Braden Turns Three!

What a fun day in March when we were able to celebrate all things Braden!

Braden is our BOY.  Our long awaited BOY!  He loves bikes.  He likes to bother the dog.  He likes Bubble Guppies.  He loves Molly.  He loves his pacifier (his pass) which we started taking away from him after he turned three -- not the easiest thing in the world for a pacifier addict.  He loves to cry.  Oh my.  This little boy makes his presence known.  Which is why it was hard to take the pacifier away.  But he started to cry WITH his pacifier in his mouth (not an easy trick) so all bets were off.

The last three years with Braden have gone way too fast.  I do not remember really being able to enjoy his "toddlerness".  I hope the next year goes by a little slower.

To celebrate his birthday, we went to his favorite place -- the zoo!  Oh, he loves the zoo!  He loves the train at the zoo.  He loves the carousel.  He loves the monkeys and the turtles.  The bears and elephants are okay, too.

Afterward we celebrated Braden with a dinosaur cake.  Happy happy day!

Dead Sea Scrolls

We had a wonderful opportunity in March to go with our good friends, the Larsons, to see the Dead Sea Scrolls.  It was a great night.  We had dinner at an Italian Restaurant across the street and then over to see The Dead Sea Scrolls.

The exhibits before the Dead Sea Scrolls were a little redundant.  It will show my utter lack of sophistication, but it was a lot of pots.  A lot of pots.  A few weapons.  Seeing the rocks used in sling shots was a little fascinating.

The actual Dead Sea Scrolls are fragmented but fascinating.  There were scriptures but also legal contracts and every day life.  I wish that I had read more about them so that I could have appreciated more of what I was seeing.

Studio 5

I started off 2014 with the ridiculous idea that I should go on television and talk about books.  I reached out to a few morning shows as well as NBC's Studio 5 which airs on the morning.

By the time I got on Studio Five I had already been on Good Things Utah twice.  In January I talked about comfort books (after all, January is freezing cold) and in February I talked about romance novels.

In March I was finally scheduled to go on Studio 5.  I hated every minute of it.  The producers were hard to work with.  They wanted me to spice up my segment on book clubs.  Perhaps talk about dressing up as your favorite character?  Door prizes?

Ugh! 

When I finally went with my friend Amy, I just wanted it to be over.  We drove downtown and waited and waited for our segment.  It's not a live show -- they pre-record -- and something was going horribly wrong with the cooking segment.

And my segment was a split segment, meaning that they go directly into another segment.  I hate split segments.  You never get to talk afterward.  It's all rather abrupt.

All in all, I did not enjoy it.  I love my Good Things Utah family.

  

Frozen

My girls loved Frozen when it came out in theaters last Thanksgiving.  They went to see it in the theater two times.  Emma got to go see it in the theater three times because a neighborhood friend had a birthday party where she took the neighborhood girls to go see it.

When it finally came out on DVD, I woke up at o-hurt-early to purchase it from Target.  Molly was not feeling very well that day (a coincidence?) and was able to snuggle up and watch it while her sisters were at school.  Such big fans!