chinese

It's official -- Matthew will be in the Chinese Immersion Program next year!  Wahoo!

more easter picts

 Coloring eggs was left up to me, Matthew, and Jacob this year.  We did about 20 eggs.

 The football egg is my creation.  Pure genius, I think. 

 Matthew got a new Batman with a jetpack in his Easter basket.

 Ryan made this fabulous tower and accompanying jelly bean courtyard with his candy.  Can you guess what his favorite candy is?

 Sometimes eggs that rattle have money, sometimes its just candy.  Matthew checking out his winnings.

 Classic bartering.  Jared is offering Matthew some chocolate eggs in exchange for some jelly beans.

A good Easter was had by all!

spring break

 These picts are backwards, but oh well!  We planned two different spring break vacation agendas -- one to Moab, and one to San Diego -- but instead ended up staying here (mostly) so that Jared & Mark could do a backpacking trip on the weekend to Goblin Valley.  Anyway...  on Friday morning when they were to leave for backpacking, we woke up to snow!  Hence, the above picture of snow on our beautiful tulips!

 Now back to Monday activities!  We headed over to a trampoline park and the boys jumped to their hearts content!  This is Jared dunking on the basketball hoop.

 Ryan trying for a dunk too!

 This picture of Jacob airborne cracks me up!  He's about to flip into a pile of foam squares.

And here's Matthew bouncing around on the acres of trampoline.
Our other spring break adventure included going the long way to Idaho to visit G&G (that's thru Logan).  We made stops at the airplane museum at Hill AFB, Gossner Cheese, and Pepperidge Farms.  We met up with G&G after their temple shift and headed over to Texas Roadhouse for dinner.  After stuffing ourselves with steak and peanuts, we headed to Idaho for the night.  The next day Jared & Ryan spent the morning working at the greenhouse and got paid with steak and ham from Uncle John.  Good stuff!

egg hunts

 We managed to fit in a couple egg hunts in celebration of Easter.  G&G invited us over to do an egg hunt with Ethan, Rachel, Katie, & Will.  Everyone found some eggs and took home plenty of candy and some spare change.

 We had another egg hunt here at home which also produced plenty of candy and some money. Definitely a successful hunt!

ukulele concert

Jacob has been learning to play the ukulele this year at school.  He loves it and is really good at it. His class just presented their concert last week and they were awesome!  Jacob played the 8-string ukulele during the concert.  Ever heard of such a thing?  I hadn't until he told me and showed me.  Basically there's a high and low G,C,E and A strings -- so every chord is done in octaves. The 8 strings give a more full sound to whatever you're playing -- not so "twangy". Now that Jacob is so good at the ukulele, I think its high time we head to Hawaii, don't you agree?

wolf

Jacob earned his Wolf badge!  And a whole bunch of arrow points to go with it! Congratulations, kiddo!

monument

This hoop is a monument to Mark's desire to make the boys happy.  It was a big fat lousy pain in the patoot to put together -- to say the least.  So many times he just wanted to take a sledge hammer to it, but didn't because it was what the boys wanted most out of spring break.  The story goes like this:  Upon opening the box, the first thing he discovered was a missing part.  That got us a call to customer service (wait time 20 minutes) then a trip to the factory (luckily located in the northern part of the county) to get the part.  While there he decided to ask the employees to take a look at the rest of the stuff and see if he was missing any more parts -- so he wouldn't have to come back.  They said we were missing more parts, and he'd just have to make another call to customer service to order them!  GRRR!  In the process of waiting the required 20 minutes of more to get to a real person, he discovered that he had the wrong instruction manual for the model of hoop we had purchased!  No wonder the parts appeared to be missing or wrong! Once he got the correct manual figured out (with customer service) and loaded on the computer he set to work, only to find more really truly missing parts!  A trip to the hardware store and he was back on track with the set up.  But then, what's this?  Yet another missing part?  Yes. Another call to customer service to figure out exactly what part he needed.  The customer service dude totally got an earful of frustration this time!  The correct size of part was finally figured out and Mark set off again for the hardware store.  With correct part now in hand he was off for the final time in this setup fiasco.  Finally the hoop was raised and the basketball games began -- wahoo! Glad that's over.  The boys are loving it, so maybe it was worth it?