More Mother's Day pics...

Mother's Day with the gang!

Happy Mother's Day! I hope everyone had a really great day! We had a really nice and relaxing day over here...very simple but nice. Maddie absolutely loves the holidays and Mother's Day has proven to be no exception. When I picked her up from the Kids Club at the gym yesterday morning, she gave each kid a great big hug goodbye and enthusiastically yelled "Happy Mother's Day" to every single one of them! The teachers and I couldn't stop laughing because most of the kids just looked at her with these blank looks in their eyes, not having a clue what she was so excited about, but there were a few girls about Maddie's age who shared her enthusiasm because as Maddie went to hug them goodbye, they all got in a circle and huddled together, excitedly whispering, "What are YOU doing for Mother's Day?" and each of them telling the others about their special plans. Maddie told them she was making me a cake. I couldn't have been more proud. Her enthusiasm is definitely contagious!

Well, I knew this one was coming...it always does. Maddie and I ran over to Costco and we were walking along, talking about nothing other than Mother's Day when all of a sudden, she folded her arms, got a pout on her face and said, "Hmph...." in the most indignant voice I've ever heard. It was hard not to smile but I pretended to be very concerned and asked her what was wrong. She said she'd been thinking and that it just didn't seem right that today was Mother's Day and that Father's Day is coming up soon and that kids just don't EVER get a special day for themselves. Why don't kids ever get presents or treats? IT'S JUST NOT FAIR!" at which point she broke into about a 30 second round of tears. You HAVE to love the drama, AND the reasoning, of a 4-year-old, don't you? (Keep in mind this is right after I just placed a swimming pool into our shopping cart!) They just don't understand when you try to tell them that pretty much every day is "Kids Day"..that one just goes right over their heads. It cracked me up so bad!

Anyways, Josh left Moab early this morning so that he could be home for Mother's Day and then Justin came over and we had a really nice dinner, just relaxing and spending time together. Maddie's new thing is telling jokes and she captivated us all for about 10 minutes with jokes that went something like this...."Why did the peanut butter and jelly sandwich cross the road?" "I don't know, Maddie. Why did it cross the road?" "To get to the garbage can!" after which she would break out with the biggest case of the giggles. It was great....she had us rolling because absolutely none of her jokes made one bit of sense! Oh, and one of the best parts was that after dinner, Maddie made me a beautiful pink princess cake, just like she'd been telling everyone, so that "you and me can be princesses together FOREVER, mommy"....now if that doesn't make a mom's heart melt, I don't know what does. It sure did mine... Anyways, here are some pictures from tonight's antics. Again, I hope you all had a wonderful Mother's Day. You were all in my thoughts even though we may not have spoken....

Our first customer!

A few weeks ago, Maddie and I were at Home Depot and ran across a cute hummingbird feeder and decided we wanted to get one of our own. We had gone to Michael's a few months ago and bought birdhouses that we're still in the process of painting (yet ANOTHER unfinished project we've got going on!) so we decided to get the feeder so we could get some immediate gratification of watching the birds visit our backyard. We have a big palo verde in our backyard that attracts alot of birds, especially the cactus wrens that Grandma loves so much (just kidding...they drive her crazy!) so we thought a hummingbird feeder would be perfect. We hung it from our palo verde (if you look real close, you can see it!) and the other day, we were standing by the back door and Maddie happened to look outside at just the right moment and see a hummingbird at the feeder. She got so excited and yelled as loud as she could, "Hey, Josh. Look outside! We've got our first customer!" It cracked us both up! She kept track a few more times, screaming out, "Looks like our third customer's here for dinner!" but then finally gave up and has moved onto bigger and better things, like the lizards in our backyard... stories for yet another day.

A few more pictures of the princess...

Princess Maddie

Well, I finally got around to washing the princess dresses Maddie got for Christmas. They were too scratchy for her to wear so they've been sitting next to my washing machine and every time I did a load of laundry, I always thought to myself, "one of these days I have to wash these". Well, that day finally came. It only took me 4 months to do it (but who's counting?)! So, once the dresses were ready, Maddie pulled out all her princess gear and started dressing up like all the different princesses (I won't mention the fact that we played hookey from church today because she woke up sick...you'd never tell by looking at these pictures!) and then asked me to take pictures....lots and lots of pictures. I'm only putting a few of the pictures on the blog so here we go...

Introducing, your royal princess... Madelyn Grace Allred.....