February

Like all months, February was a great month. The weather was beautiful and we spent a lot of time outside and playing at the nearby parks. 

At one of Ethan's flag football games, Ellie learned about dandelions and is just about the cutest little wish blower that I've ever seen. Most of her wishes have something to do with wanting to be a real princess.

In mid- February, we were lucky enough to have my mom come down for a few days. The Gilbert Temple was still in it's open house phase and we jumped at the opportunity to take her through it. It is such an impressive temple. 

The next day, we were able to go with her to the Mesa Temple to do Baptisms for the Dead for her very first time. 

It was such a sweet and special experience to be able to do those things with my mom. We are so blessed to live so close to 2 temples!

On President's Day, we went for a family hike to the Wind Caves. We made it to about the half way point and Ellie had already fallen down and scraped her knee, was poked by a cactus, fell down again and scraped her hands up, and the last straw for her was having to go potty. We decided to celebrate how far we'd gone (not very far at all actually), semi- convinced Ethan that we made it to the caves, and turned around to go celebrate with snow cones from Bahama Bucks! It was a successful hike!

Now I don't mean to rub it in to all you northerners or east coasters but this is what we did a lot of in February....

Have I mentioned how beautiful the weather is here?? :)

Ellie got some new kicks complete with all the princesses on them. She was pretty excited to show them off to everyone! Ellie wears a size 12.5 for shoes and a size 6x for shirts and shorts/pants! Something tells me that she isn't going to be a short girl!

Friday night is movie night around here. We always eat home made pizza, pick a kid friendly flick and eat lots of popcorn. The kids love it and live for it! Unfortunately, Justin is out of town for a lot of them with his busy travel schedule but we are so happy when he is on town to make it!

We love establishing traditions with our little family!