April Randoms

This year for April Fool's Day, I put toothpaste filling inside some oreo cookies and left them on the counter for when the kids got home from school.  I was on the couch feeding Clara and they were in the kitchen.  I was laughing so hard I was shaking (because I was trying to be silent).  It was Elise that figured it out and warned the kids who hadn't eaten any yet.  So funny!

 Austin has been reading some fun chapter books lately.  He likes Nate the Great because it has activities, facts, and jokes at the end.  One favorite was "Nate the Great and the Owl Express".  He REALLY wanted to make the twinkie train and the owl nests.  I love this kid!

Austin made this book for me.
It was blank paper stapled together.
The cover page said "Dofinz" .  He said I
was supposed to write everything I knew
about them inside. 

by Austin

I thought Lucy looked so cute so I told her
to take a picture of herself.  Looks like
someone needs to clean the mirrors.  :)

We had a crazy windstorm that blew our grill over.  I'm sure it was pretty funny watching me trying to get it right side up and into the garage.  All sorts of rubbish was flying all over the fields.  We didn't have roof damage, but neighbors did.  That day I had decided to bake some french bread for some other neighbors that were having trouble.  Right before I went to put it in the oven, the power went out.  And stayed out for a few hours!  These loaves of bread were crazy huge.  But I baked them anyway.  And they didn't turn out near as yeasty as I thought they would.

Cole's preschool group field trip to the McMillan farm

Erik and Cole are pantry bandits.  They raid
the thing all.day.long.  It drives me crazy
because I find cereal and chocolate chip
trails all over the place.  I used to stick a wooden
spoon through the handles, but Erik figured that
out.  Then I tried tying it up with ribbon.  Cole
loves to help with that part.  It works but now
Erik dumps the contents of the game closet.
*sigh*  Can't win.

April had some tough days for me.
We were contacting the county and
HOA to suggest some law changes.  Even
though we felt it was very important to do,
 it was not a fun thing for me.  It really
stressed me out.  George sent me
flowers after one particularly
rough day.  What a gem he is!

The boys and I had a great morning laughing while cleaning the boys room.  We made up a song to "Hush little Baby".  Love these moments and these cute boys!!!

The end of April brought the end of our membership at the Treehouse Museum.  We had squeeze in one more visit before it expired.  They had a traveling Curious George exhibit, so we got to see some fun new stuff.  Emily Stephenson sent Elise a Flat Stanley so we took him with us.

 They had a Curious George meet and greet in the afternoon.  Erik was so excited.  He kept sneaking away from us and walking over to George and giving him a big hug.  And ruining all the people's pictures.  When it was finally our turn for a pic, he brought along a hard hat and wasn't near as interested as before.

Can you see Flat Stanley?

 Elise also took Flat Stanley to meet her classmates.  They thought it was great!

I love Erik's voice.  He is quite the talker these days!  One of the things he does that cracks me up is turn 1 syllable words into 2.  "Tu-hub" is one of my favorites.  :)

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Cole plays this sound game every day.  He changes everyone's name to start with a certain letter.  He thinks it is the funniest thing ever.  For P day, he'll call us "Pom" and "Pole" and "Paustin" and "Perik" and then he bursts into a fit of giggles.  The odd thing is that he goes in backwards order of the alphabet.  So he says to me, "Mom, what is after S... but the other way?  Backwards."

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For our Family Home Evenings in April, we let each child pick one of the 10 commandments and teach us about it.  We were discussing this plan at dinner and Austin was DYING to go first.  He'd seen a video on the Friend website and REALLY wanted to show it to us.  He brought it up several times during our 10 minute discussion.  So Austin went first and he gave a great little lesson on honoring our parents.  I thought the video was wonderful.  And he really made an effort to do what we asked him.  A few weeks later, I heard him call out to Elise, "Elise, you are breaking the commandments.  And I'll tell you which one.  You know 'Honor thy Father and Mother.'"  Here is his video:

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We were glad to host two of the young women in the ward come over to our house to teach us a lesson.  It was a missionary activity.  Each pair of youth got a "call" to a certain place and the ward members acted as families from that place. We served Hawaiian food and dressed up in our Hawaiian clothes.  We gave them some lei.  It made me homesick for HI.  After dinner, the girls taught us the 1st discussion as missionaries would.  They had prepared good questions.  First they asked what we knew about God.  And the kids all gave great answers.  Cole said "That He and Jesus created us and the world."  !!!  They asked Elise to read a scripture with a bunch of hard words and she did great!  Lucy gave great answers too.  Then the young women started talking about Jesus' crucifixion and how the gospel was taken from the earth for a long time and people were confused about churches and God.  Austin piped up, "Hey!  That sounds just like what Joseph Smith was talking about."  One of the young women said, "Well, why don't you tell us about it?"  And then he told us the whole story of the First Vision!  He even quoted James 1:5... not perfectly but pretty well.  I was amazed and also really felt the Spirit as he talked.  They had been talking about this vision in church at primary sort of recently, but I was still impressed!  I think he'll make a fine missionary!  And it also reminded me to not to give up or be too frustrated in my mothering.  Having lots of little kids is hard work. I am exhausted every day.  I love it, but wow!  Sometimes I feel like no one is listening AT ALL in family home evening.  When we read the scriptures or the scripture readers, I feel like I say 100 times, "Don't bug your brother" "Please pay attention" "Stop fighting" "You can't read if you are upside down" etc.  But these little cuties are picking up more than I realize.  They don't understand it all, but they get a lot more than I think they do.  And they know that Jesus loves them, which is the most important thing of all.  And I'm reminded why Jesus told us to become as little children to enter the kingdom of heaven.

And the chopped Champion is...

the distinguished judges

Chopped (the show on food network) has been a family favorite lately.  We don't have cable, but George downloaded some episodes so we usually watch one while folding clothes.  The kids are always saying how cool it would be to be on the show (especially when we saw a "kids" episode) so one Saturday night, we threw together an impromptu "Tripp Family Chopped."

 We decided to just do a desert round and come up with one winner, rather than eliminate one by one.  The basket ingredients were:  marshmallow peeps, cheerios, vanilla pudding, and coconut cream filled cookies.  We put everything in paper bags and George was Ted Allen, the announcer guy.  I laughed so hard as they pulled each ingredient out.  I think maybe we've seen the show a few too many times.  :)  Their faces were hilarious!  I wish I had it on video.  We gave them 20 minutes to work, which was plenty of time.  At the end, they were just messing around, but they still threw up their hands when Ted Allen (aka George) did the count down and called "Times up!".

Whew!  Just in time!

 Austin did a "peep car" using the pudding as glue for the cheerios.  He may have peeked over at his sister to get some inspiration.  He said he was going to use the prize money for a fighter jet.

 Elise did a peep on a cookie dish as well, but her decoration was every sprinkle known to mankind.  She wants to use the prize money to buy a lot of pets.

Lucy smashed up the cheerios, mixed them with the pudding and the original filling of the cookies and replaced her new and improved filling on the inside of the cookies.  She used oranges as decor.  Lucy thought it would be a good idea to use the prize money to redecorate her room.

This lovely dress was the one I wore
for the Senior Ball.  Can't even come close to
getting it zipped these days.  ha!

The judges listened to the explanation of dishes and tasted everything.  Well, two of the judges did.  Cole just ate the oranges off and Erik found a stray pudding and gobbled that down.  George gave especially good feedback and commentary.  Here's a few videos of the explanation of dishes. Austin's first explanation was hilarious but I missed it so I made him do it again.  And its a little bit canned the second time.  boo.

peeker!

Now was the hard part for the judges... the chopping block.
We did what any good parent would do... award a price to each.  Austin got the best taste. Lucy got the best creativity.  Elise got the best presentation.  (The 3 criteria dishes are judged on in Chopped).  The whole thing was a lot of fun and an unexpected hit!  The kids talked about it for days afterwards and want to do it again.  Anyone else want to be on our show?  We are taking applications.

Froggy Preschool

 The last day for me to teach Cole's Joy School group was Tuesday, April 28.  I was a little nervous because of Clara so I asked gma Liz to come and help with the littles while I was the teacher.  And it's a good thing she did!  Clara wasn't at her best and was pretty high maintenance.  Thanks Grandma Liz!

The internet was down the night before I was to teach and of course I didn't have much ready.  (What in the world did we do before the Internet?!?  My brain doesn't seem to work without it.) So I pulled up my old stuff from HI and  asked Cole whether he wanted to learn about Cowboys or Frogs.  And Frogs it was!  We talked about the life cycle of frogs and painted frogs with party blower tongues.  They thought those were so funny!  Probably the favorite activities of the day were doing show and tell (they brought green things) and jumping into the "water" (big blue blanket) as we sang "5 little speckled frogs".  We sang it twice since we had 9 kids (+Erik is 10) so each kid got to be a frog and of course the jumps and swimming in the water became more elaborate each time.  Crazy kiddos!

I've really enjoyed teaching Joy School this year!  We really had a good, mild group of kids.  Erik was a real stinker at the first but got better as the year went on.  I loved seeing Cole interact with his friends and was amazed at how much he learned this year.  He pretty much knows all his letters and sounds, shapes, colors (still not sure if he's color blind?).  Writing is a little trickier for him.  He'd get so excited to have everyone come over and loved to ring the bell to get everyone's attention.  And Austin was fun to have around too.  I'm really going to miss mornings with my little boys.  Austin will be in all day school next year and although I know he'll love it, I'll miss him.

Clara Jane - 2 months

WHAT?!?

Clara is getting more fun all the time!  She smiles and coos.  All that hard work is worth it!  :)  She kicks and often stops crying when she hears my voice.  She likes her travel swing (and so do the rest of the kids... stinkers!) Clara still nurses some but probably over half of her food comes from bottles these days.  She's still a pretty good sleeper and towards the end of the two month mark, started giving us a full nights sleep.... like somewhere in the 9 or 10 range to anywhere between 4-6.  Joy, joy, joy!  The kids call her "Claire Bear" and we sing the "CandyCane Jane" song by Laurie Berkner (substituting Clara Jane of course) a lot around the house.  Most people comment on her long fingers and long body and say she looks like me or Lucy.  This is quite a switch... most people have said our babies look JUST like George.  (its the bald head :)

We sure love our little sweetheart!

Clara stats:
Height:  22.5 in (48%)
Weight:  9lbs 14.5 oz (13%)
Head Circumference:  14.5 in (10%)

photography helpers :)

this is where you can usually find these
two on a Sunday afternoon

Girls are so fun to accessorize!  We take turns each Sunday choosing
her clothes and accessories.  Lu and Elise of course.  The boys *might*
notice if she was just in her diaper, but that's about it. :)

Austin and the Pops Party

My favorite thing to do with my dad is: watch him play Zoo Tycoon
My dad is good at: cooking
I love it when my dad: lets me play on the computer
My dad is smart!  he even knows to: share

Austin had his Kindergarten POPS party on April 23.  It is a special night with their dads.  The Kindergartners perform a special program, eat dinner, and play games with their dads.  Austin has been so excited all month!  The games and activities in the classroom were his favorite part.

Lucky for everyone, they do a dress rehearsal for the school and the moms that morning...lucky for us ladies that we got to see this handsome boy perform and lucky for George that he didn't have to take any pictures or video (not his favorite thing).  They performed songs that showed off what they learned in Kindergarten this year:  nursery rhymes, months of the year, days of the week, a "getting ready to start the day" song as well as a "dad-o" song.  It was really cute.

 One reason I love to watch Austin is his big actions and facial expressions.  His favorite song was "This Land is Your Land."  I admit, the video is super shaky and kind of terrible, but you can see parts at least.  :)



I thought the Vowel Song was pretty fun, but the Hawaiians would have died to know they use "ukulele" as one of the sounds for u.

Big thanks to the grandmas for coming up!

more of the fan club!

We sure love this handsome guy!