Smith Family Easter Egg Hunt 2012

This year I "organized" the Easter Egg Hunt.  It was a very simple plan...hide the eggs (older kids), find the eggs (little kids), eat hotdogs and chicken and sides.  And it was so much fun.

The older kids hid over 150 eggs and the little kids found most of them.  Everyone was able to find at least a dozen eggs and had fun doing that.  The weather cooperated well and we were able to have an outdoor BBQ and play time as a family.

Easter 2012

After a long spring break and an 11 hour car ride home we awoke to treats from the Easter Bunny. I think everyone slept in their clothes and were just glad to be home!!





The Easter bunny was fun, but now it's on to NO CANDY week!

2nd Annual Smith Girls Trip

For the second year now the Smith family girls traveled to Allison's house in Neola for our "Girls Retreat". How fortunate we were again to have everyone 18 and older able to attend the whole weekend. We have such a good time! We had Mom, 6 daughters, 3 daughter-in-laws, and two neices in all! This year was every bit as fun as last year.


For our "craft" this year we were able to make beautiful patterned shirts. We learned how to do them and then let creativity take over. Essentially you take a solid colored, dark shirt and lay designs over the shirts. Anything from plastic grass, to laminated cut outs, to chains and old keys. Then you spray bleach directly on to the shirt and when the shirt turns the color you want in the places you want you spray vinegar on the shirt to stop the bleach. Hang dry and then launder as normal. Some of the shirts turned out great, some were good, and a few were honest to goodness failures. But overall I think we all learned how to do it and most have shirts to prove it works!
Another craft (of which I have no pictures??) was making countdown blocks. They are basically 2 wooden blocks on a platform that can be turned to count down the days until a special event or holiday. They turned out really cute as well. Thanks to Jeremy for cutting all those blocks out for us!

And of course we ate...and ate...and ate! We had wonderful soup when we arrived, and an evening of treats! Breakfast was mini puff pancakes with strawberry syrup and bacon. After a beautiful morning at the Vernal temple we went to Gondolfos for lunch. Dinner that night was Cafe Rio pulled pork salad and dessert nachos! Our final morning we ate crepes with triple berry sauce and more bacon. We all gained a few pounds over those 3 days!
And a lot of the time and a majority of the fun was unplanned, spontaneous, hangin' out and visiting. We sure do love each other and have such fun together. It's a true blessing that we all get along and genuinely love spending time together. I definitely married into a wonderful group of sisters and sister-in-laws of the Smith family. (And my two beautiful nieces that were there too!)




We came back with fond memories, great laughs, and a desire to do it all again next year! Thanks to Alli for hosting us and putting up with a couple late nights and crazy times!

Something's Missing!

McKinley lost a couple teeth! She lost one of the front teeth, which is always my favorite stage! Love the freckles and the missing teeth! Too bad she's growing up....

Happy Birthday Dave!

Yesterday we had to squeeze in David's birthday. Tuesday's are always a crazy day here, but we were able to have some cake at about 8:49pm! Of course we started the day with hugs and kisses and well wishes for a great day. Then we all scattered for school, work, soccer practice, gymnastics, cub scouts, youth group, and soccer games. We met again at 8:48 and sang Happy Birthday, ate cake and rushed the kids to bed! Phew, that was fun!
Tonight, we have nothing. We are going to go out to eat with Dave's parents and two brothers and their wives. We will go for a long dinner and enjoy a quiet evening! That will be a Happy Birthday kind of night!

Snow Day!

We finally got a good amount of snow and coincidentally the kids had Friday off from school (except poor Austin who didn't have the day off and had to go while everyone else slept in and played!). Since it was the beginning of March we decided we better take our chance and get our sledding in for the year. We bundled up and headed out to the nearby hill with our sled, snowboards, tube and Jagg (the dog!). There was only one other family there and so we pretty much had the place to ourselves. Evan mastered his snowboard, and a jump. McKinley and I went the farthest on the sled (together) and Jagg ran for over an hour and ate a lot of snow! It was a very good family time!

McKinley also made a beautiful snow angel and we all stayed pretty warm. Funny thing is--today it was over 50, the snow is all gone, and tomorrow is supposed to reach 60 --if we're lucky. That's all fine with me...goodbye snow!

President's Cup Champions!

Another holiday weekend...another soccer tournament!! I love, love watching the team play soccer and tournaments are so good because there are so many games in such a short time. This tournament had another plus...it was in sunny St. George, so it was warm! Yea!

Our team had it's first game on Friday, so we traveled down just in time for the game. It was not a good game and there was a lot of rust to dust off. We ended up tying the game and trying to forget about it. Saturday morning was another game and we rocked! It was so fun to see the team come back and play the way they know how to. Evan had a great goal in the game with a driving run to the net and in! We won that game 3-1 and went on to beat La Roca 2-0 in our second game that day. With the group stage over we were on to the semi-finals on Monday.

After a fun weekend we played a hard semi-final game and won that 1-0. The final was set as a rematch with La Roca. We thought we had our first goal when it was called back for an offsides call that could have gone either way. Evan was offsides, but was not involved in the play, but it was still called as offsides and in the way of the goalie. That was really hard, but the team rallied on and fought hard to a 0-0 draw in regulation. On to a 10 minute overtime. With 30 seconds left in overtime we scored a goal! Then we hunkered in for the last 30 seconds and we won!

The Blue Knights are the champions of the President's Cup 2012!



While I love being a soccer mom I seriously wonder how much my heart can take in these high pressure, so close games. I have to walk and pace around the field to ease up the gitters I feel as I watch. It is so fun and the boys make us all so proud. Win or lose they play hard and keep their heads up. But, boy it is fun to come out on top!



Congratulations boys!! It was sure fun to watch!