Backlund Brief

Mother's Day

Mother's Day weekend we spent Friday night and saturday in Sacramento visiting my friend Chris Daughtry :) and visiting our good friends, the Quayles! We had a blast!!

All of our kiddos!!!

Faye and I treated ourselves to a Daughtry concert on Friday night. We went out to dinner and then to the concert. It was GREAT!!!!!!! to say the least :)

Silly Alia hanging from their tree.

A close up of all our kids. They are all paired up age-wise and it was so cute to see them all play with their "pair". They matched up nicely. Now to see which pair marries! :)

Alia had her first Open House on friday night. We all went and had dinner there and enjoyed Tricky Tray-a school raffle fundraiser. Although I didn't enjoy it as much as I could have...I didn't win a darn thing! :)

As we looked around the room Ethan found the perfect spot to sit.

Then...he decided he was ready for kindergarten! :) Who's open house was this, anyways? He is sitting in the chair that the daily star student sits in.

Here is a picture and story that Alia wrote. You can't see the picture all that well but she is sitting on top of a sea turtle! Girl after my own heart! I hope I get a picture of one of those next month when Jason and I are in Hawaii!

They've been growing these little grass catepillars! It's so cute and Alia loves hers. :)

Thanks a TON!!!!!

Elijah finished his first year of preschool on Friday! I can't believe it!!!! He's getting so big. As I was looking through the packet of stuff they sent home I started to get emotional thinking about how big he's gotten this year. He's learned so much...I'm so proud of him!

As a thank you gift for his teachers we made these plates. I wrote the words (obviously!) and Elijah made all the flowers with his finger. I loved how they turned out!

Here's Elijah on the last day of school with some of his first school friends.

Thanks Miss Gracie for letting Elijah love on you!

And thanks Mrs. Judy for being a great teacher to my kids! I wouldn't want any other teachers for their first school experience! You hold a special place in our hearts!

Elijah's preschool picnic

The preschool always has a picnic for the kids who aren't graduating and Elijah got to be a part of this this year. All of the kids sing some songs for the parents and then we all eat our lunches on the grass. It was pretty cute :)

Here's Elijah with some of his buddies.

Singing a song.

Here's a little video for you viewing enjoyment :)

The last MOPS

This week we had our last MOPS meeting. It has been an amazing year full of joy, laughter and tears...encouragement, truth, and challenge! I am going to miss being with all the ladies I've been blessed to be with this year. BUT am also SOOOOO excited to see what God has in store for us next year. I will, again, be the creative activities coordinator and can't wait to come up with some fun ideas! If anyone has any suggestions, pass them my way! I need them. :)

For our last MOPS we decided to prep a meal for each mom to make DURING mops and bring it home to cook it! Imagine, a dinner made BEFORE 11am! fabulous! So...after cooking and shredding over 100 pounds of chicken, cutting up who knows how much green onions and prepping everything else everyone went home with an 8 chicken enchilada dish! It was great! Well worth all of the effort!

This is the table of ladies I was blessed to sit with every week (well, when I didn't have a craft to manage). I love these girls!

Hard at work making her dinner!

Look honey! I am actually making a dinner! :) AND my hands are messy!

This was the beginning of the assembly line. Each mom grabbed a bag of chicken and dumped cheese, sauce, green onions and sour cream into it. Then they mixed it up and that was the inside of their enchiladas.

This was the end of the assembly line. See all those green onions?

Yeah...I chopped them all...by hand. :)

Until next year!! Stay tuned for more ideas!

Sit back and relax!

I've somewhat updated the blog....so...sit back, get a cold beverage and enjoy the pictures!!! It might take you a while :)

Classes

For a long time we have wanted to give our kids the opportunity to join a class or do an outside of school activity. In January we were blessed with help to be able to do this. So, Alia wanted to do dance-so we signed her up for a Ballet class. She has class every week and will be in a recital on Fathers Day. These pictures were taken on picture day for her recital.
Elijah needed to do some type of sports...so we signed him up at the Little Gym for a sports class! Perfect! He has gotten to learn skills for golf, frisbee, hockey, baseball, gymnastics...there are some others but I forget.

Sports Class!

Here is elijah at his Little Gym sports class! He goes once a week for an hour and he absolutely LOVES it! And we love it because he gets to work off some of the energy he has! It makes for a great bedtime!

Images of Easter

He is Risen!

Our friends, the Reeds, invited us to celebrate Easter with their family! We (well, maybe mostly me) was so blessed to have somewhere to go!!! We had a great time and it felt like we were part of the family!

Well...as usual, my boys make quite the picture :)

We dyed eggs after church. The kids enjoyed doing this...but Ethan made it pretty interesting.

The Easter bunny came!

spring Break...

The second half of our spring break was spent in san diego visiting our good friends Dan and Tracy!!! We had a great time! We went to the Birch Aquarium, the San Diego Zoo, played at the mall and went strawberry picking. Thanks so much Dan and Tracy for hosting us and taking such good care of us!!!

Some of the strawberries we picked.