Keeping Busy

I've been a little stir crazy lately. Not only because Winter seems to be lasting all year, but also because I am currently a full-on stay at home Mom. Bracken's mommy is on maternity leave with their newest little baby girl, Leah, so I haven't had anything on my schedule during the days which is a little well... boring. I guess this is when most women say, "time to have another baby"... but not me :) So I've been trying to keep myself busy, church callings have helped. On top of preparing weekly singing time and monthly song charts, I'm also this years Young Women's camp director.

Being camp director has been a little frustrating because there isn't much you can do ahead of time. You have to plan a lot, but have to wait until a few weeks before camp to put it all together. I've been working on sewing the mailboxes for secret sisters. Yes, it looks like a shoe rack and that's is basically what it is but the girl's will put their name on a pocket and wait for their gifts. Glad this is almost done (just some dowls and ribbon left).

 Andrea calls them my "pockets" when I work on them.

Next I'll cut out of wood location signs for the girls to paint, "latrine" "mess hall" "barricks" and "officers quarters". Our camp is Boot Camp themed, if you can't tell. Then will be the flag and schedule, luckily my assistant is handling those.

I've also been working on a few house projects... ever since Andrea has started sleeping in her bed again I've been anxious to get her more girly bedding, the Elmo stuff was driving me nuts. As I looked online Andrea wanted Dora, Princess, Backyardigans, but I wanted the ladybug one. Luckily she liked that one too! It works great with her lady bug tent and actually happened to be the same colors I used for her padded seat on the toy box.

Our masther bedroom is always a work in progress and when I found these 3D flowers at Bed, Bath, & Beyond I knew they would work great. I had some red, white, and blue stars there for a long time and as you can see, did not match the decor. I love these flowers and they were a lot of fun to put up. 

On a completely different note, Andrea is potty trained! She actually has been for over a month. My friend gave me a copy of "3 Day Potty Training" and it was just what Andrea needed for it all to click. But while washing 10 dirty pair of brand new underwear after only 3 hours on the first day I didn't know if I could make it, but the next day she totally got it and I'm glad I stuck to the method. She still wears pull-ups at night and during naps but I couldn't care less. She does so well all day long, even tells the nursery leaders when she needs to go and is comfortable going potty at the store, the library, in restaurants, I am so proud of her!

Easter

Easter really snuck up on me this year, but that made it an easy going week. I wanted to try coloring eggs with Andrea this year and kept trying to figure out a night when we could do it with Ryan, but between him mowing lawns in the evening and me going to aerobics it just didn't work out. In all honesty, I knew Ryan wouldn't care if we did it without him, so we did it during the day.  

My first plan was to just let Andrea put stickers on the egss but I couldn't believe how well she did at carefully lowering the eggs into the dye. I only boiled about 14 eggs but I wish I had more, it was a lot of fun and Andrea loved it!

 When I was young the Easter Bunny always hid the egss we had dyed. I don't remember getting plastic ones filled with candy. So I thought we would have the best of both worlds and re-use the plastic eggs from last year as well as the real ones. We heard the weather was going to be bad on Easter so we decided to let Andrea hunt for Eggs on Saturday, plus it would give us more time to get ready for chuch the next day. Even this 2 year old is too smart of the Easter Bunny... while hunting she told us "thanks for the eggs guys". And after she emptied the candy from the eggs she asked where the Easter Bunny went so she could give him his candy back :)

 

Sunday she found her Easter basket on the island after we had let her wake up for a while. The Easter Bunny left her a bunny Mrs. Potato Head, new sandals, Minnie pajamas, peeps, a chickie that chirps, and a chocolate bunny. Only a little girl would be most excited about the shoes!

Sunday we put on our most Eastery dresses, and Ryan put on his usual boring church clothes and headed to church. In Nursery they also joined in on the Easter fun. One of the Nursery leaders had planned an Easter party. They hunted for eggs and got to eat lots of candy. When I went in to do music time Andrea was wearing the funniest bunny glasses. The best part was... she was the only little one wearing hers and she never took them off, not even on the ride home.

Grandma and Grandpa gave us all our own chocolate bunny when we joined them for Easter dinner and even Grandma LaVelle had a little basket of coins for Andrea to put in her piggy bank. What a fun Easter weekend, I know we all enjoyed it, especially Andrea.