Easter 2010

Don't be grossed out, just laugh (see below). I guess some things really don't matter when there are Easter eggs to collect. Notice I do not use the word "find," just collect. We had our second annual Cook/Giles Easter egg hunt. Last year we filled 240 Easter eggs for 6 kids. This year we had 230 eggs for 5 kids (Naiya and Holly were in Idaho). We did add two babies to the mix but they are a little too young for Easter egg hunts (Macy-6 months, Ridge-2 months). We combined our Easter egg hunt with a navajo taco dinner. Wendi made the best scones I have ever had. I ate so much dinner that I didn't have a cupcake for dessert. Anyone who knows me knows that I must have really eaten a lot because I LOVE dessert. Wendi has been called a pioneer reincarnated so it wasn't a huge surprise that her scones were so delicious. I brought the cupcakes and supplies and the girls decorated them to look like bunnies. Mike and Holly have moved since last year and they have a big grassy yard now, so we had the hunt at their house. It was a lot of fun and we look forward to doing it again.

The day before Easter we decorated eggs between conference sessions. The Easter Bunny hid them for the girls to find Easter morning and he also hid some big plastic eggs filled with candy. The girls were very excited. We had Easter dinner at our house with Mike. I think the girls had just as much fun peeling the hard boiled eggs as they did dying them. We also made a little Easter basket from a pattern on familyfun.com. We used an old T-shirt of Rusty's ripped into strips and dyed them in the leftover Easter egg dye, then wound them around the template from ff.

Earlier in the week we made handprint Easter lillies and put them in a vase. The girls have been somewhat craft starved since Ridge was born so they were happy to have a few Easter crafts.

I am always sad when Easter is over because it is the end of monthly holidays. On the other end it is always exciting to begin again when Halloween rolls around. I'm sure there is plenty to look forward to until then....

Ridge smiling

We keep trying to catch Ridge's cute smile on camera. This is what we have so far. He is showing evidence of Rusty's super cute somewhat crooked smile.

Ridge's first tie

Does it get any cuter than this?

Still laughing

Katelyn is always making us laugh. Here are a few of the latest things she has said or done...

- Sitting at the table she asked Rusty if he was going to leave the flower in the table. We had no idea what she meant so we asked her. She pointed to the leaf in the table and said "you know, the flower that we put in when Nama and GG were here to make the table bigger."

- In the middle of the night Rusty woke the girls up to have them go to the bathroom (trying to avoid wet sheets). Katelyn popped right up and started chatting with Rusty. She told him about her mosquito bite. She said, "Dad, look right here (pointing at a spot on her leg)." I used to have a mosquito bite right here, but I ran really really fast. I was so fast that the mosquito bite fell off of my leg and now it is all gone."

- She woke up the other morning and I sent her in to use the bathroom while I dressed Ridge. She called for help a few minutes later so I went in to see what she needed. She had her leg up on the toilet seat and there was urine all over the seat and floor. I thought she must have just been up too high when going to the bathroom. After all she's new at using a toilet. I asked her what happened. She replied (while using lots of hand motions to talk), "Well, I wanted to see if I could go potty like a puppy and this is how they go potty." We had a little talk about the fact that although she would like to be a puppy, she is a girl and should go to the bathroom like one.

Kyleigh lost some teeth.

On Sunday May 23rd Kyleigh lost her first tooth and her second tooth. They have been loose for awhile and both teeth had the permanent teeth lurking behind them. I took her to the dentist a month and a half ago to be sure the growing teeth wouldn't cause any permanent damage. The dentist told us to continue to have her try to pull them out. Rusty tried to pull them out with floss but Kyleigh kept getting nervous and pushing the floss off her teeth with her tongue. In the end a container of yogurt pulled out her first tooth. She was trying to pull off the lid with her teeth and noticed that her mouth was bleeding. She showed Rusty the blood and he informed her that she had lost her tooth. She went back to the kitchen where she had opened the yogurt and found her tooth. The second tooth Rusty pulled out with his fingers that night. She dropped that one on the carpet and it took us 10 minutes of searching on our hands and knees to find it. Luckily Rusty is a genius and got a flashlight. The tooth cast a shadow and he found it. She was so excited to put them under her pillow. The tooth fairy brought her $2.00 for each tooth. I'm not sure what the going rate for the tooth fairy is. Why doesn't someone publish that? The last thing I want is for Kyleigh to wonder why she got less or more than her friends from the same tooth fairy. Uncle Mike told her that the tooth fairy must have included a cost of living increase in her tooth payment because she lives in Hawaii.

St. Patrick's Day 2010

There is nothing traditional about our St. Patricks Day celebration. No corned beef and cabbage. No Irish stew. No beer. Just a lot of green food coloring.

For breakfast:
Green eggs
Green milk.
Green napkins.

For Dinner:
Green pasta.
Green water.
Green napkins.
Green pudding in our cream puffs.

Usually we put out a special sparkly green box that attracts the leprachans and they leave a treat for the girls. They hide the box full of treats for them to find the next morning. Our green box was missing this year so we decorated shoes with green yarn to attract our little green friends. Guess what... it worked. The leprachans brought a package of M&M's and one dollar for each girl. They had lots of fun finding their shoes with treats inside. Happy St. Patrick's Day!

"Sweet" Saturday

Mike needed some beeswax to make a new batch of MH hippie salve*. He met a bee man at a craft show selling his honey and got to talking to him. The man offered a tour of his operation and said he always had some extra beeswax. We made the trip to the bee place on a Saturday and had a hands on tour of honey production. The operation was very low key. His wife came out of their house and offered her grandkids' toys for the girls to play with. We were going to leave Jake in the back of the truck, but she offered him a spot in the shade on the deck. So, Katelyn and Jake spent all of their time on the deck, even taking a few cat naps together during the afternoon. The bee man taught us all about bees and honey. He let us scrape the wax off the screens from the bee boxes to "break the seal" of the wax. We then put the screens into a centrifuge which separated the honey from the remaining wax. The honey poured from a spout at the bottom of the centrifuge into a five gallon bucket. He poured the honey from the five gallon bucket and strained it a few more times to clean out any remaining wax. He put Nancy and Mike in bee suits and took them out to the bee box in his yard and taught them some more about the bee operation. Kyleigh and the bee man's granddaughter hung out together and even got to make bee wax candles. We all got to taste pure honey straight from the bee boxes. You had to suck the honey off the wax and throw the wax into a waste bucket. I have to admit that I wasn't excited about the bee tour. After all, Rusty carries an epi pen and Mike, who is a little less allergic, carries the pills for bee stings. Anyone who knows Mike and Rusty know that you can't change their minds once they are made up. They were determined to visit the bee man. Thankfully, it turned out O.K. and we learned a lot.

* MH hippie salve is an herbal remedy for topical ailments that Mike and Holly concocted when Katelyn started having bad reactions to bug bites. It is pretty much the best stuff on the planet.