Upcoming Enrichment Projects

My new job at church makes it so I get to plan the women's activities and I love it :) Each summer the activity I looked forward to the most was Super Saturday... a day of fun and girls and crafts. Well, with the economy and such, this year I decided to change it up a little, but still offer some fun crafts that are super inexpensive. The first half of the day we're going to have classes on Spring Cleaning from the inside out, Savings and Storage, Photo Organization, Canning and Menu Planning & Making Meals Memorable. Then we'll have lunch and here are some of the crafts.

Re-usable sandwich wraps/snack bags... I found a great tip on a blog where they used the flannel-lined table cloths for the liner inside... I'm excited to see if these work out better than the rip-stop nylon. The polk-a-dot table cloths are in the spring section at wal-mart... and 1 fat quarter will make a set of 1 wrap and 2 bags. With donations of fabric we can do it for $2 a set.

I ran across this really cute wooden temple decor from here. We're doing it up as a 5x7 pic and we can offer it for $2.


Our Dry-Erase Menu Board... you can do it with vinyl on the glass or the way I did it was just print the words on the paper with a variety of papers to switch out. With the wal-mart $3 frame and donated paper we can do it for $4 which even includes a dry-erase pen.

I found some really cute tutorials for making all these different flower embellishments and we'll be demo-ing how to make 1 of each different style for $1 a set.
Simple Scripture Case that can hold either a soft or hard-bound Book of Mormon... I plan on taking one of those cute felt flowers and fancy-ing mine up and then I want to find a little "Future Missionary" tag to put on the boys. Thanks to donated fabric, these are only $1 too.

Quiet Book... pretty much complete

Easter 2011

We had such a fun Easter... nice and quiet at home by ourselves. We missed being around family, but with the kids getting older it's more and more fun to hang out with them. Earlier in the week we got together with Roy & Stefani and colored our eggs and this is what they looked like before Egg Wars :) The grand champion this year was little Ben and so proud of it!


In the morning the kids woke up and were really confused because there were no baskets on the table.. instead the Easter Bunny left this....


I will definitely admit that I like matching on holidays... someday the kids will get really sick of it, but until then I'll be lovin' it. I had some hand-me-down purple fabric, so we went to town on girl's dresses. It ended up being not too bad and when they beg to wear it that makes it all worth it. I loved the pattern.... I used Simplicity 2377... no zippers or buttons :)

Spring time is here!

The weather is getting so nice and we are loving it! Here's a super-fast update on what we've been doing:

For FHE this week we decorated egg-shaped cookies from my fave Lofthouse Cookie recipe, so yummy! The kids loved mixing the colors into the frosting! And you can just imagine all the piles of sprinkles they had on top of them.





Meanwhile Ryan is getting SO big, still the happiest kid around, and he loves hanging out in the pantry. He is such a monkey, I keep finding him stuck after climbing up all sorts of places :) I had to take the ladder off of Alaura's bunk-bed because he figured out how to climb that. He's not walking yet, but will stand and take a couple steps if we make him.







We went out exploring another part of AZ this last month, dragging Roy and Stefani along with us and their two cute kiddos. We drove through Jerome (without anyone getting too car sick) to Cottonwood where we visited Dead Horse Ranch State Park. It was alright, maybe not on our must-come-back-to list, but still fun. After hiking we got the most amazing BBQ at Hog Wild BBQ, and I'd say that was totally worth the trip!



At the kids school they had spirit week and the kids totally got into it. Superhero day wasn't Ben's things, but the girls took their spin on it being princesses. The other days were Twin day, Mix and Match day, Crazy Hair Day, and of course, PJ day.

































Ben had his pinewood derby... :( didn't win any races but had fun, next year we hear the key is to really smooth out those pins on the wheels, we'll be running for 1st!







Samantha had her 6th birthday... the cake requests are always exciting, but since it's going to be eaten in a matter of minutes I refuse to get complicated... so we resort to a quick-draw method. This time she wanted a ballerina. She also got a small bike with training wheels. I broke down and went for a 12" wheeled one so she could fit it. I have hope that we'll get her riding without the trainers come summer.


We had to say farewell to our Phoenix friends this last month, Beau and Chris both got heli jobs up in Alaska and are moving on in their careers. I'm sure we'll see many more friends go for the same reasons. Most pilots use flight instruction as a step-stool rather than a career destination like us, but we're so excited for them and will miss them and our fondue nights a lot.



We braved the thousands of people and the hour long line to make it into Luke Days Airshow in Glendale. Ben (dad) got to fly a heli down the day before and stay there for the weekend and we wanted to join him. It was SO much fun. I would definitely do it again :)




Anabelle has now turned 3. She has so much personality and is usually really sweet. Ben (dad) and I took her shopping for her birthday gift and it was so cute to see what she picked out. Her favorite was the Pinkalicious unicorn from the kids book series. I think it's supposed to be called Goldilicious, but she liked Pinkalicious better.

Seriously Slackin, but not really :)

So my blog has been seriously slacking, but life definitely has not been. Hard to even comprehend all that's gone on since my last post, August, yikes. Ben got promoted to Manager over the flight line, we found out we're expecting #7 (woo hoo), I got a new calling at church (boo hoo).. they took me from Primary and made me 2nd counselor over Relief Society, but at least that means I get to do fun activities for the women now :) We've had tons of holidays since then, maybe I'll get around to post pics if we're lucky, and I've been crafting away. I'll have to update Olive Oily to show that fun stuff. Life is good and moving quickly!

Backtracking to Halloween 2010... we LOVE Halloween, any ideas for next year's theme?Christmas PJs

The whole family at Christmas 2010
Our trip last weekend to check out the Verde River.. come summer we'll have to come back swimming here, there were some great spots... anyone wanna join us?