Our Garden

So this year we finally started a garden. Brian and the kids built the boxes in February and we filled them with the right soil in early March, so we had no excuse to not plant. We planted some peas outside in March and planted some more fragile plants inside our house at that time. The pease did well, but growing plants inside was . . . a fiasco. The last straw was when a child accidentlaly bumped into them and everything dumped out. It didn't matter, we picked up some tomato plants in late May and put them in the garden. From here on out, that is probably what we will do.

Here our are two garden boxes with a good variety of plants growing.

Here are the two squares of radishes. Megan REALLY wanted to plant radishes and she was a little generous with the tiny seeds. We thinned and thinned and still ended up with tons. They were also the first veggie ready to pick and eat. See how proud she is of her radish. (A friend told me that our nice cool spring led to them being really sweet. Once it heated up outside, the radishes got really spicy.)

I must say, this is what I am most excited about. I love peas right from the garden. They are so sweet. And our pea plants grew huge, so hopefully we will get lots all summer long.

Yum!

More produce and pictures to come. I think we might actually get a carrot. I have never had a carrot right from my garden before, and it is really looking promising

!

Liz's trick

Liz is so proud of this trick! She wasn't able to show it to Grandma Call during her visit, so we recorded it and are posting it here.

Rest assured Grandmas that after the events of early June Liz has agreed to not do this trick anymore. :-)

No more pencils, no more books . . .

So school ended on Friday. But it was much too chilly for our annual water party/BBQ with our friends. So this year we picked the kids up and walked the additional four blocks to a really fun park. (on a side note, this brought back memories of our 1st or second summer living in our house. This same friend and I decided to walk to this park. Between us we had five children, ages 3 and under. WE put two in my double stroller and the big three in the wagon. And we did all of the work getting us there and home. This trip was much easier!) We played and had a picnic. It was a perfect morning and a great way to celebrate the end of another great year!

Megan, loving the slide

Liz and Nathan showed off some skills they honed at recess. (another side note, I am glad I am not their to watch them at recess. I know they are strong and confident, but I prefer to watch this kind of thing knowing that it is their 100th time, not the first.)

This picture of Mike absolutely cracks me up!

Not sure what was going on with Nathan's expression here.the girls hanging out with friends.
Mike and his buddy
The whole crew - Our friends are moving soon. Luckily it isn't too far and hopefully we can continue some form of this tradition next year.

This pretty much sums up our spring . . .

Yep, it has been a rainy one. There has been so much water. And except for a small leak in the roof (that Brian was able to take care of quickly) it isn't such a bad deal. We finally bought an umbrella this weekend because I knew we would need to be riding the bus on days that it was supposed to be wet, and I am so glad we did. Megan really liked holding the umbrella, which was fine with me because the bus stops were covered!

On the positive side, our flowers, vegetables and grass are looking very good!

BYU Baseball

Brian got an email in March offering free season tickets for BYU baseball. We thought it would be great to get the tickets and to spend a few evenings out in the beautiful spring weather watching some baseball. Well, thanks to our crazy Utah spring every game in April was rainy or snowy. But we finally made it to a game on Friday evening and we had a great time.

The kids before teh game. They got more excited once we actually saw people playing baseball.

Megan counting the seats in our row while we waited for the game to start.

Mike, Nathan and Liz watching the players warm up.

With every hit the boys would watch intently to see if it would go over the fence.

We saw a few home runs.

Hooray for home runs!

Liz and Megan weren't really into the whole baseball thing. (it is hard to follow when you can't see the ball.) But they had a great time anyway. Liz was so cute and would dance around to the fun songs they played between innings and they laughed at the funny sound effects when the players hit foul balls.

I just love this picture of Nathan. He is a pretty intense kid.

It was a beautiful night for baseball!

Oh, yeah, BYU won 13-3!

Happy Hunting

Yesterday, when I woke up to snow covering the ground I decided to finally post these Easter pictures. We had an egg hunt on the Saturday before Easter. It was fun to be with Brian's family. Dad and Grandpa did a great job hiding eggs for the kids. They each had their own color to find and had so much fun finding them. The pictures are pretty self explanatory. Needless to say, we had a grea time.

Last weekend we met up with the kids' Chantry cousins down here in Orem to have a professional cousin picture taken. Our goal was to surprise Brian's parents with a picture of all of their grandkids in honor of their upcoming anniversary. Well, it was a surprise and I think they were really pleased.

I couldn't have been more thrilled with how well it all turned out.

6 kids, 6 kids looking at the camera, 6 kids with nice expressions on their faces

that is quite an accomplishment

Then to get pictures of the boys and girls separately was so fun too!

I loved that they did some groupings of my kids too.

And they did individual shots of all of the kids.

The whole process was kind of long, and I was worried about how all of the kids would do, but they were all GREAT! Chloe and Russell were darling and it was so fun that the whole day was so successful. These are just a handful of the many, many pictures they took. What a great memory we now have!