April 2023- An Easter Scavenger Hunt & Brent travels to TX/CO

 April started with General Conference, our favorite. The kids love it when I put treats or activity ideas in Easter eggs, with each egg corresponding with an apostle. When it's the apostle's turn to talk, the kids open the egg to see their surprise.

The sister missionaries had invited me a couple months before to go to a lesson with a lady named Jennifer and her family. It was such a beautiful experience to be there, and to join in on some of the lessons after that, and watch her joy and enthusiasm for learning the gospel. On General Conference Saturday, we had the sister missionaries and Jennifer's family over to watch the afternoon session. Before the session we had aus jus sandwiches together.. The only picture I have is the jumping jacks break:

We had a cold spell but Audrey still wanted to ride her scooter to pick up the kids from from school:

Ava constantly does handstands- she probably does 200 a day. 

The kids love to play dress up still:

Tammy Tuesday- she's so nice to read Dog Man to the kids, because I do not like reading that! 

I got this from Olivia's mom, who watches Audrey once a week. Audrey LOVES her "Olivia days."

Brent went to San Antonio, TX for the Pop Culture Association academic conference where he presented on digital revisionism to movies (Star Wars, E.T., Disney+), television (Stranger Things), and music (Beyonce, Lizzo, & Taylor Swift) due to progressive culture. He was gone about 4 days, from Wednesday through Sunday. It is a lot less stressful when he travels now that the kids are older. The night before Brent left, as I was putting Ava and Coen to bed, they had this conversation. 

Coen: I don't want Dad to leave the state.

Ava : I don't want Dad to leave the house! 

Coen: He's going to have to learn a new language.

Ava: He's just going to Texas.

Coen: He's going to have to learn Texan!

Brent went to the Alamo that was right next to his conference hotel.

He loved visualizing the history of what happened at the battle where Davy Crockett died.

While there he went to a Disney Immersive Experience with some other Disney scholars. The room reacts to everyone in the room using digital mapping. 

Activity days- I invited the sister missionaries to talk to the girls about what it's like to be a missionary, and then write letters to missionaries.

The kids played Legos for hours and hours this month! We had Esther over to play and they played lots of Legos then too.

Ava went with Esther to an Easter egg hunt at a barn near us and got to hold a baby goat that was just one week old.

I planted tulips in the Fall and was so happy that they came up and made our yard look beautiful!

Here's a screenshot from a text thread with Brent while he was out of town. I do not even remember this at all anymore, but I text him "Quote from my dream I had when I just woke up: Always marry a cup filler." Brent said "good advice." I replied "Yeah, I thought so. In my dream it related to having cups of cat food prepared ahead of time for the next person haha. But I told Ava always marry a cup filler." Brent replied "I see. Cat food??? Did not expect that."  Haha- I always have bizarre dreams!

Easter Sunday- I got the kids ready and to church on time by myself as Brent was still out of town until the afternoon.

Coen's Primary teacher text me that when it was Coen's turn to share something in class he said that he had learned his Audrey was even cuter than he had thought.

After church my friend text me that she had borrowed two bunnies from our friends, but Olivia wasn't too impressed, so did my kids want to come see them? My kids loved the bunnies and it made for some cute pictures!

Once Brent got home from church we decided to go for a drive, and when we got home, we discovered that the Easter Bunny had visited us! The Easter Bunny was tricky and did a scavenger hunt to point the kids to where their baskets were. The scavenger hunt didn't have words, it just had misplaced items, such as the kitchen stool in the bath tub. The kids knew their next clue was the kitchen pantry where this stool goes. 

Audrey and Coen were squealing with each step. Their baskets were in the upstairs linen closet! 

I did Audrey's hair so cute one morning. It's getting long!

Audrey learned about "Humpty Humpty" at school- the way she said it killed me.

Ava drew Hogwarts on the dry erase board at Brent's office. We went to meet him and have Subway sandwiches for dinner before his Film Club one night so that we could spend some time with him, as he was only home from San Antonio for two days before he turned around and went to Denver for another conference.

I took Audrey to her first day of speech at Connect the Dots. She was a bit nervous and wanted to hold my hand throughout her 30 minute session, but worked hard and did everything the therapist asked her to do. I took her to Dairy Queen to get an ice cream as a reward.

I love my Audrey days! Every morning when Audrey wakes up she asks me, "what day is it?" She wants to know if it's a preschool day, Olivia day, or Mommy day. 

The next week Brent went to Denver for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference for 4 days. He missed two weeks of the new term. He met up with friends from all over including UO, UNT, and even Brazil.

He presented on the National Film Registry with a few of the leading scholars on film archives. He argues that the Library of Congress needs to reassess Film Preservation Act 1988, due to the LOC and studios no longer preserving "original" films, as the Act required.

Brent met up with his thesis chair and friends from his Masters program at UNT.

He had a layover in SLC for a few hours so his parents and Daniel picked him up and they went to Crown Burger for dinner.

While Brent was in Denver, he found out that he was offered a position as a visiting Assistant Professor at BYU-H! I had figured that he would probably get it since he had gone through so many interviews the past couple months. But- both Brent and I were running on the assumption that we wouldn't accept it, and we would stay in Oregon the following year. We weren't going to accept the Hawaii position for a lot of reasons, a couple being that Hawaii had changed the position to be only visiting for one year, and the logistics of moving our family across the ocean and renting our house seemed overwhelming. 

My tulips!

While Brent was out of town, my ward had a RS activity where we painted pictures of Jesus. Before you think I did an amazing job, you should know that a lady had sketched the outline of Jesus, and we just had to follow her instructions to paint it. It was nice for me to get out and talk with other adults while Brent was gone! I brought the kids with me and they just played in the nursery while I painted, and then they came in at the end and enjoyed the Italian soda treat.

I made hamburgers for dinner and the kids turned them into monsters with grapes on toothpick eyeballs.

On Friday night I hired a babysitter so that I could go out shopping by myself- big deal! Ava and Coen didn't have school on Friday and I knew that by the time it got to the evening I would really need a break, so I planned ahead and gave myself a little gift! I went shopping and bought myself a few new things to wear for my work trips coming up, including this shirt:

On Saturday morning I made the kids pancakes- I'm writing this a couple months later now and super impressed with all I did while Brent was out of town, ha!

Although, keeping it real, the house looked like this in places:

I took the kids on a walk near the reservoir by our house.

This is where we got family pictures taken three years ago! After this, it was time to go pick up Brent from the airport.

Ava and Coen sang "I Know that My Savior Loves Me" in church, while I played the piano.

Here's a video of them practicing at home in their PJs a couple weeks ago:

I love it when everything starts to bloom in Eugene.

Loving my snuggle time with Audrey. 

One day Audrey put my hand on her chest and said, "Mom, feel my heart. It's bumping!"

Yellow day for Audrey at preschool!

One day I thought I could do a few work emails after Audrey's preschool while she played upstairs. I smelled something stinky and went upstairs to check on her. I looked at her and asked, "Did you change your clothes?" She casually responded, "No, I just wanna wear these clothes now." Then I said, "Why do I smell poop?" She said, "Coen pooped." (Coen was at school). I went to the kids' bedroom to find this:

UGH! I made Audrey help me a little, but it took a whole bunch of scrubbing and baking soda over a week to get the stink and stains out of our new carpet.

Activity days- we had a glowstick party and paraded around the church:

The kids playing nicely:

On Saturday I got up early and got so much done! It was nice warm weather so the kids ran through the sprinklers and I did a picnic with them.

I played DogMan with Coen and he was so happy:

We had our friends the Lukes and Ortmans over to play games and have dessert:

When I was at Winco with Audrey she saw this tiny purse and wanted it so bad. To stop her from escalating into a tantrum, I told her I'd take a picture and think about it for her birthday. She agreed and didn't cry after I took her picture. I didn't look at the picture until the next day and I noticed her poor little puppy eyes! I sent it to my mom and she said my dad said, "Get her that purse!"

Coen posing on our play house- the kids like to play Santa Claus and climb down through the whole in the roof.

We had friends over to run through the sprinklers. It was kind of fun, but also kind of not, since Ava and Coen were fighting so much and I was getting mad at them.

The next week when we were at Winco I couldn't help myself and I bought Audrey the little purse. Look at her face!

Audrey's preschool had an Art Show fundraiser night. I took the kids to it and we won an art kit in a raffle. She loved the cake walk- here she is laughing with her little preschool friends.

We started to think more seriously about accepting Hawaii- I mean how could we turn that down? The position offered a lot more money and stability than Oregon was going to offer. We went back and forth in our decision. Then we found out that we couldn't get the subsidized faculty housing in Laie so we decided not to go. But something kept pushing us and we investigated more and found that the Church owns 50 houses in Laie (through Hawaiian Reserves), and maybe we could rent one of those. The night of the Art show, Brent got in contact with someone at Hawaiian Reserves, and she had a 3 bedroom, 2 bath house that would be available for us. Brent sent me a picture of the house and said "say hello to our new house." When I saw the picture I said to myself, "oh my gosh, that's our house! We're doing this." All of this back and forth of "Are we moving? Are we staying?" was stressful and a huge decision! When Brent got home that night we just hugged/clung to each other.

I LOVE the blossoms on the tree in our backyard!

Coen got a watch from Tammy Peaslee- it came in the mail and he was so excited! He's holding it up in this picture.

Ava was a good big sister and helped the kids paint with their new paint set.

This Saturday was a rough one- I can't even remember exactly why but I remember taking this picture of a scowling, half-naked Audrey and thinking that this sums up the Saturday!

Our roller coaster ride of "Are we going to Hawaii?" wasn't over... we didn't accept yet because even though we had tentatively found a house to rent in Laie, it wasn't the subsidized rate we had been promised from the other faculty housing. So we debated if we should counter-offer? Or just take the easier route and stay in Oregon? Stay tuned for May on how our decision came to be.