An Audrey update

Someone please tell me that my baby girl is not really 11 months old!!

Audrey's hair has been growing so much that we can actually get a little piggy in there. Well, that is until she notices and starts yanking it out.

She has a thing for Nolan's Batman cave as well, but she has learned that the best time to play with it is after he's gone to bed!

We've been purposely taking pictures and movies of her crawling, because we're quite sure she won't be doing it for long. She started out backwards, and it took her a few weeks to figure out her forward gear, but it wasn't long until she was full steam ahead!

Audrey's mobility has increased SO FAST! She's been crawling since January, and started cruzin along the couch and things about the same time. She quickly moved on from just holding our fingers and walking around the house to taking multiple steps on her own and as of a few days ago-March 24th or so she just takes off on her own. She's confident enough with her walking that she'll go from one side of our living room, to the door of the dining room with a big grin and a giggle on her lips the whole time. She loves it. We love her.

I spend a lot of time doing this around the house with Drey. Yeah, I've got lots of other things that I could be doing, but I know that this phase won't last too much longer, and I'm going to enjoy it while it's here.

I was, however, surprised to see this the other day. Kenny is a very safety concious guy when it comes to our kids, but her balance IS really good-she's even been trying to do it on ONE foot lately!! Crazy little girl is a cheerleader in training I guess!

Audrey and Nolan share a bedroom and I think that has really helped them grow closer. I have found them numerous times sharing little giggles and hearing Nolan invite her to come play with him on his race car bed. I'm sure she'll always look up to her big brother...no matter how many times he snatches away a toy from her slobbery mouth!

A Nolan update

Here's a little bit about what our Nolan boy has been up to lately...

He's growing and learning stuff so quickly we are having a hard time keeping up with ALL of his questions. I never new there could be SO many questions about what EACH sign says as we're driving down the street. For example, "what do those arrows say? why does it say don't go that way? why are those people walking on those two lines?" You get the picture...actually I'm not sure that you can get the picture until you're trapped in the car with him! :)

He attends preschool at the YMCA on Mondays & Wednesdays, and he LOVES it. He insisted that if he had to wear green to school on St. Patrick's Day, then so did Audrey and I since his teachers would see us drop him off.

He has been noticing the letters in his name on signs or any store front and saying, "Hey Mom-there's N for Nolan, etc." but on March 15th he surprised us by writing his name out on this little whiteboard. We had NO idea that he could do that yet!! Now he does it all the time, with what ever he can, finger in the air, finger in the sand, finger in the yogurt he spilled on the table. He's quite proud of his new skill, and now he's working on the rest of our names.

It's been easier convincing him that he needs to get in the tub now that we've discovered homemade tub paints. Hallelujah! If you're wondering about the baby tub that he's in, yep we still use that for both kids, our tub doesn't hold the water in very well and he has never liked taking baths in our tub (we don't have a clue why).

If you're ever looking for him and it's awfully quite in the house, this is usually where he can be found. He loves to play his PBSkids.org and Nickjr.com games SO much-literally he can go for hours if we let him. Since this captures his attention for so long, and he seems to learn quite a bit from them, I decided to move our old PC (he refers to it as his "new puter") in to his room, so when Audrey is napping and I have to do some work with my at-home scheduling assistant job, he can usually be found doing this. Judge me all you want, we have to do what works for us!

Nolan still plays in Rubbermaid tubs whenever they are available, but he does include Audrey in the fun now!

He's also trying to teach her how to play super heros, and is quite patient when he finds yet another toy of his in her mouth.

The best part about Nolan is that he tells us numerous times a day that he loves each one of us. I counted one day and got up to 23 times that he said, "Mom, I love you". That doesn't even count how many times he tells Kenny or Audrey. He is also the first to say "I missed you!!" when we pick up from preschool or Kenny comes home from work. He's our reminder that no matter what the days bring, those three little words make it all worth while.

OK I give up...

I've been hanging on to the idea that I would post all of our Christmas endeavors on our blog so that the friends and family that we visited would have a record of all of the fun pictures that we snapped while out playing with them in December. But since blogging is not something that I have a ton of time to catch up on right now, we purchased a journaling program that can serve as a journal for our family and it will post to our blog if I'd like it to. So instead of me worrying so much about getting it up on the blog so I can print out a blog book of our year in review, I can worry about updating the blog with more up to date information and recording more of the fun things that happen like when Nolan says or does something funny or when Audrey starts taking more than 8 steps at a time on her own...important stuff like that!

So here's to recording the here and now...I know most of you do that already but I'm pretty excited about it!

So here's a most recent picture of everyone...and then we'll go from there! :)

Audrey showing off her new big girl booster chair.

Kenny & Nolan at the frozen Geneva Lake

Me, sporting my Happy Birthday to me-new 'do!

Still testing the new software...

Our little bathing beauty

The "bunking beds" that Nolan enjoyed during our trip to the Dells in January...more about that later I guess.

The 5 Highlights of November 2009

Here's my quick Five point photo based recap of November:

First: Batman and Iron Man still reign supreme in our house-even when we're feeding the missionaries.

Second: Audrey has now turned 7 months and starts teething on everything...that first tooth finally popped in on November 14th. The next one was a week later.

Third: We had a WONDERFUL Thanksgiving dinner hosted by Katie & Ricky Irion, and enjoyed spending the afternoon with Chelsea & Matt Rowan, and Jenny & Richard Leake...and all of our children who mostly spent the time playing in their bless-ed basement! :)

Fourth: The influence of having mostly little girls his age finally overcame Nolan and he happily experienced the joy of being a Princess with the girls for a change. This made Kenny squirm quite a bit, but I just laughed and encouraged it-why should the girls have all of the dress up fun? Besides, the other 29 days of the month he spent in his Batman, Buzz Lightyear, Train conductor, or ninja costume-I think he'll be okay.

Fifth:The rest of the month was spent anticipating, preparing and waiting for Christmas vacation to begin! Hooray! Utah and Washington here we come!

Happy Halloween Nauvoo!

On Halloween weekend we decided to take our first trip to Nauvoo. I found a cheap hotel with an indoor pool about 9 miles away, so we packed up the kids, the costumes and the cooler and headed out for the 5 hr drive. We got there just in time for the Friday night trick-or-treating and Nolan was SOOO excited! He didn't even complain one bit about the freezing gale-force wind that shocked us the second we stepped out of the car! (That explains the Buzz Lightyear costume with new winter parka ensemble he's wearing.)

We trick or treated to as many stores down their main street as we could stand and then promised him that we'd take him again the next day (on Halloween).

The next day we hit the visitors center and then toured all of the sites that we could with our two kids in tow. The weather was still pretty chilly, but at least there was lots of sunshine. Note to everyone: if you ever want to check out Nauvoo and practically have the whole place to yourself, do it on Halloween weekend!! It was so great to be the only ones in every site and get to ask all of the questions and sit and chat with those sweet elder missionaries as much as we wanted! Plus we got all of the great 'handouts' at each station and Nolan thought that was a pretty cool trick or treat experience too.

Then after we saw as much as we could of the sites, we caught a quick buffet dinner at Hotel Nauvoo (everything was really good too by the way), and then grabbed the kids costumes again for the big Halloween parade and pumpkin festival. The town members carve and display over 300 pumpkins and the line them all down the main street, have trick or treating and the church sponsors a bunch of fun things for the kids in the pioneer village shops like cake walks and bean bag tosses, etc., just too much fun!

Nauvoo was even nice enough to put on this gorgeous sunset by the temple...Wow right?

The next day we were able to find one of the curious 'fruits' that our friend Katie Lindner told us about. They grow on some trees in the area and apparently people used to put them near their front and back doors to keep pests (bugs, spiders, etc.) away. The man I asked gave me the name...but I can't remember what it was.

Finally, on our way home we drove by Carthage and toured the jail. That truly is a very humbling experience. It's amazing to feel the power that is in that building. I'll be honest I was expecting to cry and be more emotional that I actually was during the tour. I was surprised at the sort of peace that was in that building. I guess it was just a confirmation from the Spirit of the what an amazing man the Prophet Joseph Smith was, and how admired and loved he was by the men that served in that jail and died with him. We were so glad that we were able to spend the weekend enjoying each other's company, watching our kids experience a one of a kind Halloween, and seeing for ourselves the testimony building sites and sacred places that our church has so wonderfully preserved and shares with everyone. It was by far a Halloween weekend that we won't forget for a long time!

Fall Fun

October was a busy month for us. The weather was chilly but the leaves this year were gorgeous! We probably took photos of our kids with the leaves once or twice a week!

The first weekend of October My Mom came to visit and keep us company while Kenny flew to San Francisco for a breast cancer symposium he was invited to attend. We did as much shopping and playing as we could in between me getting sick and then Nolan...plus it was REALLY cold for October out here so that hampered our plans a bit. We found time to hit the pumpkin patch, Johnson Creek outlets and even the Zoo when Kenny got home.

My Mom even got to witness Audrey eating her first cereal...this was her reaction:

Here are some of the pictures that stood out from the fall "portraits". Really there were so many I'm really struggling not to post them all!

Dear Blog Followers...

I will now start updating our blog with our fun family events that have taken place the last few months....I can no longer take the guilt of looking at other people's blogs and wishing that they would update theirs from a week ago when mine hasn't been touched since September. Ahh guilt...my only motivator. :)