Easter...... Instruments?

No, I suppose there is really nothing very Easter-ish about drums or maracas.  We made them anyway and the kids loved it!  Here's how they turned out:

And here are the proud creators:

Annika and Mieka were here too, but it was a little crazy with Bella crying, so I didn't get a picture till after they had gone home.  We all had fun though!

What's In A Name?

For anyone who reads this blog, you probably already know that I call my little boy Bugsy.  Yes, I know that has nothing to do with his name which is Matthew.  It originated when he was born and Emma finally had a little brother.  We started by calling him "Brother."  That morphed into "Bubbers" which then morphed into "Bugsy" or any form of that such as "Bugsy Boo," "Biggetty Buggetty Boo," and "Bugsa Boosa."  Now that you know the history, here is the conversation we had in the car today:  


Matthew:  My middow name is Bugsy!
Mommy:  No, your middle name is Paul, like the prophet.
Matthew:  No, my first name is Maphew and my middow name is Bugsy and that's awl my names!


I guess maybe I need to stop calling him Bugsy.  But then I suppose we would have to explain that he has a last name as well.  With the length of our last name, that could get difficult.  :)

Scared What?

Daddy:  Bugsy, you need to put your fire truck away in your room.
Bugsy:  Daddy can you come with me?
Daddy:  No, you're a big boy, you can do it!
Bugsy:  But daddy, I need you to come with me because the clock scares my ears!

Blessed!

As I mentioned in my last post, we had Isabella's blessing last Sunday.  Here are some pics:

This is the invitation I emailed out

Here are pictures from the actual blessing day

Isabella did quite well the whole day, except for the 1 minute that Daniel was giving the blessing.  She hates being cradled in your arms and since she was being cradled, she fussed for most of the blessing. She was an angel the rest of the day though.  Thank you to everyone who joined us.  We had a wonderful day!  We feel very blessed to have our sweet little Bella and for all who came and celebrated with us.

Poor Daniel!

My poor husband!  Why you might ask?  Because he is married to me and we just had a shindig!  We just blessed Isabella last Sunday which of course means that I (like my mother before me) had to make changes to our house.  Fortunately, I did not go as in depth as we often did as children.  There was no knocking down of walls, wallpapering, or painting to be done.  I did however decide to finally finish up some decorating.  This meant that the whole week before the blessing I was working on getting pictures arranged, printed and hung.  Here is what I did:

I took these pictures of my kids and then arranged them in photoshop.

Then I had Daniel make them into canvases to hang on the wall.

Then we tossed around some Ideas of what to do with the wall in our hallway and ended up with this.

Finally he helped me update the pictures over our stairs.

Besides all of that, Daniel cleaned the entire house, (I am talking, bathrooms, mopping floors, vacuuming, kitchen, the whole shebang!) and watched the kids for much of the day on Saturday while I taught a Zumba class and tried to figure out how to cut the vinyl for the walls in the pictures above.

Yes, poor Daniel.  He was fabulous though.  I am so blessed that he is so supportive of my often annoying habits.  He wasn't bugged at me even once the whole weekend and there were plenty of opportunities for him to have been so.  I AM BLESSED!

Black-eyed pea!

I forgot to post this back when it happened, so here it is a little late.  

Bugsy is our crazy little guy!  He likes to run back and forth in the kitchen/living room area.  He was doing this one night as usual when he slipped and hit his cheek on the bottom part of the couch where it is hard.  Here's what happened:

This was actually after about a week.   It got a lot worse the first few days and then slowly started to get better.  It looked much worse than this when we went to church the next day!  We got some teasing about that.  I called him my little black-eyed pea for several days.  I felt so bad every time I looked at it because it just looked like it hurt.  It didn't seem to bother him though.  It has all cleared up now, but I imagine this is just the first of many to come with this little guy.  

As a side note, he did something the other day that we were praising him for.  I don't even remember what it was now, but when I asked him how he did it he said, "I'm just a cool guy."  It was so cute!  We love our "cool guy!"