Happy Easter....last weekend :)

Well, so I'm a bit late posting, but what do you do? I was able to go home last weekend and spend Easter with some of the family. We had a grand old time, and here are some of our pictures to prove it!
Decorating us some Easter eggs!


It's time for the Easter egg hunt!!!!

Go Jared, go!!!

Those darn roots. This is Jay. (Sorry, I just thought this picture was too cute. :)

Cute girls - Hannah, Karen, and Abby

Yeah Tait - get that egg!!

Of course, there is food too. Look at this super cute bunny my sis-in-law Emily made.

Abby loves to dip those cucumbers!!!

And we also got to celebrate Makenzie's birthday!


Karen, Makenzie, and Ellie just enjoying some good cake and ice cream. :)

Spring????

Maybe. But the weather doesn't seem so sure. These pictures were taken this morning when I left for work.

A little catch up

Here are just a few things that have happened but I've never really posted. I figure since I don't really have much to post about in my ever so exciting life, I should post these!

In the middle of March, I was able to go with some of my family to the Draper Temple open house. It was fun to see Kevin and Jeanette because I don't get to see them often. And everyone else. And it was fun to be there with the kids to see the temple. When we were in the Celestial Room, Abby, who is 1, kept reaching for the chadelier at the top. It was cute. So here's a couple of pics from that.

Some of the family (it was so windy and cold!)


The Temple

A little more recently, I went with my sis-in-law Emily and a few of my nephews to the Fablehaven release party for the 4th book in the Fablehaven series. Yes, I am a fan. They're good books. I'm a bit sad that I now have to wait for the 5th. I think I need to stop reading series. Anyway, here's a few fun pictures from that too.

With the witch Muriel


This book is all about dragons. So....


We were going to wait in line to get books signed, etc. But it was just waaaaayyyyy to long. So we worked to get some pictures of the boys with Brandon Mull, the author, anyway. :)

Reading Rainbow

Okay, not really quite that. But I saw this on my roommate Hilary's blog and was somewhat intrigued to see how I would stack up. So I figured I had to see.

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (X)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien ( )
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X )
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (x)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee () sad, I know but I will, I promise
6 The Bible - (x)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (X)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell ( )
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ( )
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens ( ) I did start it once
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott ( )
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (X)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ( )
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ( ) not all of them
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier ( )
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien ( )
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger ( )
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger ( )
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ()
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell ( )
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (X)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens ( )
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy ( )
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams ( )
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh ( )
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky ( )
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (X)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll ( )
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame ( )
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ( )
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens ( )
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X)
34 Emma - Jane Austen (X)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen ( )
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X) Although this is part of Chronicles of Narnia
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - ( )
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ( )
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden ( )
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne ( )
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell ( )
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (X)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving ( )
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ( )
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery ( )
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy ()
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood ( )
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding ( )
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan ( )
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (X)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert ( )
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons ( )
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (X)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth ( )
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon ( )
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (X)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley ( )
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime-Mark Haddon ( )
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck ( )
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov ( )
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt ( )
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold ( )
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (X)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac ( )
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ( )
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding ( )
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ( )
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville ( )
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens ( ) But I was in the play twice
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker ( )
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett ( )
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )
75 Ulysses - James Joyce ( )
76 The Inferno - Dante ( )
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ( )
78 Germinal - Emile Zola ( )
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray ( )
80 Possession - AS Byatt ( )
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens ( ) Does that children's book Mickey Mouse version count?
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ( )
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker ( )
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ( )
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert ( )
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ( )
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White ( )
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (X)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ( )
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ( )
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ( )
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery ( )
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ( )
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams ( )
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ( )
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ( )
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas ( )
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare ( )
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl ( )
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (X)

Hmmmm. How do they come up with these lists? I know I've seen a different one. Which I would love to find. I'm pretty sure it came from Mrs. Teeples, my AP English teacher. I'll have to try to find that one. I think it's something about 100 books everyone should read before they die or something like that. I'm 18 for 100 on this one. I guess there's a few things I should add to my reading list eh?

Oh the madness....

March madness that is!!!! I'm pretty excited that one of my favorite times of the year is here, and sad that I work all day long and won't get to see a lot of the games. It was so great last year because I would sit in the back of the classroom, mute my computer, and watch the games on demand!!! :) Hee hee. Don't worry. I still payed attention. But I'm currently working on my bracket and just haven't had the research time in this year. Sad stuff. One of those other not so fun things about being "grown up". Anyway, who's your pick?

Isn't it just so beautiful?!

Ah the memories

So, never fear, but on the way home from work yesterday, I passed two, not one but two, semi's with large trailers that had painted on the trailers in huge red letters "Jesus Christ is Lord, not a swear word". While the message is totally true, it kind of made me laugh and brought back a couple mission memories. I couldn't help but share.
The first memory that immediately popped into my head was a special little evangelical ambulance in Albany. See picture. I don't think anything more needs to be said.

Second memory - my companion and I had just jumped on a bus (also in Albany)and a couple of people were behind us. Of course, the bus drivers don't really care if you're seated or even expecting them to start going. They just do. So it jolts forward and this girl is kind of thrown into some other people. She very loudly and explicitly takes the name of the Lord in vain, cussing at the bus driver. There was another person on the bus who we had met a few different times around town and was a little bit mentally handicapped. When the girl on the bus says this out loud, this gentlemen says, "He loves you. He really really loves you." My companion and I just about busted a gut. Of course, we contained our laughter until after we got off the bus. The girl looked so awkward. It was great.
So thanks for sharing the trip down memory lane...

Thankful Thursday

Today I'm thankful for the smell of rain.

Dreamers?

So, I just read the book, "The Ultimate Gift" by Jim Stovall. First, I would definitely recommend reading it. But make sure you have some time to sit and think once you finish. :) If some of you aren't familiar with this book, or the movie that was based on this book, a man is trying to instill in a family member the ability to understand the greatest parts of life. And he does this through teaching different elements of the ultimate gift. While I have been contemplating numerous of these gifts, there's one that's sticking out in my mind, and that's the Gift of Dreams.

Here is how Red, the guy in the book, introduces this gift...
"I have been trying to decide, as I have been formulating this ultimate gift for you, which of the gifts is the greatest. If I had to pick one, I think I would pick the gift of dreams because dreams allow us to see life as it can be, not as it is. In that way, the gift of dreams allows us to go out and get any other gift we want out of this life."

He continues on later with this challenge. "...I want you to begin experiencing the gift of dreams. Assume everything is possible. Make a list of all the things you would like to do and be and have in your life. Then begin to prioritize that list as you discover the ones that generate the most passion in your soul."

And I'll clarify - the dreaming he is referring to is something that is driving us and moving us forward. And once we hit a milestone, another one even greater and grander appers, so that we don't just dream, but we become dreamers.

So it gives me cause to pause and to ask myself, what really are my dreams? And so, I'm asking you the same. And, please comment if you feel like you can. What do you want to have and do and be in your life?

Thankful Thursday

Okay, maybe today's is super lame-o, but I am so stinking grateful that I'm getting my hair cut tomorrow. It's so long overdue and I'm so excited.

Thankful Thursday

So, my supervisor at work challenged me to do what she had challenged her kids to do - that is a "Thankful Thursday" post. I've missed a few weeks since the challenge, but I'm going to try to do it. I may not get every week. Even though I have more than enough to be thankful for. So, I may just list more than one thing to make up for the last couple of weeks.

1 - I'm thankful for my family. Some of you are probably thinking that this is totally cliche. However, it's not. This week has reinforced it even more. I work with a lot of really dysfunctional families, and I am reminded over and over again how blessed I am to have grown up in a family where I felt loved, where I was taught to work and have values and be a good person, and just so many other things. My heart breaks basically daily at some of the things that some kids have to deal with. So, cliche sounding or not, I am so very grateful for them!


2 - I'm also thankful this week for heavenly help in getting through a not so fun experience. I had to testify in court this week in a case for a couple of clients. SCARY!!!! And not fun. But it's over and done with and I'm still alive. Enough said.


3 - My not quite as serious thankfulness (which was supposed to be posted 2 weeks ago) - is for the blanket that I got for Christmas from my sister-in-law Jenny. Seriously, this is the softest blanket in the entire world. On both sides. It's so comforting. And when I've had a long day, it's so nice to cuddle up with it on my bed and just not move for a minute. :)