another very fun day at the zoo, this one with grandma zuzu! i love the 80 degree days in march. many thanks go out to grandma zuzu for taking lucy on the carousal, as they make mommy dizzy and sick sick sick.

am i a bad mother for allowing this each and every night??? lucy loves to climb up and select her own story for bedtime and i refuse to fight it anymore.

two cuties all dressed up for church on easter. lucy was most distressed about having to wear a shirt under her new, pretty dress, but it was just too darn cold outside to go sleeveless. i half expected her to look me in the eye and say, "fashion before comfort, mom" but i guess i have a few years before it comes to that.

the easter hunt was exciting and very short-lived. it turns out the easter bunny is a pretty lame candy hider. maybe said bunny can improve by next year.

one of our new favorite things to do is get onto the computer, mess up all the settings and randomly click on icons until we are successful at pulling up microsoft paint. these two little snuggle bugs love to draw with the mouse!

we had a great day at the zoo in the newly refurbished children's area with our friends the maas family!

little miss naughty decided to get into mommy's make-up and absolutely destroyed my favorite blush (what the pictures don't show is that immediately following these photos the blush was tossed onto the floor, where it broke into a million pink, powdery pieces). it was everywhere! all over her face (which still had some nice syrup from breakfast, so it stuck quite nicely), the counter, the floor, her jammies...what a mess!

this past weekend we went to the much-anticipated fiafia (samoan pig roast) with our church ward! it was great fun. here we are in line for the potluck. not a great photo, but it's the best one i got. no, lucy is not drunk and yes, shane is wearing a fanny-pack. don't even get me started.

yes, it was an authentic fiafia! apologies go out to any animal lovers, vegetarians or PETA activists for this photo, but it was just so cool! this bad boy was roasted on actual river rocks. rumor has it that it was quite the ta-doo to find a whole pig and involved much internet searching.

our friend, joey, from samoa demonstrates the effort involved in extracting coconut milk. i'm really glad they sell it in cans...i can personally guarantee that i would never go through the effort of squeezing shredded coconut to get the milk otherwise.

emma's school had a fun roller skating day last week. we were so excited!

go, emma, go! it turns out that roller-skating is much trickier than i remember. it took us a while to get the hang of it, but emma did really great!

we spent much of our time hanging onto the wall for dear life.

shane spent much of his time taking the place of the wall when lucy wanted to venture onto the hard, slippery rink and thus, hang onto shane for dear life.

and sadly, this is where lucy spent much of her time when she let go of the wall or her dad. it was a hard day, but so, so fun! we'll have to do it again when lucy is a little bit bigger. knees and bottoms were quite sore at the end of our roller-skating adventure.

for the 100th day of school emma got to wear a t-shirt over her uniform with 100 things glued onto it. we chose ribbons and glued them so they hung down like fringe. emma was one cute kid in her little shirt.

miss daisy is the blessed little bear that comes home twice a year with emma over the weekend. we get to photograph emma doing various things with miss daisy, trying to be creative and trying desperately not to, HEAVEN FORBID, lose the darn thing or any of her accessories (she comes in a rolling suitcase...think literal luggage). we take pictures, then glue them in the miss daisy diary and write captions for each photo. here are some of our cute photos!

miss daisy, emma and lucy eating breakfast.

miss daisy helps with the laundry.

miss daisy finds daisy fabric at joann fabric.

miss daisy visits s.m.u.'s campus.

emma had a great valentine's day party at school! shane and mike were in charge of planning, which moms everywhere know is code for: autumn and jane were in charge of planning. it turned out well and the girls had a great time.