Tulip Festival

Friday afternoon we went to Thanksgiving Point to see the Tulip Festival with my family. Our timing for the visit was perfect. The skies were overcast most of the time we were there, making conditions great for pictures, and we left soon before it started raining. The gardens were beautiful, and we had a lot of fun.

My brother Allan, Nate, and I decided we would be silly and take our picture behind this tulip stand.

This is looking down from the entrance to the gardens.

My brother Nathan was even happy, especially when we tipped his chair all the way back.

Painted Eggs

We enjoyed it so much last year that we decided to paint eggs again this year for Easter, even though we were late in getting to the project. Here are our finished products:

Nate's Egg

After he started painting some shapes onto his egg, Nate decided to make his a jelly bean egg. It is fun and bright, and very Easter appropriate.

Rebecca's Egg

This is my dragon egg. It is less "Easter appropriate," and it was a lot more time consuming to create, but it was still fun all the same. It is pretty detailed, so it would probably be easiest to view if you click on the picture to enlarge it.

Easter

We were lucky enough to actually be in the Provo/Orem area the day Rebecca's friends were having an Easter party. We dyed some eggs with Rebecca's family to bring with us to the party. I don't think we did that bad with just a small crayon fragment and a birthday candle as the only wax implements.


The party was at the Wyview common building since it was raining. We hid eggs and candy throughout the classrooms and hallways. We didn't think there would be many good hiding spots, but it was actually really fun and nobody even found the egg we hid behind the tithing slips. It was even more fun watching the kids have such a good time. Lucy has obviously had a lot of experience with cameras already judging from the excellent funny faces.

Birthdays

Last Friday was Rebecca's 20-something-th birthday! We celebrated it and her Mom's birthday with her family in Orem. Her aunts and grandparents made a delicious dinner and two yummy cakes. One was a chocolate cake with caramel sauce, whipped cream and Score candy crumbs on top and the other was a strawberry shortcake.

Rebecca designed a birthday card to give her mom and also sent a copy to my brother-in-law. The inside says "I hope your birthday ROCKS, dude!" You probably can't see it from this picture, but the pig has a skull tatoo on his arm and studded bracelets. If you want to order one of these fine cards for someone special in your life send Rebecca a self-addressed stamp envelope and $1.99 (or just $2 to avoid mailing coins). For an additional 50 cents, the card can be mailed directly to your special someone along with your personalized message hand written in size 6 font.


Something you should know about gifts with Rebecca's family, is that they pay almost as much attention to the wrapping as they do to the actual gift. If the wrapping is good enough, they'll pull out the pocket knife to carefully cut the tape so that the paper is kept in good enough condition to be used for at least 5 more gifts. The bows, bags, tissue paper, etc. are saved as well. On the other hand, if the wrapping is done by one of the male members of the family, there will usually be comments such as "This is christmas wrapping paper!", or "This bow doesn't match the paper at all!" In the exibit below, the christmas ribbon had been chosen by Rebecca's dad because it was the only ribbon wide enough to cover the huge gap in the paper which had been cut too small. I'm pretty sure that incident put a bigger grin on her mom's face than any of the actual gifts (thus warranting a picture before it was even opened).


Rebecca got the game PIT for her birthday. I just want to rant a bit about the other versions of the game that don't include the bell. It just doesn't make sense to play PIT without the bell. That's the best part! The sudden feeling of doom upon hearing it, and the privilege of victoriously ringing it cannot be replaced by the anti-climactic slapping of a piece of cardboard, even when accompanied by the most enthusiastic shout of "Corner on Wheat"! End of rant.

I got Rebecca some usefull accessories for her camera and a nice looking but casual shirt for her birthday. Her family is pretty big on having gift lists and sticking to them, which is great for buying what is wanted, but not so great for the surprise factor. It's especially hard when the list includes clothes, because they prefer picking out the clothes themselves. I think I came up with a pretty good system though. I let Rebecca pick out several shirts that she liked and that fitted, and I didn't let her know which one I actually bought. That way she was at least a little surprised and didn't even have to worry about me picking out something horrendous.