the playground and in the snow.  They are definitely Idaho children and don't mind the cold!

Slides are Ava's absolute favorite thing.

At the top of the hill!

I was getting the girls ready for a bath and couldn't find Mia.  She came out looking like this and said she was hiding under her bed putting on makeup.  I had to hide my lipstick and nail polish because she kept opening them and trying to put them on.  I need to hide my makeup better I guess.  

Asher trying out his cousins hoverboard go cart thing!  He was very nervous about trying it (he has a hard time with new things) but he did and I was so proud of him!