Easter Pictures, the rest of the story

Here's the rest of J's Easter pictures:

My Little Nurse

Today, I'm very grateful and full of love for my little nurse. I haven't been feeling well today so I laid down after Erik went to work and J came and laid next to me. She gave me a big hug and started to sing me a song to make me feel better and she continued to sing until we both fell asleep. I'm very fortunate to have such a compassionate and loving little girl. Whenever I don't feel well either physically or emotionally she's always taking care of me and doing things to make me feel better. She'll put the back of her hand to my forehead to see if I have a fever, she'll kiss where I hurt, whether it be my head or my heart and then she'll let me hold her, snuggle with me or sing me a song. Occasionally she'll tell me that a treat for the two of us to share will make me feel better (you'll be amazed at the wonders that a little ice cream can do at our house). Today as I was watching her sleep as I woke up from our nap I was overwhelmed with feelings of gratitude and love and can't thank my Heavenly Father enough for sending her to our family. She's my little nurse, my friend and my baby girl and I LOVE her more than words can express!

Easter Pictures

These were taken today so I'm still editing them. We hope to get some more later this week when there are more blue bonnets out, but until then I hope you enjoy our little cowgirl!

Monday Memories

I know, I know, I'm a little late (okay a lot late). I could go on and on about why I didn't get around to doing this until now, but I'm just going to say that life happens. I actually thought of this weeks memories on Monday (does that count?). As Erik and I were at the rodeo Monday night I was thinking about how it was J's first time having a sleepover at Mimi's (when we lived there it didn't really count as a sleepover) and I thought of the first time I can remember staying at my Grandma & Grandpa Wahlquist's without my parents. It was when Toni was born. I don't remember much about the stay, just that it happened and that brought back a flood of memories about Grandma & Grandpa's house in Toquerville. I remember the willow tree in the back and how we'd always make crowns out of it's branches. I remember one of my cousins twisting the branches together to make a pair of shoes. I remember going to the pond at the back of their property. There's so many things that remind me of them so I'm just going to make a list of all the things that I think of when I think of Grandma & Grandpa Wahlquist

Going to family reunions with ALL the cousins (which brings back a whole other set of memories)
Grandpa playing his guitar
Grandma's garden & and her rose bushes
shelling peas on their back patio
playing dress ups in the basement of their house in Hurricane
playing pit (a.k.a spoons)
Grandma's cooking (especially her bread)
homemade ice cream
Grandpa giving us "horsey rides on his knees" (this is the way the girls ride walk, walk, walk. . .)
Grandma's bell collection
Kneeling down around the kitchen table for prayer at dinner time with Grandpa ALWAYS holding Grandma's hand
Grandma helping to make gifts for Mom on Mother's day (my Mom still has a little bottle that Grandma helped us to glue beads on)
Their big Afghan dog (and later on Callie, their barking fur ball of a dog with her "lion" hair cuts in the summer)

I'm grateful that I have such amazing grandparents and the opportunity I had to live so close to them growing up and the great example they were to me. Some of my fondest memories are from the few months that I was able to live with them before I get married. I LOVE you Grandma and think of you and Grandpa often!

I Looked Out the Window. . .

. . . and what did I see, popcorn popping on my peach tree. I don't have an apricot tree. Erik doesn't really like apricots so we planted a peach and a pear tree instead. The peach tree started blossoming this week! The pear tree isn't blossoming, but it does have a ton of new growth and we're excited to have pears in the fall! To welcome in spring, we've also started planting our garden. The previous owners built a raised flowerbed along the entire back fence (about 5' x 60' it's HUGE) and we turned it into our garden. We have our 2 fruit trees, a couple raspberry bushes, strawberries, tomatoes, onions, garlic, cilantro, zucchini, bell peppers, jalapenos, Serrano peppers, poblano peppers, corn, lettuce, radishes, peas, carrots, and cucumbers. We planted the lettuce, peas, radishes, carrots and cucumbers by seed last week and when we went out to plant the rest of the plants today, we were pleasantly surprised to see that our seeds were sprouting! Tomorrow we're going to plant our green beans and go try to find some summer squash and spinach plants. We're very excited and hope that our little garden grows!

Just for you Dad!

Apple Slice, Pink Whisper, Pale Butter, Universal Umber. . . these (and several others) are the paint colors we've used on our WALLS (notice "Hospital White" isn't one of them). For those of you who are a bit lost, let me fill you in. My dad has a FEAR of color. He thinks all walls should look like those in a hospital [STARK WHITE]. Our walls started out a cream, almost white color and we HATED it, everything looked so Blah, so we went to our handy hardware store and bought a little paint (okay so we bought a lot of paint, our local hardware store knows Erik by name, is that bad?). Here's a few pictures of what we've done. . .

J's room: Pink Whisper
Dining room: Churchhill Hotel Brown (the bottom; the top is the color that the entire house was painted when we moved in)

Laundry Room: Pale Butter (it was left over from our old house. We had it in the kitchen, but it was too bright)

Master bath water closet: Humboldt Earth (left over from old Master bedroom)

Powder room: Universal Umber (left over from old Powder room)

Fireplace: Fairmont Penthouse Garnet

Main house color: Lyndhurst Stone

Kitchen: Hazy Dawn

We also used Cincinnatan Hotel Hannaford in J's bathroom and have bought Apple Slice for the spare room but haven't gotten around to painting it yet.

If you want dad, we'll be there in 3 weeks and would love to add a little color to your house!

Monday Memories

My little sister did a great post on her blog with memories about each member of our family and it got me thinking. I make a blog book at the end of each year so this would be a great place to write my memories and record my personal history. So here's the first installment of "Monday Memories"


Toni mentioned in her post how she and I used to share a room. That brought back memories of how I HATED sharing a room with her, not because she was my little bratty sister (which she was a times) but because she was so MESSY (and I'm a bit obsessive about cleanliness)! At one point I convinced my mom to have my two sisters share a room and I got my own room (YEAH!) but that didn't last too long. Neither one of them liked to keep things clean so within a few weeks you couldn't see the bedroom floor. Needless to say I got stuck with Toni again. There were times that her mess would bother me so much that I couldn't sleep and would stay up late cleaning up and making sure everything in the room was in perfect order. In the morning Toni would wake up to a cleaned room and wonder what happened. I told her that the cleaning fairies had come during the night. I wonder what happened to those fairies, they never seem to show up at my house now!

Another memory that came to mind was about how my older sister, Heather and I would torture my little brother Colt. We weren't physically mean to him, we just made him play "girl games." Heather and I would take blankets out of the closet and pile them just so on the floor so that they'd make great Barbie houses. We'd then pretend that the carpet was water. Colt had a G.I. Joe aircraft carrier that we used as our "grocery boat." We made him drive the boat around to our "houses" and play Barbies with us.

The last memory for this week is one day Heather and I were playing in her room when we thought we saw a snake near her bedroom door (my parents lived on a hillside "out in the fields" so seeing creepy crawling things around the house wasn't uncommon). We yelled for Colt who was playing in the nearby family room to run and get our mom. It seemed like he was gone FOREVER and our young imaginations started to get carried away. By the time my mom got to us (a few minutes later), we were jumping up and down on Heather's bed crying. We were sure that it must have been a rattlesnake and that the snake got to Colt and that he was now lying on the outside of the door dying and we were trapped inside the bedroom. My mom looked at the spot where we were SURE we'd seen the snake and all she saw was a yellow #2 pencil.