Now Is the Month of Maying...

"Now is the month of Maying, when merry lads are playing!" Or in our case, merry children, and lots of 'em. Here's a quick recap of what we've been up to so far in May:

Little Elizabeth is growing, growing, growing, and starting to sit up in her Bumbo. We set her right smack in the middle of the kitchen table during dinner time and she loves it. And Leah loves this polkadot dress Grandma Cardon made her because it reminds her of Dorothy Gale from the Wizard of Oz, and so it has become her "Dorothy dress."

This baby! Three and a half months old and just getting to be the cutest, most loved-on, spoiled baby ever! She is so fun to have around as she becomes more socially aware. Jon had to take her out of Sunday School last week because she was SO loud-- not because she was crying, but because she was singing and talking and squawking and enjoying the sound of her own voice. 

Miss Lucy won a most prestigious award at school at their end of the year award's assembly (hard to believe there's only 3 more weeks of school!!), called the Outstanding Buffalo Award. One boy and one girl from each class are selected to win it, for displaying exemplary behavior all year long, and for being all-around awesome. Here's Lucy's teacher reading all the nice things about Lucy and why she won!

After being recognized at the whole school assembly, the "buffaloes" are then fed lunch the next day and waited on by the principal and their teachers. Lucy was thrilled! It doesn't surprise me one bit when her teacher says she loves Lucy. How can you not?? 

Some funny pictures of Elizabeth trying to talk to us in the car. She watches our lips and then tries so hard to copy the shapes we make. I have a feeling she may be a little chatter box like her older sisters...

We have to run lots of grocery store errands to keep this family of 6 up and running and well fed! I swear, I feel like I'm constantly buying food and it scares me to think what it will be like when they're teenagers! My two little grocery cart buddies on a recent Target run. 

Jon and I snuck out of the house one Saturday evening for a much-needed date night and alone time. We discovered a cute little Beehive in our ward who likes to babysit and we use her quite a bit. I haven't left her with Elizabeth yet-- I feel like Leah and Zach are enough to make her earn that babysitting money, so Elizabeth gets to come along. It was a rainy/snowy, FREEZING Saturday so we headed to Wahoos for fish tacos, hoping it would remind us of our long-lost days in the Caribbean...

This cracked me up. Oh! The perils of dates taken with a 3 month old! Elizabeth had a MAJOR blow-out, complete with poop covering her from head to toe. Gross! Lucky Daddy got the honors of de-pooping her.

Ahhh, fresh as a daisy and not wanting to participate in this car selfie! Nursing in the car on the date, because that's what happens when the little poopster won't cooperate and just sleep through date night. Oh well. There's always next time!

So far, spring has not been very kind to us. We get a couple of gorgeous blue-skied, sunny days, and then either rain, or snow, or hail comes and we have to start all over again. Having officially experienced all four so far, spring is definitely my least favorite season here in Colorado. I thought these tulips were kind of pretty all covered in snow, but I'm ready for some summer heat!

We've been working on our backyard. Here is a BEFORE picture. I'll post more as we go along, but as I'm sure you're well aware, we are NOT yard people, unfortunately. This side was a muddy mess after all the snow this winter, and all the perennial plants were growing crazily, and so feeling adventurous one day we decided to take it on and try and tame it. We had a few landscapers come out and give us estimates on everything we had in mind, and --no joke-- one of them wanted $12,000!!! ((cough, cough, sputter, sputter)) to do it, so that sealed the deal for us. We are able-bodied and can certainly provide our own free labor, and can pretty much look up any how-to YouTube video we need!!! We'll see how our many projects progress through the summer... 

Lucy and Zach's school recently held a Fun Run to earn money for their school. After having been rescheduled once due to snow, you can see the new date was a gorgeous 75 degree day with lots of sun. I went right before school was ending to cheer them on and they were doing their last few laps. (You can see we still have very few buds on the trees. Not sure if that's normal, but like I said, loooong, yucky spring).

Here's Lucy with her class, running like a champ! Lucy ran over 5 miles! Impressive!

I finally caught up with Zach who was running with all of his first grade buddies, and they also ran about 5 miles. Great job Zach-O! They both slept so good that night, I should make them run laps before bed every night or something.

May 5th was Cinco de Mayo, Jon was working the late shift so it was just the kids and I, and I decided we needed a little Cafe Rio to celebrate Mexican independence. Ole'!