I won a trophy!

I've seriously been having such a great weekend!! I just had to get blogging! :) On Sunday, Ben and I will have been married for 6 lovely years. We celebrated last night with an awesome date! Ben's always been sooo amazing at planning great dates and being a real cutie-pie. I love you Ben! We started our date shopping around at the outdoor mall, Kierland Commons. I got a couple super cute shirts! After enjoying the evening air, we ate dinner at Lon's. This was seriously one of the best dining experiences I've had in a long time! We love to eat out, but this place tops them all. Well, I didn't think we'd ever come across a place we like more than the tree room in Sundance, but this at least ties. :) Anyway, the atmosphere was great and the food was to die for! :) It was a lovely romantic evening. Here's to 6 more awesome years married to my Ben (plus many many more!!).

The weekend continued to be great with a wonderful Saturday morning. I ran my first 5K and I was just so proud of myself for not dieing on the side of the road in exhaustion (beforehand I had thoughts of Micheal Scott running for the cure for rabies and him throwing up at the end of the 5K... that could have been me!). Anyway, I managed to push through the race without stopping to walk and I actually won a trophy! Somehow I got 3rd place in my age group. Woohoo! My trophy is a cool bobblehead - so awesome! Now I need to find a place to put it. :) I was also really proud of Emma - she ran the 1 mile kids race and almost ran the whole time! Way to go Emma! The Hunters attended the event as well. They are so fun. Craig ran the 5K also and finished in 24 minutes - awesome!! Addy also ran the kids race and was a real motivator to Emma as she booked it off the starting line!

So, Ben is currently out in Scottsdale somewhere picking up a trampoline. We're getting it for free from my brother-in-law's boss whose looking to give it away. We're so excited! Well, Emma is especially excited - she loves jumping. :)

Easter Events

Happy belated Easter! It was a great weekend! Well, it was mostly great - I was rather sad on Saturday because Ben wasn't able to spend the day with us like I would have hoped. He's just been soooo busy with his surgery rotation this past month that he had to spend a day getting some stuff done, such as studying and applying for 4th year rotations. However, because of his hard work on Saturday we were able to have the whole day with him on Sunday. He even woke up with the kids! I sure have missed my Ben! Anyway, despite not having Ben with us during our Saturday activities, we managed to have a good time. So - to backtrack - Friday we did Easter egg hunt #2 with friends and it was great! Emma just can't get enough candy! ;) On Saturday morning we went to Egg hunt #3 at Ben's school (without Ben... sigh...). As with last year, Emma LOVED jumping in the inflatable bounce house. She's always had a real fondness for jumping. :) Saturday evening we attended the Easter Pageant at the Mesa Temple with Ben's family (once again, we were Ben-less... ho hum...). I was really impressed by the show that was put on. And it was soooo busy with people. But, we got there plenty early and had seats relatively close. We had a good time hanging out till the pageant started. We had a good 2 hours to kill, so we ate dinner, chatted, wandered the grounds and attempted to take some good pictures of the kids. It's so darn hard to get decent pictures with crazy kiddos - I've just learned to snap as many as I can and hope that one of them turns out good. During the performance, I was impressed by how interested Emma was. She really enjoyed the costumes and the animals - she was really frightened during the thunder and crucifixion scene, though. I wasn't sure how I was going to like watching these events depicted in this type of setting, but I thought that it was done well. It really was a great event to be a part of. I hope to go again next year! It was nice to have an activity that reminded us all of why we celebrate Easter - it's easy to get caught up in all the Easter bunny and Egg hunt stuff and not devote enough attention to the true central focus of the holiday. Emma really learned a lot from the Easter Pageant and I was glad for it.

Sunday was just great! I was seriously just sooo happy to have Ben with us the whole day, without any school stuff hogging the attention. :) We drove down to Gilbert and attended church with Ben's family. Afterwards we spent our time hanging out at Ben's parents home. Easter dinner was really yummy - ham, rolls, "egg desserts", spinach salad, and scalloped potatoes. I was particularly glad to have leftovers to bring home for dinner tonight - I love it when I don't have to make dinner! After Easter dinner we had Egg hunt #4 at Grandma's in her backyard - the kids really cleaned up - I've got a huge amount of candy sitting in a large bowl here at my house now. If anyone felt like they didn't get their fill of chocolate and sweets, then head on over and help us eat all of this! :)

On a side note - while we were hanging out with Ben's family on Easter, Becca tried out a little walking push toy and she just LOVED it! She's been practicing her walking while holding my hands for the past couple of weeks and this was just so liberating for her - she was able to 'walk' without mommy! I'll be so excited when she can do this completely on her own - she'll be sooo happy with herself!

Leprechauns and Easter Eggs!

I've been so happy to have some holidays to celebrate this week! It seems like it's been forever since Valentines Day and I've been ready for some more holiday activities! Well, for St. Patrick's Day we didn't do much, but I'm surprised at how simple things can just make Emma's day. When Ben got home from work he distracted her while I laid out little leprechaun footprints. At the end of the trail was a little goody bag filled with coins and green Starbursts. Emma was really excited about this - I had told her earlier in the day that leprechauns might come visit our house, so to keep her eyes peeled! She was seriously on the look out all day - she told me a couple times that she thought she saw one hiding under the kitchen table - she's so funny. She really has quite the imagination!

This morning we had a little Easter egg hunt for playgroup. We had a great turnout! The park was crazy busy, but we still still had a good time. One of the girls had the clever idea of doing the egg hunt across the parking lot in the empty ballfield - this worked great... away from the busy spring break crowd! Emma sure loves Easter egg hunts and she's getting much better at it as she gets older! Last year she stopped after each egg to open it up and check out the goods - this time she swept the area clean before diving in. Way to go Emma! :) I love Easter!!

Who-cakes!

So, we had a fun morning/early afternoon today! A few days ago I would have been surprised to hear myself say that about today, considering I got my wisdom teeth pulled yesterday morning. However, I've been recuperating quickly - wonderful! I went in to the dentist a few weeks ago for a check up and they said I really needed to get my top two wisdom teeth removed. The bottom two were taken out back when I was young and spritely!. ;) Now that I'm nearing 26, I'm on the 'old' end of the ideal time to get them pulled. Anyway, I was scared to get this done, because Ben wasn't going to be home and I was afraid that it would hurt like the dickens afterwards. But, thankfully, it hasn't been too big of a deal. Dear Melinda watched my kids while I was at the dentist, Ben got home a little early from work, and Ashley even brought us dinner - goodness sakes! I'm just so well cared for. :) I've also been hopped up on vicodin - that's always fun! It reminds me of the good old days when I had a bottle of percocet pills for after labor pains with Becca. Those were the days... (sigh)...

Anyway, this morning I woke up feeling pretty good and not too terribly swollen. So, I went with Ben and the kids to attend his dad's birthday celebration. We met up at IHOP for a themed brunch. Afterwards we were to see Horton Hears a Who and IHOP is doing a promotional thing I guess and serving Green Eggs and Ham and Who-Cakes. It was a lot of fun! And the green eggs were actually quite good - done with spinach for the green. I was particularly glad to be able to eat something - the eggs were nice and soft and yummy! Yesterday I only ate ice cream and pudding, so I was definitely hungry for real food!! After eating we went to the movie and it was really great. I definitely recommend that everyone go see Horton - I thought it was funny and cute and the animation was just super. Jim Carey was hillarious!

On a side note, Becca is just a doll. Seriously. I LOVE this girl - as she grows older, she is just getting cuter and cuter and her personality is just bursting right out of her. She cracks me up with her funny faces and silly noises and the cute way she crawls and cruises. She's just great. I also noticed that I can finally put little clips in her hair - hooray for girls! She has the funniest hair right now - it's long enough to stick up in weird places when she gets up from naps and will look so silly. It's also relatively fine, but thicker than Emma's was at this age. Emma was a real baldy even past turning one. So - back to Becca's funny personality - I took a little video of her practicing her artistic skills. It's so cute to see her really start to play with Emma and join in on the day-to-day activities. It makes me feel like our family really has grown to 4 and isn't just 3 and a little baby.

Some griping... and other stuff

So, we've been really busy with day-to-day activities the last week or so - I've been really feeing like my calendar is so booked up right now between doctor and dentist visits, activities for the kids, visit teaching, Young Women stuff, baby showers, girls nights, babysitting, and on and on. Mostly just regular old events and appointments that keep life busy and fun, but still, it seems I've had an extra amount of it all. Thankfully, it's been good timing for all the business on my calendar, since Ben has been away all the time! I've been feeling like a single mommy while Ben's been keeping up crazy hours at the hospital for his surgery rotation this month. He's up in the morning at 3:00 am and sometimes doesn't get home until 7:30 or 8:00 at night. It's just crazy - and this weekend the poor boy was on call at the hospital and was there from 5am Saturday until 10am on Sunday. Good grief! They run these students ragged sometimes. Well, despite it all, we are all surviving and I've been impressed with Ben's stamina to keep up - he's coming home relatively cheerful and doesn't seem to be collapsing of exhaustion just yet. We'll see how much longer he can keep it up - he still has 2 weeks left of surgery! I'm thankful that Ben doesn't want to be a surgeon for his career because I don't think I'd be able to survive the residency years! I've learned through all this that I wouldn't fair well as a single mom - I desperately need a hubby that works reasonable enough hours so that I could at least remember him leaving in the morning and have time to give him a hug and a kiss in the evening before having to go to bed and start it all over again. I bite my thumb at you surgery rotation!

Alright, moving on.... Emma had her 3 year well check this morning (almost a month overdue) and she was just relieved that she didn't need to get any shots this time around. She was sooo pouty at the thought of having to get a shot at the doctor's office. Her stats were nothing exciting or dramatic - 50th for height and 25th for weight - nothing surprising there for my petite little Emma. It was a quick visit with nothing much to discuss, considering I don't really have any medical concerns for her. I'm happy to have a healthy, normal 3 year old! What a blessing! In other news, I noticed this morning the signs of a tooth in baby Becca!!! Can you believe it?!! There's finally one coming in! 11 months old and her first tooth is on its way! Good work Rebecca - way to really take your sweet time! She'll be so happy to finally have some teeth to help her eat, because she sure does love to eat. I've been impressed with her skills at gumming just about anything. Another new Becca thing is that she's signing! She doesn't do it much, but she can sign milk! And it's really cute. Here's a weird video of me pressuring Becca to sign for the camera.



The weather has been just perfect lately - ranging from 75 to 85 for the high over the past couple of weeks - it's just lovely! Needless to say we've been spending a lot of time at the park. I love the park! I love being able to sit outside while watching my kids play. I'm proud to say that Becca is doing quite well playing at the park without eating much of the sand. A couple months ago I couldn't put her down at the park without her going straight for a handful of dirt in the mouth, but now it's much more uncommon, which is nice. :)

Sorry this post is all over the place! This week we made shamrock cookies as a pre-St Patrick's Day activity. I used Taya's sugar cookie recipe and it's awesome! My previous recipe always resulted in rather thin and crispy sugar cookies, but these turn out thick and soft and yummy!! Thanks Taya! Anyway, they turned out nice and I was particularly grateful to be able to give a number of them away to friends, because I just kept eating them! Eeek! So many calories!! I've been becoming a little more calorie conscious this past week - I actually tried counting my calories for a few days just to get a better idea of what I usually consume in a day. It was frightening! I tried to get away with only eating 1500 calories/day for a couple days and that was way too hard for me!! I also decided I need to focus less on calorie counting and more on just eating a little healthier and mostly exercising more! I've been running a lot this past week and it feels great! I'm going to do my first 5K at the end of month and I'm so excited! I've never done anything like that before. I'm surrounded by all these athletic, fit friends, and I want to do better at joining in the fun! I don't know how some of you do these triathlons and marathons - you crazies!! Well, really, I'm just jealous and would love to work up to doing something like that - but first I've got to lay off the shamrock cookies and the double stuff oreos!! wink, wink Heather. There was a lot of exclamation points in that paragraph!

So, because Ben was on call this weekend, I missed the Spring Fling - what a bummer! But, it turned into a pleasant evening anyhow - I offered to watch Addy for the Hunters while they went to the dance (since I was just going to be home sulking anyway!) and we had a lot of fun actually - we played Easter Bingo and I was surprised at how much they both loved it! It was funny - we used Easter M&M's as markers and every time someone won they both got to eat the M&M's off their board. Obviously, they just wanted to play that over and over again. :) In addition to that, they colored and we read a bunch of books and then when it started to get late we put in Little Mermaid, which put Emma to sleep after a bit. I also enjoyed indulging in my Oreos which Heather gave me as a little present since I was having to stay home from the dance. Did you know that there are 140 calories in one serving of Oreos - and one serving is only 2 cookies! Oh my!!! But despite that, I love Oreos and thanks so much Heather!!