Rainbow

Dylan and Sadie were sooo excited to see this rainbow. I took a picture of it with them and their friend H.B.

Dylan is so weird.

Disagreement

Ben took a picture of these "clouds" in the sky the other day. I told him that they were leftover jet plumes from planes, not clouds. He insisted that they were clouds. What do you think?

Handy Gramps

Look what my cute gramps made for me:

He also made one for Mom and Nat. He came up a few weeks ago from St. George, where he winters. He drove up during that blizzard that put six inches of snow on the ground, and then he blew a tire in the middle of it. He didn't have a cell phone, and two Hispanic guys stopped to help him put the spare on. When he told me this story, I said, "Welcome back to Idaho!!!"

I came home from work later that week, and here this was, on my front stoop. He is so stinkin' cute.

I'm a bad granddaughter. I've been wanting to have him over for dinner, but I have been soooooo busy with work, and then I got soooooo sick. But I'm going to invite him over for this weekend. Mom invited him over to her house for our big Easter celebration, but he declined. (I think my and Nat's kids stress him out. They really are loud. But you know, they're kids.) So maybe a quick dinner at my house will be okay and not stress him out. :)

Work Easter Party

My dad's office, where I've been working part-time, had an Easter party after work the Friday before Easter. We tried our best to get there in time, but we were like twenty minutes late, and the egg hunt was over by then. I felt so badly - Dylan was crushed. The gal that was in charge of the party said that there were some more eggs hidden inside the conference room, and she let Dylan and Sadie get a head start in there, which was really sweet:

So the kids got a few eggs that way. And then one of the accountants hurried and hid some more eggs outside just for Dylan and Sadie. That made them happy:

Then there were refreshments in the conference room for everyone. Nat and Brock:

Jake:

Dad and Micah:

Dylan:

They also had someone's pet rabbit there, which was cool. That was one huge rabbit:

Hurt Feelings

My brother-in-law, Pete, loves this show called Flight of the Conchords. He is forever coaxing us to sit in front of his computer and watch snippets of it. The ones I've seen are really hilarious. My sister, Lex, is also a huge fan. These dudes are from New Zealand, I think. And they write and sing really funny songs and perform little skits. I became an instant fan when they did a takeoff on the scene from Footloose, where Kevin Bacon is really pissed and dances by himself in an abandoned train station. Sooooo funny.

Anyways, Pete and Nat's ward had a talent show, and they decided it would be funny to perform a song from Flight of the Conchords. They chose "Hurt Feelings." But they didn't have a version without pre-recorded words. Lex's friend, Mark, has all of these gadgets so that he can record music, right from his apartment. He's really into music. So he and Lex played their guitars, added a synth beat, and recorded it. It sounded so good and really professional.

I went to Nat and Pete's talent show to be their official videographer. :) They did such a good job! This is so stinkin' funny:

Xena, Warrior Princess

Do you recall this lovely little nugget of a show from the nineties?:

I can honestly say I never watched it - can you blame me? It seemed very cheesey. Though I'm jealous that Lucy Lawless's bangs hang so effortlessly straight downward. Sigh. I'm soooo growing these stupid bangs of mine out.

Anywho.

Ben is a MAJOR cat lover. A cat can melt this 6'2", 220-pound man into mush. When he was on his mission in Brazil, he kind of adopted this stray cat. Ew. A stray cat? In Brazil? Can we say "scabies"? He let this cat sleep in his bed. And I think this cat had, like, one eye or something. You get the picture. Anyways, one night, the cat was sleeping near Ben's bumb, and he was petting it, and suddenly, he feels this wetness on his hands. As it turns out, this stray cat had kittens IN BEN'S BED!!! Ewwwww!!! I should ask him sometime what he did with the kittens. I haven't been able to stand even getting past the whole scabies-infected-stray-Brazilian-cat-giving-birth-in-one's-bed thing to ask...

When Ben was jobless, and seemed to be okay being jobless, I was going nutso. So, to motivate Ben to get a job, any job, I told him that, if he got a job, I would let him get a cat. When Ben landed his current job, off he went on a cat search.

I haven't let Ben get a cat yet in our marriage, because 1) Let's face it; my track record for keeping pets is really bad. I hate cleaning up animal poop and barf - I clean up kid poop and barf. And my own poop and barf, as the case has been this week. I don't need to clean some animal's poop and barf. And they ruin stuff. Carpet, shoes, upholstery... the list goes on and on. I just have a hard time with an animal wrecking my stuff. So I have been nervous that I wouldn't be able to handle having a pet again. 2) I've been marginally allergic to cats for most of my life. We had a Persian when I was in high school, and I figured that her dryish hair, instead of her oily hair, made me not sneeze so much. My best friend, Pooh's, mom's cats have always made my eyes go bonkers. So much itching and watering. And so much sneezing. So I've been careful about not touching cats, and if I do, I've always tried to wash my hands afterwards. Still, even with these precautions, I often fled Pooh's mom's house with a wet washcloth covering my eyes. Wet washcloths on one's eyes greatly help when one is having an allergic reaction to a cat. Or a hay fever attack. I get a lot of those, too.

Ben did a lot of searching online for an "allergen-free cat," and it seems that there really isn't such a thing, but what he has read over and over again is that, if you bathe your cat once per week, the allergy-sufferer doesn't, well, suffer as much. He promised to bathe our future kitty once a week, and if I was still not doing well, we could obviously find a new home for her.

We don't have a local Humane Society shelter per se. The local Humane Society "rents" cages in local pet stores for their animals. Ben went to PetSmart to check out the cats, and he fell in love with a little black cat with tortoiseshell markings named Xena:

She was born last summer, and she has been fixed or neutered or whatever the official word for cats is. She has also been de-clawed, and she is already trained to a litter box. Voila. No hassle for me. No poop cleanup (I make Ben clean out the litter box). No shredding of upholstery or carpet.

And she couldn't be sweeter. We have to actually lock her out of our bedroom at night, because she likes to spend all night sitting on our faces, head-butting us, and massaging our throats with her little paws. When I pick her up, she faces me and puts her little paws around my neck. What a babe. She's so stinkin' CUTE.

And the best part is, she's really sweet with the kids:

That dang Sadie treats Xena like a stuffed animal, and she just sits and takes it. She doesn't push against Sadie with her back claws, she doesn't hiss, and she doesn't struggle. She just lets Sadie cart her around. And then, when she can get away, she walks like three feet away and lies down, and Sadie grabs her and starts the process all over again.

I love this picture. Sadie didn't know I was there to take a picture. This is her actual closed-eyes look of contentment:

Verdict: Xena stays. With her original, fabulous name. :) Ben has bathed her once a week, and so far, so good.

Gorgeous!!!

I have wanted to paint my living room ever since we moved in a year and a half ago. It has been this ugly off-white color. So not me. I'm a color-meister. You may or may not recall that I helped Nat to paint her living room a few weeks ago, and she suggested that we paint my living room the following Saturday, while we were in the painting state of mind. So we did it!!! Here are some pictures of the process. We let Dylan and Sadie pretend they were painting - believe me, after these shots, we shooed them out of the living room for the rest of the day. Sadie:

You can see in the background what a boring color, or lack-of-color, my living room was. You can also see in the background my flat butt. No matter how much I weigh, my butt is as flat as a board. So funny.

Dylan:

Ben had to scrub off some residue from some sticky backing we had used to hang some stuff. I used the word "some" three times in that sentence:

Here am I, doing some trim and exhorting the kids not to touch the paint:

And here is the finished product. SO BEAUTIFUL!! I'm terribly pleased by the result:

Nat, I need to write you an official thank-you note, but for now, thanks a million for helping me, and for kicking my lazy butt into gear to do something I've wanted to do for ages. And Mom, thanks for taking the kids for a few hours.

Now if I could just scrape up the money to get new carpet... I HATE my living room carpet. So ugly. Someday.

The Papaaaa... THE PAPA!!

My dad's birthday was April 3rd, and it was big fun. We all went to Smitty's for dinner, and then to Mom and Dad's for cake and ice cream.

Smitty's is soooo good. Just when I thought I knew everything there is to know about my family, while we were eating, Dad asked Nat and I what we got. We both responded, "Eggs Benedict." Dad said, "I knew that's what you both would get!" 1) I didn't know that Eggs Benny was also Nat's favorite breakfast!! And 2) I didn't know that Dad knew that Eggs Benny was both Nat's and my favorite breakfast. Dad always surprises me with the things he observes about us. Here's the birthday boy at Smitty's with Mom:

Did you notice all of the old people in the restaurant in the background? Smitty's has been an Idaho Falls staple for years and years. When Dad's siblings come back to town to visit, they always have to go to Smitty's. Whenever I go there, it's filled with old folks.

Anyways, like I said, after Smitty's, we went to Mom and Dad's for cake and ice cream. My uncle started this tradition a long time ago of having a candle-blowing contest - you have to be a certain number of paces away from the cake, and you have to try to blow the candles out from that far distance. It's pretty hard. Here's Dad:

Um, it didn't really work out this year. Dad used to be a champion at it, but he couldn't do it from far away this time. Neither could Ben:

Or Pete:

Nat, Mom, and I didn't even attempt it. The kids tried, but obviously couldn't do it:

So... maybe that tradition is now dead? We'll see.


My mom is planning a fifties party for her ward this Friday, and the kids spotted her hula hoops in her back room - she's going to have a hula hoop contest, a bubble-blowing contest, etc. for this party. So the kids (and Nat and me) decided to test her new hula hoops out. I've NEVER been able to hula, but I actually did it this time! Here's a video of Nat and Dylan hula-ing:

Dylan told us that he learned to hula-hoop during P.E. days on Thursdays. Weird! He also told us that they do old Mousercize videos, that old exercise show they used to have on the Disney Channel during the eighties. So weird. Whatever happened to playing kickball, or basketball? Mousercize???

And a slide show of Dad's birthday extravaganza, if you are interested:

Dad, I love you tons! You are such a generous, loving person. Thanks for all you have done for me. And thanks for always being a person to whom I can go to for sound advice.

Oh. And some updates as of today: Ben and Micah got the flu yesterday. I'm letting Micah sleep in this morning, but part of me is wondering if I should check on him... Ben had it all day long, but was able to sleep through the night. He felt good enough to go to work today. Dylan is completely better, so he'll be heading out to school today. Sadie went to school for the first time today. Micah had a big blowout in his diaper yesterday, but besides that, and sleeping an awful lot, he seems to be doing okay. I'm worried about him. Gonna check on him as soon as I'm done here.

And another update - this morning, I opened a chocolate Slim Fast, chugged like five gulps, and realized that it tasted like coffee. Well, it tastes how I imagine coffee tastes, because I've honestly never drunk coffee. So I look at the can, and Ben had bought Cappucino-flavored Slim Fast, thinking it was chocolate. Ewwww! It's so gross, you guys! I still have the nasty aftertaste, even after brushing my teeth and downing a bunch of apple juice! We have eight cans of this stuff, which is worth like eight dollars, but I don't think I can bring myself to drink the rest of it. Maybe Ben can gulp it down and not make it a total waste of money. Ben has lost 20 pounds on Slim Fast in about three months, and I've lost 5 in about a week and a half. Not bad! I was hoping my bout with the flu would lose me another few pounds, but alas, no.

What We've Been Doing for the Last Few Days.

Barfing. And having diarrhea accidents in our underwear. And that's not just the kids. I had my turn last night. ALL NIGHT LONG. It was one of those times when I was begging Heavenly Father to just kill me and put me out of my misery. And I seriously should have sent Ben out for some Depends, because Dang.

It started out with Sadie on Saturday night. One minute, she was great. The next minute, it was like she was hit by a ton of bricks. Barfing Bricks. She barfed every ten minutes, all night long. I stayed up with her, camping on the floor of her bedroom, when I wasn't doing loads and loads of laundry. She still barfed all day Sunday. This picture is from Sunday:

I broke the Sabbath by going to the store to get some Pedialyte, because I was seriously concerned about her becoming dehydrated. She fell asleep on the hardwood floor while waiting for me. I tried to take a pic of her sleeping, but she woke up and stretched right when I was going to snap it. I kept her home from school yesterday (and I kept myself home from work), and she was still looking peaked, but no barf. Xena, our new cat (more on that in a later post), is a good comforter when one is sick:

Then I got it last night while we were at Leo's Place. Again, one minute, I was fine. The next, sicker than a dog. And I struggled with it all night. Today, I'm still very weak, and extremely achey, but no more nausea. And I'm keeping the diarrhea thing in check with tons and tons of Immodium AD. Whoever invented Immodium AD is my hero.

This morning, it was Dylan's turn:

I feel so badly. I wish there was something I could do to make his nausea go away. Does Ipicack work? I seem to remember Mom mentioning that when I was a kid. Or Pepto??

So, don't come near the House of Sickness for a few days. And pray that Micah and Ben don't get it. That will NOT be fun.

I'm in a New Dog State of Mind.

No, don't get worried - it's the name of a song, not my state of mind. :)

Sadie's favorite movie is Garfield, the live action/CGI movie. In it, Jon adopts Odie, and Garfield is angry about it. He makes a retaliatory mess in his house, so Jon kicks him out for the night. Garfield then sings his version of New York State of Mind, which is New Dog State of Mind. It's pretty funny. The kids have seen this movie a million times, and I caught Dylan singing along with the song, so I made him sing along again for this video:

Cute Whitney

One of my Laurels is Whitney, and she is a babe. Love her. Here is her senior picture, which my friend, Megan, did. Megan does such good work:

Whitney sometimes baby-sits my kids, and they love her, too. Her boyfriend, Josh (who I also really like), just bought a little Miniature Maltese puppy, and the two of them brought him over for the kids to see and play with. I attempted to get a close-up:

Here's Sadie holding the puppy, whose name is Buddy:

And Dylan:

Micah was LOVING Josh. He doesn't usually warm up to people so quickly, but he nestled right in and enjoyed Josh immensely. It was soooo cute. Here he is with Josh, playing with the aforementioned Lexapro box:

He was a fan of Josh's hat:

And there's Whitney, on the left:

I'm going to be REALLY sad when Whit takes off for college this fall. She has been so much fun. A good friend. We connected from the first time we met. Love ya, Whit!

Lexapro Reps are the Coolest.

So. At my work, drug reps stop by all the time to drop off samples. My favorite reps are the Lexapro reps. Sometimes they bring Jamba juice, or peanut M&M's, or really expensive, nice water in glass bottles. A couple of weeks ago, they brought a couple of boxes of tongue depressers. We obviously don't use tongue depressers in psychiatry, so I brought them home for the kids to play with. The boxes had magnetic lids, so when you shut them, they didn't pop open when the kids carried them around, which was a plus for the kids. And the tongue depressers... well, HOURS of fun. At one point, Dylan was making pictures on the floor with them:

I have no idea what this one is supposed to be:

Stethoscope Tail

My sister is a nurse, and she gave the kids a real stethoscope last year. Sadie likes to put the ear things around her waist and pretend that she has a tail. :)

Paint by Number

I went to Roberts one night to get a couple of things, and I took Dylan with me, because he was being annoying and Ben was going nuts. I told Dylan we could get him something if it was really inexpensive, and he, after much deliberation, decided to get a paint-by-number. I used to LOVE doing paint-by-numbers, so it was fun for me to watch Dylan do it. He was really into it for a couple of days, and then he decided he was done. He's such a boy. :)

Per Emily E's Request

My friend, Emily E., taught me how to make bows for hair. Here are my first two pair:

Cute, huh?? I have a feeling this is going to be my new obsession. I need to go buy a few supplies, because I would love to make more. I hope I don't forget how to do it... it's been a couple of weeks.

Emily wanted me to post some "bow-in-action" shots on my blog, so here they are:

I really shouldn't have put the perriwinkle brad in the middle of the white bows, because I'm a big matching freak, and I won't put them in her hair unless her outfit has white and perriwinkle. I actually made those bows to go with a new dress my mom sewed for her: