Celebrating Emily One Year Older

Emily has been counting down the days until her birthday for weeks.  Last night we hosted a pizza/American Girl movie party for Emily's Birthday.  I guess one benefit of having my kids get older is that it is a lot easier to plan their parties.  No complicated games or activities to try and entertain the kids every second!  As the years go by I've planned less and less for parties and tried to just go with the flow.

A birthday cake with no candles or pink frosting?!

Emily chose to have a strawberry poke cake with our favorite pudding/cream frosting.  It's a little harder to decorate with, but it tastes so much better than ordinary buttercream!  We realized at the last minute that we were out of red food coloring for a pink heart so this was our spontaneous frosting creation.  Sadly, I couldn't find where I had stashed the candles, so she was a sport and blew out the imaginary candles :)

Melted Crayon Art Creations

 Becca had the great idea of making melted crayon pictures while we were waiting for the pizza to arrive.  Some streets were closed due to serious flooding from a crazy rainstorm so it took Jared a lot longer than expected to pick it up. Fortunately our basement didn't flood at all.  Our neighbors were not so lucky :(
After cake, presents and movie, the girls had a great time playing with the 24 pack of play-dough that Emily received from her friend.
This summer Emily decided to try out gymnastics.  She has loved it and it is nice for her to find something she can excel at.  It was quite humorous the other day when she showed us some of her skills and the boys tried to do the splits.  Emily makes it look so graceful and natural... the boys and I not so much!
She has always been a kind tender-hearted girl and I love finding the pictures and sweet notes that she leaves around the house.

Children's Treasures

Alyssa went on a walk to the church this morning and came home with a handful of treasures to show me.

A pile of dried worms!

Big Shoes to Fill

Joshua has a little obsession with shoes lately, just like Jacob did at his age.  Every morning he finds some shoes and hands them to me as his signal that he's ready to go outside and play.  He loves trying on everyone's shoes and its funny to hear him clomping around the kitchen with the girls high heels on.  He actually successfully escaped out the door and walked 2 houses down in Emily's silver church shoes.  Sometimes its a little crazy when he hauls off with the neighbor kid's or piano students shoes and we have to go searching through the house looking for them when they're ready to leave. 

 Today he tried on Jared's big shoes and successfully walked a few steps before he tripped and fell.  It's a good thing he's short!

I'm Not Tired!

Several days this week Alyssa has dozed off to sleep in random places.  First it was the garage steps, waiting for dad to come home (at 1:00 in the afternoon... long wait!).  Next it was the front porch next to the dryer vent where she was "warming up."  It's a good thing we didn't have any visitors because it looked like she had passed out on our doorstep.  Yesterday she fell asleep balancing between 2 bar stools.  Today she was eating her chips and cheese on a plate - her favorite lunch- and a few minutes later I discovered her here.  She thinks she's too big for a nap and with all the kids home during the summer I'm not so good about making it happen. When she wakes up in her bed a few hours later she insists, "But I wasn't tired mom!!"
Did you notice the her new trendy wardrobe? The layered look is in  :) and its just fine to go intentionally mismatched (at least that's what they do lately in the jcp ads). 

Not So Picture Perfect

Last Sunday I saw the kids all huddled together in the kitchen around a bowl of cookie dough that Rebecca was making.  It was one of those picture perfect moments with everyone being peaceful and cooperative and I wanted to quickly snap a picture to remember the moment down the road .  when I pulled out the camera, the kids got silly and after snapping tons of shots this was the best I could come up with, which I guess is really a more accurate depiction of our everyday life... not so picture perfect!       

 Rebecca's expression reminds me of how my sister Kara would look at Aaron and I when we'd try to snitch the cookie dough from her as kids!

Grown UP

I've had this dress hanging in my closet for years that I bought with Jared soon after we were married.  I haven't worn it for ages, but was just curious how close Rebecca is to fitting into it.  Crazy that my little girl is so grown up she can almost wear my clothes!

Online Inspiration Sources I wish I'd known about sooner

Lately I have stumbled upon new links to inspiring videos, music and audio clips that have added to my daily peace, I just wish I had known about some of these resources earlier and wonder how much more I'm missing out on.  So if you have any favorites, could you share them with me in the comments?

lds.org video/audio archive

There are so many video clips that are perfect for family night or keeping Sabbath a more peaceful day.  This weekend we watched a few of the old time seminary videos under the Book of Mormon tab and the kids were chuckling about the Star Trek style simulation on pride. I loved watching President Monson's life story again and I think we found where the idea for Napoleon Dynamite was born in "The Phone Call."  This was a little short of "inspiring" but my kids sure found it humorous!  A few of my favorite tabs (although) I haven't had a chance to explore them all are:
Bible Videos - most are short but come straight from the bible text
CES Firesides
Homefront Commercials - Rebecca loves these!
Humanitarian - makes me think of the hymn Count Your Blessings.  I'd love to show some of these to my kids to go with a family night on service or gratitude.
Youth Curriculum - I love using the new youth curriculum as the basis for my scripture study because it is arranged by topic with thought provoking questions, scripture links, conference talks and these great video clips.

The District - Real Life as a Missionary
These bring back the mission memories & I like showing them to my kids so they can get a glimpse of mission life.  Sometimes people aren't nice, sometimes you don't know what to say and have awkward moments, but the Spirit directs you and sharing your testimony and praying with all of your heart for others is such a blessing.

Youth Music
A variety of free downloadable music with great messages.

Just yesterday I found this treasure...
Stories from General Conference
I love it when people share stories and personal experiences to teach true principles.  This site has various topics such as perseverance, sacrifice, prayer, etc.  with clips of stories from conference.  Today I was motivated to do better after listening to one episode on sacrifice that had a story about a crippled man who sacrificed to help a blind farmer who was on the verge of losing his farm.  Wouldn't this make a great way to end the day with "bedtime stories" for the kids?