Snow Family

From left to right.

Snow Gem - sporting a princess hat

Snow Mommy - with a skirt and a necklace

Snow Daddy - classy in a top hat and scarf

Snow Levi - holding on tight to his bottle

Stage 2

So we are still working on the yard. At this point in time we are working on sprinklers. Basically the entire process is just preparing for grass. Oh grass how we long for you. Anyway to the left you can see them "pulling our pipe". That means they used their fancy tractor thing to lay out the pipe all over the ground for us. It took them about an hour and a half instead of taking us weeks to dig trenches all over the yard. The second picture is all the pipes coming together by our back patio door. Now that all the pipes are in the ground we get to hook them all together, wire everything to boxes, and install the heads. Not counting putting together the drip systems for our flower beds and garden. And the final picture is a pre-patio. Tyler, my dad, and my brother put up the form-work Saturday and laid all the gravel. Then Tyler pushed some dirt up against it, now we just need the cement. Hopefully that will get put in tomorrow as long as the weather holds out.

Stage 1

On Saturday we began the saga of putting in our yard. Step one was leveling out the yard. Luckily my brother-in-law Liam is quite the farmer, and he volunteered his tractor. So he came up and tilled the whole yard (including the garden and the truck-load of manure Tyler and I spread on the garden) for us. Then he leveled it out with a rake (which is attached to the back of the tractor in the below picture). After lunch Gem even got to ride the tractor!


Step two is sprinklers. We took a drawing of our house down to a do-it-yourself sprinkler place and they are going to draw a design, and make up a parts list for us, but it is going to be pretty darn expensive. However, on the upside we should be able to get it installed in the next couple of weeks, so everything is moving along rather quickly, which is how I like it.

Levi didn't get to go outside and play with any dirt or the tractor. He just had to watch out the window. Tyler got a couple of pictures showing how eager Levi was to watch the tractor out of the window.

At the Park

I took Gem and Levi to the park the other day, since it is finally starting to warm up. Hopefully in a month or two months we won't be as dependent on the park, because we will have our own wonderful and spacious back yard. Right now it is just muddy and full of puncture weeds.

I got a bunch of pictures of Levi because I thought he looked so darn good, despite still having lunch all over his face. I don't think he really liked being outside, especially after I let him eat a clump of grass.

Gem had a lot of fun playing on the playground, though she was never brave enough to go down the big big slide. Unfortunately since there weren't any other kids to follow around she just sat down on the blanket with me and Levi, after twenty minutes or so.

Home Decor

I have never professed to be very artsy. However I think my small attempts at home decorating have gone rather well.

My first trick was while Tyler was on a business trip. I cut out some squares, sewed up the edges, ironed them, and hung them on the curtain rods. I was rather pleased with the results.

Secondly, I filled up a little bit of the empty ledge that was hanging out in my living room. I don't usually like clutter just hanging around, but what else do you do with a big empty ledge? It looks better in real life, and I must say it is a million times nicer than nothing.

FHE

On Sunday in Sunbeams (or as Gem says Sun Beans) they learned that Heavenly Father and Jesus made all the plants and that we should be thankful for them.

So for FHE last night we decided to extend her Sunday lesson. We talked about trees and flowers and how they grow. We talked just a little about fruits and vegetables that grow in gardens. We also decided to go get some seeds so Gem could grow her own flowers. She chose two different types of Morning Glory seeds ( I know they will grow enormous and get all over our yard, but I really like Morning Glory). Daddy chose some cilantro and marigold seeds. I got some peas, carrots, and green bean seeds, which will be planted straight into the garden in April.

Besides the seeds we got some plantable pots and some potting soil. Then we planted our seeds, and watered them. Now we just need to wait for them to grow, and in a few weeks we will transplant them into the yard and get a trellis for the morning glory to grow on. But we still have some anxious days ahead of us. Gem has checked multiple times already today to see if her flowers have started to grow yet.

So Beautiful

Here we have our very first attempt at braids. I don't think it turned out half bad.

Crawling?

Well, kind of.

Crayons!

We finally tried the crayon maker, which we got for Christmas, last weekend. Step one was to go through Gem's bucket of crayons and find all the broken ones, then we had to unpeel all the broken ones. So now I have a giant ziploc bag full of broken unpeeled crayons.









The next step is to decide what color you want to use. Gem being the crazy girl she is chose brown, oh well. So these are the crayons being melted here. Gem is doing the brown and green and daddy is doing the pink and yellow. It takes a while for the crayons to melt, so you have to hunker down for a bit.

Finally after they are all melted you can pour them into the molds. Then you have to wait another twenty or thirty minutes for them to cool back down into crayons.

Finally we have Gem holding half of the final product: one pinkish/purplish crayon and one brownish/greenish crayon.

Oh what colorful fun.

Happy Birthday to Me!

As of two hours, I am now 24 years old. I am now as old as Tyler was when we got married, I remember thinking what an old man he was (I still think that). But now I am that old, too weird.

Anyways the one downer of my birthday (there always has to be something) is that Tyler missed it :( But overall I have had a really good last few weeks, with scatterings of birthday gifts and such stuff.

So this is my look-what-a-great-birthday-I-had-birthday list.

1-Tyler took me to a Brian Regan (click on his name for some funny videos) show up in Logan last Friday. It was a really late show, so I don't remember a lot but I do remember that it was funny.

2- Tyler got me a beautiful peridot/blue topaz pendant and earring set.

3- He also got me a pretty amethyst pendant.

4- He also got me 3 Rifftrax dvds. And 3 awful old movies that we can watch Rifftrax with. Too funny. If anyone wants to watch a funny movie come on over.

5- About a week ago we got our American Express rebate in the mail. It was three hundred dollars. Hooray!! So we went out and got a freezer, so we can finally not be afraid to buy freezer food, and I had enough left over to go birthday shopping at Old Navy. I actually splurged and spent twenty dollars on a sweater that wasn't even on the clearance rack.

6- Saturday night my parents took us to Warren's for dinner and then afterwards we got frozen yogurt. YUM!

7- Last night I made a delicious ice cream cake (my very most favorite dessert). Basically I would do anything for a piece of ice cream cake. Luckily my grandma and one of my brother-in-laws didn't have a piece which means I have two pieces I get to eat tonight. Happy Birthday to me!

8- My grandma gave me a hula-hoe and a hoe for my garden. And she also gave me an American Girl Molly doll that she has had for a long time. The first thing Gem said this morning when she saw it was "What a beautiful doll. She has long hair like me, and she is wearing a beautiful dress." So I decided the doll could live in Gem's room.

9- My mom got me some gardening gloves, on top of the birthday gift of phones she gave me a month ago.

10- I got a card from grandma Joe, who is in Arizona right now.

11- My sister gave me a twix. (Hooray, I never buy candy for myself.)


12- Since Tyler was gone, my dad helped me put together some picture frames that I had been struggling with all day. Thanks dad.

13- Finally, I think I saved the best for last, at random I was on Netflix the other day and I noticed that the first two seasons of Phineas and Ferb had been added to their instant streaming list. That is more than 50 glorious episodes of the my favorite cartoon, just in time for my birthday. How did they know?

Well after all that amazing stuff I can hardly wait the 365 days until my next birthday.