Happy Birthdays, Happy Mother's Day

 It was fun to share mother's day

with Jared and Kamryn

on their special 8th birhtdays

 with my mom on mother's day

we had fun singing happy birthday 

and putting 8 candles each in their cupcakes.

Happy 8th Birthday Kamryn

Happy Birthday to my cute girly girl!  Kamryn is all girl in every way - loves accessories, dresses and pretty things.  Also can be a bit emotional at times.  She always shares and is a good friend to everyone around her, especially to those that are lonely and really need a friend. She's fearless, a beautiful dancer and great helper to me.

I love you my little girly girl :)

Happy 8th Birthday Jared

Happy Birthday to my wonderful sweet 8 year old.  What a great age - young and growing up at the same time.  Jared is smart, thoughtful, silly, timid sometimes, helpful and fun and so much more!  He's a real thinker and frequently asks me very deep questions.  Such as:

"would you rather be poor and have a family or rich and be alone?"

The other day he said "One of my goals is to be a better kid."  I told him that would be a hard goal because he's already a great kid.  He told me he was trying to do better - like get his homework folder out for me to sign in the morning without me asking and having good manners and things like that.

I LOVE YOU my sweet Jared boy!

Birthday weekend

Jared and Kamryn's 8th birthdays happened to fall on a Sunday, which was also Mother's day.  So we celebrated most of the weekend.  They voted on going out to dinner at chuck-a-rama on Saturday night.

Since it was a busy weekend, we didn't get to open their presents until 10:00 at night on Saturday, the night before their real birthday.  That was fun!  And then they stayed up until 1:00 am playing new video games with their big brother.

being a silly 8 year old

what cute birthday kids!

Kamryn modeling her new purse

Kamryn with all of her presents

Jared with all of his presents

 

Recent YW Activities

I am the personal progress advisor for our young women.  I am always trying to find the ways to help the girls work on their personal progress.  I teach a lesson every other month and we do one of the value experiences.  We recently did Knowledge #3 where they had to memorize the 13th Article of Faith and then go to a museum and see how it relates to that Article of Faith.  Luckily the church history museum has a wonderful exhibit that was an art competition last year for the youth of the church based on the theme "Arise and Shine"  There were some wonderful art pieces and so many talented young artists's work displayed.

This was my favorite

our cute young women that came on our art field trip

 Our stake is going on trek this summer and one of our last activities was helping the YW make their aprons, which of course they can use for personal project.  We just did the cutting out for one activity and our next activity will be sewing them together.

Running for Stephanie

At the end of April, an awesome young couple held a fundraiser 5K to raise money to help them pay for infertility treatments and IVF.  The young wife was in our ward and is my friend's daughter.  They live in South Bend so we couldn't do the 5K with them.  But at the least minute we gathered a few friends and did our own 5K in support of them.  It was a great Saturday morning and we all enjoyed the time together outside in the sunshine.

the sign says
"Team Purcell, Salt Lake Chapter"

our team - Jenny, Judd and Erica, Julianne, Sarah, Jenny and me

School Choir

After watching the school choir's Christmas concert, Jared and Kamryn decided they wanted to join the choir for the spring concert.  Practices were at 8:00 am on Mondays and Wednesdays.  When practices started again in February Jared decided he didn't want to do it.  I said that was ok but he'd still need to go early to school because I wasn't going to drive up there twice in one morning (not to mention a lot of those mornings I was working and had to be there early anyway).  He thought he would just  read while he waited for Kamryn and school to start.  After one practice he decided he wanted to join the choir.

The choir directed picked some really fun songs and it was great hearing the kids sing at home - like Duct Tape and Recess.

Sadly, the director did not know that Jared and Kamryn were twins and put them on opposite ends of the choir for the concert.  It was really hard to take pictures and video.

It was a fun concert and all of the kids did a great job.

Student Driver

Way back in February Taylor finally decided to get his learners.  I didn't really push him to do it before then since learning to drive in the winter is not my favorite thing.  I did tell him that he had to have his learners for at least 6 months before he could get his regular license and his 16th birthday was just over 6 months away.

Luckily you can make an appt to take the test now and that sure makes life so much easier.  Sadly, he didn't pass the first time but you can take it again right then and the 2nd time he PASSED!

Proud new driver

 I always thought it would be a good idea to have a student driver sign on my car, just like the driver's ed cars.  Never did get around to it with Justin and Brooke but now with Taylor starting to drive I really wanted one. I thought I'd have a magnet made but then realized someone would probably take it.  Then I thought of vinyl lettering and had a sign made up.  Lots of teenagers would hate this being on there car, but Taylor wanted it on there.  He's aware of how angry drivers get out there and with this sign on your car people are more forgiving.
I've definitely noticed more space around me while driving. I've only had one person honk at me since putting the sign on (and that was in a parking lot).
Taylor's been driving for a few months now and is doing a great job.  The next big thing is he needs to learn to drive the truck, which is a stick shift :)

our van

building a sand castle

flag they made for their "sand castle"

It was fun watching Jared and Kamryn play together in my mom's sandbox.  They are way too big for it (wish I had a picture of both of them sitting in it) but had a great time building a castle (which is just a big mound of sand).  I love that they get along so well and have so much fun together.

Facebook

I don't post too much about Justin and his mission on here but I had to share this photo.
In France, and many other places I'm sure, the missionaries do a lot of street contacting and they use large streetboards to attract people to come and talk to them.  He made this streetboard while working in the office.  This is what he said about it:

" I made a new streetboard this week. The office equipe hasn't actually had one, but I haven't bothered to make one until now because streetboarding doesn't really work in winter. But now that it's good weather, we're doing it more often. But since we didn't have one, we've had to coordinate with other missionaries to use their streetboards, so I just decided I would make one for us. So one day this week I got Elder Dampt working on some stuff, then I went in the conference room and spent pretty much the rest of the day working on this thing (attached photo). We've only taken it out once since then, and the results were hilarious. It's funny because when you get a streetboard that attracts people's attention, they try to look very inconspicuously so as not to give us the satisfaction. But with this one, they look at it for so long, that they can't really hide it. While we were riding on the metro with it, there were five people sitting across from us that were reading it for almost the whole trip. Nothing like a good marketing ploy to lure the young people in."

Soon after this he was transferred to Montpellier, which he describes as California French and is pretty much on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.  He made another facebook streetboard to use there.  He said its great to use there because its a huge college town.

Elder Frazier trained Justin in the office and then Justin trained Elder Dampt in the office

Always behind

It seems like I am always behind these days - behind on household chores and the yard, behind on paying bills - just because they stack up in the mail and I forget to pay them - oops, behind on helping my parents, behind on church calling duties, behind on just about everything.
I've been extra busy because I have been doing a long-term sub job at the kids' elementary school  Its for a 1st grade teacher who had to have emergency surgery at the beginning of May.  Luckily she has a great class and they are very well trained.  I've subbed a lot this year and I've been thinking that I was being prepared just to be able to do this job of working every day.  Any other time that I've subbed I've had lesson plans prepared by the teacher and I just follow them.  But now I am doing my own lesson plans.  The teacher only had 2 days to prepare for being gone the rest of the year and its amazing what she got ready for me.  But its still up to me to plan out each day!  I've never done that before and its quite a task.  The twins and I get to school every day by 8 and school starts at 8:40.  Those are the shortest 40 minutes of my life.  And then we frequently stay after school too, getting ready for the next day.
Jared and Kamryn have been very good sports about getting up extra early every day.  The benefit for them is they usually get all of their homework done before school even starts.
And looking at my blog for the first time in several weeks I see how Behind I am.  So I'm going to try to catch up on about 14 posts.