Hair towels

Maggie got one of these hair towels for christmas. She loves it. Hailey really wanted one too so for Easter I gave her one I had found at the $ store. Such funny girls. They love to use their hair towels after their baths!! I like that such simple, cheap things are such fun for them. However, I did have to add more hooks in the bathroom to hang them on.......

Kool aid stand

Our kids LOVE to set up a stand of some sort to sell something - anything. This time it happened to be kool aid :) They do it as a team effort with the neighbor girls. Maggie was helping with advertising this time around. Pricing is always a challenge with them. They want to make lots of money so they think they should be selling it for $5 or so a cup. It's usually pretty hard to convince them to keep the price down....... we do not live in a good neighborhood for any kind of stand. The road is fairly fast and they aren't many kids/families out and about so they tend to get discouraged. So we usually 'buy' drinks to have with lunch or dinner when they set up a stand. This venture was much more successful than selling straw like last year :) Very cute entrepeneurs!!

Easter 2012

The kids got buckets filled with some Easter toys that morning so they would have something to collect their eggs in that afternoon :) We dyed some eggs with Kool aid this year. They turned out pretty cute. The kids always love coloring eggs. They also loved hunting for eggs. Especially finding the golden eggs with $1 inside. The bigger kids also had easter egg hunts at school.

Pirate night

Pirate night at Chik Fil A. We love to go to the Chik Fil A activities. We happened to have enough pirate costumes for all of them. That was pretty entertaining and very cute. Matt was a little concerned I might have the date wrong and we would come walking in with all these little pirates...... luckily I was right :) The kids loved it. Caleb especially, had a great time sword fighting with the cow. I was happy they were so cooperative letting me take a picture before we left. Face painting, balloon animals, ice cream, eye patches .... good cheap fun.

Jackson's baptism

Jackson really wanted to be baptized on his birthday so with the Bishop's permission that's what we did. It was simple and powerful. The best kind :) Both Matt and Gram gave talks. We sang Choose the Right and Praise to the Man both at Jackson's request. We had a dessert bar afterwards. I had forgotten to take pics at the church that night so Matt and Jackson were cooperative enough to put their whites back on for a pic at home. Love those two!!
We made picture announcements for Jackson to hand out. They also had little magnets on the back to help people keep track of them.

Jackson

These were the years I had the easiest access to :) It's so fun to look back and see him grow from year to year. I haven't taken him in for pics this year yet. Guess I should get that scheduled...... :)

Jackson turns 8

 

So very exciting to have the computer up and running again! Time to catch up. On March 18th Jackson turned 8 years old! Whew. We had his party on Saturday the 17th. We just kept it to family this year. Gram and Papa were in town for his baptism the next day so we got to have them here for the party too. Jackson loved helping me decorate and was pretty happy with me for getting some angry birds decorations. He had requested another donut man instead of a cake - just like last year. So I tried to step it up a bit and make it a little cooler. He wasn't very impressed :) He thought the one from last year was just fine. He was amused that the candles were his hair..... Gram helped us start a new tradition. She blew up 8 balloons and put $1 in each one. Jackson got to pop them and collect his money. All the kids were pretty excited about that.
It's so hard to believe that he is 8 already. Sometimes I don't think I treat him accordingly. Poor oldest child that gets to do everything first - including teaching his parents how to parent :) He still loves Legos and robots. Could easily be happy with those two things alone. I love his creativity and curiousity. His fire for learning, his steadfastness when he feels something is right, his empathy for others, his energy, his willingness to help. He is an amazing kid and has grown up in so many ways over the past year. I am excited to see what the next one holds. Second grade has been awesome for him. His teacher was a perfect fit and while he is not the angel child in the class :) he has a love of math and a lack of love for english/spelling. He comes home happy from school almost without fail, wants to do his jobs immediately (make his bed, take dirty clothes down, put clean ones away) so he can have his computer time. In the interest of full disclosure and for future reference - he occasionally still loses his computer time for wetting his pants while playing. Tries to wait while he finishes 'just one more level'. He loves to play with the neighbor girl who is 1 year older than he is, climb trees (although that has almost stopped since we found a tick on his head after climbing). That really had nothing to do with the tree - ticks are just insanely horrible out here. We have seen 10 this spring already..... Jump on the trampoline, have lemonade stands.
 Jackson is amazing with Caleb. He will play with him, distract him, hug him - I hope they continue to be buddies as time goes by. Sometimes it's sad to think that Caleb will only be 12 when Jackson graduates from high school. All in all Jackson is a perfect fit in our family and we absolutely love who he is.