In the Zone...the Scrabble zone

We've mentioned before that we love playing different board games, and we still do. A few weeks ago, for our date night, we pulled out our beloved game of Scrabble to enjoy. Now, we both like word games, and although Brianna is the better speller, Andrew almost always wins when we play Scrabble. We are pretty evenly matched in Boggle, Quiddler, PDQ, and a lot of other word games that we have and that most people have never heard of.

But, on this night...Brianna was the champion. And it was all because of one word. And it was a good word...with a lot of points. So good, that we documented it.

Zoned. What a word. A word worth 75 points! It was a double letter score on the z, and thanks to the d, I got a triple word score. Not bad, considering the score word right before it gave me 5 points.

All in all, it was a great game. I actually only beat Andrew by 20 points, but we had some great words and covered the board. We were pretty impressed with ourselves.

Easter 2012

We had a great Easter this year and we had a lot of fun teaching Jessica all about Easter. We read to her from the illustrated scriptures, and we are currently reading the New Testament, and on the back cover, it shows a picture of the resurrected Savior at the tomb, with Mary Magdalene. Now, every night, when we pull out the scriptures, Jessica says, "Easter" and points to the picture. We love that she is understanding pieces of what we are teaching her!

One of our favorite Easter traditions is dying eggs. My family (this is Brianna) dyed eggs every year...and a lot of them! We would always eat deviled eggs for Easter dinner and a lot of boiled eggs that week, which I loved. I am pretty sure we've dyed eggs every year since we've been married, but I am usually the one who gets excited about it. Andrew has fun once we start, but he is usually done pretty fast. Well, this year, we dyed them  on Friday night after dinner. Jessica loved it! She actually thought at one point that the dye might taste good and tried to drink it. Don't worry, it didn't happen. She didn't want to stop, but it was bedtime, so we did. Andrew started dying his eggs before Jessica went to bed...and then, he kept going after I was done.

We bought this tie-dye egg dye, which actually was really a pain and I don't recommend it. But, it made for some potentially fun eggs, and well, we just had a fun time making a mess.

And then, after we finished, Andrew commented how there was so much egg dye left and decided we should use it to decorate the snow outside...so we did.

And it was almost more fun than dying eggs. And yes, this is at night, probably around 8:30. It is so sunny here!

We couldn't wait for Jessica to wake up the next morning and see the colored snow. We knew she would love it and be so excited! But guess what? We woke up to this...

That isn't all bad. That snow was enough for Anchorage to set an all-time high record for snowfall (134.5 inches) in one winter. And plus, it was enough to cover most of the dirty snow that was piling up for at least a day. And, the next morning, Easter morning, we woke up and  it was beautiful and sunny outside once again!

Jessica wasn't really interested in finding eggs at all. We tried to get her excited about it, and I even put jelly beans in them, but she just handed them to dad and asked him to read to her instead. Her favorite part of her Easter basket was the magnetic numbers she got. She loves numbers!

That night, for our Easter dinner, we had some friends over and ate a ton of food! We had a lot of fun, even though they did tell me that the bush in front of our house is NOT a blueberry bush even though the berries looked like blueberries. I'm still a little disappointed about that one. Anyway, hope you had a good Easter too!

Pinewood Derby

A few weeks ago, we went to the Pinewood Derby. In case you didn't know, we love Pinewood Derbies, and we love making our own cars to race in an open class race. I actually just realized we didn't ever post a picture of all our cars, just the making of some. So, here are all our cars. The two front ones (Lightning Bolt and my awesome green-striped race car) were the ones we did in 2010. We need to go through our pictures and find some better ones where you can see them on their own because they are awesome! Seriously, all the cub scouts are impressed when we show up with these.

But, since our last car making days, we've moved twice, and neither ward has done an open class race. It is a little disappointing, but we figured, the race is still fun  to watch and we thought Jessica would think so too. We were right.

Super Jessica

I'm a little behind with posting, so I will try to catch up this week, but sometimes, I feel like all of our pictures are the same: Jessica playing in the snow. I found some more. Sometimes, it is too cold to play outside, or we just want to change it up a little, so we decide to play inside, and about a month ago, Jessica learned about flying with a cape on. It is always more fun to go running down the hallway when you are wearing a cape (also known as dad's t-shirt).

Dad wanted to help her really fly!

And well, I kind of didn't want to add this in because I look a little funny, but , this is who I am. I might as well admit it and let the world know.

Since that first night of flying, Jessica has decided she loves the role of Super Hero, and she requests her cape often. We converted to a red cape, and she loves it!