evan and the easter bunny

this past friday, matt and i took evan to the anderson mall to meet the easter bunny! we were the first people there, on the first day- that's not exactly like us! but with that meant we had to wait a while while they set up/trained because let me tell you, these people did not have it all together. but it didn't bother us, it actually gave us some time to meet the bunny and let evan warm up to him. evan actually really liked the bunny! he wanted to touch him and look at him and the bunny would just touch his hand and he liked it! i was so proud of him and so relieved that he didn't freak, because a giant bunny could have been pretty scary to a 7 month old! anyway, he did great and while he didn't smile for us, he did let us capture his first easter with a pretty cute picture.

(they probably could have tried a little harder to hide the mall in the background...)

spring is in the air!

spring is here, i mean duh, the calendar already told us that, but it really is here. and i'm not sure if it's just me, but i have never noticed spring starting so beautifully or so obviously before! it's wonderful. maybe it's because i lived in columbia for the past 5 years and the beauty there is well, pretty much exclusive to campus. but here in seneca, in the foothills of the mountains with 3 lakes in our county, everything is beautiful!

matt came home from school one day this week and said "let's go do something outside!" so i suggested visiting the sc botanical garden, located on clemson's campus just 2 or 3 miles down the road. we've both been wanting to go there and it was worth the wait- so many things were in bloom and beautiful and fragrant, it was a wonderful time!

here are some of our sights for your viewing pleasure.

happy spring! go enjoy all the beautiful colors of this wonderful earth we are all so blessed with!

shelf clearing

typically, i do not appreciate people shelf clearing. of course that exception is when i do it, which is super rare. i generally don't do it for 2 reasons:

1. i don't have the coupons to justify it and
2. i don't have the money for it!

well, when my mom is in town, neither of those things really matter, cause she's awesome and loves to spend money on us, especially if it's on evan, which this was.

so we went to food lion to buy all the supplies for the irish dinner and ended up with bags and bags of baby food. but it was all closeout and 50% off!! and i did have a bunch of coupons. so i started loading up the buggy according to my coupons and then my mom said "get it all" and we did. here is the proof:

so here are the numbers:

the total number of jars of food: 168 (the boxes each contain 2 jars) + 2 boxes of cereal + 2 4packs of juice

total cost if we had paif full price: $124.57

total of closeout price: $61.82

total amount of coupons i had: $17.65

final price: $44.17 (a savings of 65%)

so while this not be incredibly impressive, it's still pretty good, because that's A LOT of baby food! so a huge thanks to my mom for indulging me in my love of good deals and letting me have so much fun clearing those shelves!

authentic irish dinner

since last year i wan in ireland for st. patrick's day and got to indulge in all of the irish food for a week, and since my parents and sister were coming in town for the weekend, i thought it would be fun to have a dinner "party" for my family featuring an all authentic irish menu.

and it was a lot of fun! i didn't do a lot of decorating, but i did try to set a nice table to mark the occasion as semi-special. so here was my table:

there were a few fun details on the table including the shamrock coasters and the seating cards. i made them and put everyones relationship to me on them, in irish! the answers were on the back if they couldn't figure it out, but i think everyone did.

my centerpieces had to be super simple because we had LOTS of food. so i used green candles i already had on black candle holders i already had and got FREE cards from shutterfly of pictures i took in ireland to put around them. all of the pictures were different. here is one side of one of them.

of course, evan had to have a special place to sit too! so i decorated his high-chair, including a name tag that said "baby" on it in irish.

it was a lot of fun preparing all of the food. my mom and katie helped a lot, which made it even more fun! i had been researching recipes, trying to find the perfect ones, for a while. they all ended up being amazing!! for the first course we had irish soup. this was served to me twice just in my first day in ireland. it is really like hot baby food, because you puree everything. i was a little worried because it calls for carrots, potatoes, onion, turnips, parsnips, and a leek, a lot of foods none of us ever eat, but everyone, even katie, loved it!

that's the only picture i got of the food. from there, we just ate and forgot all about the camera. we had guinness soda bread, which is something i loved in ireland, pork tenderloin, a cabbage/potato/bacon/onion side, and an apple crumble for dessert. nothing disappointed- it was all SO good! we were all so stuffed afterward, i don't think any of us had anything else for the rest of the night. but it was so much fun to enjoy this dinner with my favorite people in the world- my family! it was the best st. patrick's day possible! i hope that this turns into a new family tradition.

the leprechauns made him do it!

so i was in ireland last year for st. patrick's day- it was an amazing trip and i loved the country. while i was there, i bought evan his shirt for his first st, patrick's day. the shirt says "the leprechauns made me do it" and it looks like this:

well little did i know that the leprechauns would actually make him do crazy things the whole day. it all started when we found outside, in our backyard, with a roll of toilet paper in his hands:

while we were cleaning up, he made his way into the kitchen and up onto the counter to make this mess:

while we were cleaning that mess up, he snuck into my and matt's bedroom and made this mess:

then, of course, we had to clean that mess up, so somehow he got outside, into katie's car and wanted to drive away!

we told him he was too little though. we thought the shenanigans were over, but then when dinner was over, he did one more crazy thing:

he pulled his daddy's hair! after that, we didn't see the influence of the leprechauns from him. he turned back into his sweet, wonderful self and slept soundly and peacefully like none of it ever happened:

rs birthday celebration

tuesday night my ward had our annual relief society birthday celebration. it was a great evening! i am blessed enough to be in charge of planning these events, which is such a fun calling. to know what we did, go here, we followed their idea pretty closely with the exception of a few fun twists of our own. we included a progressive dinner where we ate salads sitting by at tables by our birth decades, then we moved onto another room for the main dish where we sat by our birth month, then we finished in a big circle where you could sit anywhere you wanted. we had 40 women turn out for the event- which is awesome!!

i just want to say how much i love relief society. i've never had a calling that prevented me from attending relief society on sundays and i am thankful for that. i love spending time with my sisters and hearing their wonderful thoughts and testimonies. so many of them are examples to me of exactly the kind of mom and woman i want to be as i progress through this life. so thank you relief society for providing us women the opportunity to be together. and congrats on being the oldest and longest lasting women's society in history. and thanks for letting me be a part of it!

manual labor!

i actually did some today. if you know me, and i assume you do if you're reading this, you know me and anything physical don't usually go together. the only exception is marching band, that's kind of sad. that makes me sound really lazy, and i'm so not, i just don't enjoy exercise or sweating.

well today was a big exception and it felt great! i didn't exercise, that's still not something enjoyable for me, but i did do some manual labor around our and my parents house!

my parents are in the process of converting a room in their basement into a music studio for me to teach my piano lessons out of- they're amazing. earlier this week, the drywall got finished so today, matt and i went and painted it while grammye so lovingly offered to watch evan upstairs (she's amazing too). we didn't get one wall finished, because it needed longer than the other walls to dry and it needed a primer (it's cinder block), but other than one coat of color on that wall, we finished!

in between coats and after we finished the painting, we did A LOT of yard work. right now there is little to show for it other than a completely empty flower bed next to our sidewalk, because it was all prep work for what we plan to do in the very very near future. so stay tuned! because beautiful things are occurring around the smith home!

evan- 7 months

how did my little baby prince turn 7 months?? it shocks me everyday how fast he grows and how quickly he learns, he's awesome. he had a flu shot on monday and they weighed him so i know that he now weighs 20lbs 1.5oz. he's a big boy! some new stuff about evan:

he now has 5, yes FIVE, teeth!

he is less and less interested in bottles and more and more interested in food.

he can turn around in circles on the floor, go backwards really well, get up on all 4s and rock, but still cannot move forward, which greatly frustrates him.

he says "hi", "hey", "mama", "dada" and a myriad of other sounds

his new trick: taking off his socks and/or shoes and then chewing them

another new trick: his tongue. he has discovered it and now, it is usually outside of his mouth

he is very observant and curious now. he will watch people very intently to see what they are doing. he can pull down his bumpers on his crib so he can see out of his crib when we come get him.

things he currently loves: his lion trash can (still), the paintings in his room by my aunt joyce, stuffed animals, anything he can hit (did you see his castanet debut on facebook? so cute), and the phone

evan continues to be the greatest thing in the world, in my unbiased opinion. we are working on "soft" because he loves to grab your face and neck and man it hurts! he grabbed fergye the other day and she screamed bloody murder, which made him cry. we are also working on him just laying down and then falling asleep instead of having to be held and rocked to sleep. that has gone incredibly well, he actually prefers it at this point. he is the smiliest, happiest, cutest, most fun baby ever!