Sewing

Alaina's Easter dress this year turned out super cute!  She picked out everything from the pattern to the material.  I've been trying to trying to do more difficult sewing projects lately to increase my skills.  This dress stretched me a bit.  The yoke (the green top part of the dress) was a bit of a challenge to attach to the rest of the dress.  The rose in the front of the dress also gave me a bit of trouble which I didn't expect.  I added some green tule to the underside of the skirt to help the dress flare out more.  The dress is also completely lined which Alaina likes because then the dress isn't itchy.  My biggest accomplishment with this dress is that I had minimal seam ripping, which mean I didn't have to take stuff apart and redo it.  I started 3 weeks before Easter Sunday to give myself plenty of time to work on the dress and I'm glad I did.  I had planned on sewing myself a dress for Easter too, but that just didn't happen.  I have a retro dress pattern I've had for over a year I really want to sew up for myself.  Last fall I sewed a button up shirt for Lincoln.  I cut down an old men's shirt and reused the buttons.  So no cost for me!  Again that project stretched me a bit and I certainly studied closely other button up shirts as I put it together.  My next planned project is to sew up a pair of jeans for Lincoln from a pair of Carson's where he split the crotch. Again no cost to me!  I've recently started teaching sewing lessons.  I've got two students right now.  A girl from our ward that's Carson's age and an adult friend of ours.  I really enjoy it and it's so fun to see their progress.

Easter

We had my parents come and visit us for Easter weekend this year.  We spent Saturday working in the yard.  With their help we were able to clear the rest of our back yard.  It's all level and ready for for sod.  Hopefully we can manage to keep the weeds out until we can get more sod.  The kids dyed Easter eggs in the afternoon.  That evening my parents treated us to dinner and we in return treated them to ice cream to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary!   On Sunday morning the kids woke up to some candy and a small toy in their baskets.  My parents then came to church with us and we enjoyed a very special sacrament meeting full of meaningful musical numbers and talks on the atonement. We followed church with a special meal of Ham, potatoes, asparagus, rolls, and jello.  We then snuck an egg hunt in for the kids before my parents had to leave for home.  We really enjoyed our time together and loved having them to visit for this special holiday.

Home Improvements

We've been in our house about 6 months and we're slowly making big and little improvements.  First we gave the whole place a good cleaning and replaced some of the carpet.  We've put up blinds in all the windows and got a lot of our pictures hung up.  Recently we've started painting all the ceilings white.  Originally they were the same brown color as the walls throughout the entire house.  We've nicknamed our house the brown house.  Literally everything inside and out was brown, even the lawn.  Painting the ceilings has proven to be a little more labor intensive then we were expecting.  We've had to prime and paint with multiple coats to cover the brown paint.  We've also been working on fixing the brown lawn.  We've rotatilled the back yard and removed all the old sod.  A coworker of Tony's cut up sod from his yard that we laid down in our yard.  Unfortunately we only had enough to cover a little less than half of our back yard.  Hopefully we'll be able to get more sod to at least finish the back yard and we'll seed the front yard if we need to.  We purchased a lawn mower last weekend for our soon to be luscious green yard.  We also replaced the light fixtures in all 3 of our bathrooms this week.  This was an unplanned project but the fixtures were on clearance at Lowe's and we couldn't pass up the good deal.  They look so nice and will be even better after we repair the huge holes left in the wall behind the old light fixtures.  You gotta love contractors.  If you can't see the hole then it's not there, right?  Our next big undertaking will be to paint the exterior of our house.  This is going to be another labor intensive job, but it'll be worth it.  We're hoping to replace the siding above the gable of our garage to a shake siding and paint it and the front door a contrasting color to the rest of the house to give some interest.  We have really been working hard on our home, but we enjoy it.  There is something so gratifying about it all. 

Lincoln's 1st Birthday

We recently celebrated Lincoln's 1st birthday.  We weren't able to celebrate on February 24th because we just had too much going on that night.  A couple of nights later we had some friends over for cake and presents.  Nothing too extravagant, but Lincoln enjoyed himself.  Lincoln got some farm toys from Grandma and Grandpa Foster, a Tractor book from Grandma and Grandpa Elton, and we gave him some bath toys, a big bird stuffed animal and some puzzles.  Lincoln is growing fast and is happy as ever.  At his 1 year check up with the his doctor he weighed in just over 20 lbs and only in the 5th percentile for his length.  The doctor started to express his concerns about how short Lincoln was until I reminded him how tall Tony and I are.  I guess Lincoln taking after his dad.  Lincoln's not walking on his own yet, but still manages to get into everything!  His top two teeth have been trying to cut through for the last couple weeks which will bring his total teeth to four.  We love our little man!

Little Big Man

It seems like Lincoln has grown in leaps and bounds over the last 6 weeks.  With Lincoln being our last baby it makes me a bit sad when he hits each milestone.  He's now crawling, pulling himself up, and getting into everything!  At Thanksgiving he got really sick and stopped nursing altogether.  He's now starting to eat some finger foods.  He's 10 months old with his first birthday just around the corner.  The whole family just adores our little guy! 

Christmas Festivities 2015

Every year the kids school does a Christmas program with all the grades at the same time in the High School Gym.  As you can imagine it's quite the production with all those kids, parents, and grandparents.  This year Carson auditioned for one of the speaking parts and got it.  He did awesome!    

This year we stayed home for Christmas and that meant getting our own tree again.  The kids of course loved decorating the tree and Lincoln loved pulling the lights and ornaments off the tree.

 Our ward had a Christmas breakfast again this year with a visit from Santa Clause.  I keep waiting for Carson and now Alaina to ask the big question about Santa.  I even  carefully approached the subject with Carson.  Making sure he knew that he would still get presents regardless of what he believed.  He was still adamant that Santa is real and made sure that Alaina knew that too.  Next year I may have to spill the beans if he doesn't come to the conclusion himself.

 On Christmas Eve we had a breakfast dinner and then acted out the nativity while Tony read.  It's a little hard to do the nativity justice with three active participates.  Earlier in the week we had dinner with some friends and did the nativity with them.  It was a comical rendition of their 3 year old daughter had a meltdown because she wanted to be Mary and stole the manger for her baby Jesus.  Lincoln didn't like the idea of laying quietly while playing the part as baby Jesus.  Ultimately we did a summery of the story and finished the evening with watching Star Wars episode 4.  Anyway after our own nativity we all opened our new pajamas and watched The Polar Express.  Next year we may watch the Muppet or Mickey's Christmas Carol instead.

 Once our little ones were all nestled all snug in their beds Santa came.  The three older kids all got new bikes this year.  Carson also got a new video game, a case for his Ipod, Legos, and a model jet.  Alaina also got new art supplies, lip gloss & nail polish, a couple cross stitches, and some new shirts.  Charlie also got a remote control car, Legos, some puzzles, and a Lego Truck.  Lincoln got a walking toy, a dump truck, a plane, a bath toy, and some books.  The kids were all thrilled!  It is a bummer though that we've had snow and ice since Christmas so the kids haven't been able to ride their bikes yet.

We traveled to Boise the day after Christmas to spend the rest of the break with our Families.  The week was packed with family visits, playing with cousins. seeing the new Star Wars movie, yummy meals, going out to dinner, and the kids going to Jump Time.  We got home Sunday night after some pretty sketchy roads because of the snow.  As fun as all the Christmas festivities are I'm glad that things are settling down and I can catch up on some stuff.

Robos

As many of you know Carson has been part of a Robotics club for the last 9 months.  In December his team competed against other teams from all of Eastern Washington.  We traveled to Spokane to watch him compete.  It was nice for me to see what he had been working so hard on.  Basically his team had to program their robot to preform certain tasks on a coarse.  (YouTube FLL Robotics for an idea of what they do)  Unfortunately everything that could go wrong did for his team and they didn't qualify for state.  But they still had a great time and now Alaina wants to join the girls team and Charlie the junior team.