At the end of the day, in the springtime, you should smell like dirt!

I LOVE springtime.  The weather is finally warm enough that the kids can just run and play outside.  Thankfully, I do not have a grass-only lawn, so my girls bring me bouquets of flowers everyday!

Spencer and I have been doing some MAJOR relandscaping to the front of our house.  We've been at it a month and are about 1/2 done.  Here, we are eating a picknick dinner so the girls can eat and we can work.  Well...Heavenly Father sent us a thunderstorm instead.  So we watched the storm move in and then moved inside and watch the Princess and the Frog!

The Heirloom Hydrangea my parents gave us last year is doing great and will even flower this year!  The Hydrangea is a clipping from plants that we can trace back to the 1800's!

We built a flower box with landscape timbers about 2 feet from the house all along the front.  Then I moved all my bulb plants.  We have iris, lilies, amorylis, gladiolis, and spring lilies.  I still need to move my society garlic, but it's not all up yet.  The rest will be grass.

We also built a box at the front.  This is the girl's flower bed.  They will get to pick out the flowers every year.  Last year they chose snapdragons and marigolds.  But we didn't have the box so the weeds dominated the landscape.  This year, they choose African daisys and petuntias.

Here's a look at our newly remade front!  We pulled up all the overgrown juniper shrubs and will have grass instead!  It will look (and feel) great once the grass has grown in!

And here is the 1/2 that we haven't finished!  We'll build another box around the base of the trees and just keep it mulched.  Then we'll cut back the weeds, smooth out the dirt some, and grass the entire thing.

But first...we have to take care of our erosion problem!  We are in the process of building some retaining walls.  We'll probably end of with 2 tiers up to the top.  Then the side will just be a smooth hill with grass.  Cross your fingers...we are hoping to be done with the retaining walls this week and maybe done will the entire project in two weeks!

Then we can get our act together and build some raised beds so we can have home-grown veggies all summer!

Modesty Is More Than Clothing Choices

On Sunday, we had a fascinating discussion in Relief Society. 

Since we are studying the Old Testament in Gospel Doctrine, the Relief Society presidency has decided to focus on the "Women of the Old Testament" for their 1st Sunday Presidency lessons. 

This Sunday we studied Vashti.  She only has one small chapter in the entire Bible, but what she did was impressive and worth our time and study.  She is found in the first chapter of the book of Esther.  The king is having a HUGE party with all the other royals.  The queen is hosting a similar party for all the wives.  The king and guest get slobbering drunk and then call for the queen to come and "perform" for them.  The queen refuses!  The other royals counsil with the king to get rid of her because they are afraid that their wives will no longer obey and they'll have too much trouble on their hands.  So the queen is dismissed.  We don't know if she is killed or just banished.  As the queen, she must have known her husband and must have known the dangers of refusal.  And yet she did not compromise her standards. 

She knew that entertaining the men in that situation would compromise her values. 

This lesson really highlited for me that modesty is not just what you wear...it's how you act!

Spencer is REALLY OLD!!!

Okay...so he's only 34...but that's 4 years older than me!

His birthday was on Friday and he took the day off and we joined my parents in Charleston.  Grams joined us at Charles Towne Landing while Grandpa was at the Canoe and Kayak Festival.  The girls were horrible...so we HAD to put them in the stocks!  (Just kidding...about the horrible part).

On Saturday, we took the ferry out to Fort Sumter.  I learned ALOT about the Civil War that I either never learned or shortly forgot about our country's history.  South Carilonians are rebels at heart!  They were the first to leave England and the first to cede from the Union!

When we made it home Saturday, we found two white dogs on our porch!  Our friends, Aaron and Cory (I'm pretty sure I misspelled her name), just moved up here from FL.  They are going on a cruise this week, so we get to watch their dogs.  The girls LOVE the smaller, cuter dogs!

General Conference

The first weekend in April was our church's General Conference.  On Saturday and Sunday, I had the chance to listen to our living prophet and apostles speak to us.  It was beautiful! 

Some of my personal favorite hightlites:

~~Apostle Boyd K. Packer:  It was NEVER easy to live the gospel of Jesus Christ--it was not easy when Christ was here, it was not easy in the early days of the church, and it is not easy now.

~~Apostle Boyd K. Packer:  There will be times that the only thing standing betwee your homes and Satan is the Priesthood!

~~Apostle M. Russell Ballard:  The influence of a righteous woman is lifechanging!

~~Apostle L. Tom Perry:  None of a woman's preparation is ever wasted.

~~Apostle Elder David A Bednar:  Children may not always understand the words of the scriptures, but they will undertand the Spirit they feel.

~~Apostle Dieter F. Uchtdorf:  A $20 bill...weither brand new or greatly used...is still worth the same amount.

~~Apostle Quentin L. Cook:  The symbol of Christ for the Latter-day Saint is our faith and how we choose to live our lives.

~~Apostle Russell M. Nelson: When our hearts turn towards our ancestors, something changes within us.

~~Apostle Robert D. Hales:  The greatest influence in our lives comes from the warm interaction with our parent's.  The greatest missionary service we will ever do will be in our homes.

~~Apostle Neil L. Anderson:  Two men can do ANYTHING as long as one of them is the Lord.

~~Prophet Thomas S. Monson: The world seems to have slipped from the harbor of safety and out of the bay of peace...look to the lighthouse of the Lord.

(You can listen to any of these speakers at http://www.lds.org/)

Easter Morning

We had a lovely Easter.  He all took turns being sick Friday and Saturday, but we were all healthy by Sunday.  The Easter Bunny found our house and left eggs everywhere.  The girls were up at 6:00 AM!!!  They found all the eggs and ate LOTS of chocolate.

Isaiah loves his mother more than the girls and slept in!  So, he was not awake for the hunt but enjoyed playing with all the empty eggs.  He was also very generous and shared his candy with the girls.

FL Pictures...As Promised

Here are the pictures from my trip to FL at the beginning of March that I promised everyone.

On our first night, we all loaded up and ate dinner on the lake.  Hailey and Makenzie LOVE riding on the boat.  Isaiah didn't like his big, bulcky life-jacket, but when we were stopped we took it off and let him crawl around.  He was much happier then.

Grandpa caught a nice large bass (little girls are good luck for fishermen).  He asked Hailey if she wanted to eat it for dinner.  She was really hoping he wasn't serious!

Saturday we went to Trenton, FL for their outdoor quilt show (didn't take any pictures).  Then we stopped by Gainesville on he way home to go throught the UF Butterfly House and their travelling exhibit called "Quilts of Natural FL".  We were not the only group coming from Trenton, FL either!

Here are the girls and Mrs Ruth.  She is my mom's neighbor, and awesome quilter, and an amazing lady.  She is nearly 80 years old and was able to keep up with the girls, walking all day long!  WOW!!!

On Sunday we headed to the Jacksonville Zoo.  Beautiful weather.  This is the entrance to their newest exhit: China.

Me, the girls, and the panda bears.

Isaiah LOVES Grandpa.  The girls are riding the carasol with Grams.  Isaiah loves Grandpa'a beard.  He stares at it, rubs it, licks it.  They are quite the pair!

On one of the last mornings, Grandpa took the girls fishing.  They actually slept in, so they fished from the dock.  Good thing Grandpa feeds the fish every morning to keep a large stock of large fish down at our finger of the lake!

Makenzie's first bass on her new princess fishing pole (Christmas gift from Grandpa, of course!)

Such Good Friends

Thursday, I had a visit with my visiting teacher.  April Fool's.  No really...a visiting teacher actually came to my home and visited with me!!!!  WOW!!!!  It was fun talking with her.  During the course of our conversation, I mentioned that I had broken our camera at Makenzie's birthday party.  Well, after she returned home, she called me back and said they had some extra camera's that we could borrow until we replaced ours!!!  I had a choice even...between and SLR (big with big lens type) and an HP (normal little point and shoot type).  I choose the little one that would fit in a diaper bag and could be operated easily with one hand.  But WOW...what awesome friends.  Even better...her husband dropped the camera off this morning in time for us to take it with us to the zoo!!!  Good friends and nice people are AWESOME!!!!!!!!

(And yes...that means I'll need to get my act together and actually publish some of those pictures on the blog!)

(Oh...and can you tell I like exclamation marks???!!!)