He can talk he can talk he can talk...and I can sing

(5 points if you can name the subject line quote)

Zachary LOVES to sing. He constantly amazes me with his ability to hear a song a few times and then sing it from memory. He'll often surprise me by singing theme songs, nursery rhymes, or Primary songs I didn't know he knew or adding in additional verses he doesn't hear very often.

A recent favorite of his to sing is called A Child's Prayer. He loves to sing both verses through and often requests it. One thing I love about the way he sings it is that he always sings one line wrong. The first verse starts out:

Heavenly Father, are you really there?
And do you hear and answer ev'ry child's prayer?

Zach's version goes:
Heavenly Father, you are really really there...

His version of the song turns the phrase from a question to a testimony and it touches me every time.

Another story about the song:

During the Saturday Afternoon session of General Conference, both boys perked up when they noticed the choir was made up of Primary children (under the age of 12). Zachary walked up to the TV and said "sing Child's Prayer", waited while they continued to sing I Feel My Savior's Love, (pleading now) "pleeeeease sing Child's Prayer". It was really cute but it was hard to help Zachary understand why the children weren't listening to his request.

From the mouth of babes...

Stewart Beach

I worked a few mornings this week to help support users in London, so I got off early enough for us to head down to Galveston on Friday afternoon.  The water was warm, the weather great, and the beach wasn't very crowded.  The boys loved it.

Pic Pics

I finished my art project that I posted about a while back.  We think they turned out pretty nice, and definitely add some color to our room.  I got Zach to pose for a few minutes with promises of Chocolate and Popsicle.

New Blog Design!

We've been wanting to update the skin for our blog ... so we did.  It's even mobile friendly (if you don't have a smart phone, get the newest version of Firefox or Chrome and make the window skinny - it's cool I promise)

Here's some pics of the boys for good measure

And if you are interested, the CSS code that mobilfies this theme is on my tech blog (it's a default blogger template, so it may work on others as well.  Or it may not.)

New Bikes

My mom recently sent Zachary a Smart Balance Bike. They're a pretty cool idea for teaching kids how to balance and to prepare them for a "big kid bike". If anyone's interested in knowing more about the bike that's all the rage with families in my parents' ward, you can go to this website.

I think it's a hit

Caleb wanted to get in on the action

Thank you Grandma and Grandpa!

Back in April we celebrated my birthday and my main presents from Derrick and the parents were a new bike and bike trailer/double jogging stroller.

We got everyone helmet-ed up and biked for about 7 miles.


It was pretty hot and the boys passed out. Caleb's a little small for the trailer so we used the boppy to fill in the extra space.

Playing in the Rain

With other places getting pounded with rain we've had a surprising lack of it over here. I decided to pray for it last week and was happy to see that it ended up raining the next day! Gotta love those quick answers. The boys and I went out to play in the rain and get incredibly dirty. Derrick joined us after he got home from work. Enjoy!

(sorry, a little blurry)

Zach loved standing under a steady stream coming off a carport

Caleb wanted to try catching the water as well

Easter Pictures

On the Saturday before Easter we went over to Jamon and Jean's house where we ate brisket and Grandpa Holly's famous carrot cake. We also had an Easter egg hunt and dyed-Easter eggs. We loved that Zach was able to figure out how to do some of these things.



The egg hunt for the babies involved crawling after eggs spread out in the middle of the floor. These were filled with Cheerios and Gerber yogurt melts.


Caleb preferred the eggs to the treats inside.


I found an egg-dyeing kit that had some foam rollers so you could "paint the dye on. This seemed to work pretty well for Zachary. After just a couple minutes of dyeing eggs Zach got bored so Derrick bribed Zach with some "Daddy juice" (soda pop) to get him to finish.





Caleb needed some milk in order to be okay with sitting out on the egg-dyeing.


Much happier.


On Sunday we went to church and Derrick and I sang a duet in sacrament meeting. We sang an arrangement of The Lord is My Light. It's not a typical Easter hymn but those are hard to come by for duets... We had a great weekend spending time with family as well as remembering the death of and celebrating the resurrection of our Savior Jesus Christ.