We had a wonderful Easter Sunday this year. The day before we called "chainsaw day," because we spent the entire day with a borrowed chainsaw felling and dragging trees out of our yard. It was so much work. We're really pleased with the results. And we were really  glad to have a day of rest the next day. It was truly a delightful Sabbath. That night we got invited to a flashlight Easter egg hunt at a friend's house. It was loads of fun! We dyed eggs and watched general conference which was full of all sorts of surprises! The most exciting one for our family was when President Nelson announced that there will be a new temple built right by us! Woohoo! We whooped and hollered and got misty-eyed all at the same time. Our kids are at very nice age for conference watching. Come October conference we'll have a new addition! How exciting! A little conference-time snooze for Asa. Our egg hunt was fun. We have the best yard for hiding Easter eggs,...

 We had a great General Conference weekend! Generally I dread them because of the struggle to keep unruly kids at bay and also try to get something out of the messages, but this time it went really well. We didn't do a lot of sitting and watching, and I think that was a key to success for us. We canned applesauce, cut grass (Addison and I shared headphones), rode in the car, and the kids did great. In between sessions on Saturday we had a picnic lunch at the park. The weather was perfect.  It's not conference weekend without these babies!  On Sunday we headed up the canyon between sessions in hopes of finding some fall foliage. We missed the first round and were too early for the second. But it was still beautiful. And the aspens were yellow here and there. We did a little mini-hike to break in our new baby backpack and were all sad to go when the time came. Asa absolutely LOVED the pack! He did spontaneous squeals of delight here and there...

The first weekend in October we made the three-hour trek up to Rexburg, Idaho to visit Megan and Sam and pick some apples. BYU Idaho has an orchard with like 120 varieties of apples and they were pick-your-own for fifty cents a pound. We had a blast picking peaches earlier this year, and were excited to take the kids to pick again. The car ride was great (thank you technology), and we found Meg and Sam's cute apartment without any trouble. Their apartment is really nice. Perfectly clean and good-smelling, with love messages written in lipstick on every non-porous surface. They are definitely living up being newlyweds, and it is just cute. We headed over to the apple orchard shortly after arriving and got excited as we hauled out laundry baskets and read the poster about the different varieties of apples, talking about apple pie all the while. But we soon discovered that something was missing.  That would be the apples. Row after row of beautiful apple trees picked comp...

Easter was fun and crazy around our house. Addison doesn't eat much of anything on normal days, but he loves sweets. Since it was Easter, the chocolate was plentiful and Mom and Dad were feeling generous, so he went nuts on it. And we definitely paid the price during General Conference. It was fun, though. This was the first year he hunted for eggs, and he did pretty good with it (see video below). We had some of his cousins up that evening for another Easter egg hunt and more treats. My favorite picture is the one on the top right. Bryn and I got up pretty early on Easter, and she was dying to get into her (and Addison's I'm sure) Easter basket. But we waited for the sleepyhead boys to get up. The top left is another fave. Addison really wanted the Easter Bunny to bring him a tie. Surprise! He got one!

Nate here. If you are going to be in Salt Lake this weekend, for General Conference or otherwise, just a friendly note to let you know you'd be crazy to miss this: If you go to the British Library, you're not going to skip the Magna Carta, and if you're going to get your money's worth in Washington DC, you're going to check out the Declaration of Independence. For Mormons, the documents on display this weekend are up there with the Declaration of Independence. You can see the pages with Oliver Cowdery's actual handwriting as he wrote the words of the Book of Mormon Joseph Smith spoke, as well as the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon. You'll see Joseph's writing in his journal, pleading for divine guidance, and the oldest surviving copy of his revelations. These documents are the foundation of the faith, the historical evidence that God speaks to us in modern times.

Editing is the kind of work that doesn't get noticed unless it's done wrong. For instance, notice anything out of the ordinary from the front page of Monday's Daily Universe (BYU's student-run newspaper)? Hint: click to enlarge and read the center caption. Can you say bad day for some poor editor out there? Upon realizing that those are apostles, not apostates, BYU rushed to pull all 18,500 copies from the newsstand and reprint the issue, a first for the university. According to Google, 236 news organizations have run the story of "BYU's ungodly typo," including the Boston Herald, FOX, CBS, and Newsweek. I feel sorry for those Daily Universe guys, but what a HILARIOUS example for editing teachers to use for decades to come. Read the newspaper's mea culpa here , and the AP story here .

This weekend was awesome. We spent Friday night and Saturday in Provo with Shauna, Doug, and Beck for our church's general conference. We watched both sessions, ate ourselves sick (way too many fruit snacks), got introduced to the tv show House, and just had a general chill session. And then we drove home and still had another day before Nate had to go back to work. And Sunday was at least 60 degrees. Honestly, does it get any better than that? Add taught Uncle Doug how to play Mario Kart In between sessions we had a blast with a bag of moldy bread and BYU's duck pond. BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: Sunday marked 20 weeks of being pregnant. AKA halfway to the finish line!