Happy Spring!

It's April 2 and spring in St. Louis has been absolutely beautiful so far! Warm, yes, but beautiful nonetheless! Here are a few stats for the month of March in St. Louis that are pretty remarkable. This was the warmest March on record (by far) and we had 11 days where the temperature was 80° (or above). The average temperature this past March was 72.1° which was 16.2° above the normal average temperature, and we set five new record high temperatures and six record high low temperatures!

A lot of people are saying this is "too warm, too fast," but I've really enjoyed the warm weather. If March's weather is indicative as to what our weather will be like the rest of the summer, them we're in for a doozy, but from everything I've heard on the weather, an excessively warm March doesn't necessarily mean we'll have an above-average summer. Time will tell!

This is April's picture on my Mary Engelbreit calendar. I love the quote at the top of the page from Carl Bard that says, "Though no one can go back and make a brand-new start, ANYONE can start from NOW and make a brand new ending. " Very true and good "food for thought!"

One of my favorite parts of spring is the General Conference for my church which is always the first weekend in April. It's wonderful to be able to hear uplifting messages from the leaders of our church.  Thanks to the marvels of modern technology we're now able to watch this conference on TV, whereas when I was a little girl the only way we could watch conference was by going to our church building where it was broadcast over the satellite dish. In my family we always have a really nice brunch now that we're able to watch conference in the comfort of our own homes, so that makes me look forward to conference even more!

Here's a few pictures of our brunch. My mom made a breakfast casserole and caramel pecan rolls, and my sister Laura made orange rolls and brought a fruit salad. It was delicious!

For dinner my mom made made a new recipe; tortilla soup. When my mom planned the dinner menu she didn't know who is going to be 90°, and way too warm for soup, but we still enjoyed it. Mom also made a new cheesecake for dessert. This is a recipe I recently found on Pinterest for Cheesecake Factory's Oreo cheesecake.We thought it would be fitting since Oreo recently celebrated its 100^th birthday.