Favorite dishes

For the past year we've been trying to make it a goal to make as much of our food from scratch as we can with all natural ingredients and as much from our garden as possible. Here are a few of our favorites. We're thinking about creating a webpage or blog to document our garden successes and to post our recipes. Pictured: cream of mushroom soup, tomato basil pizza and garden vegetable pizza, lemon basil penne with lemon marinated grilled chicken, pasta with garden vegetables topped with freshly grated parmesan cheese, and home made chicken pot pie.

Picnic with the ducks

I know these latest posts are out of order. I'm just getting caught up since having the baby. Around the beginning of May we went to a local park to feed some ducks. It was beautiful weather in the evening and we had a little picnic of sandwiches, chips and salsa and guacamole. We brought a lot of stale bread and old pancakes to feed to the ducks. The kids just loved it. We even saw a mama duck with a group of baby ducks behind Corinne in the second picture. And the last picture is me about 3 weeks before Masen was born.

Father Son May 2011

Jeremy took Matthew on his first camping trip in May to the ward Father/Son outing. They arrived late but Jeremy brought the fun fireworks for all to enjoy. Our ward Young Men leader is somewhat of a pyro and decided to light a whole bunch at one time causing a few of the younger boys to scream and cry. He also brought his black light which he uses to find scorpions and then taught the older boys how to make the scorpions scream when they are thrown in the fire. Nice. Just what I want my son to learn.

Since we are not avid campers, we don't own a tent. Jeremy and Matthew just had to make due in the back of the van. They came home tired and dirty, but it sounded like Matthew enjoyed his first taste of camping.

Matthew graduates Kindergarten

Matthew graduated from Kindergarten. As part of the graduation they sang some songs with actions. It was super cute and very entertaining.

Here is a picture of Matthew with some of his classmates and Mr. Parks. Matthew really enjoyed his teacher and his year in Kindergarten.

Writing Stories

Matthew wrote me a story a few weeks ago while I was making dinner. If you can't read it very well, here's what it says: "It was vairy windy. It eevin blode up the hou[s]e! The nexst day it was windyer. Den the man said ok das u nuf." With a word bubble next to the stick guy that says, "Ok! Das u nuf!" We had a good laugh about it. Now we quote his story a lot. "Ok! Das u nuf!"

 Here are some pictures of baby Masen. I know it's taken me awhile to get them on here, but hey--it is my fourth child after all. I've been a little busy. The first is minutes after he was born. The kids came later that night and all took turns holding him.

Nora can't keep her hands off of him. We have to keep reminding her to be gentle.

A rare awake moment.

And this is what he does best.