Catch up

It has been quite a long time since I posted (like two months!). I have lots of excuses, but I won't bore anyone with them. :0) We have been doing well and doing lots of things, so this posting is going to be very long!

I took the kids (including Taylor, the little girl I babysit weekdays) to the zoo here in Idaho Falls a few weeks ago. It was actually a pretty good sized zoo for being in such a small town. The kids haven't been to a zoo in a LONG time (and it was Maddie's very first time to a zoo), and they just loved it.

Parker (3), Taylor (20 months) & Maddie (19 months) by the seals

Maddie & Parker in the petting zoo

Parker by the lion fountain. This fountain has been there FOREVER! It was there back in the day when I was little and lived in Idaho Falls (we moved to Pittsburgh in '95).

Maddie looking at the lions

Parker by a monkey. It had fallen asleep in the window like that.

Maddie was so taken back by the monkeys! I think she couldn't believe that there were live, moving monkeys, since she'd only ever seen pictures of them.

Madisyn was actually trying to climb up this tiger even though it was way too humongous for her, crazy girl

Spring has brought beautiful weather and we have loved being outside just about everyday. We have surprisingly had a LOT of rain lately though (which is highly unusual for Idaho) and I think we definitely don't have to worry about a drought this year. Luckily when it rains it doesn't usually last all day, so we have still been able to do a lot outside. We bought a tee-ball set for Parker, and Ben took him out one day to try it out. He did pretty good, although his patience wasn't that long for it. He just wanted to swing the bat around after a while (typical boy!).

Daddy helping Parker get started

Parker going at it himself

Maddie had fun playing in the rocks while Parker was playing tee-ball

I love this girl's silliness!!

Maddie has been in to trying to dress herself lately. She loves to get her pants and shirt on (with help) and tries so hard to get socks and shoes on by herself. Then a couple of weeks ago I had just gotten the kids out of the bath and had started to get them dressed. I was getting clothes out of their drawers when I looked over and saw Maddie trying to get a pair of Parker's underwear on over her diaper. She was so determined and trying very hard, so I helped her out. She and Parker had quite a fun time running around together with underwear on. It was cute.

hugging each other

Then again the other day when I was putting laundry away, they each grabbed a pair of underwear and put them on their heads as "hats." I hope my kids don't become too obsessed with underwear!!


We babysat my friend's little girl, Joslin. She was 11 months old (I think she just had her 1st birthday) and was WAY cute. Madisyn just loves little babies and just couldn't keep her hands off of Joslin. It was funny because Joslin (who is 8 months younger than Maddie, but has very tall parents) is as big as Maddie.

best friends forever??

Parker got his very first nursery wound. Of course, it was self inflicted. The kids were cleaning up the blocks and he was helping, but also running around while he was "helping." He went to put a block in the container and fell forward and landed on the edge of it. He had a fat lip (as you can see), his tooth punctured the outside of his lip, he had a big red bruise there, and he had a black bruise on his gums above his front tooth. It was a lot of bleeding just because of the location, but he tried to be brave. He's got a scar there from it now, but hopefully he will have learned not to run around in church!

This is just a funny picture I thought I'd include. When Parker gets in trouble, he goes in "time-out" and recently I've added putting his nose on the wall when he's really in trouble (it's quite more effective than just regular time-out). Madisyn thinks it's cool (she thinks anything Parker does is cool), so she often goes over and joins him and I have to stop her so she doesn't distract Parker. This particular day, however, they were BOTH being bad so when she went over and joined him, I let her.

We also got off of Craigs List a new toy for our house. The kids have had so much fun with it. It takes up our entire living room so we bring it out completely only sometimes, but we'll let them play with just parts of it sometimes too (like we have just the tent out, or the "house" and one of the tubes, etc.

The other day I had just the tubes out for the kids and they were being so silly with them. They love to stand inside of them while they "hide" and then they pop out of them which of course produces lots of laughs and giggles. Parker also loves to roll around the living room and down the hall inside one of the tubes too, although I'm still so surprised that he never runs in to a million things.

I have found a new hobby. While I still love making cakes... (this is one I made for a baby shower)

...my friends and I have recently learned to decorate hair clips. They are so fun and so easy, and I love making them!! Here are some of the clips I've made:

and here are some of the bugs I have made.

The bugs are a little big more time consuming and a little trickier, but I actually like making these the most. My friend's friend is opening a baby boutique store in August and she is going to have us start selling them there. We're so excited!!!

And here's a little update about Maddie. Have you noticed anything different about her in the last few months? Well, here's a picture of her taken back in January.

and another in February. See all her hair? See how long it was getting? See how gorgeous it was??? . . .

. . . And then this was her in early April.

What?????

So around the end of Feb/early March, Maddie's hair started falling out. This was quite alarming I assure you. We took her to the doc who said he had never seen a toddler's hair fall out like this, and he sent us to a dermatologist. Well it ended up being a simple but ridiculous cause. Because Maddie had been anemic from Oct-Feb, it had paused her hair growth. Then once her hair started growing again when she was finally not anemic (it took FOREVER for us to get her levels back up!), it was pushing all the dead hair out to made room for the new growing hair. So she was losing her hair. It was funny though, because most of the hair she lost was from her right side of her head and not from her left. As you can see from the picture above, she lost most of her bangs and as you can kind of see from the picture below, she's pretty close to having a bald spot on the back of her head on her right side. We've had to trim her hair several times to even it up so that she wouldn't have hair down to her shoulders on her left side, and practically no hair on her right. Poor girl!!

But at last her hair has finally finally finally started to grow back. She has bangs again and her hair is long enough (beside her baldish spot) for me to put hair clips in again. We'll see how long it takes before I can put her hair in pig tails again (pout pout).


Our whole family will be in Pittsburgh for six weeks starting July 28th (July 28th-Sept 8th) while Ben has that time in between semesters. Me and the kids get to spend lots of time with my family and friends that are there, and Ben will be helping my sister with her home security business there. Well, that's all for the update for now. Hopefully it won't take me two months again to post, but we'll see. Hope you're all doing well!!

Happy Mother's Day Mom!

I made this for my Mom for Mother's Day. We love you Mom!!

Make a Smilebox scrapbook

Grandpa's house

One of the things we love about living here in Idaho again is that we're near my grandparents and we get to go visit them. Before my family moved to Pittsburgh in '95 (from here, Idaho Falls), we spent so many good times there. It was my favorite place to go as a child. We would roam around the farm, hide in "the forest", play all kinds of games, climb the trees, play by the canal, go tubing in the canal, pick rasberries and strawberries and eat them, have sleep-overs in the big yard, play "Ghost in the Graveyard" late into the night, and all kinds of other things. So when we had yet another day of glorious sunshine today (yeah!!) I decided it would be fun to take the kids out to Grandpa's to visit and to "explore" the farm. They loved it! I mean Parker had been out there last summer, but since Maddie wasn't even walking then she of course hadn't. So now that they could both be out there running around and with Parker being older and way more interested in every little thing he sees, it was a lot different. Parker had to go see the tractors first of course.

Then Parker had to use the potty, so I took him to the old out house. Okay, just kidding. I didn't make him use it (he didn't really have to go), I just got them to get their pictures by it. :-) (It's filled in and everything by now of course) Then we made our way over to some old equipment that's still laying around.

And finally we ended up at the tire swing. Us kids used to spend HOURS on this thing when we were young, swinging way up high, twisting it up so we'd make ourselves sick spinning around and around. So it was fun to see Maddie having fun on it (Parker was too busy looking at other stuff so he didn't get on).

It was so fun to get pictures of the kids out on the farm where I used to play when I was little! I had such a fun childhood that I kind of wish we could guarantee my kids to grow up here like I did. But alas we can only guarantee them two years (while Ben finishes school). I guess that will have to do for now. I'm just glad we can give them at least that much! I love my grandparents so much!!

On a side note, at the end of this last semester for Ben (a week ago), he had to go up to BYU-Idaho to hand in one last thing and so me and the kids went with him. We got another picture of the family up there on campus, so here it is:

She's finally 18 months!!

Maddie has finally hit that magical and really fun age of 18 months. Wahoo!! It's magical for us because that means that she is finally old enough to go to nursery!! In our church, the kids get to go into nursery once they're old enough to be away from their parents (they're in there for two of the three meetings-Sacrament Meeting we are all together as families). They're in nursery until they turn three, and then they get to go into Primary classes. So this means that church isn't a complete wrestling match anymore and Ben and I get to actually listen in our classes!! YEAH!!

So here's some updates about our girl. We just took her to her well child checkup today. She is a whooping 19 lbs 11oz (yes, I'm being very sarcastic) and 29.5 inches, just 2 lbs and 2 inches more than at her 12 month. That puts her at the 2nd percentile for weight and 5th percentile for height. Her head is actually at the 64the percentile though (never thought of her as having a big head!). Compared to Parker at his 18 mo checkup, she weighs almost exactly the same, but is 2 inches shorter. She is STILL anemic even with iron vitamins (has been off and on for four of the last six months), but doc says that may just be how she is.

Maddie is such a funny girl. She's got so much spunk and is always doing crazy things around the house. Here's some of the things she loves to do:

She loves to walk around the house with a blanket over her head. I don't know how she doesn't run into things, but she doesn't.

Maddie LOVES blueberries, and pretty much any other kind of fruit. But especially blueberries. She also loves cheese (asks for it ALL the time), and gummies are her favorite treat.

Maddie likes to use things for something it's not usually used for. Just the other day I found her using her beach ball for a bench to sit on to play her little piano.
She always gets the toy basket and dumps it (which I groan at every time she does) and sits in it and plays. Sometimes Parker will push her around in it too (not the wicker one of course), which she loves. She also likes to play under their kid table, and Parker will usually join her under there.
She has somewhat recently learned to pull over her little chair to wherever she needs so that she can get to something she wants. She loves to do this to grab things off the counters, play with the light switches, look out the front window, and peak at what Mom's making for dinner.
Maddie loves baths. Every single time we change her diaper she asks, "Baff? Baff? Baff?"

Maddie loves her brother so much. When she wakes up in the morning or after a nap and comes out and finds Parker, she gets so excited and gives him a hug. She also loves to pretend an injury so that she can say to her brother "Ow, Ow" and he'll kiss her better. It's precious. (here Parker is kissing her "injured" hand)

But at the same time, Maddie is also quite the sass. She just love love loves to pester her brother to death. I think it's her way of getting him to pay more attention to her. An example of how she pesters is when they're sitting on the chair together (which they both love to do), she'll just reach over and put her hand in his face, and she'll start rubbing his face all over, and he'll kind of push it off, and she'll put it right back on, he'll push it off, she'll put it back on, etc. It's actually kind of funny to watch and Parker really takes it like a champ (well, most of the time). He's definitely learned to put up with a lot more than he used to.
Maddie loves is when Parker takes off the cushion of the red chair and they both climb up and "dance" on it (meaning they jump up and down). This also happens a couple of times a day, as it is one of their favorite pass times.

Maddie is also obsessed with walking on her tip-toes and walks like that all over the house..and church.. and in the stores (I get really surprised that her legs don't get tired because of how much she does it!). And she loves to go places...any place besides our house...and several times throughout the day she will go and get her shoes, stand by the door, and say "Go? Go? Go!!" and reach for the door.Maddie loves playing outside. Not only does she go to the door and ask "Go?" several times throughout the day, but she also tries to run to the backyard every time we go into the garage to get into the car. She'll grab an outside toy, go stand by the garage door and wait patiently. If we open the garage door before we've gotten her into the car (we quickly learned not to do that) then she would run out and head for the back yard where the swing set and slide are. She still puts up a little bit of a fight when we put her in her car seat instead of going out back, but she's gotten a little better.

She loves the slide, but the swings are her favorite

Maddie likes to make a mess, especially when it comes to eating. About half of the time that she eats, her food ends up in her hair and all over her face. This is not because she hasn't mastered a spoon but because she inevitably ends up ditching the spoon so that she can squish the food in her fingers, rub it on her face, and spread it in her hair. It's loads of fun for her I'm sure, but the clean up sure isn't. :-)

Here she is just from tonight, putting yogurt in her hair, over and over again.

Maddie still only has two of her top front teeth. She has all four of her bottom teeth and she has actually gotten three of her four molars (the fourth one is very close to being out), but we are still waiting for those other two top teeth to come in.

Maddie has gotten to be quite the talker these days and says at least 40 different words. She loves identifying body parts, especially eye brows (which she started saying on her own much to our surprise). She still loves doing animals sounds and besides the basic ones, she loves doing noises for frogs, owls, snakes, donkeys, turkeys, elephants, dinosaurs, and more. She tells me "pee-yew" when she has a dirty diaper, and loves asking for her "nilk" (milk). We've gotten rid of the bottle all together (we used to rock her while she drank a bottle, and then we'd put her down to sleep) and she uses just a sippy cup.

One weird quick about Maddie is what she does when she gets surprised. Most kids/people open their mouth and gasp when they are surprised, right? Well Maddie not only opens her mouth, but sticks her tongue out every time. I don't know why, but she has always done it that way. It startles some people because they think she's sticking her tongue out at them, but really she's just acting surprised. What a funny girl!

She has just grown up so fast and she definitely spices up our lives in so many ways. We just love our little girl to death!