Slow Down, Life.

Well, this has been a busy, crazy month. Every month is busy and crazy nowadays, it seems! 

To start things off, Spring Break was the first week of April. 3 of Nils' siblings and their families came to town to spend time together; specifically to spend time with Par and Jenny (Nils' parents). Par was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer in January. Suffice it to say, this is terrible news. He has an amazing attitude about it, of course, and he, Jenny, and the rest of the family are doing everything possible to make the most of the time we have left with him. So, we partied hard for about a week together.

As luck would have it, Nils came down with the flu on Easter and was sick in bed for the entire week that his family was visiting. It was pretty lousy for him, but the rest of us had fun. He started feeling better the day before everyone left. :(

First there was Easter and an egg hunt:

Par n' Pip

Parker the crack up

Pip the dog

Aani and Rubi

Tiago

Ava and Saada

Thrilled Anders

A tour of Sweet's Candy Factory, and Parker cracking us up once again.

Eating popcorn with chopsticks....because you can!

 Cousins twinning (Xan and Anders)

Crazy pictures taken under the trampoline. The pit is so fun?

York decided to do our backsplash one morning. Randy showed up to help. We could use these guys around more often! :) We LOVE it.

Bottom: Nils, Grove, York. Top: Saren, Par, Jenny. Missing Shiloh and Harmony, but they both came to visit in March. It's been so fun seeing everyone. 

With spouses. Randy, Andrea, me and Luly.

We have a family reunion in June and will see everyone once again, so that will be spectacular.

I took Aani and Ava to the nickel arcade, because the older kids are too cool and busy to spend time with me now.

In other news: 

We got our trampoline back-filled and put up. What a friggin' ordeal! Aaaand, now we have to finish the yard, which makes me feel sad inside. Putting in the rock wall and trampoline did a fine job of tearing up much of our yard. Where are the magic forest animals that do this for you? 

In preparation for house guests for 8 days (while Nils' family was here), we realized that we needed to finish the bathroom in the basement, otherwise 13 people would be sharing one bathroom upstairs. Oh man, it was bananas getting that thing done. We bought 3 vanities before we found one that worked, took 8 million trips to Home Depot, spent 1.5 times what we thought we would, and finished it about 10 minutes before York and Luly & fam arrived, no exaggeration. Start to finish, it took less than 3 weeks, but the vast majority of the work was done in the 5 days before they came. In hindsight, we should have just had the handy brothers and brother-in-law help us while they were here. Haha.

 It's really nice having a bathroom downstairs! All the labor and stress was worth it after all.

Anders got his learner's permit. My mom has been letting him drive her car since he was like 13, so it's fine...kinda. Still scary. He has much to learn.

After way too long, the boy finally got his braces off. Good heavens, that took forever. Over 2.5 years for phase 2. He had them on for like a year and a half in phase 1. I'm so over the monthly visits to the orthodontist. I finally just told them to take them off, because I'm pretty sure the orthodontist would have left them on for eternity. Every month for the last 9 months he would say, "Well, your teeth are straight as heck, but your bite is a little off on one side." Then they would tell Anders to wear this crazy, convoluted rubber band arrangement in his mouth that made it impossible to eat or talk, so he never wore them. Ugh. It's over. It's fine.

Celebratory lunch at Costa Vida. Gluten free, baby! (Minus the flour tortillas)

We celebrated 18 years of wedded bliss this last weekend with a trip to Park City. Nils found this cute little studio room at Deer Valley. My mom was kind enough to watch the kiddos. We had a grand time.

In addition to dinner and some shopping, we found a blood pressure machine at the Walmart in Park City. If this is what we do on or anniversary get aways now, I can't wait to see what we do in 20 years!

We made a nice little breakfast. Gluten free, of course. 

Took a little hike so Nils could fly his drone. It was snowy and muddy, so we didn't get too far.

We decided to buy Nils a new car. Does everyone get this excited about used Honda Accords? You get to see the car and Nils' bare midriff! The old Accord is the perfect teenager car, so keep it we shall.

LRN2DIY swag in the mail today! Pretty fun to have the logo on there and everything. The YouTube channel groweth.

Hey look, Nils took a picture of me teaching Sharing Time. I feel like Oprah with that microphone, but we gotsta have it in there!

One more month until school is out, and then we have another busy summer to look forward to. This phase of life is not calm, no sir.