Easter

Our Easter weekend started out with Rachel on antibiotics for strep throat with a scarletina rash (ie. scarlet fever). Luckily, while Rachel was not up to 100% on Saturday, she was 10 times better than she was feeling on Friday. We went to Grandma and Grandpa Knight's house to decorate Easter Eggs. Rachel and Grandma were both soooo excited about it.

Too bad we didn't get any pictures of our awesome eggs. We got distracted by more Easter excitement, I guess.

After dying eggs Rachel and Annie got to go on a special Easter scavenger hunt that Grandma and Grandpa had put together for the girls. Rachel had a fun time figuring out the clues, and Annie had a fun time watching Rachel run around.

This is pure joy at finding jelly beans:

After all the excitement Rachel and Grandma were a little worn out:

Rachel woke us up Sunday morning with an ear-splitting, "MOM!!! Mom, Mom!!" Jacob thought there must be blood or throw up involved until Rachel said, "The Easter bunny comed!" Oh, was she excited.

Annie was a real good sport with the bunny glasses. I love both of their expressions in this one:

We had a real tough time getting Rachel to hunt for the eggs the Easter Bunny had left. She would notice one, pick it up, then when I would suggest that she go get her basket and put it in there she'd just put it back where she found it and say, "No, I'll just leave it there." I think part of it was that after a sampling of candy from her basket we told her she had to eat breakfast before having more candy so she wouldn't throw up. And she didn't want to pick up the eggs filled with candy if she couldn't just open the eggs and eat the candy. She did finally go on an egg hunt and had a good time finding all the eggs.

We topped the day off with the important stuff: going to church and remembering the true reason we celebrate Easter, the resurrection of our Savior. After church we enjoyed a delicious Easter dinner at my parents' house. I always wonder about ham on Easter...do you think it's a celebration of the end of the law of Moses--the law is fulfilled, Christ is resurrected, let's eat PIG! I don't mind. It is rather tasty. :)

writing skills

Yesterday Rachel was playing around with her cheap-o magnadoodle she got for Easter and pretending to write different things. Then she decided to write "Annie." I was very impressed. I had her recreate it on a piece of paper so I could show Jake when he got home:

She wrote a lower-case A: a circle and a line coming off of it. Yeah, not exactly to the right bottom where it normally goes, but if you rotated it it would be right. She then sounded out Annie's name some more: aaaaaaa nnnnn... and proceeded to write an n. Oops. Her marker didn't stop when she meant to, so she wrote an m. Close enough. She then wrote a capital E. The 3 lines on the E were pretty close and the vertical line went far below the bottom line, so she said, "Oh, it looks like a flag!" And proceeded to add more lines to make it a bigger flag. Anyway, so amE=Annie. Pretty darn good for a 3-year-old. She then wanted to write her own name, but when I suggested she do it on her own since she was so good at it, she refused and told me to write it and she'd trace it.
I was pretty impressed with her writing. We occasionally have "school" where she practices reading a few words, or she does a worksheet from a little preschool workbook I found at Walmart a while back. She used to love it and ask to do school often (which was why we started in the first place). Lately, though she's not a fan of anything to do with school, except for the worksheets that require her to use scizzors, so we haven't done it much lately. But hey, who needs school when you can figure it out on your own? :)

Springtime fun

We just had our first harvest from our garden yesterday: 4 yummy strawberries. The whole garden prep and everything sometimes gets to me, but once we start getting food out of it, it's all worth it.
We're trying to enjoy springtime here while it lasts (it's been in the 90s lately, so summer is almost here--but 90s still count as springtime around here). Here's Annie flying in Grandpa Knight's flying machine (t-shirt):

She was having the time of her life, squealing like crazy. I looked at her yesterday sitting up all by herself and realized, this kid is almost 6 months old. That's half a year! She's no longer a floppy little baby, she's a sitting up, rolling over, scooting around little girl with teeth. Crazy how time flies!

Yesterday Rachel and I pulled out the sidewalk chalk and decorated our wall. Rachel made lots of really loooong twirly slides.

Here's the other half of our masterpiece:

Jake couldn't help himself, so had to join in the fun and add an airplane and some other drawings.

We had a hard time pulling Rachel inside for bed. We promised she'd be able to go out in the morning and do more. Unfortunately she has zero energy today with a sore throat and probably strep. :( We'll be going to the doctor real soon so hopefully soon she'll be back up to running around like her usual self.

One last picture of springtime:

Nothing says spring better than Robin Eggs. Hope our little girl is feeling better for Easter festivities this weekend.... Happy Easter, everyone!

Edit: We just got back from the doctor and Rachel has strep with a scarletina rash. Otherwise known as the scarlet fever. But they don't say that in the doctor's office so you don't freak out and think your kid is going to die. She got antibiotics, so she should be feeling better and not contagious within 24 hours. Yay for modern medicine!

Aunt Cari

Jacob's sister, Cari, graduated from BYU-Idaho a couple of weeks ago. (Congratulations!) We were supposed to be the parent stand-ins since her parents are in Alaska serving a mission, but instead of going up there, we flew her down here to soak up the sun after a long Rexburg winter. Rachel was SOOOOOOO excited to have Aunt Cari coming to visit. She asked every morning "Is Cari coming this day?" So we started a countdown on her calender and she would mark of each day every night and count how many more days until Cari came. Rachel used this dollar store wrapping paper and made a big sign for Cari. It says "HAPPY GRADUATION AUNT CARI!" though most of it is in pink, so you can't see it, except the parts that we also did glitter over.

When Cari got here we went straight to the Pima County Fair. Rachel had a ton of fun. We started on her trusty favorite from last year, the carousel:

Rachel only wanted to ride with Cari. :)

Though we managed to convince her that Dad could join in, too, as long as Cari was still on board.

For most of this roller coaster Rachel had a rather concerned look on her face. But I think she had a good time.
Then we headed over to the petting zoo. Here's the only proof I have that I was actually there:

Good picture, huh?

Rachel enjoyed herself with the animals. Here she's trying to feed the wallaby a little piece of hay.

Then it was home for me and Annie to get Annie to bed for the night, while the rest of the crew stuck around for a few more rides. Rachel's favorite this year was by far the spinning dragons, though she called them dinosaurs.

Unfortunately the camera didn't come out the rest of the weekend. Saturday Cari hung out with Rachel and Annie while Jacob went on a cycling activity with the teacher's quorum (he was recently called as an advisor), and after Jake got back I headed over to the institute to help decorate for prom. I made it home for dinner, then Cari headed off on a hot date her cousin set her up on with a former roomate of his, and I headed back to prom. Sunday I abandoned them again to go to our last ward conference of the year. I felt bad for abandoning everyone most of the weekend, but honestly, we all know Cari came to play with the kids, and the adults were just a side bonus, and Rachel probably didn't even notice that I was gone with all the showing off and playing she was doing.
Rachel was very sad to see Cari go, but we have high hopes that that date might go somewhere and if we're lucky we might have Cari living down here in Tucson (yes, I know we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves, but hey, we can hope, right?). Last night it was Rachel's turn to pray and after she said amen she realized she'd forgotten something. She said, "Oh, wait! And we're thankful that Cari can come back real soon." (Rachel mixes up the "please bless..." and the "we're thankful for..." often.)
Cari, we're glad you could come visit. Hope you come back to stay real soon. ;) Congrats, college grad!

Prom in Paris

This year our stake was in charge of the first ever LDS prom for Tucson, covering 8 stakes, and being in the stake young women I got to be involved in seeing all the planning and hard work that went into it all. It was on Saturday and turned out AWESOME. The theme was Prom in Paris and the people in charge of decorating it went way over the top. Here's the hallway on the way in, made to be like unto the Louvre:

And inside the cultural hall:

They had a nursery bring a bunch of live plants and trees, had park benches and fountains scattered around, and really transformed the cultural hall into Paris. There was even a 19 foot Eiffel tower:

For the food they made store fronts that looked really cool. And the food was to DIE for. YUM!

Our job was to take tickets and address any modesty issues (which is the absolute WORST part of this calling). We had little shrugs and jackets all ready in case of anyone who was not up to snuff, but luckily we didn't have to use any of them. :) (We did have to go ask a few girls in the dance "Did you come in with a jacket on? Could you put it back on?") The youth looked great and had a great time. We had a little over 375 kids show up, so it was really crowded, but most everyone had a pretty good time and we'll call that a success. Woohoo!

Teeeeeeth

I keep waiting for Jacob to get guilted in to posting again, but apparently waiting isn't enough. I've got to do some active guilt-ing to get him to do it. We've got a little bit of catch up to do (not too much, thankfully).

Anyway, last weekend Annie was not her usual happy self and Monday morning I woke up and found the culprit: her first tooth, almost breaking through. And on Tuesday the tooth was through the gums and she was back to her regular happy self.

Fuzzy tooth picture:

She's getting another one coming in right next to it, but I'm not sure that it's broken through yet, though it's real close. Luckily she's not really fussy with this one.

And one last quick picture of Annie's morning hair:

No complaints here

For all of Jake's attempts to exempt himself from future blog posting responsibilities, he failed miserably. I have to say, he did an excellent job, and maybe he should become the official Campbell family blogger. :) Especially since I am such a slacker in that department lately.

Most of the time pictures push me to post something on the blog. Since we hardly ever print out hard copies of our pictures, the blog book we do every year is the only printout of pictures we have, so if I want a hard copy of a picture, I have to post it on the blog, which will in time be printed in our blog book. Jake did a great job at getting caught up on the pictures. There is one last picture, then I'll feel completely caught up. Rachel, ready and excited for her dance class:
A couple of weeks ago Rachel started a dance class through the parks and rec department. She loves it. I took her to a dance recital a few weeks ago that her friend was in (we were planning on doing that dance class, but I forgot to sign up until it was too late) and since then she's been talking about going to her own dance class, so I signed her up. It's a ballet and creative dance class, and she has a ball. Her favorite thing so far is the rainbow scarf dance they do at the end of every class, which involves her holding a rainbow scarf and running around waving it.