A Mother's Mantra...

"I Love My Kids..." I Love My Kids..."
That's what I kept reminding myself as I spent over 4 hours creating cookies for Carly's volleyball team today. Her championship tournament is tomorrow, they will spend 12 hours playing their hearts out, and I was assigned to bring brownies and cookies for the team. Usually, this would be an easy task for me. I however, got the bright idea to be creative. Note to self: Bad idea!
I found a darling cookie cutter on clearance at the grocery store, it was a flower shape with an extra petal shaped cutter. The idea is that you make the flower shape, then frost the petals a different color and stack them on top for a 3-d effect. Cute, right? Well, little did I imagine the chaos that was about to begin. It turns out the flower shaped cutter was VERY large. My sugar cookie recipe ended up making only 14 cookies. Then, when I went to cut the petals, I realized that each cookie required 8 petals! Ok, elementary math... 14 x 8 = 112 petals!!!! So I spent the rest of the afternoon baking, frosting, and stacking petals. The outcome was cute, if I do say so myself....
Next time, please remind me to follow my mother's advice and "just buy Oreos!" Now lets just hope the cookies spur the girls onto victory - GO MATRIX!!

Way To Go, Brady!!

A few days ago Brady came home from school toting a brand new "Monsters, Inc." book. His teacher told me that he was the first child in his class to read all 15 level readers on his own! Now he gets to move up to first grade reading! I am so proud of my kids, all of them have been avid readers, and Brady is no exception! We're proud of you, buddy!

Here is Brady showing off his new book!

Here he is showing how well he reads!

Sweet Thing...

How cute is my little Brady-bug? Let me give you an example... His Kindergarten class is learning about ants this week. His homework assignment last night was to come up with a list of things ants have in common with people. He did well, coming up with comparisons like "Ants have eyes, we have eyes," and "Ants eat food, we eat food." He even came up with "Ants live in families, we live in families." He started struggling then, so I gave him a nudge. I said "Well, do ants have a leader?" He said "Yes! the queen ant!" Then I said "Good, so do we have a leader?" His eyes lit up and he enthusiastically responded "YES! Jesus Christ!" At that moment my heart melted into a big mound of mush. But I continued..."Good, and what about our country? Does our country have a leader?" He pondered for a while so I prompted "President..." Then my little boy jumped up and down and said "President Thomas S. Monson!"
A Mama could never be any prouder.