Welcome March!

My good friend Smitty shared this video with me yesterday and it just makes me smile



and also makes me wish I were Irish or planning a trip to Ireland sometime soon.

The arrival of March makes me smile too.

It's such a beautiful month in my little part of the world.

Today was filled with family

and  flowers

and some basketball

All things I love, that sometimes don't go together very well.

These are the basketball casualties from my garden,

but today,

they even make me smile.

Hello March!

May I spend you singing out loud in God's choir.

Today I am thankful for

family time - to work and talk and play and eat and enjoy some basketball - together.

boys to dig up my weeds.

a phone call from the oldest daughter and Shad.

Springtime at my House

When I think of spring flowers I always picture colorful tulips or bright yellow daffodils poking their heads up through the damp, frigid soil, often sporting a soft coating of snow on their welcome green leaves. Ah, spring flowers bring with them a promise of new birth after a cold, dark winter. Just looking at them reminds me of Easter and the Resurrection of my Savior, Jesus Christ.

However, I haven't had much luck getting bulbs to blossom at my house and so I am usually lacking tulips and daffodils at this time of the year. I do love it when I can find affordable bouquets of these flowers to bring home and add a little springtime cheer to my home.

A couple of days ago I bought some beautiful tulips and put them in a vase on my piano next to my statue of Christ in the Garden and in front of my Living Christ frame. It felt like spring!

And they sat there for about 1 minute before Sparrow, the curious one, had to come and check them out. He thought they smelled pretty good

And head-butted even better.


And he had to make sure that he could still take his short cut across the piano to the table.

I could envision what was going to happen next, so the tulips got moved to the dresser in the entryway, where they still make me think of spring.

Springtime flowers in Arizona are a little more showy than these standard blooms. Our flowers go all out to blossom and grow and truly welcome spring with a grand hurrah. This is perfect flower growing weather for us and the place they grow the best, in my opinion, is at the Mesa Arizona temple.

They are so beautiful and they smell so wonderful.

A truly impressive sight.

I am learning to think of these as springtime flowers as well. While tulips and daffodils offer the quiet promise of new life, our flowers shout it from the gardens with uncontained joy.

Christ Has Risen! He Lives Again!

And I sat and enjoyed them for a few minutes today


because next week they will probably disappear.

It's time to plant the less showy, but equally beautiful, Arizona summer flowers.

Didn't spring just arrive?

Today I am thankful

that I didn't wait and go to the 2:00 session at the temple - it closed early today because of the Easter Pageant and I would have been sad.
for beautiful flowers.
for this Easter season and all that it represents.