Joy in our Journey

The past one month....

Valentines day!! We had an FHE Quiz about each other a few weeks ago that Andrew put together for the activity and it was surprising to learn how many people love Valentines Day in our family! It got ranked high. I blame our amazing Andrew for that!!

Us girls woke up to this staring at us....

He spoiled us with gifts on the table....

The family has a rotation system going on where everyone gets to take different turns with the fox to sleep it with every night. Tommy just likes to tackle it.

Andrew is the best ever.

The girls and I decided to "heart attack" Daddy's car. The girls worked hard making him thoughtful and beautiful cards to spread in his car and got him some yummy treats.

Remember Angela's glittery beautiful Valentines box?! I LOVE what Carolyn came up!! Her silliness is awesome!

Carolyn gave an excellent lesson about charity to our family. She talked about how we can follow our Savior's example of charity and then we listed people we can show charity to in a heart circle she made. She challenged us to strengthen our charity and write down when we or we see someone demonstrating Christ-like charity. I loved her lesson!

Emily's summary of Valentines Day :)

In the "friend" magazine, there are CTR challenges the girls have been working on each month. One was to write their feelings about Heavenly Father and our Savior in their journals. Emily's written testimony really touched my heart.

Angela's mini-lightsavors were a huge hit at school!!!

Here she is with her mini-lightsaver. The kids had to come up with a product to make that they could sell! She didn't have enough at the school sale for everyone!

Emily started gymnastics at the end of February. And is loving it and totally rocking it. Every day she gets bonus stamps because the teachers talk about how awesome she is in the class.

She did 122 of these babies last Saturday.She got an extra stamp for that one.

Love this sweet and fun girl!

I don't know why I took a picture of this, but I just post every picture basically on my camera so here it is. Maybe one of the girls took this picture?? But I love the charity bingo Carolyn made at the beginning of 2017. She is one of few that has really been sticking to her 2017 goals. She made this and wanted to be able to mark off services she does throughout the year. She based these goals on the 24 days of Christmas from the Prophet and from pondering what she can do this year to serve. This week she took about 2 months worth of allowance (after giving some to tithing and her college/mission fund) and spent it all on food to donate to the food bank. I learn a lot from this special girl.

I love the scripture Carolyn picked out for ponderizing for our family.

Angela was sick one Sunday so we stayed home together. We each prepared little lessons for each other. Can I just say that I loved Angela's lesson. This girl is amazing. She worked hard to put together different gifts for me to open. The very last gift was a picture of our Savior. She talked about how that is the greatest gift we have. Who is this girl? What an amazing lesson she came up with all by herself. And I love that she gave the lesson to Emily before church.

This was the lesson I made for Angela for our Sunday home together with the sicky.

Angela has a weekly assignment that is, let's say challenging!!!She is such a rockstar at doing it. This past week took us about 110 minutes and that was a pretty good week.

More pics from our sick day....

I LOVE preschool with my Tommy!!! Have I mentioned we started about a month ago!!! It's one of my favorite times of the day!!! We are working on counting to 10, letter sounds, and a lot of reading.

FHE lesson. We read an awesome talk from the friend and then "fished" for follow up questions after the reading.

For my birthday, I was a complete nerd and wanted to reorganize our learning room. It's one of my favorite rooms in our house.

Here is the hallway leading to the learning room. Often, we will have pictures and posters, etc of what our family is working on currently. Up right now is the charity challenge Carolyn gave us.

Learning room:

We use this mini board to write each other letters often enough:

I LOVE Carolyn's FHE lesson she came up with a few weeks ago!! A game where we were asked to act out/talk about how we would react in certain situations. LOVED it. She got it from the "friend" magazine.

For our family history part of FHE we talked about our sweet Carolyn one time this week. We sure are blessed she is in our family.

More nice notes I find on the board...

The family totally spoiled me on my birthday. I have the best family ever. Truest true fact.

Today I was soooo happy about Tommy!!! Today (3/16), he picked up an "S" and said the ssss sound. This boy is learning his letter sounds!!! What a smarty pants!

I love how Emily loves taking care of her brother. And she is so good at it. He loves listening to her read and her playing with him. One game they play is "rolly-polly" They lay on the floor and roll around while singing a "rolly-polly" song.

Sick day with Carolyn!!! Bad part: Carolyn woke up in the middle of the night throwing up Good part: She felt completely fine in the morning but I wasn't about to send a sick kid to school so we just got to hang out.