Happy-For-Jesse Day

Jesse turned 31 yesterday! (I can spill the beans on his age because I have more grey hairs than he does.) I decided to dedicate a blog post to him.

Why I Love My Engineer Husband
1. I have someone to keep organized. As an engineer, he loses all track of time. If he says one hour, I bargain on two. When he gives me an estimate of work on a project, I double it. When he loses his keys, I retrace his steps to help him find them. I calendar our activities, and let him know what days are open for things he needs to do. I am his Palm Pilot - this adds great meaning to my life. ;-)

2. He can fix things, and they work better afterwards! (For you to completely understand my joy for this special talent he has, I need to give you some background. My brothers liked to take things apart, but they never got them back together again. For the first several years we were married, I would hover around Jesse while he was fixing something and worry if he was doing it right. I finally learned to relax, that everything would be perfect when he finished. Jesse adds, "Sometimes.") Our dryer has stopped drying twice since we moved to Texas (it is over fifteen years old, after all) - he has saved us loads of money by fixing it himself. (We are also blessed to live within three miles of a Sears parts store.) One day a friend at playgroup said her dryer wasn't working, and she was going to have a handyman come look at it for her. I told her to cancel the handyman and sent Jesse to her home. He saved her money by discovering the problem, something very minor that would have cost tons of money in labor. He is amazing!

3. He keeps a cool head about him when all around is chaos. A few weeks ago, we woke up at 3:00 am to the smoke detector. Jesse disabled the loud offender while I thought I should at least look around for the problem. (Diane noticed that when the smoke detectors went off in the cabin at reunion, our first thought was to stop the noise that might wake the children, not to discover why they were sounding.) As I approached the stairs, I noticed that the AC unit was far too noisy. I shouted for Jesse and started running upstairs to the closet in which it is housed. The smell of burning started me in a panic, and I half expected flames to be shooting out of the metal box - like something you would see in a cartoon. Jesse stayed calm, shut everything off, including the circuit breakers to the unit, and we opened the windows to air out the house. We figured that the unit had been running to long (my fault - I tried to change the temperature and did it wrong), and the belts and drums were starting to smoke. The smoky air was being blown from a vent right onto a smoke detector downstairs, waking us up to a potentially dangerous situation. Gratefully, our AC unit can reset itself, so after a day of cooling down it was running properly again (which Jesse had found out last year by calling the AC guys about a similar problem - yes, my fault again).

4. He has to leave work at work. He might have to work an extra hour or three during a week, but I know our family is very blessed that he is home at the same time every night and has every other Friday off.

Jesse is amazing for other reasons, which many of you know and can add to, but I will keep it to his engineering side today. Love ya, babe!

The True Meaning of Easter

The children had a lot of fun at our Easter egg hunt Saturday. Julie invited her friend Katherine to come along with us.

Guess what was breakfast this morning? The usual- Cheerios, yogurt, jellybeans...

With all the fun and jellybeans, I was glad to see that Julie and David had put together their own special Easter edition of the Friend magazine for today. As James says (or at least Julie said he says...), "I wike candy. But not the menin of Estr..."

Happy Easter!

P.S. For "An Apostle's Easter Thoughts on Christ" video, go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpFhS0dAduc

NEWS FLASH

Julie lost a canine this week. Her smile is a mix of little teeth, big teeth, and gaps. (You can't see that she has two more adult teeth on the bottom row; they are just farther back on the gum line. Braces are in her future.) She and David speculated that the tooth fairy might give more for losing a canine and even more for molars. Sorry, guys - all teeth are equal.

$20 Bunk Bed

Jesse found some scrap wood in a field near our home. There was enough lumber that he thought he could make a bunk bed for James. We bought a choo-choo train mattress a few months ago, and taught James to sleep on it on the floor in the playroom. He loved his big boy bed and thoroughly enjoyed jumping on it. Finally, this weekend, Jesse finished the long-awaited bunk bed.

TAH DAH!!!

Sadly, James wasn't too enchanted with the experience. He can climb up, but won't get down without help. He also wanted to go back to "his" room, the playroom, in which he has slept for the last (almost) two years. We settled on a compromise: David gets the bunk bed, and James is sleeping on the twin under Josh's bunk bed. He seemed more comfortable with this solution; maybe someday he will try the bunk bed again.

Video Time!

My mom requested that we make this video for her last fall; she wanted to use it in a Stake Primary Training Meeting. If you have primary-aged children in your home, they learned it in primary last month. Please invite them to sing along!