The girls started ballet this week. They had really been looking forward to it. They are required to have their hair completely pulled back. This is difficult for Tansy considering her lack of hair. I did manage a ponytail, and a barrette held the rest back, but it still looked really funny. Sydney is almost too old for the class that she is in, but I thought that Tansy would do better her first time around with her big sister there. They had a lot of fun and can't wait to go back this week. I forgot the camera so I'll get pictures another time.

Sydney finished up her soccer season this week as well. She is quite the little player. I have had parents from the opposing teams come up to me after the games and comment on her ability. A far cry from the joke of a soccer player her mother was. She is going to play coach pitch baseball this summer.

Ben had a down day on Friday after a big exercise, so we decided to head to the temple. It is three hours away, and we don't have the money in the budget to spring for a hotel, so we go out and back in one day. Our friends, the Fosters, go too, and we take turns going in while the others watch the kids. We grab some dinner afterwards then head home. It is exhausting, but definitely worth it. We hope that if we go regularly, the Lord will bless us by sending us to a base closer to a temple. We'll keep our fingers crossed.

On Saturday, Sydney got to participate in Operation Spirit with Ben. It's an activity for elementary school aged children to experience what a deployment is like. She got a phone call at 8:00 a.m. instructing her to report to the Deployment Center between 8:45 and 9:00. She got to have a briefing, get a pretend shot, check out a lot of equipment and tour some vehicles. She had a really fun time and really loved her face paint.. On Saturday night, I was still pretty sleepy from Friday's adventure and was trying to get kids in jammies as quickly as possible. This is what happened:Poor Tyler. The girls thought it was hilarious. I must admit, I found it pretty funny too. Once everyone was ready for bed, we settled in to watch Megamind. Fun family night.

This morning the kids decided to be superheroes. Sydney was Animal Girl, Tansy was Flower Girl, Zack was Stripe Man, and Tyler was Green Man. Creative names, huh?

Sometimes Zack and Tansy just can't take any more of the busyness of their lives. That's when Tyler gets to finally be in charge. The kids had been watching Netflix on the Wii. Tyler knows that he is not supposed to touch the remote. Do you love the look of glee as he finally gets a chance to watch his choice? Tyler has also discovered that when he is in trouble, he can smile very sweetly at me and it totally works. I hate that it works. On Friday, I had had enough. When he ripped a book I had told him to put down, I was upset. He tried the smile again, but I held firm and told him he was going to time out. Being the fourth child, he knows what this means. Here he is in his very first time out. He looks a little less upset than he did most of the time because he was interested in the camera. He looked appropriately remorseful and did sit there the entire time.

Yesterday was beautiful weather in the 80s. Once we finished what we had planned, we were going to pull out the swimming pool. However, the air pump is missing in action. We looked everywhere except, of course, in the one place it is. While we were looking, we discovered a bag of water balloons we had purchased last year. After thirty minutes of water balloon prep, it was all over in about two and a half minutes. Zack started chucking them two at a time once he got the hang of it.

Fortunately, our neighbor across the street had a sprinkler on so the kids got good and wet after all.

Ben is working 12-hour shifts, seven days a week right now. Not terribly fun, and even more frustrating with the government shutdown talk. Congress has managed a bill that lasts until April 15, so we SHOULD get paid. I'm not holding out a lot of hope that a budget that was supposed to be finished six months ago is going to magically be finished in a week. We will see.

On Monday I firmly planted both feet in my 30s when I celebrated my 32nd birthday. My mother sent me a card that was supposed to sing, but the batteries were dead when it arrived. Ben decided to pull it apart and rewire it to a D battery to play the song. The kids thought that was awesome. Sydney's first grade music program was Thursday night. It was a lot of fun since they were singing Disney songs. Be Our Guest was hilarious because, no matter how many times they got back on track, they would quickly get ahead of the music by a full line.

General Conference kind of blindsided me this year. March just went by to fast. I don't have stuff ready for the kids, but I'm going to print some things off this morning. Thank goodness for the internet.

A couple of my friends and their kids came over last night while our husbands were at the priesthood session. We made doughnuts last night right before the guys came home so they were nice a warm when they got here. Making doughnuts during priesthood session has been a joke between me and Ben for most of our marriage (which is approaching nine years, so it's been a while). In his talk at the priesthood session in April 1999, Elder Russell M. Nelson gave a talk which started like this:

It is a joy to be with you tonight, brethren, and wonderful to see so many young men with their fathers. We are assembled because of our desire to hearken to the leaders of the Church. But this congregation is unique. I don’t see any mothers. Not one of us could be here without a mother, yet we are all here—without our mothers. Tonight I am attending with a son, sons-in-law, and grandsons. Where are their mothers? Gathered in the kitchen of our home! What are they doing? Making large batches of homemade doughnuts! And when we return home, we will feast on those doughnuts. While we enjoy them, these mothers, sisters, and daughters will listen intently as each of us speaks of things he learned here tonight. It’s a nice family tradition, symbolic of the fact that everything we learn and do as priesthood bearers should bless our families.

The part about the doughnuts stuck with him and we would always joke about how sad it was that no one was making Ben doughnuts. I decided to give it a try this year. I found a yummy recipe on allrecipes.com. I'll have to make more next time. They were so good. Yet another tradition to add to our conference weekends.