March @ the Ricks Home

Yay! John finished building the playhouse bed!

Now I need to paint it and decorate it all cutesy and fun!! Ignore the mess, please.

John and I had a great time putting together all these fun snacks for a surprise Star Wars marathon day. The kids thought it was AWESOME!

The week leading up to St. Patrick's Day we had a sneaky little leprechaun come visit our house each night doing all sorts of shenanigans. He rearranged furniture, hung clean underwear in the living room, and drew silly things on pictures of our faces!

The neat thing was, the leprechaun dropped gold nuggets where ever he had been that night. Gavin and Jordan had enjoyed collecting those each morning.

As a school project Gavin and Jordan created leprechaun traps the day before St. Patrick's Day to try to catch that silly prankster!
They did a great job really thinking things through and coming up with clever ideas.
Gavin left a trail of gold and a pretty girl leprechaun to attract our mischievous visitor to his trap.

Jordan demonstrated to me how the trap snaps shut as the leprechaun climbs down the string into the box. 

Jordan was determined to catch this rascally leprechaun. Just look at that serious face!

I planned some fun things for school all week with the theme of St. Patrick's Day, leprechauns, and rainbows.
I used an idea from pinterest and added food coloring to glue. We then learned about mixing colors to get a different color.

We "tasted the rainbow" after we separated and counted the different colored Skittles. They guessed which color would be most and least in a personal package then we graphed what the actual count was of each color.

Gavin and Jordan played Rainbow Math and rolled dice, found the sum, and colored in the answer to fill in the rainbow.

We watched the video on YouTube from They Might Be Giants about Roy G. Biv to learn the order of the colors in the rainbow. It's a really cute song and video.

Then Gavin and Jordan made a Roy G. Biv of their own.

St. Patrick's Day morning we had a fun breakfast with cloud pancakes and a fruit rainbow.

The cats are getting big. They sleep on the stairs all the time. You have to watch out for them because they will NOT move out of the way for you. I think they are trying to kill me sometimes. Haha. Here they are laying exactly where the sun shines in from the window. I call this spot Pride Rock.

We planned a small family adventure and went hiking through the new trails close to our house. Some of the young men in our ward worked on clearing these trails and building the benches and stuff as their Eagle Project.

 We went hiking not long after a small tornado went through our area. Look at how huge the tree is that Gavin and Jordan are sitting on!

Smaller trees were all twisted and splintered.

After the hike we stopped at the pond to feed the one and only duck. The little kids named him Henry.

Hello, Henry.

Ducks like Henry, the ones with the red faces, give me the heebie jeebies. When I was in kindergarten our class went on a field trip to the fire department followed by a picnic lunch at the park. I remember having fun feeding the ducks when some red faced ducks came up behind me and bit my hand trying to get the bread. I screamed and ran but they chased me and kept trying to bite me! Very scary for a tiny 5 year old!! I'm still nervous around these guys!

John and I try to take advantage of  his rotating work schedule so if he is off work on a Wednesday morning we plan to go to the temple. It happened to work out that we were able to go 5 times this month! Three times on a Wednesday, once with the youth baptismal trip, and again with a group of friends to do sealing proxies. Usually on Wednesday mornings at the temple we are asked to be the witness couple. I think it's because we are the youngest ones there on a Wednesday morning, everyone else there is probably retired. Haha. No matter the reason, I really enjoy it. As we were walking to the car one day, a man pulled up in his car and told us he enjoyed watching us as the witness couple. He said he could tell there's a lot of love there! What an awesome compliment!! Spending the 4 hours during the ride there and back with John is so wonderful. We are able to just talk and enjoy each other with no distractions. I love being able to go to the temple so often with my eternal companion!

John has had many doctors appointments recently. Something that his doctor told him was that studies have shown eating meat has been connected to getting cancer. So he suggested to John to have one or two vegetarian meals a week. John also needs to lower his cholesterol. Then with more research I discovered some of the other health problems John has can be caused by eating processed food. So we've decided to start eating more real foods and very little processed food. It was interesting to learn that those who have had cancer need twice as many servings of fruit and vegetables a day. We are also going to eat better portion sizes and start exercising. It's time to face the fact that we aren't getting any younger! I want us both to be healthy and strong for our kids as they get older.

A couple of years ago I had great results using the Wii fit. Using that program I also discovered I really like yoga. I kept up with my work out routine until I started homeschooling. Having the kids home all day threw off my schedule. I was used to putting kids on the bus then exercising for an hour before starting my day. I've started using the Wii fit again and I started jogging. Well, sort of, I've been so frustrated because not too long ago I could jog the neighborhood without even thinking about it. Now it's killing me!! I have to walk some or fall over dead! The important thing is I'm exercising. Love this quote...

I found this great site called 100 Days of Real Food. She has lots of recipes and even an menu plan with grocery lists! We've really enjoyed trying new recipes and eating real food tastes SO much better than processed stuff. I've started making homemade wheat bread and granola cereal with no processed sugars!!

We've been having dinner outside almost every week. It's been so fun gathering around the fire together as a family.

This photo of Jordan makes me laugh. She's putting on a brave face right now.

She was freaking out just a second before because of the fire. 

If you have dinner outside, having s'mores for dessert is mandatory!

Then we played one of our new favorite games Disney's Hedbanz. It's a fun game where you ask "yes" or "no" questions to figure out which character or object from your favorite Disney movies is on your hedbandz.

John, Natalee, and I went to the midnight showing of The Hunger Games movie!! Earlier that day Jordan said, "Wasp!" I thought, "tracker jacker!" Aryn said, "mentor." I thought, "Haymitch!"
The movie was good but I feel like they left out so many important details that could easily be added. Of course I didn't expect every detail to be in the movie but there were a few important things they really should have included!

Aryn and Natalee were playing around on our new laptop and found a feature that created what they call "round heads." I about died laughing watching this video! These girls are hilarious. They always have us laughing.
Click here to watch the video on YouTube > Roundheads or click on the player below.

March was a really good month! So glad life is feeling like it's getting back to normal and full of fun!