Happy Birthday/Easter/Conference weekend!

This week we saw How to Train Your Dragon. It was super cute. We might buy it when it comes out on DVD. I think I am beginning to get over my aversion to DreamWorks. Or at least, as long as the screenwriters stay clear of constant potty humor. Like they failed to do with Shrek. I really recommend seeing How to Train Your Dragon though. We even got the whole theater basically to ourselves. There were only two other people in the theater. I think we've found a great theater to frequent: the Scera Theater. Great big screens, comfortable seats, $6.50 a ticket. The only downside: the armrests don't go up, so you can't cuddle very close. Darn. Still worth it though, I think. :)

We also went to Target and Walmart to shop for my birthday presents, since I received gift cards to those places. A gift card to Target or Walmart is like a dream come true; it's basically permission to impulse buy to your heart's desire! Upon running around the store picking up whatever I wanted, I discovered that I have an unconscious urge to relive my childhood (I am suspicious that this desire may be attributed to jealousy of the first graders I work with every Tuesday and Thursday.) Among the things I ended up buying were:

**a tub of Peachie O's

**a couple cans of Chef Boyardee

**Ice Age the movie

**Madagascar the movie

**squirty cheese

**an Easter egg dyeing kit called "Mini Monsters!" where you can put stickers of assorted monster facial features on your dyed eggs to make them look like monsters!!!

**a box of Otter Pops

**a 24-pack of crayons

**a Disney Princess coloring book, complete with stickers!!!

In case you were curious, I have already colored a picture of each princess except Jasmine and Mulan (they left Snow White out of the coloring book. Mwahaha. She was ugly and annoying anyway). My favorite that I have colored so far is a picture of Ariel when she just got her new legs. I colored a remarkably beautiful sunset behind her, if I do say so myself. I will actually take a picture so you can see my artistic talent. Haha.

I also never realized that I had such a craving for Otter Pops. The first day I got them, I ate six. It was 39 degrees outside. I don't think they've ever been so tasty. And after dinner tonight we will dye and create our Mini Monster eggs. :D :D :D I've got a couple of monsters in mind. I think one of them will be Mike, from Monsters Inc.

Last night Christian and I and our friend Chris went to the Nickelcade. It's got all kinds of fun games you can play with nickels instead of quarters like you usually put in at other arcades. Which makes your spending about 1/5 the amount of money you'd spend at another arcade. Including a $2.50 admission, Christian and I spent $10 at most and had about 2 hours worth of solid fun. We didn't even spend like half the nickels we got, either. The place has got games that are fun for everyone; not just racing and shooting games, but they also had Skee Ball, air hockey, Guitar Hero, Chuck-E-Cheese type games where you try to get a token into a slot or whatever so you can get tickets printed out, and Dance Dance Revolution (DDR). They also had Laser Tag for $4 (great price for laser tag!). I usually don't sit at the arcade games and shoot or race, but we all sat down and raced this one game and I wasn't actually as bad as I thought I'd be. I even got a high score; a #1 time for my console! Christian won first place like every time. We played DDR like 4 times, and it got really sweaty but it was super fun!

Our friend Chris has some connections and so was able to swing things so that we each got a ticket to Sunday morning Conference, including Music and the Spoken Word. It was awesome. We woke up at 6 AM and left at 7 to allow for traffic. We were supposed to be in our seats by 9:00. We ended up getting there like... an hour early, because there was barely any traffic (hooray for the HOV lane)! Anyway, we sat up in the nosebleed section (there were actually two kids who ended up with nosebleeds from it, haha) and watched the MoTab rehearse while people trickled in. I think it's crazy how many Mormons there are. I mean, look at this picture.

This picture is looking at maybe 1/3 of the Conference center, which in total seats 21,000 people. So right here you're looking at about 7,000 people. There are 13.8 million members worldwide. So print out this picture 1,971 times and lay the pictures end to end, and you would see approximately all the members of the LDS Church today.

Holy crap. That is a LOT of people. And Joseph Smith started the church with what... like ten people, just 180 years ago, and it's grown to have 1,380,000 TIMES that many people since then, not even including all the ones who've died before now? Crazy.

Recipe for this week is Tuna Noodle Casserole. http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Tuna-Noodle-Casserole-IV/Detail.aspx Pretty good. Cheap and easy, at least. Not the best I've ever tasted, but then again we went with just the recipe that was listed, and didn't do any of the changes suggested by other reviewers.