April 2013

 Happy April. What a month full of family and friends. Elk Grove is lovely this time of year. The rains have stopped and the sunshine has found it's home here. The flies and mosquitos have also decided to stay away for the time being, so meals and play outside are bug free. It's wonderful!
  The whole Sammamish Hartley clan came down to Elk Grove and we got to keep them for 4 days. Originally they had planned to fly to Hawaii while Clark was on 2 week leave from the Navy, but the military flights were cancelled several times. The budget cuts due to sequestration really hurt the military spending, so flights out of Washington State weren't happening any more. Clark noticed that there were still flights from Travis AFB (in Northern California) to Honolulu, Hawaii. They rented a car and drove down. To our great delight the flights from Travis AFB were also reduced or cancelled, so the family stayed with us and played until they could get on a flight a few days later. I pulled Tanner out of school for a day and we all went to a jump house to work off some energy. Clark took the kids and had a fun day in San Francisco, and stopped at the Jelly Belly factory on the way to the city. We made pizza and went to the park, we watched general conference and played conference bingo with belly flops. We had "revel in Hawaii" night with the Legers and watched video of our scuba diving and Hawaiian adventures. It got Clark's family excited for their trip. Parker and Ethan were fast friends and spent the entire weekend together. Tanner loved that the girls were big into reading. We were happy that they finally got a flight on Monday, but sad to lose all the fun and mayhem at our house.

Darryl had a new calling in the Stake. He is one of the sports coordinators. He helps run the basketball league on Thursday evenings. This was also the first official month that he did not have a drill weekend. He's feeling the effects of leaving the National Guard. We are on a 2 year hiatus, and will decide if he will return to active Guard duties at a later date. For now, We love having him home every weekend!
We spent some quality time in Fremont this month. Amy Crane is having her 5th baby (what a wonderful miracle). Her baby shower was lots of fun. Darryl took the kids and played with the Weston bunch while I caught up with my Fremont friends. We played some games and ate wonderful food. It was fun to catch up with the Crane family since they have moved further south and we are now north. After the shower we had a lunch BBQ with the Hale family and the Hancock family. The kids broke out some water balloons and got wet. They also loved watching old episodes of Animaniacs. It's fun to watch the kids grow up so much. Jason Hale is an amazing pianist and he entertained us with some of the music he plays by ear. It was hard to pull ourselves away and head back home. I miss Fremont a lot.

 We had a fun event this month with the Moms Club. We had about 6 families over for a BBQ and game night in our back yard. We grilled and talked the the kids ran around everywhere. They especially liked the pic nic blankets, so they were very cute when they all congregated on the blankets and shared chips, lemonade and hot dogs. By the end nobody knew who's food belonged to whom. The kids and I had a fantastic month playing outside. The weather has truly been ideal, so we played in the pool, made milk shakes with the perfect fresh strawberries from the field, and generally kept our Saturdays fun. We had a great laugh on the first day the pool came out, when Alyssa got a hold of the hose and she and Parker couldn't stop giggling as the water poured over them. She was the queen of the pool.

Tanner growing up! He now rides his bike to and from school. His reading level has taken off, and in this 3rd trimester of school his grades are reflecting his hard work. He has straight A's and is enjoying math and writing a lot more than at the beginning of the year. He is excelling at piano and recently started composing little tunes. He's on his 3rd set of piano books and occasionally likes to sit down and play some of the songs he's memorized.