Aunt Mari's new water slide

We hooked the slide up to the water heater so it was nice warm water and everyone had a blast!

Carter doesn't like the water spraying in his face so he spent most of his time on the side.

Long Beach Aquarium

While in California we went to the Aquarium. It is such a great place where you can see lots of cool fish (the jelly fish are my favorite).

Sara surfing, Carter the seal

Hanna surfing, Allie the seal

All the kids by the shark tank

Hanna feeding the birds. They sell little cups of nectar. Hanna is the only one I got a picture of with the bird eating from her, but all the kids walked around for half an hour trying to feed the birds. (It was a busy day at the aquarium and I don't think the birds were very hungery by the time we got there). Grandma Carter is a bird whisperer and the birds flocked to her.

Petting the sting rays!

California Beach House

We spent a week at a beach house. It was right on the beach and we had so much fun building sand castles, burying each other, and playing in the ocean. It was a great vacation!

Allie's Birthday - May 30th

Allie had her birthday while we were in California at the beach house so we had a party there. This is the cake image that she picked out in Cedar and we carefully packed to California, but then it wouldn't come off of the paper to go onto the cake and I put it in the microwave to try to help it along and burned Giselle's face. OOPS!

A new princess/fairy dress to go with the other 20 we have at home. She is in heaven!

New sparkle princess shoes (are you sensing a theme here?)

Happy with her make-shift cake!

Sara's Birthday May 16th

Sara had a water balloon party and it worked out that the day of her party was about the only day in May with good enough weather for an outside water party.
She invited a bunch of friends from her class at school (most of them boys) so I was too busy to take very many pictures.

Carter's Birthday May 5th

Making the cake!

"Lightning McQueen" ... of course

Lots of new trucks, tractors, motorcycles, and cars

Happy with a sucker

Family Home Evening - The Garden

We decided to get our garden ready for family home evening last week, but...I didn't get a chance in the day to go to home depot so we took the whole family.

It was all fun and games when we first arrived...

...but by the time we were done, everyone was tired.

In the end everyone had a great time!

Slideshow

Three Girls

How could it be that we have three girls - only three and a half years apart and they are all so different. I remember in college discussing nature versus nurture and kind of having an attitude of "who cares" but, now that I have these three I am really interested.

I noticed from a very early age that I was not going to be able to treat Sara the same way that I treat Hanna. The parenting techniques I used on Hanna didn't work and I had to keep trying different options.

Hanna is king and caring, organized, compassionate, tender, etc.... Her first word was "mess" and she loves everything in their place. She thinks life should always be fair and she treats everyone fairly.

Sara is fun, spunky, messy, the class clown and a ball of fire. She requires more parenting and pushes her limits. One minute I am so mad at her that I want to scream and the next I am laughing.

Allie is a true princess at heart. She worries about having a bow in her hair that matches her outfit and the perfect shoes. She is always content and blends in to any situation. She has always been happy and makes the best of everything.

So, in the case of my three girls, nature has won and I will do my best to nurture their 3 different personalities into outstanding adults who are all individual and all contribute to society in a variety of ways.

Some visiting my blog may know my friend John Marriott. He went to High school with me and college and was my partner on Acclamation. Last week he was diagnosed with Leukemia. For the past several weeks John had been experiencing excruciating headaches lasting for about 5 minutes… and coming a few times each hour. It was recently determined that he would need a blood test to see if that could help the doctors determine what was causing his headaches. During that series of tests (on March 27th) is when they discovered his rare form of leukemia. By March 31st it had gotten so painful that he was admitted to the Cancer Center at Dixie Regional Medical Center until he was stable enough to be transported to the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the U in Salt Lake City… and where he will now remain for the next 30-45 days. John started his first round of Chemo, and is optimistic that by catching the disease early and employing aggressive chemo and possible radiation treatments he will have great success and beat this. His pain has been tremendous, and although his white count is going up, he feels as if his bones are expanding inside his body. ..although he’s on all sorts of pain medication. It was determined with 100% surety that he has “APL Leukemia” which is less common, but in most cases more treatable. I just wanted to put this one post for those who don't already know, if you would like me to forward information as I receive it please leave me a comment with your email address. Please keep him in your thought and prayers. There is a site set up for him giving updates on his condition at http://johnmarriott.bravehost.com

Future Rock Star?

I have to write this funny conversation that took place between Carter and Allie last night.

Allie - Carter, when you grow up you should be a truck driver
Carter - No, when I grow up I'm going to play the guitar
Allie - Oh, yeah you should be a guitar player
Carter - No, I won't be a guitar player, I will be Hanna Montana (for those of you who don't know Hanna Montana is a teen pop star - female- on the Disney channel)

I love the terrible two's. One minute I want to pull my hair out and the next he has me laughing. The other day Carter was over at my sister-in-laws house and she asked him what his favorite kind of sandwich was. He kept saying Apologize and she didn't understand. She finally figured out that he was talking about his favorite song, not his favorite sandwich. "Its too late to apologize" is his favorite song, not twinkle little star or itsy, bitsy spider. Its a pop song by -one republic- that is on the radio all the time.

Easter

We spent a night down in Zion with the whole Melling family. It was a blast. Swimming, a great sandbox, the river, lots of cousins, and of couse riding down the grassy hill in the Tonka dumptrucks.

Easter morning looking for eggs



Back down in Zion (I don't always get my pictures in order) The huge family Easter egg hunt. (Even the 20 year old grandkids love to participate).



A fun game - Human Foosball - you need lots of people to play so it works great for our family

Sara was the only one who wanted to go down as many times as Carter and she wanted to go as fast as possible.


Swimming with the cousins


Exhausted after a long, hard day

Hanna got hit by a confetti egg. (Ok, lets be honest - she cracked it on her own head) 8 is such a fun age.