Life with a Toddler

He loves chocolate donuts!

This is how I found the oreos.  He only likes the filling.  

May Showers

May was a very rainy month and one evening we took advantage of the cool rainy weather and sat outside on the porch swing we are storing for some friends.  We talked and laughed and dad told a few stories. Hearing family stories is one of Cayden's favorite things to do.  

Happy Birthday Daddy

Don turned the big 44 this year.  He is not one for birthdays but I am so we always celebrate.  This year again we had his favorite lasagna cake.  I was going to make him a banana cake but he was leaving out of town the next day and he really just wanted the lasagna.  For his birthday we signed him up for the CCW class.  He has talked about it for a long long time so I just went ahead and paid for it and told him he was going.  The class was actually the week before his birthday but it was the last one they were offering out here until the fall so I went ahead and signed him up for it. He got our neighbor Mike Morgan to go with him so that made it even funner.  He and I also went to Mesquite to see Avengers and to eat at our favorite Mexican restaurant, La Fonda.  The next Saturday his parents took us to Mesquite for sushi ( I ate steak!).  

The candles equal 44-we have been doing this for a while since the one time we didn't have the actual right number for someone's cake-we just use what we have that adds up to whatever number they are turning.  The candles were melting into the lasagna!

Spring Orchestra Concert

On Tuesday May 9, Cayden got to participate in his second orchestra concert.  He has been in orchestra class all year and plays the violin.  Don was out of town and the boys were working so I got to take Kyle.  That was not a fun thing to do.  The orchestra music was fine and the kids worked really hard.  There were just so many songs!  And there were some songs sung by the chorus class in between sets and they were awful.  It was a horribly long night.  Cayden's class was almost toward the end but after he was finished I went and grabbed him and we went home.  Cayden did a very good job and has improved so much this year. 

I had to take Kyle outside several times to keep him entertained.  I had snacks and my phone for him to play with but the concert was so long that he just couldn't make it through.  My friend Serena came outside with him so I could go in and watch Cayden's performance and then we got the heck out of there!  

Mother's Day

Mother's Day was almost a weekend event. I went to Mesquite on Friday for a pedicure. 

Don brought me home some beautiful flowers. 

Sunday morning I got breakfast in bed. It was pancakes and bacon and my sweet husband even measured out the peanut butter and syrup since I am counting my calories. 

Cayden sang me a lovely song that I was pretty as pie and cake. 

Caleb shaved his face. This was a huge gift since hates to shave. 

Kyle made me a necklace in Primary but he decided that he wasn't going to give it to me. 

All the sisters in the ward got a big cupcake and Chris Zundle saw us walking into church and gave me 2 Sweet Tooth Fairy sugar cookies. 

I took a lovely nap after church but woke up with a serious sugar hangover headache because I ate all that sugar.  Connor sent me a sweet text and gave me a hug at church. Don had Caleb order me a FitBit on Amazon but it didn't get here before Mother's Day.  That's ok though because I didn't exercise one bit today!  It was a good day! 

In My Pretty Garden

When we came home from Provo I went out to check my garden and found that a little rodent had decided to make my garden it's new home.  We have had gophers in the past in the front yard but I have never had one in the back especially in the garden.  He had already killed one of my squash plants and I was not going to let him have another!  I flooded him out Sunday night and then watched to see if he would come back.  On Tuesday there were more tunnels so I called Connor to bring me a gopher trap from Grandpa's.  While I was waiting I tried to drown him out again.  Grandpa came right over and while we looking at the trap the little sucker  stuck his head up out of his tunnels because they were filling with water.  I sprayed him and he ran out of the garden toward the back wall and then grandpa stomped him.  That was the end of the gopher.  The next day I went out to check the garden to make sure he was really gone and didn't have any relatives helping him and I was happy to see he had not come back nor any of his friends and family and even his little corpse was gone thanks to a neighborhood cat I would guess!  Hooray!

These are the first 3 pickings from our garden this year.  The dark one was really tough but it was all going into minestrone anyway so it softened up some in the soup.  The squash are doing awesome but the zucchini are not doing to well.  I even went and bought two more plants because of the 5 I planted only one was doing really well.  The two new ones are still not doing that great either.  The tomato plants are getting big and we are starting to see some little tomatoes on them. Yay for gardens!

Payson Temple

We took a quick trip to Provo the first weekend of May so we could go to the Payson Temple open house.  We went the Pitt's family and my mom.  It was a breezy spring day and it was lovely.  The temple is absolutely beautiful inside and out.  There is so much detail and artistry all through out the building.  After the temple we went to Los Hermanos-my favorite Mexican place ever.  The Pitts family didn't go eat with us but they were going to come back to Grandma's and visit for a while until Ella bella got sick as soon as they got home.  She had been sick for a few days but they thought she was over it until they got back home and she barfed in the garage. We were very fortunate that none of us got it especially because Kyle and Ella were holding hands and Don and I carried her some.  I'm so glad that the church is building so many temples and we can take our children to the open houses.  Cayden has been to 4 now and Kyle has been to two.  Caleb and Connor did not go with us on the trip because they had to work.  The Provo temple should be done here in the next year and we will get to go to that open house.  The church announced it was breaking ground in Cedar City for that temple so we can go to that in a few years as well.  Kyle especially asks about the temple because I try to go as often as I can.  He asks if he can go all the time and so we were finally able to take him to the temple open house in Ogden last summer and then to St. George when Ashley and Brad Farmer had their twins sealed to them in February.  Kyle got to go then but only to the waiting room. And now he has gotten to go again.    Cayden has been able to do baptisms for the dead 2 or three times since he turned 12 in February of last year.