David's Birthday Party

We decided to celebrate David's birthday in style by hosting a party with his friends from preschool. It was a Star Wars-themed party. Thus we played games like, Pin the Lightsaber on the Jedi, Pass the Thermal Detonator, Star Wars Bingo, and more (some of which can be found here). David's cake was two lines of cupcakes made to look like lightsabers. We also had lemon-lime soda with lime sherbet (called Yoda Soda).

We also used pool noodles to make each child their own lightsaber (like so), at which point Ben trained them all to be Jedi masters, by teaching them to keep balloons aloft (without touching the floor). Needless to say, it was a bit chaotic!

Anyway, David had a wonderful time and is very happy to be six-years-old now.

Happy Birthday David!

David turned six-years-old today. He got some cool presents from his grandparents, including a Big Book Of Trains and a Fisher-Price TRIO Hot Wheels set.

David was ecstatic. Then his parents swept in with some additional Star Wars-themed presents. That set up David for a fantastic remainder of the day, as he had plenty of cool things to play with.

Where is the cake, you ask? Well, that is a few days away as part of David's upcoming birthday party this Saturday.

We're Okay!

When we woke up yesterday morning, we were notified that our area was under what was designated as a "Particularly Dangerous Situation" (the area in white in the image below). The difference between a Particularly Dangerous Situation (PDS) and your run-of-the-mill Severe Thunderstorm is that the tornadoes anticipated in a PDS are likely to be longer-lived, going from town to town, rather than fizzling out after a few minutes.

This is only the second time in history that a PDS has been announced over 24 hours in advance. The last time they did, in April 2006, there were nearly 100 tornadoes.



So, since we wanted to stay alive, we spent a good part of yesterday keeping up with the weather reports from Dave Freeman at KSN.com.



We had a few tornadoes in our area, such as the one in this video from earlier in the day (which was in Ellsworth County), but most stayed to the south or east of our city. (side note: the video was copied from KWCH.com).



Things were pretty good for us until around 11:00 p.m., when we had to wake the kids and hunker down in the basement for about an hour. David went right back to sleep, Analeigh wasn't sure what was going on, and Cailainn was perky and all to willing to stay awake forever, if we would let her. Luckily, the tornado passed by us (again to the southeast) and no one was hurt.

By the way, as of this writing, there were an 122 reported tornadoes on Saturday.

Temple Tour

Today we went to the Kansas City Temple open house. We were looking forward to taking the kids to see what the inside of a temple looks like (David was mainly interested in seeing the twelve cows under the baptismal font).



Before the tour, we had the kids touch the temple, just as we have in the past. Analeigh and Cailainn were happy to oblige, but after the long car trip, David wanted nothing to do with it. So we took another picture with him sitting against the light post (we did eventually persuade him to touch the temple before the tour).

Happy Easter

It is so much fun to have Easter on Sunday - they should really do it that way every year! (wait, apparently that is how it works every year).

Liz sewed matching dresses for Analeigh and Cailainn and then tweaked the photo in Picasa (possibly described as her new favorite program - at least compared to the software that came with our Kodak Easyshare printer).



After church (which, incidentally was stake conference), the pagan Easter Bunny reared its ugly head (the use of which was not prohibited during our conference session), but the kids did not seem to mind one bit, as they hunted down all the eggs that the bunny left for them to find.