Easter

The entire month of March we sang the same song each morning and each evening during our family devotionals (a scripture, a song, a prayer). It was "Christ is Risen" from the children's song book. And because of this throughout the month, multiple times during the day someone in our family would just start humming or singing the tune. It was very cute and got us in the mood of the season. That was our first success. Our second success was that we used multiple random opportunities to testify of Christ and the Atonement and what that personally means to all of us. This helped the children understand more why we celebrate the death and resurrection of the Savior. This also helped us to be constantly thinking about Christ and His role in our life. Our third success was a little Easter Egg Scripture activity. I just found in quickly online. My original idea was to use a week long scripture sequence to move through the final week of Christ's life, starting with the triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, but I couldn't find anything suitable for children. Maybe one day I'll make up my own. So instead we did an activity that I've seen actually before. 12 eggs, 12 scriptures, and 12 little visuals as well, each depicting a scene or event from the Easter story.  Before we even did our egg activity (all on Saturday instead of o ne a day for 12 days) we read the entire Easter story out of the Gospel of Matthew. We broke it into 3 chunks - the last Supper and the Garden of Gethsemane, the Trial and the Crucifixion, and the Burial and Resurrection. The kids really loved listening to the story directly out of the Bible, which has prompted us to change our family scripture study. Instead of reading a verse or two all together (I read a few words, they repeat) we are going to read short stories directly out of the scriptures instead. So I guess that was success 4. Back to success 3, with the egg activity, the kids were really excited to find out what was in the eggs, and since we had read the story so recently, they tried to guess what each visual was to represent before we read the scripture and talked about it a little. It was a lot of fun.

We dyed eggs.

We colored eggs and taped them to our window.

On Easter Sunday morning our very first Osternglocken (Easter bells - daffodils) bloomed. Of course, it's Spanish Fork so the wind was blowing and the photo doesn't look very good.

We had Easter baskets Sunday morning.

We had an Easter breakfast cassarole, hot chocolate, and strawberries and bananas for breakfast.

We attended the 9:00 church services up in Midway (Derek's parent's were in church in SLC for the morning, and although their ward didn't start until 11:00, timing just worked out better for us to attend at 9:00 and then go to their house afterwards.

After church we headed over to the Heber City to my grandparent's grave - another opportunity to testify of Christ's resurrection and of the Atonement.

And then we were off to my in-laws for an afternoon of playing with cousins, and Easter basket hunt, a chicken race, and of course, a ham dinner with family. This year Derek's cousin Yuri and his wife Manu were in town from Switzerland so we got to visit with them and it was a lot of fun.  Marlies also had a little Easter program with a variation of the Easter Egg Scripture activity we did on Saturday.

We headed home exhausted, but Derek said he felt like it was one of the best Easters ever. We both attribute it to the fact that we didn't talk about Easter bunnies or candy, although we did color eggs and have baskets and eat chocolate, but that we spent so much time focusing on Christ.

Another aspect of this Easter made the resurrection and the Atonement seem much more personal to me. Some of you know from my blog post and things on facebook about my friend from middle school, Bethany (Lindstrom) Hersey, whose baby was born just 4 days after my little Kaleb. But her baby was born with 4 congenital heart problems. He spent the first maybe 3 weeks of his life in the hospital undergoing surgery and such, he got to go home for 57 days, then back to the NICU for more surgeries and he was there for the last 8 weeks of his life. He died the Thursday before Easter. So many of us had been praying so hard for this sweet little baby. And poor Bethany and her husband, who just adored their little boy, were and probably still are just devastated and totally heart broken. She does not have a testimony of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I have testified to her of what I know, but it is up to her to decide if she will believe or not. Still, how grateful I am for my testimony of Christ. That I know that he suffered the Atonement for us, that He bled for us and died so that we could repent of our sins and return to live with our Heavenly Father. I am so grateful to know that His resurrection brought to pass the resurrection of all of us. I am grateful to know that little Mathew, through the power of the Atonement, passed away and went straight to our loving Heavenly Father and that his place is secure in the celestial kingdom. How I wish Mathew's parents understood that and knew that their little baby is not lost, but with God and waiting for them if they too will accept the Gospel of Christ.  I could go on,but my own little babies are crying and need attention. Anyway, I know Christ is our Savior and Redeemer and I am so grateful for this knowledge.

Back to the Temple

I decided to make it a semi-annual thing.

Here we are back at the Provo Temple. Instead of doing a trip right before General Conference, we snuck this one in right before Easter. My sister-in-law Heidi took the pictures for us. Thank you so much. Now I finally have updated pictures for my frames in the kids play room downstairs.

 And of course we all went to the Provo Bakery afterwards for the traditional donut!

Patty Cakes (St. Patrick's Day)

We never "celebrated" St. Patrick's Day growing up, besides wearing green. And I know there is a blog post or article or something going around facebook about how we all overdue the holidays - I didn't hide any presents from a leprechaun, I don't celebrate the 100th day of school, and I don't do elf on the shelf or eat pie on pie day (although my sister does and really, any excuse to eat pie sounds pretty good to me).  However, I do like to do a little something for St. Patrick's Day because it started out as a religious holiday and I figured we might as well know a little about it. (St. Patrick was a missionary to the native people of Ireland back in the day. He used the Shamrock to teach the concept of the Trilogy.)  Here are the things we did.

Dinner on Friday before - Corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, and carrots - SO GOOD!

Breakfast - Green Milk and Green Oatmeal

Lunch - Green milk on our cereal (I know, we're getting real creative here.)

 Dinner - Patty Cakes! (I came up with that name myself) green shamrock pancakes and green jello and orange slices.

And right now you are asking either one of two questions. 1) did they really just eat breakfast for every single meal on St. Patrick's Day? (Yes, we did.) or 2) so... to celebrate the "holiday" all we did was eat? Not exactly. The kids wore green, as evident by most of the pictures and we made shamrocks to hang on our front window. We also made a big rainbow to hang on the window as well. I have no idea what happened to those photos. Maybe I'll look through my camera again.  Also, we read two books, "Green Shamrocks" and "What Leprechauns Do." They were both written by the same lady, whose name I have totally forgotten. One of those boys is still hiding somewhere in my house and my library late fee is growing as we speak.

found them:

ps. Green Shamrocks is the most ridiculous book I have ever read. I'm not sure how it even got published, except for maybe the fact that it is so ridiculous the publisher didn't know what else to do with it.
 

Kranky Franks

In Springville there is... well, there was a little hot dog shack called Kranky Franks. A friend of mine spread the word on Facebook that due to some really terrible health problems (the owner was rushed to the hospital to have a brain tumor removed) Kranky Franks was about to close. His kids were running the shack for just two more days (probably to get rid of all that food in the fridge and freezer) and to help offset the incredible health care costs the Dangerfield's were about to see. We picked Joshua up from school and drove right on over for our very last Kranky Frank. (ok, technically I had only had a Kranky Frank one time previous to this, but they are really good.)  The line was way out the door. There was a big fire truck and the police all came by to support the Dangerfield's as well. Even someone from the local newspaper came by and took our picture... he literally did actually take my picture. Someone from our bishopric was there also so a stranger, Brother Holdaway, and I made the front cover of the Serve Daily.

Kaleb's Baby Blessing

Since the flu season has been so bad this year here in Utah, we held off on giving Kaleb his baby blessing until the weather started warming up... which thankfully it has! We blessed Kalebe this last Sunday, on March 3rd at our ward, the Spanish Peak Ward in the Spanish Fork Utah Stake. It was very nice. Our friends and family who came to the blessing were as follows: Rob and Marlies Mock, Heidi, Maren, and Hazel Christensen, Lance, Janelle, Caitlyn, Julia, and Elena Mock, Syd and Carolyn Pratt, Alberto, Melissa, Sarah, Nathan, and Gabby Trevino. Plus our family of course. My aunt and uncle had been planning on attending but my uncle had hip replacement surgery less than a week before so of course he wasn't ready to be up and moving around that much. And my cousin and his daughter drove all the way out from Orem but they ended up in the wrong chapel and missed it, which is sad. That is easy to do here in Utah. Somebody in their testimony that Sunday mentioned she drives past 3 chapels before she gets to ours... and she only lives 5 minutes away!

Anyway, the blessing was very special. Kaleb was very quiet and peaceful and Derek said after he had finished saying the blessing, Kaleb just smiled and smiled. He certainly does smile a lot. Today I was reading to him out of the Book of Mormon and the second I started reading he started smiling and smiling - even though I was reading about the terrible destruction of the Lamanite people and their dead bodies piled in heaps throughout the land. Anyway.

Derek held Kaleb during Sunday School, which we actually never made it into. We were saying our goodbyes to our friends who needed to go home and it just kind of took awhile. I took all the little kids to primary - Abigail and Hazel went to Sunbeams and Joshua, Maren, and Caitlyn went to CTR5. Julia snuck in with Caitlyn after awhile, though Lance and Janelle took the two littler girls home with them after Primary. Marlies, Heidi, and I went to Relief Society. It is my month to conduct so my mother and sister-in-law held Kaleb while I sat up front.

After church we had a little dinner at our house. My group for the dinner kept getting smaller and smaller so I kept changing the menu but in the end we had "creamy black bean salsa chicken" which is like a Mexican style soup or stew with shredded chicken, tortilla chips to eat it with, grapes and orange slices, a large green salad, limeade to drink (YUM) and oatmeal chocolate chip raisin cookies for dessert - with milk of course. The kids, except Lukas who was tired and preferred the adult company, played downstairs with the dress up clothes. It's a good think after all that Abigail has so many princess dresses! Maybe someday we'll need to get some more pirate gear. :) The children were so happy down there that the adults - and Lukas - ate dinner upstairs without them and when we were done we let them come eat. It was a lot of fun. And even Uncle Barret (Heidi's husband) was able to join in the fun after a while. He is a Bishop in Provo and had a lot of work to do in his ward that Sunday, but thankfully it didn't take him all night.

It was so fun to see everyone and it is always nice to have people come to a baby blessing. But now that it's over I can't help but think about what I am supposed to be doing now. Does it always seem to you like there is always something on the horizon to plan for? When I think about it, there is actually a ton to do. And the more I think about it the more overwhelming it gets so I'm just going to stop thinking about it for awhile and enjoy a little artificial break.

Enjoy the photos.

 Lukas wore this baby blessing outfit too. But Joshua only wore a little white onesie and Abigail had a different little girl white outfit. I didn't have money to buy the first two special blessing outfits - and technically my mother bought this one for Lukas.  During church little Hazel asked Heidi whether Kaleb was a boy or a girl and Abigail thought it was really funny when she found out Kaleb was going to wear a dress to church. But I like this kind of baby blessing outfits best.

 Right after church, instead of going downstairs with the wild and crazy kids, Lukas grabbed his "Decke" and crawled up into Grampy's lap.

 The meal.

 I look like a car ran over my face, but oh well. This is officially our new family picture until I think of a reason to take another one.

 Grammy and Kaleb. Kaleb felt much better after I changed him out of his "dress."

 The princesses and pirate. I suppose one is technically a fairy. the girls did a really good job of negotiating who got to wear which dress. This is often a problem but I am proud of them for being able to work it all out. Abigail still has 3 more dresses not shown here! so spoiled :) - and now she says she needs a "belle" dress. That's probably not going to happen.

 Kids dinner time - Lukas still wasn't done and Heidi is helping keep the peace. Or maybe just making sure they eat something besides grapes!

Grampy and Kaleb.