Evie is such a great big sister. She's so helpful and eager to please. After school she finds Emmie and takes her upstairs and will entertain her for like an hour! I'm very lucky that she was born 1st.

What can I even say about my little Ellie. This particular disaster was an attempt to use food coloring as pixie dust. She realized something was very wrong when it started running down her head toward her face, so she wiped it across the top of her head down toward her ear. Her head and hands were purple for about 5 days.

Trey Man! My little super hero:) Trey has been experimenting with saying naughty words lately. But usually it's as in, "Hey mom, we don't say poopy-face, huh?" and "It's not nice to say stupid-head, right mom?" ...etc.

This isn't the greatest video of Emmie walking, but it's what I've got. So here it is.

Random pictures and explanations.

Boy do my kids love fruit. So much in fact that they needed to try one bite out of EVERY SINGLE APPLE >:/

Old man Mahe found the baby powder and gave himself a little shower with it.

Ellie had been told I'd say 7 or 8 times - "DO NOT TOUCH THE PIE. It's for dinner tonight and I don't want you to eat it yet." As in, there was NO QUESTION whether she could have any or not. Well, I left the room for 5 minutes and came back in to find her sitting on the floor... eating the pie!! *steam coming out of my ears* So, we took that pie and put it in her face just like on the cartoons. The pie may have been ruined, but it was horribly satisfying. Who wants to nominate me for mother of the year?

Ute Fan

So for the next 4 years, I'm a Ute fan. I know - shocking, possibly friendship ending for some of you. But my baby bro will be playing tight end for Utah for the next 4 years, so I will be there wearing red and cheering for him. Max Hall hates me too. Haha, just kidding.

While we were at the scrimmage on Saturday, Evie, who was wearing a skirt, kept telling Ellie, who was wearing sweatpants, that she didn't look pretty. So Ellie poked her in the eye. Who looks ugly now? Haha! I don't encourage this, my mom actually snapped the picture and that's me trying to console Evie...don't judge me it was funny.

Here's a few more pictures from the weekend while my mom was here.

We LOVE garage sale season. I think every stitch of clothing on my kids in these pictures are someone else's castaways. Yes, I am one of the crazy people that's up every Saturday morning at the crack of dawn looking for treasures. Ellie is my garage sale partner. She just loves poking through other people's stuff. I give her a buck to spend and you would be suprized at how long she will hold onto it...and at what she ends up spending it on.

I'm out of time - mommy duties are calling. I'm trying to be better about blogging though, so stay tuned:)

Listen to the Spirit.

This is my big advice for the day. This post is highly overdue and honestly I just don't enjoy blogging that much, but this particular thought has been bouncing around in my head for months and I felt like I should share it. I have always admired a certain mother and dear friend of mine. In college as a newlywed, before children were even an idea, I used to love just going over to her house to watch her mother her children. Her patience seemed endless to me - once she showed a home video of her daughter in the bathtub fully clothed! She had jumped in while her mother was filling the tub and had left for only a moment. How I looked up to this woman! Instead of being angry and frustrated, she had laughed and captured this adorable event on camera!
Which brings me to the title of this post. Well over a year ago I felt prompted to write this woman a letter or an e-mail telling her these things and what an example she was to me. She is someone that I think I have always felt closer to than maybe she felt to me, but SO many times it has been her that I have thought of when I've chosen to laugh instead of yell and snap a picture instead of spank a bum! (I'm still working on this, by the way, but when I've been able to do it successfully my children have her to thank.)
About 6 months ago, something unspeakably terrible happened to this friend. I read her blog and wish there were something I could do to ease the pain. But the thing is, I never wrote that letter. I didn't listen to that prompting and now it's too late. Hearing the words from me NOW would sound so trite and contrived as if I were only saying them because of the pain that she's enduring now when those words would have meant so much more before. That's the worst part is the knowing I should have said the words earlier, but I didn't.
Just listen to the Spirit folks. It's a horrible helpless feeling when you know you didn't do something you should have.

Welcome Baby Emmie!

Emmie Karalena Mahe arrived at 5:59AM on Wednesday May 27, 2009. She weighed 8lbs. 7oz. and was 19 inches long. She's such a good baby! She sleeps really well and hardly ever cries. But she does have a set of pipes, so when she does cry...you hear it!

This is the hat I made her while I was in the early stages of labor. It turned out cute, but it was a little bit small on her head.


Ellie and Trey were the first ones to get to visit - Evie had school, so she had to come later.

Trey was very concerned that the flash was hurting the baby's eyes. Here he is telling Junior to stop! Protective big brother already.
Ellie was thrilled, she has wanted a little sister from the start.

This new baby stuff is old hat for Evie now. She's a great big sister.

My mom came in from Texas on Tuesday night, so it was wonderful having her there for the birth!

Emmie was a little bit jaundiced, so once we got home they brought over some "bili-lights" that she had to sleep under. Here she is in her little tanning bed.
And this is what she looks like now at 5 days old.

Welcome welcome Emmie! We're so glad you're here!

Ellie's Mother's Day Program.

Sometimes there just aren't words to describe my little Ellie. But luckily for me, now I have these pictures. These were taken during her preschool class' Mother's Day program. If you'll notice, the other kids are sweetly singing the Mother's Day songs that the teacher had prepared - and to be fair, occasionally Ellie would sing along. But she would quickly get bored of that and start making these ridiculous faces. There's really no rhyme or reason to why she was doing this, that's just my Ellie.
I recently caught her sitting on the roof. The fearless little monkey may just make me bar the windows of my house. Oh - and Ezra, if you're reading this, Ellie asks me daily if she can go use the gray bathroom..it took me a few days to figure out what she was talking about until I drove by the park and she pointed and asked again. So you have at least one little customer waiting.

I looked out the window and what did I see?

I have no idea if this is an apricot tree, but it looked enough like popcorn that I snapped a picture. On Thursday I took the 2 little ones to the gardens at Thanksgiving Point. I know - I jumped back on the saddle after the disaster last time. The kids had a great time, the only real snafu was when they tried to jump in the water falls, so we had to leave the tulip festival side and go back to the children's side. It was such a beautiful day, I was ALMOST fooled into thinking spring had arrived. But the snow that fell today convinced me otherwise.

Trey has decided that big boys use their pockets. This is how he likes to walk around now.

This was only seconds before they tried to jump into the waterfall.

Where's Ellie? So many flowers!

Ellie wasn't thrilled to be wearing the big floppy flower headband that I made her, but she was a good sport about letting me take pictures anyway.

Another successful outing. Mary Poppins. Psh.