Jillian the Brave

Jillian tends to be a little wary of other little kids who are bold and get right in your face. My friend's son is a few months younger than Jillian, but is not shy and loves to play with other kids. My friend and I often watch each other kids and only recently, after about a year of being around this kid, has Jillian initiated playing games with him. He was over here last week and Jillian was telling him what to do and get him involved in the games, rather than the other way around. It was pretty funny to watch.

Annabelle the Chef

Annabelle really to help make dinner the other night, so I put her right to work.

Land of Dinosaurs

On our way back home from Salt Lake City, we stopped downtown to look at the changes that have taken place since we moved away 5 years ago. It is so different, but looks great. We had lunch at City Creek, which is a new shopping center. Inside the food court, there was this amazing children's play area. It was definitely not what you would typically think of when you think of play area. There were no slides or tunnels to crawl through. Instead, there were tons of different types of foam dinosaurs that you could climb on. It was crazy. There were so many kids running around and having a blast. Both Annabelle and Jillian took right off exploring and in Annabelle's case, made friends right off the bat with some other kids that were playing as well. I got to say it was one of the best play areas I've ever seen.

Family and Dancing

A couple of weeks ago, we went to Utah to see my parents who were in town and also watch my sister's dance program. I LOVE it when I get to spend time with family. My kids had a great time playing with their grandparents and it is a sweet moment for me to witness. I only wish this would happen more often, but that's not easy when you live far away from each other. I'm just so grateful that I have both siblings and extended family that live in Utah and can let us stay with them and also give my parents a reason to come out to the mountain west area.







My sister is on the International Folk Dance team at BYU and they performed with other dance teams from the university in a show called EviDANCE. I really enjoyed the show and variety of dances and my sister was absolutely amazing (as usual). It was a great night.













My brother was also a folk dancer a few years ago. 

Sarah's kisses

Sarah has a very unique (and sometimes painful) way of giving me kisses. She forcefully grabs my face, digging her nails into my skin, and ferociously pulls me toward her with her mouth wide open. Sometimes she that's all she does and other times, it turns into a very wet kiss. It's one of the funniest things for me to experience because most of the time, she'll give no indication that she's going to give me a kiss. It's just this sudden grabbing and pulling of my face. This video doesn't quite capture how funny it is, but you get the picture.

School Pictures

Last week, Annabelle had her school picture taken. She looked so cute and grown up. But I hope she didn't have as goofy a smile for her real school picture as she did in these.

Slaps on Sunday

Our idea of spending some good, quality family time together on a Sunday afternoon.

6 Months

 I can't believe this girl is 6 months old already. She is such a sweetheart. She's 16.8 lbs (65th percentile) and 27.3 inches long (93rd percentile). She's not crawling or even sitting real well yet, but she's happy a can be. I've started her on baby cereal and she loves it.















 
 

Jillian

Jillian reached a few milestones in the last few weeks. I'll start with the worst one. She colored on the wall with crayon. Fortunately, I had one more Mr Clean magic erasers left. I was quite frustrated, but it seems like every child has to do it at least once during their childhood.

 Jillian is also sort of potty trained. She goes through spurts where she wants to wear big girl underwear for a couple of days and can even make it the whole day without an accident (this doesn’t happen every time she wants to wear underwear, but she’s pretty good about going in the potty when she wants to). But after a few days, she doesn’t want to use the bathroom anymore and chooses to wear diapers for a few days. It’s driving crazy. It just depends on her mood that day. I know if she decided she wanted to be potty trained for good, she would be. But she just sometimes doesn’t want to put in the effort. It does no good for me to force her to wear underwear because she’ll just have accidents all day long. I'm hoping she want to be a "big girl" permanently soon so we can be done with diapers for her.

A much smaller, but nevertheless still important milestone for Jillian is she got her hair french braided all the way down her head. It looked so cute. She doesn't stay still quite as well as Annabelle did when she was that age and Jillian seems to have a much softer head (either that is much wussier than Annabelle was). But she stayed still long enough for me to get the braids done. Way to go, Jillian.

 

Annabelle and Sarah

Annabelle has an uncanny ability to make Sarah laugh. Sarah is already a very happy, smiley baby, but Annabelle just has to walk in the room and Sarah lights up and laughs. You'll see what I'm talking about when you watch these videos. The last one is especially funny.

Table Rock

A few weeks ago, Michael spent most of Saturday climbing Table Rock with a friend. It's about an 11 mile round trip hike that gives you crystal clear views of the Grand Teton at the top. Unfortunately with all the fires we've had lately, the skies were too cloudy with smoke to be able to see much.


Halfway up the trail, there are two different paths you can take to get to the top. Most people take the easier, less steep path. The other path has this sign by it:

Guess which trail Michael's group decided to take? Yep,the non recommended one.

When he got home late that afternoon, his feet and legs were so dirty, he had to crawl on his knees from the kitchen to the bathroom to avoid getting the the carpet extremely dirty as well. I offered to give him a piggyback ride, but for some reason, he didn't take me up on it.




He said it was a great hike and that he'd like to take me sometime and also the girls when they're older. He was very early that morning and was exhausted by the time he got home. After getting cleaned up, he laid down on the bed to wait for me to bring him some food. I knew he wouldn't last very long before succumbing to sleep so I tried to hurry. By the time I brought the food to him, he was almost asleep and told me to put the plate containing two brats on his chest. I was a little nervous to do so because he might roll  over in his sleep and the last thing I wanted was to clean up brats and mustard off my bed. Fortunately, he got a phone call a few minutes later and ate his food sometime during or after the call.