EASTER! and other things we did in March

Our family on Easter Sunday!

 

(not pictured: Margo)

Jon's tie is a Jerry Garcia, borrowed from his dad's collection. My dress and cardigan were thrift store finds. Kate's dress was handmade by me, and her hair flower is from Little Lesiw! (The lady who makes the blooms gets her fabric from Bev's. It was a perfect match.) Kate's dress ended up a little big on her, which is perfect because she will be able to wear it for a few more months :)

 

Visiting Gram and Grandpa!

 

 

The Easter Bunny brought something adorable for Kate :)

 

She was also spoiled with puffs, a pink bunny from Grandpa, a board book from Gram, teething cookies from Nana and Papa, and some stacking blocks.

 

Katherine's first tooth made it's debut on Thursday! You can barely see it coming in. It's the bottom right tooth. Jon and I were VERY excited! I had no idea I would get so excited about her teeth. She especially now likes to munch on everything she can.

 

Jon and I also worked on decorating an Easter basket for Kate. It's about halfway done. We're hoping to add more to it this week before storing it away. Right now it's full of mine and Jon's candy, but it will definitely be ready for the Easter Bunny to fill with goodies next year!

 

 

Jon made the grass and flowers:

 

I made this little bunny guy with the Easter egg:

 

***

 

In a brief re-cap of the month, here is what else we've been up to:

 

I made a mini apron for my niece's 6th birthday

 

Kate gets more adorable every day.

She can sit by herself and loves to look at everything while we are grocery shopping!

 

Jon and I have been crafting as always (see previous post about knitting). Here is a picture frame/vinyl project we put together for Jon's dad's birthday:

 

Both the original frame and the vinyl quote are from Beverly's. We did the lay out and tried to find all the pictures we could of Jon's dad with paintings he has worked on for the kids and grandkids. He's done a lot of amazing work!

 

We got to visit with this lovely lady :) So excited for her finishing law school soon!

 

We worked on our veggie eating skills

 

Speaking of crafting and birthdays... my coworker Savannah and I put together a magical basket of goodies for our friend, Shayla. It came complete with a burned-edge scroll of magical directions. Mermaid scales, Siren hair, wings of a Griffin and Phoenix tears, just to name a few.

 

I met this fantastic creature at work:

It's so fluffy I'm gonna die!!!

We made flower tiaras at the park:

And with an average of 2 photo sessions a week, we are definitely having fun and keeping busy. Can't wait to see what April brings!



March - The Month Of...

Knitting!

 

Or, to make it sound more manly, "yarn stabbing".

 

It all started with this book: First Steps in Knitting.

 

Well, let me back up. My grandma taught me how to knit when I was younger, but I never work on it. I've picked it back up on and off again over the years, but never really made anything substantial.

 

When I was pregnant with Katherine, I REALLY wanted to knit her a blanket, but I never did it. This month was going to be my chance. And since Jon had never knit before, we decided to make this one of our months of exploration!

 

My goal for Kate's afghan was to be 3 colors - orange, brown and green. I also picked large needles because I wanted the stitches to be chunky.

 

We kicked off our knitting projects with Breanna!

 (her hubs was out of town)

Katherine thoroughly enjoyed laughing at the Baker's dog, Nelope, as we watched James and the Giant Peach.

It's so fun when Jon dresses her for church. All blue, athletic socks, and her sparkly Christmas shoes :) Love it.

Jon decided to tackle a manageable project; knitting a scarf for Kate.

He did start over once at the beginning, but his stitches were nice and even and looked great for his first project! He also learned quickly the importance of COUNTING your stitches.

We did some knitting at Summer and Riley's place too. All the while I was practicing different stitches, knitting and purling so that I could read the pattern I wanted to use.

As of today, Jon's scarf looks like this!

 

All done with some beautiful green fringe on the end :) He made it extra long so that she can continue to grow with it and wear it for a few years.

 

My project?

 

 

Looks like this...

 

I was getting a little thrown off with the giant needles, so I decided to use smaller needles to practice on until I really feel comfortable with the stitches. It's nowhere close to being a blanket yet, but I do feel good about my practicing. Good thing it's a skill I can continue to develop :)

 



You are who you pretend to be

A few weeks ago, the chubs woke up nice and early. Because of Jon's ability to hear the footsteps of a mouse, he woke up with the chubs, and couldn't fall back asleep. Instead, he browsed through Netflix, and found Unicorn City...

 

 

and so our lives were changed forever.

 

I told my friends at work about it (being that they love Unicorns) and thus, our bacon/movie/magical creature craft night was invented.

 

Lindsay went above and beyond, finding pictures of the most majestic unicorns she could to cover the soda bottles. She even made unicorn horns for them and added a mustache to one! After all... what is a majestic unicorn without a handlebar mustache?

 

 

All of our cups had unicorn name labels. Mine has 2 unicorns to represent myself and baby Kate :)

 

 

We colored, decorated picture frames,

 

 

and made shrinky dinks! (Which sort of failed)

Notice how the shrinky dink with the rainbow has a unicorn with fangs and a maiden crying tears of blood. Epic.

 

Per Savannah's request, we also tried to make Unicorn poop cookies!

 

Step 1: separate the sugar cookie dough into 6 parts and color each chunk with food coloring so that it resembles the colors of the rainbow.

 

Step 2: arrange the cookie dough in rainbow order inside a plastic baggie, and then squeeze it through the cut off corner so that it looks like... well... poop.

 

 

Although they looked good going IN the oven, they totally turned into flat cookie mush! I think it was partially because of the food coloring that they never really set up. So we just ate the warm sugar cookie mush straight off of the cookie sheet with forks :)

Me, Savannah, Shayla and Lindsay

We had so much fun that "Magical Creature" night is going to become a monthly event! Next time? BIGFOOT.

 

***

 

Speaking of things we like to pretend we can do...

 

on Saturday we were in Sacramento with Johnny and Ari when Johnny told us about this 6 pound noodle challenge. It's pretty much just what it sounds like. One must eat 6 pounds of noodles in 15 minutes. Johnny really thought he could do it.

 

He started off with some stretches (see the action shot on the left)

 

But the noodles were intimidating...

 



 

Johnny held the chubs so that we could really see how large this noodle bowl was comparitively... it really just looked comical.

 

He was allowed to let the food cool down a little. And with the first bite, the time started!

 

Ari, being the good fiance that she is, kept the time and when Johnny felt like he was getting overwhelmed, she was there to shove his face back down into the noodle bowl.

 

Johnny strategically maneuvered the noodles into smaller bowls as he went for optimal air flow and cooling. Meanwhile, the Katherine took her afternoon nap on the bench in between me and Jon. What an awesome baby :) She can sleep anywhere!

 

Ari was really getting a kick out of Johnny's noodling. I seriously have never seen him so focused.

 

AND TIME IS UP!

 

Ari tried her best to console Johnny, but let's face it... that bowl is still AT LEAST half full.

 

It was a good effort.

 

We finished off the night at Rick's Dessert Diner

 

We took our desserts to go and headed home to watch... (you guessed it)

 

UNICORN CITY!

 

 

Double dates will never be the same.

Sunday at Home

After visiting our Fair Oaks ward for baby blessings yesterday, we got to spend the afternoon at home. Kate had plenty of smiles for dad :)

 

 

Katherine is officially 7 months old:

 

Jon, looking manly ;)

 



 

And the Margo pup.

 

 I'm glad to have these moments together and that we'll have fun memories to look back on as Katherine gets older. We're ready for Spring!