Sarah and Hazel come!!

My sister Sarah and her baby Hazel came to visit us for a whole week!! Hazel was born 2 days after we left Utah last summer and we've been longing to meet her. Sarah and I have never had a one-on-one visit before since usually when we get together its in Utah and we're trying to see lots of family. We're so grateful Sarah and German were able to give us their time! All the kids came with me to pick her up so we had quite the carful. A few days later the kids made a duplos model of our airport experience, complete with Sarah walking down the gang plank with Hazel. 

Half of the time, Hazel and Max were moderately interested in watching each other and half of the time completely ignored each other. The big kids loved playing with Hazel.  Freddy even turned down a playdate with his best friend, Addie, to stay and play with Hazel. 

We went on a walk to Noxubee Wildlife Refuge and walked along the boardwalks. We even saw alligators! 

We went for a walk behind our fence amongst South Farm's horse and cow pastures.

She hung out with me everywhere and I LOOOOOVED having the company. We took Gwen to ballet and cheered on Charlie at one of his baseball games. 

 We walked around campus and surprised Chris' class, showing up with our babies and strollers and pretended to be the sub.  I loved having her come to church, talking with her while we did dishes, folded laundry, picked up the kids from school, made dinner, exchanged back rubs, and watched movies.  We ate out at Anthony's in West Point for the first time and ate real good southern food: including fried alligator meatballs, creamy cheese grits, fried chicken and catfish.  Our last day we ate at Little Deweys for some southern BBQ with fried okra, fried pickles and fried green tomatoes.  I love Sarah so much and we looked forward to this trip for so long. We'd call each other every few days just to give an update on the countdown of how many more days until we saw each other.  Sisters are awesome - especially my sisters.

Sunday and spring fun

One Sunday when the kids were begging and (probably) crying, "What can I do?!" I suggested they use legos to illustrate scenes out of the scriptures then we could take a picture (which we did) and submit them to the Friend magazine (which we didn't).  Charlie illustrated the story in the Old Testament where the people were commanded to kneel down and worship a gold idol and Daniel and his friends chose to keep the commandments and NOT worship it. Charlie did a similar time frame Old Testament story of the Shadrach Meshach and Abednego getting thrown into the fire yet they didn't get burned. 

Preschool is going strong. Max can be helpful and sleep through most of it some days, and then he can be a handful and just fuss the whole time. I'm really loving the transportation theme but I'm also getting to the end of my rope and I'm finding that I'm putting less time into preparing fun new centers and just repeating activities and getting by with as little as possible.  Making Puffy Paint Rockets was really really fun.

Freddy will still take a nap most days and he does this thing were he likes to have his face covered.  He'll even bury himself completely with a blanket or covers and I might have a hard time finding him. In fact one Saturday, Charlie fell asleep up in the library and Freddy went looking for him. Upon seeing Charlie asleep, Freddy followed suit and found a cozy spot behind the chair, under a blanket, against the wall.  A hour or so later, after Charlie woke up and came downstairs we realized no one had seen Freddy for a while. We all searched frantically around the house and outside, calling his name over and over again. Finally Alec found him.

We're getting ready to landscape the front! Its so hard to figure out what we want to put there, trying to balance out colors, textures, heights, and plant-specific needs of sunlight and drainage and times of bloom with a budget. I like the plan we've come up with and it and I'm excited to put it in. (since I'm writing this months later, I can say that the dream was better than reality... we had to compromise on some plants because of price and availability and some plants look different after they grew a little and to be honest, I'm not very happy with what we did....AND the sunlight in the spring is different from our summer sun and a lot of our plants are roasting! :( I guess that's why there are professionals who do this! Its not easy.)

Easter

One time, a few years ago, we tied each kids' basket to a long long string and wound the string all over the house and hid the basket so the kids had to follow the string to their basket. The kids LOVED this and ask us to do it every year. But its a mess and wastes LOTS of string so we've never repeated it. This year, Alec (I think) suggested we hide them but do a riddle hunt to find them. Chris loves riddles and he stayed up late the night before coming up with lots of riddles for each child and hiding the clues all over the house. The kids really enjoyed this. About 1/2 through finding her basket Gwen felt like throwing up and needed to take it easy all day. Poor girl, she couldn't even eat her candy...but she slept by it!

We dyed eggs two days before so we could have plenty of time for an Easter Egg Roll.

We did the roll in between General Conference sessions. Its a fun tradition started by my mom's family that she did growing up. I tried not to get distracted and depressed by the boys throwing fits about who got to help max or go first, or sit in certain chairs. Every family 'fun' time seems polka-dotted with fighting but we just try to not let it stop us from still trying to do fun things as a family.

I can't remember who won! It was either Max or Freddy. I do remember Charlie freaking out and throwing a tantrum that he didn't win.  I think Max won.

Freddy wanted this blanket, TAPED on to him just so, so he could be a bird, I think. It was pretty funny.

We had the Gines over for an Easter Egg hunt.  There was such a pretty sunset that night.

Max is just the cutest. I love putting him in his little baby clothes. Since I gave away most of our baby boy clothes a few months before I was pregnant with him, people have been generous and given us their old baby boy clothes. I did save a few of my very favorite outfits that all my boys have worn.  I need to do a baby picture comparison spread again.

Spring Break

Chris and Alec joined the YM on their backpacking trip during the first part of Spring Break. There's currently mainly 1 active young man, and so Alec (as an 11 year old scout) often gets invited to join in on their activities when its scout-related. Alec was super excited about this. I'll let Chris put in some details about the trip. 

The rest of the kids and I tried to have fun at home. We enjoyed the beautiful weather and went for walks and went to the skating rink. Gwen LOVED skating at the rink. She got roller blades for Christmas and almost CONSTANTLY wears them around the kitchen/family room so she was particularly excited to use her newly honed rollerblading skills.  After just 1 or 2 laps at the rink she comes up to me and says with breathless feeling, "The wind, mom, the wind! I can go so fast it makes my hair fly back!!" She is truly a daughter after my own heart. I love the wind.

We wanted to go down to the coast for a night and go to the beach but we've had SUCH a rainy/stormy spell. It rained constantly and had severe thunderstorm threats down by the coast. So we just hung out around home.  The kids created an obstacle course with yarn and pretended they were lazer beams. Then they "kidnapped" Max and imprisoned him back on Charlie's bed and Chris and I had to try and navigate our way back to him and rescue him! Then we switched and Chris and I held Max hostage (adding on a few surprise components like the, Pokey-Bomb Alley, Slippery Paper Pass, and the Pillow Windmill of Death. It was really fun.

Pinewood Derby

With having my hands full at home night and day, I told my presidency that I'm ok to not do a Pinewood Derby this year. But everyone said they'd help out and I know a lot of people in the branch really enjoy it so we ended up doing it. Besides, our cubscout program fell apart last summer when our cubscout leader moved away and this activity at least gives our boys a taste of what cubscouts is like.  With our fiasco of an attempt at doing really fast cars last year, Chris and the boys were really determined to do better this year. We let the kids sketch out whatever design they wanted and then Chris cut it out with our scroll saw. Then the kids sanded and painted it and Chris and I glued on weights to try and reach 5 oz. Charlie's is the black car, first in the bottom row, then Gwen's teal with red and glitter stripes is next in line, followed by Freddy's multicolored one, then skip a car and the skinny gray fade to black car is Alec's.

I pulled out some decorations I made for the pinewood derby two years ago and Chris, once again, figured out the brackets and ran the races. We let the kids take turns pulling the lever down to let the cars drop on one of their car's official runs.  A lot of the races were really close and our 1 young man, Holden, used his mom's phone with the slow-motion camera to double check our eyesight.

Turns out the overall winner of this race, despite getting crashed around a bit at home before hand, was.... Frederick!! He was super excited and super fun to watch.  Charlie, Alec and Gwen all finished in the top 6 or so. Not a bad showing for the Archibalds! Go Chris!

Max's Blessing

We blessed Maxwell Henry Today. He is such a sweet little baby. We had just seen family at Christmas time and knew we wouldn't have any family able to come for his blessing. But our branch family was there and I enjoyed sharing this special family event with them. One of our friends, a young, newly married guy Troy Hurran, told me he felt honored to be able to participate in giving the blessing.  I tried to prep Max to be nice and calm by feeding him right up until the moment. But that may have backfired because he was sleepy and wanted to nurse to sleep and was not happy to be interrupted. He fussed almost the whole time, and Chris had to juggle, bouncing him and trying to get him to suck on Chris' thumb during the blessing. The older kids were excited for this special time and behaved well so I could listen. I took some notes on my phone and these are the things that stood out to me. That He would be blessed to feel love of our family and the love that Heavenly Father has for him and be able to share that love, that Max would be a positive influence on others and a strong healthy body to carry out his mission. That he would have an eternal perspective while setting goals like serving a mission and getting marred in the temple, that he would be sensitive to the spirit and learn how the Spirit speaks and comforts him.  That he would learn how to rely on the Atonement of Jesus Christ and be blessed with charity and faith. 

I almost didn't take any pictures as a family since I didn't remember until after church when the kids were running around crazy and my Post-Primary Brain was a little fuzzy but our friend Shellie Altman offered to snap a few real quick. I'm glad we took her up on her offer. 

As I'm writing this post months and months later, I can't recall much else to blog about. Except that, unhappy with the way my clothes were fitting with my post-partum body, I quickly folded some fabric and sewed two seams to make the black pencil skirt that morning before church. Also that we had the Gines and Hurrans over for cake later that night. I think Chris might have voiced his comfort with not having any kind of party or celebration and I think I decided to just make a cake and invite those two families/friends over because I wanted to celebrate.  Its special events like this that make living away from family difficult.  I think we may have made carrot cake, like we did for Freddy after his blessing.  I wish I remembered more about this day!! Why did I wait so long to record it. :(  oh! I also remember that Lexi Hurran knitted a cute white lap blanket for him.