Spring is Springing

April was a good month.

For Spring break we stuck around and kept it low key.

The first day I drug the kids to Apple Creek Amish Store.

They have this mining for gold set up and the kids each got a bag of rocks that had some gems hidden in there. They ran their dirt through the water with a siphon and got a bag of semi precious stones.

They loved it, and I love the amish store!

The next day I took them to one of my favorite places - BYU.

We had never hiked the Y and I felt like it was time!

It's not that long but it's such a  s t e e p  hike.

We made it!

I brought chocolate cake for the top:)

They touched the Provo Temple

Cody had a game on his new competition baseball team, the Bombers.

The next day we went with Ben, on his day off, to a canyon called Diamond Fork Canyon. There's a 2 or 3 mile hike in to some hot springs in this river. It's not a hard hike and super fun!

The river just starts out like this,  pretty standard slow moving river.

And gradually it turns a little white and milky looking

We got more and more excited the closer we got.

Here's the hot springs section. There were quite a few people, and some places are piping hot and some are the perfect hot tubbing temperature.

We LOVE hot springs, obviously, since we go to them every chance we can get!

Macey found a hot spot:)

Our darling friends the Jenkins came to ride at the farm one day this week.

I told them to wear boots and clothes that could get dirty

and Jaime came in brand new boots and a white shirt and I got a little worried. She was horrified and how much mud there was. I mean, there is a lot of murky mud in the spring, but the horses don't care:) She was a good sport.

This is one of my favorite families from Ladera and I'm so glad they took a minute to come visit us. Jaime was in the thick of cancer treatments technicalities, but she doesn't let them slow her down too much.

This is what wrestling at our house looks like:

Mackayla loved, really LOVED kindergarten.

The weather never really got too terrible during winter, and the spring was amazing.

We were able to wander over to the river by our house and take a walk along the path after church on a sunny Sunday.

This is what our storage of all our stuff ended up looking like after a year of looking through it. Ugh

My parents came home May 1!

They had such an amazing mission. They definitely made the most of where they were sent.

It seemed to me like they came home with a lot of peace and love, not chaotically trying to serve every person that needed help, but thoughtfully serving the people they loved.

Our family was really blessed by their mission, because it allowed us to transition to Utah smoothly. It would have been incredibly stressful trying to move here without that year cushion we had.

My parents were also an incredible example to our kids.

They gave such sweet homecoming talks.

They spoke on mother's day. 

My mom told a story of 

Thomas Edison

who got a letter from his teacher that said he was unfit for school and his mom told him that he was too smart for school and his mom would be teaching him.

He obviously became a successful inventor.

And whether the story is true or not, I thought it was such an inspiring story of the positive power a mom can have in her kids' life.

Dare

I am a terrible singer and I know it

But I still believe in singing.

I've always thought the gift of singing is an incredible gift.
I know it takes a lot of courage to sing in front of a crowd so I'm proud of these kiddos for having the courage to sing in sacrament meeting.

But this might have been the last time I got them to do it so I'm so grateful that one of the darling mom's in our ward snuck a piece of their song while I played.

We Finally Bought a House

I'm clumping February and March together because Feb is such a blah month, except for the fact that we get to celebrate our favorite son. So I'm glad that's in there. But aside from that, these two months were occupied mostly for me with finding us a place to live.

This was one of Cody's favorite presents and he built it himself.

Along with his Tom Brady shirt.

 Ben gave a community presentation for work and it was on FaceTime so I could tune in. He did a great job talking about lameness and some treatments.

 We had cousins come over to celebrate Cody.

 Annual blue gold banquet for scouts with a derby

Time Out for Women.

I think this was the first year I've ever gone to this but I can see that it is going to become a favorite thing. 

I should start the house hunt story with the first house I looked at. I wish I would have taken pictures.

We really didn't know what we wanted but were thinking about finding horse property.

But we quickly discovered that the house we could have gotten with that property would have been disgusting.

So - we went and looked at a home on an acre. The first red flag was the pile of garbage out front.

The second red flag was opening the front door. I literally don't know if the floors have EVER been vacuumed.

The door knobs kind of grossed me out to touch. They were filmy.

There were hundreds of hanging statue heads and plants in a room upstairs. Poop on the floor of some unknown animal. probably multiple.

There was a person, in the dark, downstairs when we went down, that never said a word to us. It was weird.

We still looked at a couple of other horse properties but that was probably a good way to help it sink in that horse ownership at least in this decade wasn't going to happen.

In all honesty, Ben doesn't necessarily want to go to work and work with horses all day and come home and work on horses. He's got a little burnout going on. Maybe that will change, maybe it won't.

We put an offer on two houses and backed out before we found the house we finally got. Bless our real estate agent. I know she wanted to crawl in a hole and never help us again but she kept coming and showing us houses.

The first one was this one:

It was small and cozy but charming. It had no yard but was fully finished inside and decorated cute.

The weirdest part was to get anywhere in the basement you had to walk through the bathroom??? Who planned that oddity I wonder.

It was also right next to humongous power lines and that really bothered me more for resale, and the fact that this house wouldn't be a long term purchase made us a little leery, and we backed out.

My cute vt friend had us over for dinner. Her son was in Mackayla's class and madly in love with Mackayla and just the cutest little thing. They had a pet snake!

We looked forever in Plain City for houses because Weber County schools do not have great ratings and Plain City/Farr West area were the best. The downside of Farr West was that the school was so crowded some classes were meeting on the stage and they were maxed out with portables.

So they are building a new school but that would mean that in two years our kids would have the opportunity to go to their fourth new school, and that would have been okay, but if we didn't have to, we didn't want to.

But this area is growing rapidly for sure. There are a couple of huge developments that we looked into.

This is the next house we put an offer on.

It was also super charming and had an amazing yard, fully fenced and finished.

The downsides were that there were literally no kids living on that isolated street and the street it led onto the main road for the city. So there would be no friends nearby.

But the real kicker (I'm about to sound like a crazy person) was that I woke up in a sweat early the next morning knowing that this house was the wrong house, and we took our offer off the table that day.

More looking. Mackayla came to most of the appointments and was such a trooper. She's so easy and good, but how boring.

St. Patrick's Day. I don't know what's happening here but it looks like fun. 

 We stayed at a hotel in Salt Lake one Sunday and went to church at Bonnie and Jeff's ward at the U of U stake student ward where Bonnie was speaking.

 And these...we went somewhere and did something ... but I don't remember.

 I love Macey's point of view.

When we saw this house we weren't planning on buying it. It just snuck it's way to the top.

The cons would be that it is north facing, a terrible direction in the winter.

It's also on a pretty significant slope, pretty terrible in Ben's opinion.

The stairs are steep and it's a two story and we wanted a rambler.

BUT it had a room for my piano where no dirty dinner fingers could touch it (my list of wants).

And, it had a (small but significant) mudroom (Ben's list).

It also has a three car garage (Ben's list).

And a bedroom for each of the kids.

The kitchen and living are large and open and the pantry could practically fit another bed.

 For being our starter home maybe we shot a little high.
Maybe we could have used equity and moved in a couple years.

But we lived in a home much smaller than we could afford for five years in California saving for a home. We were ready.

And those people didn't just move across the country five times.

So I say let them talk and travel. I've done my traveling.

I'm not moving again until I'm good and ready!

And we'll still sneak a vacation in here and there:)

 We didn't move until June after we closed, after my parents got home, and after the kids finished their year at Burton.

This move has been the most stressful of all nine moves because it seems the most permanent.

Anytime I found something I didn't like in our previous moves 

I just told myself

I could do anything for a little while.

But this is a little more permanent.

But do I dare say, it doesn't have to be forever, so I'm not overly stressed. 

I tell Ben all the time there's TONS of horse vet jobs in New Zealand,

and I'm always up for a new adventure. 

I sound like I know what I want, huh.

Easter egg dying and conference!!! One of my favorite times of the year! 

 This year we had a little extra work to keep us awake during conference.

We can't forget the grandkid egg hunt at the farm - one of my kids' favorites!