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!