Our new car!

Well, I guess we're officially a Mormon family because we finally broke down purchased a minivan! We bought it a week ago at a government auction, which is the same place we bought our Taurus that we've been driving for the past 5 years and we've had a lot of luck there. It's nothing fancy, just a 2001 Dodge Caravan with no power anything so it makes me feel so old school rolling up and down the windows by hand and manually locking each door, but it runs great and the best thing is it only has 16,000 miles so it drives like it's practically new! We paid $4000 for it which is about all I can stand paying for cars anyway. I hate car payments so it was nice to just pay for it from what we'd been saving for a new car, knowing we'd need one once we had another baby and ran out of seats. Our double stroller doesn't really fit in it very well and I do really miss my nice big trunk, but other than that I'm surprised how much I'm liking it so far! I was really dreading getting one but it's not so bad! We went to the auction while Savannah was at school and we didn't tell her anything about it since we didn't know if we'd actually buy anything so it was a surprise for her when we got home and she was SO excited! She's been bugging us about wanting to buy a minivan this whole school year since my neighbor that I carpool with has one and she loves it.

I think the biggest reason Savannah really wanted one so badly is because she always wants to take extra people in the car with us but we never can since our Taurus barely had enough seats for the 5 of us. The first thing she she said was "Now we can take Julian with us everywhere we go!" (Julian is our 4 year old next door neighbor who's an only child so he's sort of like their adopted brother) So of course here are the kids, including Julian, just a few hours after buying it as we drove around to show it to my brother and mom.

This is a picture of the back seat of our Taurus after we got the car seats out of it. I had such a ghetto mom car! I'm determined to keep this new one much cleaner.

Some cheesy pictures of Joe at the auction site right after he bought it.

This is a big, exciting step for our family! I guess now we're one step closer to baby #4! We'll have to start working on that... =)

Ward Talent Show

This is kind of embarrassing but I thought it would be fun to post it anyway. We had a ward talent show tonight and Savannah really wanted to sing in it, but I told her it was mostly just for grown-ups. They were looking for people with interesting talents or that played unusual instruments and some of you may know that when I was little I played the accordion. So the song Savannah wanted to sing was "On Top of Spaghetti", which is one of the songs she performed last week with her little singing group, and I had the idea that that would be a fairly easy, fitting song for me to play on my accordion while she sang along. Then it would also be good because she could take some of the pressure and attention off of my playing so I wouldn't feel so nervous or embarrassed at my meager skills. I totally had to practice for weeks and I was SO nervous about performing it, but now that it's over I'm glad I did it. I think Savannah really liked doing it and it was fun doing it together. She's such a natural little performer and it amazes me how she doesn't get nervous at all and she just thinks it's fun. She sure doesn't get that from me!

Here's the video if you want to see it. By the way, my cheesy little dancing side to side was totally Joe's idea--he made me do it! =)

Happy Easter!

Today has been a beautiful, wonderful Easter! I'm pretty tired now after all the festivities, cleaning up all the candy wrappers and plastic grass, and getting my kids to bed when they were on such a sugar high, but it was still a great day. Yesterday we went to an Easter carnival at Wheeler Farm because Savannah's singing group was performing there and we ended up having a lot of fun there! My brother Ryan and his wife Savanah brought their three kids, too, so all the cousins always have a fun time together. Afterwards we went back to Ryan's house and let the kids dye Easter eggs and then today after church we hunted them in my mom's backyard. We had a family dinner at her house and church was really nice and all in all it was just a wonderful Easter celebration. Here are some pictures:

The kids before church

After church with their Easter baskets

Savannah and Katie swinging at Nonni's house

Alex having a great time with the Easter Egg hunt

Family Photo