Spring! Derrick's Birthday! Easter!

Last week was a great week. We had three very important days last week. 

Two of them I knew about in advance.

1. Derrick's 11th birthday 

2. Easter

The third one was a bit of a surprise. It was the first warm Saturday in Spring which is always a very special day.

All three events were great, but all three together ended up being a bit much. It's literally taken me four days to decompressed from those days enough to start writing about them. So here we go.

We started our Easter celebrations early - or maybe late depending on how you look at it. Last year I bought this baking sheet with Spring cookie cutters, but I was so busy with school we never even opened it. We finally opened it on the Sunday before Easter. 

Brandon made the dough during conference and the kids cut out shapes after conference. 

It was fun.

We watched Singing in the Rain that evening.  Derrick LOVES the Make Em Laugh song and the part where they are recording the movie with sound for the first time. He laughed and laughed at those parts and when the movie was over we rewatched those parts. Here he is jumping up and down with joy during his favorite parts. 

I took this picture of Veronica a little bit before bed time. I have to preface it by saying that Veronica 100% did this to herself. She'd been feeling a little sad on Saturday and told me, "The only thing that will cheer me up is to have a chain."  She's been talking about wanting a chain for her birthday for a while, but that was just too far away. So Brandon took her to D&B and they bought 5 feet of a metal chain.  Veronica was SO SO SO happy with that chain. She carried it around and kept tying herself up in different ways. When she does things like this I always quote a line from the TV show "Veronica Mars." The full line is "You're an odd duck, Veronica. How many teenage girls keep walkie talkies in their car?"  This time I said, "You're an odd duck, Veronica. How many 9 year old girls want metal chains?"  

Monday was another cold and dark day. Brandon changed the date calendar to say January 85th instead of April 3rd. It was very fitting. 
 

Most of Monday was just blah. Charlotte and Lydia had an orthodontist appointment. They've had their devises for about 5 months.  We found out that they will get braces on their teeth at their May appt. That was exciting. 

In the evening we attempted to make some spring by frosting the cookies. This was fun.

 

Brandon had bought a bunch of white frosting and then used food coloring to make all the colors.

They turned out really fun.

Tuesday was another cold and cloudy day. When I drove Charlotte and Lydia to school I lamented, "I just want to see the sun in the morning!" Sometimes the sun would pop through the clouds in the afternoon, but I could not remember the last time it had been sunny in the morning. 

I went to the temple on Tuesday because I want to see what all the fuss was about. Overall it was a positive experience. My favorite thing wasn't really the temple itself, but more about it's location. My ward basically boarders the temple and there are a lot of retired people in my ward so I ended up seeing some familiar faces. I ran into Amy Toft right as I went in and then ran into several people from my ward who are temple workers. When I lived further away from temples I never saw people I knew. I like that it's an option now. 

On Tuesday night I got mad at everyone for some trivial reason that I can't even remember now. After I was done being mad I apologized to everyone and said, "I'm sorry. I'm just so sick of it being cold outside."

Wednesday was another cold and dreary day. The only thing really of note was that Veronica started a little art class at her school. It was after school for an hour.  When she came out she told me, "I drew for a long time, and NOW MY HAND HURTS!!!!"  I didn't tell her that improving her hand eye coordination and hand muscles is one of the things that I hope this class helps with.

The sun finally came out on Thursday. And it was AMAZING. AMAZING. I walked out of the house and was nearly blinded by the rising sun.

When I dropped Derrick and Veronica off at school I took their picture. Their days of walking into Elementary school together are numbered. Derrick will go to Middle School next year and Veronica will stay at the elementary school for another two years. I wanted to remember how they look walking into the school and talking together. 

Look at these happy happy flowers. April is a little late for crocuses but I'll take it. 

When I drove Charlotte and Lydia to school the sun was shining directly in my eyes.  It was annoying, but I didn't mind. It was something I'd been wishing for for days. 

I ran a bunch of errands all morning and then went to work. At work the receptionist told me that there had been a several cancellations that morning.  I joked, "Yeah, the sun's out. Everyone decided they don't need therapy after all. They are cured."

After school the kids all went outside and started digging holes. 

I wandered around the back yard trying to decide something. We are planning to turn the back strip of our backyard into a drought resistant area. Its just dumb to try to pump all water out to the sprinklers back there. The strip is in rough shape right now.  In some areas the ground is so compact that nothing grows.

And in some areas there is grass that we've let die. 

I was trying to decide if I wanted to dig up the soil with a shovel. Normally it wouldn't be a problem, but remember - I have that stupid PTTD (Post Tibular Tendon Disorder). It's been doing a lot better every since I started consistently wearing good shoes and orthotics. I've even been able to stop wearing my brace unless I'm going to be on my feet a lot. I've been able to stand on my toes again. But I had a feeling that turning over all that soil would not do my foot any favors.

So I started trying to figure out how to rent a tiller. When that didn't yield great results I asked on my ward facebook page if anyone had a tiller I could borrow.  A little bit later I got a call from an older man in our ward who said he had a tiller I could borrow for the weekend. I told him I'd pick it up after work on Friday. 

That evening we dyed Easter Eggs.

The real fun part was when we were done with the eggs and could add baking soda to the vinegar water. 

This is the part the kids really liked. 

On Friday I went to work and then went to pick up that tiller. When Brandon got home he helped me get it out of the van. 

 

Here's some more before pictures. 

This area has been so overlooked. 

Not much is here.

We had quite a bit of work cut out for us. 

The first thing Brandon did was to pull up the sprinkler line. I'd been agonizing for weeks about whether we should just keep the line and convert it to a drip system.  I should have asked Brandon about that a lot sooner. He was like, "This is all crap."  And then pulled it up without a second thought. 

Here's the line scar from pulling out the line.

Just getting the sprinkler line out was a big deal. This was happening!

Then it was time to turn on the tiller. Up to this point I'd been operating under the assumption that it would be easy to use the tiller. When I was a teenager I'd used a small tiller that my parents borrowed from an older neighbor. I'd had no problem with that tiller. So I thought this tiller would be the same. 

Um not in the slightest. 

This tiller was a beast with a mind of its own. It was heavy and powerful. When I used it I felt like my arms were going to shake out of their sockets. Brandon and I had to take turns with it and I had to take a lot of breaks.  But I got about half the back strip done. 

Brandon took over and I went inside and made pizza for dinner. Brandon took a shower and then we went on a date. We went to the library for a Mocktail night. The library had invited the Redhawk Gastopub to come show how to make non-alcoholic drinks. 

We had so much fun at this event. A lady from Redhawk would show how to make a single drink. Meanwhile some other pub employs and some of the library employees were making a big version of the drink and pouring them into small glasses. Then they'd bring them around for us to try.   

Some of the drinks were sweet and some were savory.

We had fun trying each of them. But some were definitely better than others. 

Here's our view.  We were in the back on some comfy arm chairs. Our bodies were so sore from that tiller. 

This was my favorite drink. It was the blackberry mojito.

This was Brandon's favorite. It was a ginger drink with a lot of vinegar. It was so gross to me. 

This one had egg whites to make it frothy, but it was super sour!

After we were done at the library we went to Winco to buy one last thing that we needed for Derrick's birthday. Then we came home. 

Derrick spent a lot of time playing with a jar and some water.  He'd fill it up and then drop things in the water. He liked seeing how the water magnified things. 

Like seriously, he spent so much time with this jar. 

Saturday was Derrick's 11th birthday. He really likes treasure hunts so I decided to make a really fun treasure hunt for him. At first I was thinking the treasure hunt would go all over town. But I decided to scale it back. On Friday Lydia had helped me come up with 11 clues for Derrick. Veronica helped me hide them on Saturday morning. 

I wrote on the first clue that Derrick couldn't open it until everyone had breakfast.  As soon as everyone had breakfast Derrick was super eager to open that clue. 

There was some nonsense with Charlotte putting her hoodie on backwards, but once that was straightened out we were off. 

Derrick had so much fun looking for the clues. Once again I made them pretty simple. They were things like, "Look in the Cherry Tree."  Those were tricky enough for Derrick to decipher. 

Here he is running to find a clue. 

This one was hiding on his bike. 

There was one in the tree house. 

And the wishing well thing. While we were running around Derrick said, "This is like on Youtube!"  This was high praise since Derrick has watched some pretty elaborate treasure hunts on youtube.

One of my favorite clues said to look under the hood of the Honda Odyssey.

It's kind of tricky to open the hood so that was a tricky clue. 

The treasure hunt ended with a clue to look in the garage attic.

He was so excited to find a little treasure chest in the attic.

He brought it down to open it up.

And found TREASURE.  It had chocolate gold coins, chocolate gold bars, and "gems" (they were really gumballs.)  He loved it so much he couldn't even open it. He literally carried it around like this for days. 

Here's Charlotte showing what she'd been doing in her spare time in the garage. She was using the vice and a hammer to bend metal for her pine-wood demolition derby car. (But more about that next week.)

Brandon went outside and finished tilling the grassy part of the back strip. This part had been so hard. He'd had to dig it with a shovel before running over it with the tiller. But wow, look how good that looks!

Here's the whole thing. 

I was working out there too. I dug a deep and long trench and filled it with the half composted things from our towering compost pile. They will breakdown so much better in the soil. 

We took the tiller back to the brother in our ward and then came home to do some more birthday celebrations. 

First Derrick opened presents. He was so excited about everything.   

And then we had cake. Brandon had stayed up making this cake on Friday night. And then frosted it that morning before tilling. I'd been overwhelmed with all the other Birthday and Easter things and didn't have bandwidth for a cake. But Brandon was like, "Oh cakes are easy" and busted this "simple" cake out. 

Derrick loved it. Earlier in the day Derrick had said, "Do you see the zero disappearing?"  I couldn't understand what he was talking about at first. But he explained a little bit more and I realized he imagined he had a big "10" on his chest. He felt like the zero was going away. He told me that when he blew out the candles on his cake the "one" would appear and he would be 11. I thought that was a pretty fun theory.  As soon as he blew out his candles he yelled, "I'm ELEVIN!!!"

You can see that in this video. 

I love how happy he is with the cake. He wanted a pirate cake, but he was just as happy with an oreo cake. 

There was even a cookie layer in the middle. 

One of Derrick's presents was a metal detector. Brandon helped him put it together. 

Here he is so happy. (And behind every happy 11 year old birthday boy is a completely exhausted dad.)

Brandon went to take a nap on our bed. I wanted to join him, but I was basically stuck on the couch. Derrick's last present arrived in the mail. It wasn't supposed to arrive until Tuesday so I told him something my mom would say when things came early, "Angel's must have flown it."  

He opened the box and started putting the batteries inside while I fell asleep on the couch. He must have done everything right because when I woke up he was driving the car around. 

Charlotte also came in and showed me her car.

Derrick also got birthday money in the mail. So we went to Hobby Lobby to buy something else he wanted.  It was a magic kit. 

Back at home Derrick and Veronica had a lot of fun with the magic kit. 

Around 5:00 we went out in the backyard and started a fire. We'd wanted to do this for several weekends and it was finally perfect weather.  

Derrick had his metal detector and was working to find treasure.  Mostly he just found every bit of metal in the yard. (Nails holding garden boxes together, the wire strung up around the berries, sprinklers, etc.)

We've had all this junky wood left over from the junky shed demo two years ago, and I'm determined to get rid of it this year.  So this plan for this fire was to BURN BURN BURN. I pulled out the ring of rocks so it would be big enough for the long boards to be in it. The fire burned for 3 hours. 

Meanwhile the kids were digging in the dirt. I gave up on trying to build something over here for the year and told the kids they can dig as much as they want over here. 

Lydia took that to heart and dug a hole that she could sit in.  In this picture you can't see her. 

Here she is popping her head up.

This is what the hole looks like from above. 

Derrick wanted me to take a picture of him in the tree house. 

Brandon slept for hours, but eventually woke up and cooked hamburgers on the grill. They were good. 

The kids wanted to bury each other. 

This was honestly the best these three girls got along all evening. 

I loved how the fire was looking. 

Here's Veronica.

She loved this.

Brandon came over to inspect the nonsense.

Here they are before Veronica got out of the dirt. 

Then it was Lydia's turn.

More fire, more digging.

I like this long shot.

And Charlotte's turn.

When she got out of the dirt her toe nails were pretty dirty.

The kids figured out how fun it was to put dried weeds on the fire. Here's before. 

And AFTER.

Then it was time to put the fire out. It had been going for 3 hours. 

The kids love the steam.

It is pretty cool.

After all that it was time for baths and showers.  The kids were so dirty. 

Saturday had been wonderful. Derrick had a happy birthday, we'd been able to spend hours outside. And it honestly I would have been perfectly content to finish the weekend on that note.  But no!  There was a whole other holiday happening the next day. 

So as soon as the kids were in bed I went to work on their Easter Baskets. I hid them in my closet because I didn't want the kids finding them before church and that was the safest place I could think of. 

I have to explain my thinking - or maybe lack of thinking - surrounding Easter this year. I'd assumed we would spend Easter with family this year. I didn't know which family or when but I imagined something like Saturday with my family and Sunday with Brandon's. Or maybe Sunday morning with my family and Sunday afternoon with Brandon's. But the point is that in my mind we were going to be in Utah and with family for Easter.  

But then it kept snowing, and snowing, and snowing. In Twin Falls the snow was just a few inches and would melt after a few hours, but in Utah it was deep and staying. My sister Emily in Layton sent a polo of all the snow they got that cancelled snow one day. My sister in law and mother in law in the Ogden Valley near Huntsville were giving daily reports of how many FEET of snow fell over night. Our jeep that is parked at my in laws house was literally buried in snow. 

And none of this sounded like a very fun way to celebrate Easter.  So I asked the kids, did they want to go to Utah and be with family but have lots of snow for Easter. Or did they want to stay in Idaho and be on our own but have no snow. They picked stay in Idaho. 

This simplified a lot of things. We wouldn't have to figure out how to split time between families.  We wouldn't have to pack. We wouldn't get home late on Sunday. 

But in other ways it complicated things. For one the kids still wanted a big egg hunt on Easter. And for some reason I felt obligated to give it to them. (In my defense I didn't know that Jacque would be rescheduling her egg hunt for after the snow melted until about a week before Easter. So I thought this was the only egg hunt the kids would get.) So I bought lots of eggs and lots of candy. 

And I also went a little big on the baskets. Sprite bottles for each kid, fabric carrots stuffed with candy, spring themed brownies, fancy chocolate bunnies, jelly beans in the grass, robin eggs in the eggs - what was I thinking?  The only thing I'm really proud of is the water bottles. Those are actually useful. Looking back what I should have got were sandals for everyone.  That's what we really need now that the weather is warming up. 

Brandon had his own way of going overboard. He wanted to have a nice dinner. He planned baked twice potatoes, a ham, and rolls. I started thinking about the amount of food we were going to have and realized we should probably invite people over to share it with us.  I invited Macey and the other twins over. That made Brandon start thinking about making more food. He wanted to make deviled eggs with the Easter eggs. I told him Macey was already bringing a salad and a dessert. We didn't need anything else. I joked, "You have an overdeveloped sense of hospitality. It's going to get you into trouble some day."

We heard the kids wake up around 7:45 and start looking for their baskets.  I'd told them we weren't doing baskets until after church, but that didn't stop them from trying. 

I got up and had all the kids put on their Sunday clothes to get ready for church.  I was pretty proud of myself for actually getting Easter outfits together this year. Last year I'd been so busy with school that I'd had to let that ball drop. We'd shown up at my sister Emily's church looking like we'd never set foot in a church a day in our lives.  That was not going to be the case this year. 

Here's Derrick with his new Easter sweater. (And his metal detector.)

Here he is with the girls in their dresses.  Their smiles were a little hit or miss. But it's better than last year so I'll take it. 

We went to church and had a nice time there.  Weeks ago I'd told the ward choir director that I wouldn't be in town on Easter so I'd paused going to ward choir practice. Well she made a beeline for me when I walked into the chapel. She was like, "What are you doing here?" I was like, "We ended up staying home because there is too much snow in Utah."  She asked if I still wanted to sing with them. I politely declined because sight reading is not one of my talents. Apparently there had only been one soprano at the practice on Thursday. But when they got up to sing they had 4 sopranos and sounded great. 

We only had sacrament meeting so we were back home by 10:10. Brandon and I had the kids go into the backyard while we hid their baskets in the house. The kids came in and found them pretty quick. 

Here's Derrick with his. 

And Veronica

Charlotte's took the longest to find. It was in the hall closet. 

Here's her basket. 

I have to show you the little carrots. These were Veronica's idea to make.  She helped me buy the fabric and cut them out. And she helped sew the green part to the orange part. But then she lost interest and I finished them up. (They got really intricate and so they were a little beyond her skill anyway.) But they turned out really cute.  I was trying to decide what to stuff them with when our Ministering Brother showed up at our house on Friday.  He'd promised everyone a candy bar on their birthday, but had forgot to give them to us. (His wife just had a baby so I don't blame him for missing everyone's birthdays over the last 6 months.) Anyway, he's not going to be our Ministering Brother anymore and he wanted to make it up to us. So he bought every family member a BAG of their favorite candies. Like a whole bag of reese's for Lydia. A whole bag of Twix for me. It was crazy.  So everyone got a few candies on Friday and then I stuffed their carrots with the rest. 

The carrots had been so fun and so cute to make that we made two for my parents and sent them off to my parents the week before. Veronica had fun filling them with Jelly Beans and other candy.

Oh I also have to show you our newest Easter decoration that I bought online. I thought I was buying 14 small gold eggs.  But when this showed up I realized that I'd really bought ONE 14 inch old egg. I laughed so hard. It looks good though.

Here's everyone enjoying their candy. 

The kids went outside and enjoyed the lovely weather. I worked on making rolls. The kids wanted Empty Tomb Rolls. They are basically regular rolls, but you put a marshmallow in the center of them. The marshmallow dissolves when you cook the rolls and leaves a hollow place - like an empty tomb. They are cool, but a lot of work. 

When I was done I took pictures of the kids relaxing. They'd set up the hammocks and were having a great time. 

I went and took a little nap so I could have some semblance of a personality the rest of the day.  Then Brandon and I set up the egg hunt for the kids. Here they are at the starting line. (They'd constructed this make shift fence to keep Marsha in the yard. 

They were off as soon as I said go.

I love this picture of Derrick running to find eggs. 

Our yard has lots of good hiding places. 

It was fun to see the kids running everywhere. 

They would run right past some of the eggs and then double back to find them.

I really love having a big backyard like this. 

The kids found all the eggs in under 10 minutes.  (I know because we had rolls cooking in the oven and they'd just gone in when the hunt began and we were back in the house assessing candy when the timer went off.)

Derrick had a full bucket, but was whining that he didn't get enough eggs. And that was kind of the last straw for me. I didn't really loose my temper or anything, but that's when I lost interest in Easter for the year. It was all just a bit much with a birthday and a holiday and everything else. 

But we couldn't just stop Easter because I was done with it.  We were still having Macey and the twins over. There was food to prepare and eat. And so I kept going. 

I'm actually really glad we did have Macey and her girls over.  It gave us something to look forward to.  The kids played and the adults talked.  We set the table up in the living room so we'd have room for all 9 of us.  (Loosing interest in Easter also meant I set my phone down and didn't take another picture the whole day so sorry I don't have any pictures after the egg hunt.)

It was a good way to spend the afternoon. 

But after everything was cleaned up and Macey and the girls went home we did something I'd been looking forward to all afternoon. We went downstairs and watched a movie.  We watched Puss in Boots the Last Wish because all the guys on Baconsale recommended it. It was good - at least the parts I saw. I fell asleep about halfway through. I woke up right before the end and was like, "Wow that resolved quickly."

Then we got ready for bed. 

The nice thing is now that Derrick's birthday and Easter are over we are done with our birthday holiday season until Veronica's birthday in September. I'm happy to take a break from all that.  

So what did we learn from all this? Well, I learned that I'm super happy Derrick's birthday isn't near Easter every year.  You'd think I'd have this holiday birthday thing down with the Twin's birthday on Halloween, but nope. Every year it's a complete surprise. And it happened to me again with this convergence of Derrick's birthday and Easter. 

I also learned that I shouldn't try to recreate Bestemor level Easter Magic. Brandon kept saying, "You know, my mom didn't do Egg hunts like this when we were kids.  That's only a thing she started doing with the grandkids."  I guess he was trying to tell me that it wasn't my job as a mom to stress about all this. 

And next year I need to scale back the candy.  I saw that one of my facebook friends did home made paving stones where they put glass beads into cement.  Maybe we'll do something like that next year. 

There was a good thing that happened this year. I wasn't super subtle about the things I was buying. Veronica knew half the candy because she'd helped me stuff those carrots that we sent to my parents. Derrick hadn't seen me buy anything, but he straight up asked me, "Mom, did you make this basket?"  And because I was so done I just said, "Yes."  So that's one less kid that believes in the Easter Bunny.  (Veronica wont say it, but I think this is the year she stopped believing too.) So I think next year I won't feel as much pressure to make the Easter Basket super magical.

Maybe Easter will be more like Valentines Day where I can be like. "Hey kids, we are going to do some simple fun stuff because I love you. But I'm not going to go over the top because we all know it's just me doing this."

I hope so. 

Because at the end of the day -even a too long day like Easter - I really like doing special things with and for my family.

Anyway, thanks for reading.