March Madness 2023

We love March Madness every year and had a great time watching this year. 

The kids (see Lucy below) got to watch some basketball at Grandma and Grandpa Peaden's house. We also got invited to join some friends (the Johnson's) to watch March Madness with them while they watched their favorite team (Kansas, who lost to a #9 seed).



I loved watching at our house and we even had 4 split screen option to watch multiple games at once. 


Shantel had one 3 straight of our bracket battles until I won last year. This year, we had for the first time that Shantel and I did not win. Lydia, who correctly picked San Diego State (#5 seed) to the final four used all those points and won it all (She tried to pick them to win it all and I encouraged her to pick a #1 seed to make it to the championship because she is always so sad when her team goes out early and I was worried San Diego St. could lose their first game. Instead Purdue the team she picked instead lost its first game vs. a #16 seed and San Diego State made it all the way to the championship.). It was so fun watching especially because she was cheering for San Diego St. and they had a buzzer beater winner to get to the final four that we got to watch with Lydia. 

She won both our bracket contests and ended up with both treats!

General Conference April 2023

We had a really great general conference weekend. We loved all the messages. We filled our easter baskets with general conference activities and Amy was here on Saturday which was really great. 

Baskets, plus some wrestling to get out some energy. 

Lydia taking notes during one of the talks and snuggling with Lucy. 

Then playing with Amy's hair. 

On Sunday we went to see the Saratoga Springs temple. It is all completed and the open house will be starting soon!

Then we did our picnic lunch at the park. 

April Fools Day

April Fool's Day has turned into a full holiday  and my kids were very excited to celebrate this year. However, it fell on General Conference this year and with all of the other traditions we do with that (which is also a full holiday in it's own right), I decided to do it a little differently and scale back a little. Austin was worried, but I think they all had a great time. 

For breakfast we had our traditional cinnamon rolls, but I printed out sheets of jokes for everyone to share and laugh over while we ate. (Amy stayed with us and it made it that much better!) 

Lunch we had "Corn Dogs and Spaghetti and Meatballs" which was simply hot dogs with canned corn on the side, with leftover spaghetti and grapes (after I realized that the grapes looked kind of like meatballs). I think that Austin was really tricked by the grape meatballs at first and I will take that as a win.

For dinner we decided to do a "Mystery Cafe" where we assigned silly names to the food we had for dinner: appetizer, entree, and dessert - then had the kids pick what they wanted from that menu. Some kids came out with otter pops and whipped cream for their appetizer, and were eating corn for dessert but it was a huge hit. A fun mix up from our traditional "April Fools Day" cusine. 

But the REAL April Fool's Trick was that this is what our house looked like on April 1 - and then THIS is what it looked like two days later  - a massive three day blizzard that was supposed to drop 18" of snow over the course of the storm. It still totally feels like winter, but we keep hoping that Spring is around the corner!