Yo, family blog! I don't know what to say about my lack of blog participation. Everybody can punch me next time they see me.  How's that?

Big girls at the Lion King! 

Charlotte brought jammies for Suzie so they could be matching.  I don't know how I didn't get a picture of both of them wearing them, but oh well.

Sam had a LEGO birthday party this year.  I'm not much for putting effort into parties (or showering, or gardening, or...), so I kind of surprised myself with how much fun it ended up being.  They made and raced lego cars, had tower building contests, dug around in blue jello for mini figs, etc.  I'm still finding sticky blue sections in my carpet, but whatever.

I have no words for this.

Or this.

Oh wait, yes I do: WHY IS LUIGI HOLDING MY DAUGHTER?

They had a mustache day at work.  Yeah.  This is what Homeland Security is doing.  Would anybody be surprised if I said it was Mark's idea?  Supposedly it was for some kind of charitable fund awareness, but I don't believe that and neither should you.  Mark wanted to creep me out with  his bizarrely fast-growing Mexi-stache.  The end.

Sam did a project on animals in space, which included his model of Sam the rhesus monkey stuffed into a pop bottle.  This is  the first attempt.  The finished product turned out pretty fancy and Sam was wearing a tinfoil space suit (the monkey, not the boy).  It's now hanging in the library of his school.

Sister-friend is dressing herself these days.  I don't fight it.  

Ain't Nobody Go Time For That!

As final's week has slowly rested it's immensely obese self onto me, I've had to turn for youtube for help. I stumbled across this gem and thought you all might enjoy it. WARNING: Sassy blackness ahead.

March Happenings

March was great to us. Calgary gave us amazing March weather, Emme was/is the easiest, happiest baby ever. She naps well, sleeps well and literally never cries (knock on wood). What more could I ask for? Charlotte has toned down the emotional outbursts and Dave had 5 days off in a row!

Charlotte LOVES Emmeline. It's so cute to watch her play with her, talk with her, and make her laugh.

Isn't this the chubbiest, cutest smile you've ever seen?

Charlotte is part of a little playgroup rotation that a few of us moms in the ward put together. This is their little board that they sit around to have a lesson, talk about the weather, sing a song and read a book. The girls love it and when it's not at my house it makes for a quiet morning. I have now dedicated Wednesday mornings as a housecleaning day.

We got Charlotte a great little easel for Christmas and it's been such a great gift. We use it almost daily.

Em's first attempt at solids. She was not interested. We've had more success with sweet potatoes.

There is a hilarious little girl in our ward who lives next door. These two are pretty funny. They'll go and call on each other throughout the week. Charlotte acts so mature and grown up when Denali knocks on our door. In her little sing-songy voice she'll be like " Oh come on in, would you like to play?" Sometimes when Charlotte gets particularly whiny I'll just call Denali's mom and tell her to send her over so Charlotte can stop the whining. It works every time.

A little leprechaun came to our house for St. Patrick's Day and left a kite and some Lucky Charms. He even left behind some great footprints. That tricky Leprechaun!

Sometimes her hair gets so crazy we'll call her baby Einstein. If you can't tell, she is so fair, she's pretty much the color of the white change table. We love her beautiful Ivory skin.

Festival of Colours

This last week I went to the festival of colours in Spanish Fork. It's the largest celebration of this Hindi thingdi in the entire Western Hemisphere! It's funny though because it's attended by like 200 hippies, 25 Hindis and 25,000 mormon college students. It was a blast as long as you don't mind inhaling so much Indian chalk that you sneeze rainbows for a week... I brought my GoPro with my waterproof case and got some really cool footage so Graham was kind enough to edit it into a video! Enjoy!

Gift Ideas

Next time you are looking for a gift for someone hard to buy for here are two sites that are great. Well, maybe not great but at least entertaining.

poorlydrawnportraits.com

Be sure to read the site content. The FAQs are particularly funny.

mormonapparel.com

Garlic Fiasco

Mike told me I'm not part of the family until I post on the blog, so I figured I better get on that. :)

What  I am about to write is rather embarrassing on my part.  I'm not sure why I'm choosing this as my first post on the blog, but hopefully you guys won't hold it against me for too long.

I've been trying new recipes that I've been finding off of Pinterest lately.  I gave Mike a list of meals I could make for last night, and he chose the slow cooker honey sesame chicken.  Once I had everything ready to go into the slow cooker except the garlic, my mom called me.  While I was talking to her, I told her what I was making and said I only had the two cloves of garlic left to put in.  She asked if I had a garlic mincer, which I don't, and she said next time I come home I should take one of hers because she has two.

Once I got off the phone, I went back to cut up my two 'cloves' of garlic.  It took around a half an hour, and I was wondering what I was missing.  That garlic mincer must make a big difference in the time it takes to cut up garlic because a half an hour is a bit ridiculous.

While everything was in the slow cooker, my mom called again.  My younger sister came to Edmonton this weekend and was over to visit, so my mom wanted to talk to us both (I don't usually talk to her twice in one day).  The first thing I said to her was, "I think I'll take you up on taking that garlic mincer.  It took me a half an hour to cut all of it up!"

She didn't know what I was talking about, and asked me why it took so long.  I went on to explain that each 'clove' of garlic has like 15 parts to it, so I had to peel and cut up 30 of them.  This is when my mom explained to me that each of those 'things' were actually cloves, and I had put in 28 more than I needed to.  This may make me sound like a complete idiot, but in my defence, I had pretty much never cooked anything other than macaroni before I got married!

The chicken itself was really good, and you couldn't taste the extra garlic.  It was the plain sauce on the rice where it became more apparent.  I didn't tell Mike what I had done though, and he said this was the best meal I have made yet.  He was pretty happy about it.  Once he got to the point where he was eating just the sauce on rice though, I asked him if there was any flavour that was more prominent than the rest.  He thought I had put something really weird in the sauce and got all nervous, but he said he couldn't taste any one thing more than anything else.  That lasted until I told him what I'd done.  Then he claims he could taste it a lot more.

Anyway, that was longer than I meant to make it, but hopefully you can all get a little laugh out of my stupidity! :)

Talent Show

Hey it's Josh again. Sorry to take over the blog like this, but Graham and I were recently in our ward talent show and mom wanted me to post the video to the blog. We performed a song/sketch called "Jenny" by flight of the Chonchords. You'll notice that half of our laughs came from jokes about us being Canadian, that is because we continue to milk this fact for all its worth. Our friends call our room "Canada" and we are just referred to as "the Canadians." I love it, because everyone knows who we are. Anyways, enjoy!