I am not dead...

...although I felt like it was imminent earlier this week. Just kidding! I have a bad cold and am being an over-dramatic wimp. I have been trying to be lazy, but Stan says I am the busiest lazy person he knows, what with three graduations (K, 6th and 12th grades) to prepare for and go to this week. I will post pictures and videos and all that fun stuff someday, but in the meantime, I thought I'd share the painting Summer created yesterday. It is titled, "Procrastinating Packing to Leave for College," which she is doing TOMORROW (packing AND leaving) and which makes me so very happy for her and and also makes want to hide under my pillow and have a good long cry, simultaneously.

Hey, Mommy...

I hear that a lot and it is frequently followed by, "...look at this."

Here are a few fun pictures of some of the things Michael has been sharing with me.

He showed me how he can color with his mouth...

...made a nifty thing-a-ma-bob with Magnetix...

...and wore some 3D glasses around for a while.

In that last picture especially, he reminds me of my dad.

What do you think?

Mother's Day

Our Primary Presidency always does something fun for the kids to give their mothers. This year, I got 4 noodle necklaces with my kids' pictures on them and cards with their thoughts on my intelligence (see below).

Stan took me to backyard for pictures and my two youngest got in on the act. They are standing by the flowering pear tree Stan and I planted
last night.

While we were out there, I noticed that it needed more dirt. Stan thought I was pretty funny with the shovel in my heels...

I also got a bunch of lovely cards and some pretty artwork by Heather.

Summer and Rachel gave me some beads and a yummy smelling candle. Stan brought me breakfast in bed and made an amazing dinner of fish, orange basmati rice, asparagus and mango lassi. It has been a great day :)

A Blob of Jammas

This morning, I was reading my scriptures on one couch and Naomi was hanging out on the other, waiting for breakfast. Heather was making French toast and Michael was asleep.

She said, Hey Mommy! Look at me. I am just a blob of jammas!"

Last week...

...for FHE we colored eggs. We finally got to it the day after Easter, but it was still fun. Summer invited Anthony over. Rachel is hiding behind him :)

Here are everyone's "favorites", chosen by some with much deliberation, by others with insouciance.

After we colored them, we had an Easter egg hunt in the front yard. This is the least blurry of a dozen or more photos...

Happy Belated Easter!

Senior Prom

The big day is finally here! I think Summer and I spent at least five hours at the fabric store figuring her dress out. She chose the purple fabric for the sash to match a pair of my shoes that she wanted to wear. I finished sewing yesterday. Isn't she lovely?

She made the flowers at her waist. She got the idea for the poofs by her hips from a dress she saw a Macy's.

Anthony came to pick her up with more flowers for both of them.

Summer's corsage was easy to put on. It had an elastic wristband.

Anthony's boutonniere, on the other hand, came with two BIG pins. Don't worry, no blood was drawn.

Don't they look schnazzy?

A Man with An Opinion

On our road trip, we passed a couple of Adopt-a-Highway signs that read -

A fool and his trash are soon parted - M. Bibb

Like nose hair, litter is ugly - Mike Bibb

I like this guy :)

Happy Earth Day!

Spring Break! Road Trip! Woohoo!

The kids and I (Stan had to work and we missed him) hit the road last week. We headed east and stayed with my darling friend Mandy in AZ. These signs on her fence made me smile. I'm guessing the first one is spot on, but the second one is a little bit of an exaggeration.

Here is her dog Ginger...see what I mean?

The kids LOVED Ginger and they also loved swimming.

Mandy made a chocolate cake for Heather, whose birthday was on Thursday. Heather really scored. She had three different birthday cakes this year. Amanda and I took care of the beaters!

Here is a video of the amazing birthday candle Mandy put on Heather's cake.

We had fun listening to Amanda and David play the piano and drums together. When they were done, David let the kids mess around and play his drums. They had a blast.

We spent an day (during which we went shopping at some really fun stores) and two nights in AZ. It was wonderful spending time with Amanda and her family.

The next day, we headed east again. The desert we drove through, especially for the first hour or two, was beautiful. The picture doesn't come close to doing it justice. There were flowers of almost every color of the rainbow in bloom. My favorite was the ocotillo - so lovely!

I am glad my sister-in-law Steph gave me the heads up, because when I saw the Gila Valley Temple on the side of the road, I stopped and we had lunch, instead of driving by with my mouth hanging open in confusion :)

We went to see Matt, Steph and their darling girls in NM next. They had pu pu platters for dinner when we got there. They were amazingly delicious and I ate way more than fit in my stomach...oooo full!

Matt and Steph also had a cake for Heather (cake #2 - lucky girl).
Aren't the cherry blossoms pretty?

Here is birthday song video #2. Can you guess what my favorite part of the video is?

After dinner, Summer and Rachel both got on Facebook and chatted with each other. I kid you not.

We piled most of the kids in the living room which is just how they wanted it, at least until the middle of the night, when some of them wandered in to the room I was in to snuggle.

Here are all the cousins together.

We spent two nights and a day with Matt and Steph. The day we spent with them, they took us to the coolest place, Hueco Tanks State Park. The pictures pale in comparison to reality. It is a honeycomb of boulders, caves and crevasses to climb and crawl through - kid (and parent) heaven.

Opal, Matt and Steph's youngest.

One of the many crawl spaces.

You never knew where someone would appear. I looked up and there was Matt.

Steph and their oldest, Ruby.

Coral, their middle girl.

Gwen was really in her element.

Here is my beautiful Heather on her 13th birthday.

After we hiked around for a while, we ran all the kids through the restroom and started on our tour. I thought the old archeologist who was our guide looked like the Pied Piper most of the time.

Here is Newspaper Rock, with paintings and graffiti layered on top of each other from the 1800's to thousands of years ago.

The cactuses were blooming.

The kids were excited when the guide showed them a rock smoothed by woolly mammoths wanting a scratching spot.

These masks were some of the older paintings on the rock walls.

These are more recent and were painted by Apaches.

He took us to one spot near water that had a slide smoothed by generations of Native American children playing. Our kids did their part to erode.

Naomi was a trooper on our hikes. She kept going and going until she tripped and fell near the end and then she wanted carried for a bit. One of the men on our tour said she did better than some of the adults on a hike he took a month before. It was a wonderful day and especially fun to spend it with Steph and Matt :)

Somehow, I ended up with three kids in bed with me that night, on a full sized fold out couch. When I woke up in the morning, Michael had a leg over me on one side and Naomi had a leg over me on the other. It was tricky getting up...

Friday we headed back to AZ to stay one more night. David planned Mandy's birthday party for that night, a bit early, so that I could come. It was so nice of him and so fun. Somehow, Amanda got me on the dance floor which brought back memories of stake dances when we were teenagers. How did the time go by so fast?

Here she is with David and her son Nathan.

We made it home safe and had one more birthday party, this time with brownies and ice cream :)

Happy Birthday Heather!