This week-

Well this week is the first week the girls have been out of school. It was nice to have Monday off for Memorial Day. We went to our ward Memorial Day picnic at Joe Wheeler State Park. We had a pavilion reserved there and it is right next to a man-made beach. We had a sand-castle building contest. The girls stopped helping me build it because they said I was taking it too seriously. Ouch- the truth hurts. I didn't win. I'll study up on sand castle building techniques and come back full force next year.

Tuesday night Nana Bell and Nanny stayed the night on the way up to Nashville for a little vacation. The girls had fun with our "game" we do sometimes. They think of a topic, then we have to come up with a story about that topic. Alex loves it. Nana Bell is a great source of funny stories. When Alex said "hair" as the topic, Nana Bell had almost a half-dozen funny stories about hair. Some of which, she almost couldn't tell because she was cracking herself up. It was fun! We'll need to do that at the next family get together.

I took the girls to the library and Samantha signed up for the summer reading program. The library has come up with a BRILLIANT ploy to get kids reading more. The kids keep track of the amount of time the spend reading (not the number of books) and for every 2 hours the kid spends reading, they get to place a paw on the wall and for every paw on the wall, the library will donate a can of dog or cat food to a homeless pet shelter to SAVE LITTLE DOGGIES AND KITTIES! Brilliant! Samantha (who normally is not so fond of reading) is reading her heart out to save cats and dogs! Brilliant--I repeat--Brilliant!

My garden is growing well-- I'll have to take some picture soon and show ya'll how it is coming. I still haven't posted about mine and Alex's "fun" experience last week. The pictures will have to some later, because I have to transfer them from my camera to a stick and put them on the blog from work because it's faster.

But anyway- Alex received a phone call reminder about youth night at the church telling her what to bring with her. Cliff got the call since Alex and I were bathing suit shopping for her. So Cliff calls and tells me the items...her pillow, her personal progress book, her journal and something else that I couldn't remember. So Alex says..was it pajamas? I said I think so, that sounds right. So I run Alex home to get into her pajamas and get her stuff for church. We get to the church and Alex sees one of the other girls and says, crying "She's not wearing pajamas. I'm not going in there in my pajamas!" I decided to go inside and check it out. Sure enough-- no one is wearing pajamas and Alex was in the car crying. I knew she wouldn't be caught dead in pajamas with the boys in opening exercises, so I go back to the car and try to convince her to go in after a few minutes and opening exercises would be over and the boys and girls would be separate. She wasn't going for it. I said, "I'm not taking you home. People wear their pajamas all the time, it's no big deal!" But she was inconsolable. So I jokingly said, "What do you want me to do, swap pants with you?" Her face got serious and you could see a glimmer of hope as she said, "YES!" We waited for the people in the parking lot to go inside and then very quickly swapped pants. She put on my jeans, and I put on her pajama pants. Of course, we had to cinch up the jeans with the cord that attaches the MP3 player to my stereo in my car, and her pajama pants were snug, but she dried her tears, pulled her t-shirt down to cover the cord and happily went into the church. By the time I get home with Samantha, it seemed that every neighbor and their dog was outside. I was not about to walk out in her pajama pants. So I sent Samantha to open the front door for me so that I could make a mad dash when I was ready. I saw a neighbor kid look at me sitting in the car, so I put my phone up to my ear like I was on the phone. When a few people had passed, I had Samantha walk next to me inside. The irony... after going to great lengths to avoid being seen by my neighbors I got the idea to have Samantha take a picture of me in Alex's pajama pants because it would make a great post on the blog. I later got one of Alex in my pants when she got home. That's the story...I have a feeling that this experience will be brought up many times in the future to give evidence to Alex of how much I love her!!! Oh- the sacrifices we make--picture to come...