Springfest

Here are a bunch a pictures we took at Springfest a few weekends ago. Keep watching to see Jonathan eating a brownie with a cricket cooked in it. Yum Yum!

It is finished.

After working all day yesterday, all night last night and most of the day today, Jonathan has finally finished formatting his dissertation. His was a noble effort. He said that if he didn't earn his PhD before, he has now. He also said it was the worst academic experience of his life (he tried to convince me it was comparable to childbirth--hmmm???) He received an email tonight saying that it was finished.

I found a four leaf clover in the yard tonight. I thought that was a good sign- that good things are yet to come. For our entire married lives, we have been working towards this goal- we have only known graduate school life. Now that Jonathan has finished I am feeling a bit lost. What will our new identities be? What is the next thing? Getting tenure, I suppose. 

It is a little unnerving to think that we are now going to enter the "real world." I hope it's nice out there. I think I'll keep the clover, just in case. :)

Final hurdle

A friend said the other day:

"If you had all the time and money in the world, what would you spend your time doing? Now try to find a way to get paid doing that- and you've beat the system."

Jonathan has been spending this entire past semester trying to format his dissertation so that he can deposit it and graduate. Even now, he is feverishly trying to finish it so that he can turn it in by his deadline tomorrow. 

Having watched him try to get his PhD over the past six years and all the hoops and hurdles that he has had to go through, I really hope he has beat the system.

If you are a prayin' man (or woman), keep him in your prayers tomorrow!

Easter Festivities.

Easter morning we awoke to Ezra inquiring about whether or not the Easter bunny came, which was odd since the day before his father told him that the Easter bunny was pretend. But anyway here is Ezra and Joey Ramone...I mean Annika... getting ready for their big Easter egg hunt.

The kids are still little enough that we just placed the eggs all over the floor and in plain sight. They sure were excited. 

Oh! The spotted the basket the Easter bunny left for them.

They didn't get a whole lot. Mom...or the Easter bunny...has decided to stop the buying of things. Not only do we have an upcoming move to think about, but we are all way more creative when we don't buy every little thing. Anyway, so the kids got some candy and they each got a bug collector. Ezra had fun with his today. I hid all of his little plastic insects in his room and then he went in and "found" them and put them in his canister. It was his idea. See what I mean by creativity? Also, I made those little bunnies out of felt from a pattern I saw on a crafty blog. I thought they were pretty cute.

I tried to take some pictures of the kids in their church clothes before church, but it was so cold and windy and they didn't really turn out. I liked this one of Jon and Annika though. I can put Annika's hair into little braids now and I think it is too adorable. She might be wearing her hair like that every day.

After church we had a potluck dinner with lots of friends and then the kids had another egg hunt outside. The missionaries were there and they hid the eggs for the kids. I think they had a good time. We all had lots of fun and it was a really great day. I hope everyone reading this also had a very nice Easter!

Happy Easter!

One Year Ago...

As the kids were playing together today, Christina and I talked about how old the kids are getting. It's hard to believe that when Ezra was the same age Annika is now, we had a three-week old infant. 

The kids have grown in so many ways, it's hard to keep up. Here's a look at how Ezra and Annika looked exactly one year ago: 

For some reason, this is maybe my favorite picture of Ezra:

It shocks me a little that Annika looked this small just a year ago. She pretty much considers herself an adult now. 

The first four months of Annika's life, we yearned for moments like this. Usually, we just got Ezra scratching her face or throwing things at her. Somehow, he got over it, and one of the great friendships in history began to blossom...and will grow as long as Annika does exactly what Ezra wants her to do.

Some random things.

The other day someone called me from the New York Times asking if I would do an interview. It was one of those things where they interview people from all over the country to get an estimate on how people are feeling about the economy and the president and all of that kind of stuff. I said sure and I found out a couple of things in the process. 

First of all, my kids do not like it when I talk to someone on the phone for 15 minutes and they can get into a lot of mischief during that amount of time. 

Second, it has been a long time since I've been in school and have exercised  certain brain muscles. This guy kept asking me about how much I knew about what thing the president was doing this week and how I felt about it and how it would affect this or that and all I could think about was "I don't really care....what in the world are the kids doing?" 

And third, I must be totally naive about the world because he asked me how much a family of four would make in a year to be considered rich. I thought for a second and said "a hundred thousand?" which he promptly laughed at. What? I don't get it. How could that not be considered rich? Please, someone let me know. 

In other news, I am not very good at using the video camera, I much prefer the regular one, but if you would like to see how cute and adorable my kids are go here.

And lastly, we had a great time watching conference this weekend. If anyone is interested you can watch it here. The talk by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland during the Sunday morning session was my favorite and particularly pertinent to this time of year. 

life with kids

Five years ago I would not have imagined doing the dishes would ever be so colorful. Or so full of plastic-

 for that matter.

Very cool inspirational message here.