Easter Friends

Our daughter, the dentist:

"Say ah!"

"Ah!"
"Good job Averie!" (Rachel's buddy downstairs)
The three amigos (all born within a couple weeks of each other). All of them are looking at me while I take the picture except my daughter who is staring at the boy......oh boy.
I can't blame her, Spencer is a cutie. And this is a look of "Uh-oh, she caught us holding hands"
We are lucky to have some pretty awesome friends who invited us over for an Easter Egg hunt! Thank you April! Anne loved finding the eggs with the "reats" inside of them. Daddy was a good helper :)
Ahh...those eyes.



I just love the colors in this picture. Her cute little apple hat.
Anne and her buddies. See if I can get all the names right....Sam, Matt, Nicco, Anne, Cooper, Emerson, Talmage, Jocelyn, London, and Tennyson. (left to right)
With the mamas. What a great group of gals :) Genn, Me, Allyson, April, Andrea, Brittany, Jenny, Lee (also left to right)
And the newest addition to the Russell clan...Benson! Our newest nephew was born in February and is just as cute as his two big sisters :)

We were very blessed to be able to have my Mom and Dad and also my sister Michelle and her son Harvey come visit for a week! Harvey is just a month older than Rachel and it was very cute to see them play together. What a stud :)
Anne liked saying "Har-ey" and loved his adorable head of hair.
Michelle and her little bunny.
Happy Easter!

A nice way to start the morning.

I had a lot of fun making the girls' Easter dresses this year.
Zac, we make some good looking kids :)

Anne was a little hungry before our Easter dinner so she started without us.
Yay for family :) Becky, Katie, Anne, Zac, Mom, Dad, Lucy, Kenric
Hoppity hoppity.
Our new addition....welcome to the family Shizzy! We picked up our new pup a week or so ago and we love her. She is a very calm, loving, happy dog and is just right for our family. Anne doesn't have much else on her mind besides playing with her.

Rachel likes her new buddy. Shizzy just rested her head on her lap even while Rachel was pulling on her ears. She just sat there and licked her.
Zac is very excited to finally have a dog.
Anne giving Shizzy kisses.

Anne went over to the couch and grabbed her beloved blanket and put in on Shizzy so she could sleep. So much love in that girl's heart.
The kids loved having Grandma time! We just wish she was a tad closer so we could have it more often.

Stories with "Ma" as Anne would say. We are so proud of our big girl who immediately loved her Ma and Pa and was sad to see them go. She said today that she wants to "Fly me Ma Pa too!"
Rachel just loved her Grandpa.

Spring?

She did it! She finally stayed the entire two hours of nursery without us being in there with her! Yay for our big girl!.....Except for the fact that for almost 1.5 of those two hours she was like this:

Poor thing, nursery is just at the wrong time of day for her. But we were glad that she stopped crying and told the awesome nursery leaders that she wanted to sleep and they fixed this up for her.

We are finally emerging from the 6 months of Utah winter! Though mother nature keeps teasing us by giving us beautiful 70 degree days and then two days later 4 inches of snow.

Here's our pretty daffodils :(

But we made the best of it and had a fun snow day! Zac pulled us around the yard on the sled and Anne and I had a snow ball fight. It was great. When I said it was time to go inside Anne laid down like this in the snow.
Very stylin'

I've been doing a bunch of baking recently. This is my favorite new treat: homemade granola! Thanks to friends in the ward, I think I have finally fine-tuned it to our tastes. It's my favorite snack during the day...I'm actually eating it right now! Other baking treats have been several apple pies because Anne asks for them and it's just the cutest thing to hear her say "Appa Pie?"
When I put on this skirt for her for Church she said "Ohhh pitty!" (pretty) Such a girl :)
Little Rachel has discovered her feet! She loves to pull them up to her mouth and suck on her toes.

Zac caught me reading to the girls one night. I have to give Rachel something to play with or she just wants to eat the books. These girls are so different, it's great!
Rachel loves the stroller and usually falls asleep on our runs. Then I just let her keep napping in the backyard while I do yardwork.
Anne loves the backyard. It's so fun to see how much more grown up and independent she is. Last summer she would never just play by herself or run around the yard. This year she chases the birds and runs around kicking the soccer ball. We're going to have such a fun summer!

Thanks to Daddy's fence I don't have to worry about her wandering into the driveway and street :)

Once again our shy little girl shows us how not shy she is with animals. Yes, that is an earthworm in her hand and she is laughing. She loves "buss" which is bugs. About two seconds after I took this she just about squoze it to death so we put the poor thing back in the ground.
Playtime with Daddy.

Our ever-growing baby has been telling us for weeks now that she wants to eat big-people food so we finally gave in. The biggest clue of this was one night we were eating cookies and Rachel snatched one out of Anne's hands and stuck it in her mouth. I quickly took it out but she was very happy with that cookie.
Though she ate the baby oatmeal pretty well, I think she was very dissapointed at it's taste. I've been giving her licks of real oranges and apples and she loves them so I think I just need to step up the flavor.
This is her telling us she's had enough of this mush.
A very cute onesy from Aunt Jennifer.
Daddy has a special touch with getting Rachel to sleep. I love it.

So these are some pictures of some projects I and we have been working on. Zac redid our kitchen floor (which you'll see below) and for some reason that got my creative juices going and I've wanted to redecorate everything and make our house look more like our home not an apartment.

Here's the kitchen. The plates are holly hobby plates on loan from big sis. I've always wanted a red-country-looking kitchen so I made these curtains.

Our front entry-way was kind of bare so I got this idea from my buddy (thanks Mandi!) I picked pictures that were very us...so they're all of us in our Packers gear :)
And on the few days that we've had good weather I've been working in the yard pulling out weeds and grass getting things ready to plant soon.
Yay for our pretty floor and no more carpet! Zac and his friend did such an amazing job (thanks Ben!) I love my talented hubby.
Oranges, yum!

Her first baby food experience.

Snow day.

This girl rolls all over the place. She is very determined and if she sees something that she wants she'll roll all the way across the room to get it. She'll be very happy when she figures out crawling.

Anne counting to ten. She always skips seven for some reason. Don't know why, she can say it, she just doesn't like it I guess.

Just yellin. She's not sad or mad, she just likes to yell.