Popcicles

My My LOVES eating popsicles. As you would imagine, sometime they get all over the place.

It's probably a good thing we only eat them outside :)

Easter 2011

We had another great Easter this year. I love spring and I love the Easter season! What a wonderful opportunity to celebrate our Savior and the joy our knowledge of His resurrection brings. If only we could have celebrated with our entire extended family, but as I often tell Jay, "You can't always get what you want." :) We still had a great weekend. Jay and I started out by coloring Easter eggs. Here we are starting out...

Notice this was taking place inside. On our dining room table. While sitting on cloth covered chairs. With only carpet underneath (seriously - who EVER thought carpet in a dining room was a good idea?). As you may have guessed, it didn't exactly go as planned. I told Jay to gently lower one of the eggs by himself (bad idea) using one of those ridiculous wire egg holders (worse idea) while I got Amaya a snack (not even supervising him? terrible idea!). Next thing I knew blue dye was everywhere and I was shouting hysterically. Luckily I wasn't shouting at Jay - I kept reassuring him it wasn't his fault while I furiously tried to soak up the dye and clean the carpet while simultaneously reprimanding myself... quite forcefully. I think Jay and Amaya were both in shock. Ten minutes later I had somehow managed to clean up the disaster with surprisingly little damage to the carpet. I gathered my babies up, told them I was sorry for "freaking out" and we all went outside to try again. This time? Total success!

On Saturday morning  Jay was pretty excited to wake up to his Easter basket.

After eating too many jelly beans we headed out to the Zoo for an Easter egg hunt.

Then Jay got to meet the Easter bunny.

So did My My but she wasn't quite as excited as Jay :)

Then Jay was able to meet a real bunny.

And a few other animals too.

Here are the kids on Easter Sunday.

I love this picture - My My has to crawl like this when she wears a dress.

This is how the kids really felt about taking pictures...

I sure love my little ones!

Camping in the Chiricahua National Forest

Over the weekend we went on a 2 night camping trip with our friends the Seedalls. We went to the Chiricahua National Forest which is about 1 1/2 - 2 hours southeast of Tucson and it couldn't look more different. There were no cactus and tons of beautiful, tall pine trees. It was so nice to get away from the desert!

We found a perfect little camp ground surrounded by trees with a great fire pit and plenty of wood to burn. We only had one snag on the trip. As we were driving to find our camp ground we got a flat tire on the FJ.

Luckily we had a good spare and Mike and Brandon were able to fix it quickly. After a prayer of thanks we headed back out with thankfully had no more problems.

 It was both Jay and Amaya's first time camping. Jay had a ridiculously fun time. We went with some friends from our ward and they have a 3 year old boy named Bryson. He happens to be one of Jay's best friends here. The two boys played all day long in the forest.

We hardly saw them. They were hiking, throwing rocks, fighting monsters, playing hide and seek, jumping, running, collecting pine cones, and generally have the best time preschoolers can have. It was awesome! They even found a tiny caterpillar and played with it for about half an hour.

Amaya didn't love it quite as much. Not being able to crawl around very easily made it a little hard on her. But she and her friend Kayla had fun playing on the tarp together.

She also enjoyed playing with Jay in the tent on the blow up mattresses.

At night it got pretty cold. Jay slept like a champ but My My... not so much. We didn't bring the pack and play for her (big mistake) so she ended up sleeping in the sleeping bag with me most of the night. We were nice and warm and cuddly but it didn't make for a very restful sleep for me. Oh well! Overall we had a great time.

My friend Jamie and I made some pretty fabulous food for the trip too. We had tin foil dinners, biscuits and gravy, bacon wrapped hot dogs and of course s'mores. Yum! The trip was a blast and we are so glad we finally made it on our first family camping trip.