Sweet Emma

Emma

5 years old today!

Emma is such a joy to our family. Her caring, thoughtful personality brightens each day and her spunk and individuality never fails to crack me up. She is very confident and knows who she is and what she likes, and she is so sweet about it.

Happy Birthday to my little girl!

We started out the morning with a birthday breakfast. Emma loves dragons so she was thrilled to have some new dragon toys surrounding her bowl of food. She'd gone fishing with Jared last night and wanted to keep her fish that she caught so that she could eat it for her birthday breakfast. Yup, that's what she requested... I know.. This morning she told me that she wanted fish because Pterandon's eat fish. So, Jared got up and grilled fish at 7:00 a.m.

Along that theme, Emma decided to have a Dragon Birthday Party! Remember she was a dragon for Halloween and her Christmas wish was a T-Rex. She's not your average 5 year old little girl, that's for sure. I love it!

After a fun day at preschool, Emma's friends began arriving and we started off her party by going on a Dragon Hunt!

The kids had to swim down a raging river,

Cross through hot lava,

Jump over quicksand,

and crawl through a dark cave.

And once we found that ferocious dragon, he had no chance.

Victory is sweet!

I wanted to do an old fashioned party game, the one where you hold a penny out from your nose and without bending your knees, you drop it and try to make it into the jar. It is simple, yet fun, but I thought it would be nice to somehow tie it into the dragon theme. I knew if I mentioned my dilemma to Hunter, his creativity would solve my problem. He is amazing that way. Immediately, he said, "Oh, I have an idea," and he went right to work.

He came up with this little dragon for us. He even thought to wrap tissue paper around the jar to look like fire was coming out from the dragon's mouth.

Next the kids went on a Dragon Egg Hunt.

They had fun with that and even when we thought the fun was over, it wasn't. We kept finding more eggs throughout the rest of the party, and even later in the evening.

I found a cute pattern online for a dragon cake. Emma fell in love with it and thankfully, Jared was happy to help make it a reality. He always does such a great job.

Another slayed dragon.

Happy Birthday to my sweet little princess!

At last

After many, many rehearsals, the weekend of the school play was finally here. I got to watch two of the three performances and I have to say it was quite the production. -Not your average elementary school performance that's for sure. The music teacher is a bit over the top and does a fantastic job. They performed Mulan, Linsey was a maiden.



Our favorite part of the night was the little dance they did for the finale. It was so cute and we got a kick out of watching our timid little Linsey showing her moves. Since I got to see the play twice, the second night I positioned myself just right so I could catch it on film. Here it is.



I think a big part of what made participating in the play so much for Linsey was that she got to do it with one of her favorite friends Rylie.


We are so grateful for supportive friends and family who came to watch Linsey perform. Hunter was her number one fan, but she did have a pretty big fan club.

Here is Friday night's group. Our family. Papa and Grandma Jeanne. Uncle Zack and Aunt Carrie with Dylan. Uncle Mat, Aunt Bri, Olivia and baby Hudson.


Saturday afternoon Uncle Chris, Aunt Mandy, Brody and Chase also came to watch.

Grandma and Grandpa Butler really wanted to come, but they were in Utah supporting Doug who graduated from BYU! We are also very proud of him!

Tulips, Tulips, and More Tulips

If you are ever in the Seattle area in April, you really should take a trip up to the Skagit Valley and see all the tulips blooming in hundreds of acres of fields. It is an amazing sight to see! There are rows and rows of colorful tulips as far as the eye can see.

All my kids have their favorites, but mine are the red ones.

We love to take the tractor tour at Tulip Town. It saves us from having to walk the muddy trail (which is a huge pain with a stroller) and we just get to admire the beauty and take pictures. As you can see, the kids are a bit tired of posing for pictures at this point.


Austin stared with big eyes at all the bright flowers. I think he thought they looked yummy to eat and he does really love food.

Mmmm...

They do look delicious.

Lucky for me, I get to admire beautiful tulips in my very own yard too. My super husband loves to garden and landscape. I stand out front of my house to stretch before my morning run each day and admire their beauty as they are all closed up, waiting for the warm sunshine to convince them to open their petals (I sort of feel the same way).

As we come and go throughout the day, Emma (who we call twitter lately) give us little updates, "the tulips are open, the petals are out!"

It is really fun to admire them and I am so grateful for the beauty of the earth, especially this time of year when it's so colorful and my favorite tree out front is just about to bloom the most beautiful rose-like flowers.

The raspberries and blueberry bushes out back are looking pretty green and are also starting to flower.

Mmmm, now those will be delicious.
Austin is in for a real treat this summer.

Vancouver Temple Open House

This picture makes me chuckle.

I'm so grateful for my little family and especially for the blessings that come from the temple. We had a wonderful experience going to the Vancouver Temple open house last weekend. You should all go and check it out! It's worth the drive. Check out the tulip festival on the way home too. I'll post those pictures soon.

The Birth of a Butterfly

My kids had a lot of fun watching caterpillars grow and turn into butterflies. We got them in little cups like this.

The food was in the bottom of the cup so all we had to do was watch them grow. They got noticeably larger each day.

It was neat to see them hang upside down and finally form a chrysalis.

Once they all formed a chrysalis, we transferred them from the cup to a butterfly garden.


After about a week, the butterflies began to emerge from their caccoons. We enjoyed them inside for another week and then reluctantly decided to let them go.

At first, they didn't want to leave.

Then, a few brave ones took flight.
I love this picture of Hunter chasing a butterfly.

Many of them stayed around to play for awhile.

There were enough butterflies to entertain everyone.

I think they liked Linsey's pink jacket, she's got 4 butterflies on the sleeve of her coat in this picture.



This one didn't form quite right and couldn't fly away. The kids were really concerned about him so we kept him a little longer as a family pet.

This was amazing and ended up being a lot of fun!