Easter festivities

Happy Easter everyone! We hope that your weekend was as enjoyable as ours was. I wish I had more pictures of our actual Easter weekend, but we forgot our camera (yes, we do have a new camera by the way! A fat load of good it did us this weekend since we forgot it anyway...) A few pictures of our church Easter activity will have to suffice.

We had a ball at our ward Easter activity! It was mostly just a social gathering, with the Easter story being told to the kids and some games for the adults. Joseph volunteered to play "chubby bunny" along with about 7 other people. For the offchance that there is anyone in the blogosphere who didn't learn how to play this game in 3rd grade, let me explain. It's really quite simple. The premise is that you shove as many marshmallows into your mouth as you can, and the person who can get in the most while still being able to audibly and distinctly say "chubby bunny" is the winner. Ahhh...brings back the memories, doesn't it?

Here they are putting their first marshmallows in.

Jake was glued to Joseph the entire time. Joseph ended up taking 3rd. He says he could have gotten more in his mouth but one of the other contestants made him laugh too hard trying to say "chubby bunny." I don't know if I believe him though, his cheeks were reminiscent of an obese chipmunk. Third still won him a free frosty at Wendy's though!

Jake loved the easter egg hunt. It was his first time ever finding easter eggs, and I'm sure you can imagine his joy when he found that there was candy inside!

I got Jake this Elmo easter basket last year when the stores were having their after easter sales. He loves it!

Our Easter day was spent with Joseph's parents in Grinnell. We watched General Conference and enjoyed an incredible Easter feast. All in all it was a great weekend!

P.S. Jake is obsessed with Joseph's yellow Hawkeye hat. He's rarely seen without it on anymore. Even inside. Go Hawks!

It's the little things...

...that warm my heart:

Love it.

Two years old!

When I make a promise, I pull through. I told you I would blog about Jake's birthday, and here it is! Hey, better late than never, right? Jake's birthday was March 8 and he had his first (albiet small) birthday party this year. His friend Spencer's birthday is 5 days before his (ironically, Spencer was born on Jake's due date...the little punk...) so we got the boys together and invited their little nursury friends over to play and have cupcakes. We didn't have our own camera, so these pictures were actually taken off of Spencer's mom's blog (thanks Tawnya!)

Here is Jake and Spencer. I asked Jake how old he was. He said "TWO!" but only held one finger up. Thanks Mom and Dad for the cute birthday shirt for Jake! He loved that it had a baseball on it. The theme for the party was "balls" so they had lots of balloons to play with and balls and basketball hoops. A two-year-old's dream...

We made cupcakes that looked like baseballs and basketballs.The kids played a game where they decorated treat bags then went into Spencer's bedroom where there was candy hidden (and by hidden I mean laying in plain sight on the floor) for the kids to stash in their bags. Here is Spencer and Jake right before they go in. You can tell they have no idea what is going on...Both Spencer and Jake were a little freaked out by the candles.Here's a picture of the little friends that came. We have Tanner, Ben, Jake (who was thrilled to be having his picture taken), Maggie, Meg, and Spencer. Altogether it was a great day but we were ready to go home and have nap time! Sometimes it's hard to be two... Happy Birthday boys!

Amendment

Joseph wants me to make an amendment to my previous post. Apparently he was a little put-out by the fact that I was dogging on dentists. He is sitting here right next to me telling me to write this:

There are certain questions that can't be answered at this time. And there is always a reason to take a radiograph (x-ray for us normal folk). If you want to know the reason, you should ask your dentist. No, wait, delete that. I'll tell you the reason. It was to check to see if there was a fracture. And if you want free dental care you'll be nice to me. Otherwise, you can pay for it yourself, and I'll take my plasma card away from you (it's true, he does give me his plasma card...)

I'm sorry Joseph. And I promise to always be nice to you. ;)

Jaw trouble

About a year ago I noticed my jaw started popping. Have you guys ever had that? It's incredibly annoying. Every time I would talk, chew, eat, or anything all I heard was POP, POP, POP! It was like snap, crackle, and pop from those rice krispies commercials were camping out in my jaw. I asked Joseph about it and he told me that jaw popping usually corrects itself over time, but to be careful about what I ate. Yeah, right. So, of course I wasn't careful. One morning while we were visiting some family in Michigan over Spring break (did I mention that? Oh yeah, pictures to come!) I woke up and my jaw wasn't popping anymore! I was so excited, until I realized that the reason that it wasn't popping was because it wasn't opening!! I couldn't open my jaw all the way, probably less than 1/3 of the way actually, and then I was in excruciating pain!

I went to see a dentist as soon as we got back from Michigan. They took x-rays, all of which came back inconclusive (the dentist actually told me that the x-rays really aren't meant for diagnosing TMJ issues...really? Then why the heck are you taking them? Come on, guys...) Anyway, she gave me some pretty good muscle relaxers and pain meds then I'm off to a specialist in a month.

Has anyone else dealt with this before? It's really weird, and they keep telling me that it might just correct itself on its own. Of course, I'm taking that with a grain of salt because this is coming from the same people that took x-rays for no reason... In the meantime, I'm on doctors orders to stay away from anything especially chewy and try to relax my TMJ as much as possible. Does that mean not talking too? That might be a little too hard for me...

Rough Day

I'm going to apologize upfront for my lack of posts recently. I've already been chewed out from my mom, and I have felt the blistering thoughts that I know my sister has sent my way. Here's the deal...I don't have any pictures! We recently found discovered that our camera is officially going to be burried. We were told by Nikon that a bent lens is not covered by warranty, and therefore it is going to cost $100 to fix. I don't think so. Since we don't have a camera, I am going to blog about something that I'm glad we can't document with pictures!

Jake turned 2 years old! (That's not what I'm glad we can't document...in fact, one of my friends has some pictures so I'll borrow them from her and get a blog post up about it soon.) Along with turning two means doctors visits! Jake went this morning, and I don't know what it is about him and doctors (maybe the shots?) but every time we enter a doctor's office Jake starts bawling. And not like little whimpers, but full out waterfalls and convulsing, and nothing I can do is able to console him. He didn't even need to get shots today, it was just to check how he was growing! As soon as he was put on the scale to be weighed he broke down. He could barely say through his sobs, "Bye-bye?" I felt so bad for him! Finally, I was talking to the nurse there and she was asking me questions, and Jake, still sobbing, ran for the door and left! He didn't even care that I wasn't with him, all he knew was that he wanted to get out of there ASAP and he saw his window of opportunity and bolted. I ran out and grabbed him, brought him back inside the office, and he started screaming again. He couldn't calm down until, ironically, they pricked his finger to check his hemoglobin. When they did that he was perfectly fine. They gave him a sticker and he was good to go...what a rough day for a two-year-old!

I promise to get pictures of his birthday up soon, we had a great time!

Question

I've been told that you can convert your blog into a book. Has anyone done that and have any suggestions? Where do I go? How could I find this information? Thanks, guys!