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I love Royce so much.

(This is poor Daddy after Church when he gets three hours of sleep the night before.)

Happy Birthday Daddy! (yesterday)

I made Royce a chocolate ice cream cake with cookies and cream ice cream. (And for those of you who don't know, this is PomPom from Homestarrunner. I ran out of fondant, so his head and limbs aren't very proportionate, but you get the general idea :) )

My parents and I went in together for Royce's birthday present this year, and we got him a new monitor. He likes it a lot. :)


Here's Emmaline playing with the box that the monitor came in.



We took Daddy out for dinner, and he had mentioned when we were on the coast that Irish restaurants have really good food, so I found one in Austin, and we surprised him on his birthday. The restaurant is called Fado, but it's also a pub, so I e-mailed them a week before and asked if it was a family friendly environment, and they assured me that it was family friendly, but it becomes more of the pub at nine, and that's when they finish serving dinner. So we went after Royce was done with class (7:00pm) but for some reason they decided to start some drinking games an hour early, so after the 5th or 6th F bomb over the speakers, we ate really fast and got out of there :) So if you go to an Irish Pub, I would recommend maybe a lunch there. The cheeseburger that I got was really good :) (Oh, if you look a little closer you can see what logo is on Emmaline's glass)

Grrrr. New Moon makes me so angry.

Yeah Uncle Ross!

Uncle Ross got his mission call this week! He's going to the Tacoma Washington Mission. So get ready for some beautiful country (and a lot of rain :) ). And of course Gina and I won't mention what town is three hours and nine minutes away from Tacoma. Hehe.

(This picture is from Christmas of 2007; Ross drove with us all the way to Dallas and back to keep Emmaline entertained on the trip. They're both eating jerkey, so that's why they look like little chipmunks :) )

Easter at Nana and Papa's

We got to go to Nana and Papa's house for Easter this year. It was a lot of fun, and as an added surprise Robert and Kristi and their family came down from Arkansas too, so all of Royce's siblings were there except Robyn (she had to work), Ronald (at BYU in Utah), and obviously Roxanne, but it was really neat to have almost all of the family there. And Ross gets his mission call this week!

Oh yeah, and it doesn't seem to really be a trip to Nana and Papa's unless I forget something, break something, and fall down the stairs. I guess technically the order is fall down the stairs, break a picture on the way down, (Yeah, this is the second time I've fallen on the stairs at their house and broken a picture that's on the wall. And it's not like there's anything weird about the stairs. But both times though, it's been a Sunday morning and so I get up early to get ready for Church so I'm still a little out of it from the medicine I take at night, but still. Sheesh.) and then leave something there. (This time I left my glasses; last time it was my wedding ring; the time before that, Royce's new suit.)

Here's Emmaline's Easter dress this year. We ended up getting it at the Children's Place, and Emmaline got to pick it out, which was a pretty cool thing.
Paris and Chloe blowing bubble that they got from the "Easter Bunny."
Emmaline and Chloe after hunting for Easter Eggs. (The rest of the kids had to go back before they had the Easter egg hunt. They had like a 10hr drive ahead of them :( )


Emmaline and Chloe.

This is Kaitlyn. She is the second oldest cousin, and she does a really good job of taking care of the younger ones :)
This is Paris; she's five.
Uncle Ross is taking Emmaline (3), Paris (5), and Chloe (2) for a ride in the riding lawn mower.

Corpus Christi Ocean Trip

This was at the Texas State Aquarium. It was pretty neat. Emmaline loved the underground Dolphin tank. It was pretty cool down there.
This is from the overlook at the Aquarium, but it shows the beach down by our motel.
Emmaline loved the beach. When we went to the Oregon Coast last year, she got kind of scared of the water, (and we had to wear winter jackets and snow caps:) ) but here she loved it. She ran into the water, and drew circles in the sand, and just had a great time. It was really fun. I even went out and swam a little in the ocean.

Another view from the Aquarium.
Aquarium, and the U.S.S Lexington.
Aquarium.
We got to touch the sting rays. It was cool. I was surprised at how much personality they had. They really did like it when people would pet them as they swam past. I wasn't planning on touching them, but Emmaline was afraid and didn't want to, so Mommy needed to show her that it wasn't something that she needed to be afraid of, so I did it first. I also tried some of Royce's fish tacos and swam in the ocean. I was a wild woman.
Aquarium.
More Aquarium.
This shark was really creepy...

Aquarium.
We did a lot of fun stuff, and Emmaline and I were pretty tired, so Royce let us sleep in and went and got us breakfast so we could have breakfast in bed. He spoils us :)
This is what Emmaline does for fun in a motel room where she can't watch a movie. :)
This is the Whataburger By the Bay. (Whataburger is a fast food restaurant chain for those of you not in Texas :) ) It was pretty neat. It was two stories, and had some really pretty views of the bay.

Easter Bunny

So my parents sent Emmaline this Easter bunny, and she opened it, but didn't realize that it moved and sang, and so when we turned it on, she freaked out. She was really scared of it, and wouldn't let us turn it on again, and we even had to move it to the back of the room. Then she kind of warmed up to it a little bit, and wanted to take it with her on our trip, so when we got to the motel I put it on the table facing towards us (not thinking about it) and so Emmaline came back and turned him so he was facing the wall, and not out towards us. It was really funny. Anyway, my parents felt bad that it scared her, (she opened it on a video conference with my parents :) ) but by the time we were at Nana and Papa's house, she warmed up to it, and started singing and dancing with it, so here's the video, that's mainly for my parents :)

Easter Baskets

Okay, I tried to make those Easter baskets. I'm happy that they turned out pretty well, but it was a lot more time consuming than I thought it would be. Just to give you a heads up. Super cheap, but time consuming. They ended up costing about $1.50 each. So I'm going to bed now; we're going to Corpus Christi to play on the beach for a couple of days! Yeah!. Then to Nana and Papa's for Easter. Have a good weekend everybody!

Croup!

Poor little Emmaline has croup again. She woke up in the middle of the night (well, I guess really early Sunday morning) with that croupy cough, and was having a hard time breathing, so we took her outside (because the cold air decreases the inflammation and helps her breathe) but it's not cold enough in Austin at night! So being outside helped a little, but she was still not doing very well, so we ended up taking her to the Emergency Room. We were there for a long time, (but still not as long as it took to get our oil changed yesterday...3 1/2hrs!) but we got to see the doctor, and they gave her some steroids, so she's doing so much better now. This is the third time she's had croup, but she's doing the best this time, and I think it's because she got the steroids so early. Normally with the cold we can control her breathing a little better, so she doesn't need to see a doctor until around the third day(some kids don't even need to go to the doctor at all with croup, but she seems to:) ), so it makes for much more stressful nights (normally we make a little nest on the floor by the window with the window open, and Royce and I trade off sleeping with her so we can keep an eye on her breathing, and make sure she stays bundled up) but since she got the steroids so early, she hasn't had any trouble with breathing at night, and is doing really well in the day too. (FYI: Croup is a viral infection that inflames the upper airway. It lasts around 3 days, and is worse at night.) So anyway, I'm kind of keeping her quarantined because I really don't want to spread it around. So if you don't see us for a while, that's why! (Well, we're also going to Corpus Christi on Thursday, so that's why too. Another reason I want her to rest a get it done now, so she can play and have fun on the beach.)
But the other reason I wanted to post this is that in the process of going to the hospital we learned that there is a children's hospital in Austin that has opened recently, and I wanted to let our friends in Austin know that. (Maybe you already do :) ) But I guess it's just up I-35 from the Brackenridge Hospital. Because we're from a small town and there is only one hospital there, I wasn't sure where to go, so when we needed to go I vaguely remembered where Brackenridge was, so we went there, but in the course of the 2 1/2 hours that we were there there were three different people who came in in handcuffs with a police escort. And there were quite a few shady characters there, that made me a little nervous. :) I didn't say anything, but the receptionist told us about the children's hospital for future reference, and then the nurse took us to a separate waiting room (which we appreciated) and then the doctor told us about the pediatric hospital too. So that's what I would recommend :) Whew, that was long. :)


Pocahontas is what Emmaline has been watching lately, and last night she slipped her arm out of her shirt, and sat under her "canoe" like Pocahontas does in the movie. I thought it was pretty funny.
I saw this picture from a place that sells cookies, but I posted it for the basket. I thought it was so cute, and it looked really easy to make, so I wanted to get it up in case anyone wants to make one for Easter. But the web-site is http://products.proflowers.com.
And finally this is my sad, sad Easter cake. Blah! It is by far the worst fondant cake that I have made yet. (And that includes my first one, that I baked in a metal bowl :) ) But Royce keeps encouraging me that it's okay to fail sometimes, and that it needs to be a learning experience, so here is my learning experience. :) Luckily, though, I made it for our dinner when the missionaries came over, so I couldn't think of an audience that would care less of what a cake would look like, so I lucked out. And, despite my complaining, I really did gain more insight with this cake. So here you go :)