Happy Birthday to SWBy!!!

SWBy turned 2 last month!!! The time has gone by so quickly! He is such a fun little boy! It amazes me how fast little ones learn! They are like little sponges, absorbing everything. SWBy has already learned the art of teasing his sister and he does it well. He loves to tease her and yet he wants to be doing whatever she is doing. He just follows her around and then in the right moment will take her toy and wait, with a huge grin on his face, for her reaction and for her to start chasing him. We're still trying to teach Bailey how to react to someone teasing her. My mom came up for SWBy's birthday this year and apparently I didn't capture all the birthday memories I should have because I don't have pictures of my mom and SWBy. Above, SWBy is opening a few presents on his actual birthday. Spencer's dad and sister happened to be up here to celebrate SWBy's birthday with us as well. Above is SWBy with his cousins at his birthday party, very excited to open presents. I'm not sure who was more excited SWBy or the cousins.
It may be a bit premature, but we got SWBy a bike for his birthday. He is always climbing on Bay's and really wants to ride it so we got him his own and are hoping this summer he'll be able to start riding it. Of course we need to wait until it warms up and we stop getting snow and rain storms. This is the time of year I really miss Arizona!!!

I thought SWBy's cake turned out pretty cute. Of course it would; there's a picture of SWBy on it!!!

On SWBy's birthday weekend we took Bay snow skiing for the first time!!! She loved it!!! We didn't have the best weather or the day I had hoped to have but it turned out to be a pretty fun day for Bay. She was put in a private lesson and my poor mom sat in the car with SWBy because the weather was bothering him. Spencer and I skied a little bit while Bay was in her lesson. She did great! Spencer and I were a little rusty on the skiing, it had been 10 years since I last skied and 15 or so for Spencer. Above: Bay and dad sleeping after a full day of skiing. Thanks mom for a fun weekend! (Of course I didn't get any pictures of Bay skiing because I didn't bring my camera. I was not very good at taking pictures this weekend!)

The picture above cracks me up! I was trying to get a picture of the 2 of them together and Bay, the nice sister she is, was trying to help keep SWBy in the picture! This was St. Patrick's Day! We went to Bay's preschool party and it was fantastic! We had Reuben Sandwiches! They were so good! (Apparently it was all about the food for me! :o))The kids has a great time! Lots of games and finding treasures!

Here the kids are in their Easter clothes. I love Children's Place! I thought the kids looked so cute in their matching clothing!

Apparently Bailey came up with a few poses for dad to take pictures of them. This is the sitting pose!

My dad, and Step-mom, and sister came up the week before Easter! We had a fantastic time with them and it was so good to see them! Apparently March wasn't a great month for me to take pictures because I didn't get any pictures with them! They took Bay skiing and said she did great! I decided to stay home with SWBy that day so we didn't have to have another episode of someone sitting in the car with him! Thanks guys for taking Bay skiing and for a fun week!!!

Where does the time go???

February has come and gone and so quickly! We've had another fun and busy month. I just barely hung my "HOME" blocks last month and I think they turned out really cute. My friend Nikki made them and my mom bought them for me at my friend Jessica's boutique when we were home last Thanksgiving. I just added the ribbon, Spencer hung my knobs and there hang the blocks! It completes the wall for me~every time I looked at it before it just felt like something was missing!

This was Valentine's Day morning right before Church. I took this picture as they all came down the stairs and Bailey, as you can tell, was really excited to get her new Sleeping Beauty Polly Pocket!
After Church on Valentine's Day we flew to AZ and then drove to Mexico on Monday with my mom. My mom has been itching to get us down to her new condo in Mexico so we decided February, while SWBy still flew for free, was the month to do it! She has a beautiful place there and what's so great is that the beach her condo is on is all private beach. The kids had so much fun playing in the sand and in the ocean. SWBy didn't care for the ocean water at first but eventually enjoyed sitting in it! SWBy sure enjoyed playing in the sand. He was so funny he kept taking shovels full of sand and throwing the sand at us but he mostly just kept hitting himself with the sand!

Grandma took Bay to look for sea shells on the beach and Bay absolutely loved doing that. There were so many big, full shells on the beach. She collected quite a few! Bay sure enjoys playing in the water. She was so excited to get to the beach. There's nothing better, after being stuck in a cold place, than spending time on a warm beach in February!!!

This was a highlight for the kids! They sure loved being in this tub on mom's balcony! Poor SWBy got sunblock in his eyes so he was having a hard time opening them!

SWBy really enjoyed Bay's sunglasses, but only if he could wear them upside down! The kids were such good travelers!

Bay and SWBy got to spend some time with their cousins when we were home and they sure had a good time! My mom has recently redone one of the bedrooms in her house just for all the grandsons. She had one room in her house that was no question all for Bailey. It's as girly as they come! So she did a room for the boys. Above is the bedroom. (The picture doesn't do the room justice!) There is a cute table and 4 matching chairs and that's what the kids are sitting in while watching the TV.

This is my best friend Jessica's little girl Hannah! She and Bay are 9 months apart and will be the same school year! They sure enjoyed spending time together. It's fun to see them be friends when Jess and I are such good friends!

Saturday night is the time to fly if you want a flight that's not full! I loved it! Our flight on the way to AZ was full which was less comfortable! On the way home we got our own row, which was so nice for SWBy! He got the window and LOVED to look outside!

My mom bought Spencer a new beanie from Mexico so now Spencer can stop wearing SWBy's and he and the kids can match!

SWBy LOVES this hat! He has been wearing it all the time. One night he wanted it at bedtime so Spencer gave it to him and when I came to check on him this is what I found!

No reason for this picture other than I love it! This is one of the family pictures Jess took at Thanksgiving.

We love our movie time and popcorn!

Spencer is such a great dad! The kids get so excited for him to come home from work. They love to play with dad!

Bring on the New Year!

So far 2010 is shaping up to be a really fun year! January 15th-18th I got to go to New York with my mom! It was just the 2 of us and we had a really nice time! It's been about 10 years since I've been there and I think it's always a fun place to visit. Below is a picture of the Empire State Building. When we went to visit it, it was raining and cloudy so there was no visibility on top. So instead of going up for pictures we stayed down below, looked up, and snapped a picture. You can see how cloudy it was, you can't even see the top of the Building. Something my mom and I always enjoy doing together is visiting museums. Below we are at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts standing in front of what they believe to be an early Michelangelo sculpture.

We went to visit Ground Zero and this is the best picture I could snap of it. What they are building in it's place is going to be really pretty. They are leaving in place the foundations of the Twin Towers and building 5 buildings around it. (At least this is the information we were told.)
Below snapping a picture in the MET.

Mom took me to a fantastic Lobster place. Here mom is with her lobster bib on, getting ready to dig in!

Here is our food! It was way too pretty not to snap a photo! I ordered scallops and I shouldn't have! They were good but it was way too much food! I should have just split the lobster with mom because I really enjoyed it! We probably ordered too much because we were starving when we got there!

The next 2 pictures are from a fun girls night out! We went to see Twi-lite at Desert Star Theater in Murray! It was so great! At least I really enjoyed it! 8 of us from my ward went. It was such a fun night, apart from waiting over an hour at Cheesecake Factory just to leave and eat somewhere else because if we stayed we wouldn't have made our show! If you've never been to Desert Star you need to go! I've seen a few things there now and they always have me laughing and laughing. Twi-lite was a spoof and had me laughing all night!

The rest of our fun group.

I just thought this was a photo opp not to be missed! I don't care if you read my blog or not, but this is too funny not to read!!! Bailey has been begging to go outside and use her sidewalk chalk, so a couple of weeks ago it was dry enough for her to do so! She loves to practice her letters and as she was finishing Spencer was outside with her and she said, "Hey dad, come see my f n' b's." Spencer was taken back for a minute when he realized she had written "F B F B F B."

It may have been dry out that day but it was still chilly! Bay's poor hands were so red and cold, but she didn't seem to mind!

One of the few things SWBy eats is Peanut Butter! The kid loves it and I'm glad he does because we're able to get some fat, protein, and calories in him that way! This is dinner one night after enjoying some peanut butter! He had peanut butter every where!

This cute wooden rocking horse was mine when I was little and SWBy loves it! He gets on and and says nothing but "weeee."

Christmas!!!

I loaded my pictures backwards again! So we'll go from newest to oldest! For Christmas from my Dad and Step-Mom I got a ton of vinyl to put on my walls! I love it! And for Christmas from Spencer I got the wall below painted red, my rod, and cute knobs which aren't yet hung because I don't yet have frames for them. They'll go beneath the pictures of SWB and Bay. This project sure gave Spencer a run for his money! The texture in our corners is awful to paint on! The red kept bleeding through to the side walls and then the side wall color kept bleeding through to the red when we would try to fix it! It was a pain. I finally bought fine tipped paint brushes and Spencer fixed our bleeding paint problem with those! It was time consuming! Spencer knew I wanted this done before Christmas so he spent all of Tuesday, December 22 working on it for me! THANK YOU SPENCE! After we got this wall all done I kept walking back and forth just starring at it. It has been plain and blank since we moved in and I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do with it. I got this idea from the Rod Works blog and I love it! Below is some more of the vinyl that I got and hung. It sure makes a difference making my walls less plain! I love it!
During December I put out a Christmas candy dish on our kitchen table! That was one of SWby's favorite things this year! He was constantly eating the candy. We went through quite a few Hershey's kisses. Below SWBy has helped himself to some Kisses. He peeled them open and threw the wrappings on the floor. I was upstairs doing something otherwise I think I would have put a stop to this sooner!

Below Bay and SWBy are getting ready to have a movie night!

SWBy got this truck from Unlce Ev for Christmas! The kids love it!

Christmas morning after opening all of our fun stuff!

Bay had a Christmas dance and tumbling demonstration this year! It was so cute! All of the girls in her classes did such a nice job and we really, really enjoyed watching Bay. She is learning so much and such a cute little dancer and tumbler!

I hosted our preschool Christmas party this year and we decided to put on a little program this year. It was really cute! It was only about 3 minutes long but it was cute and the kids did a great job! Bailey was Mary. That's her holding the star.

Fun stuff in November!

We've had a fun November! Bailey and I had the opportunity to go to Disney's Princesses on Ice! It was so much fun and Bailey absolutely LOVED it! She keeps asking when we can go again! I really enjoyed the time I had to spend with my sweet and sassy little girl! I hope to do more things like this with Bay! We went with her friend Lauren and her mom, my friend Jenny. Before we went to Princesses on Ice we went to dinner at the Garden Room on top of the Joseph Smith Memorial building. It was so much fun! Below is Bay and me and Lauren and Jenny.

I'm sure you all know New Moon came out this month and my friends and I went to the midnight showing again! It was so fun! I thought the movie was so good and way better than the first! Below my friend Melanie and I are waiting in line to get into the movie theater. It was pretty chilly and her husband was nice enough to bring us a pizza! We were in line by 5:45. Some were in line as early as 9 or 10 am. They showed Twilight first at 9 before New Moon which is why we were there so early!
Below, finally in the movie theater, (L-R) Natasha, Melanie and me! Yes we made shirts! We got free iron on prints! The backs were all different but the fronts were the same - "Team Edward!" After New Moon I came home, finished packing our van, got about an hour of sleep and then Spencer woke me up to drive to AZ for a week of Thanksgiving fun! Below is just part of our Thanksgiving party. This was my table and the family members lucky enough to sit with me! Or maybe they were unfortunate to sit with me, either way this was my table. (My mom, my brother, my dad, and of course Spencer.) Thanksgiving dinner and dessert was so good!

Below, we are off to the park for a marshmallow gun war! Bay and SWBy really liked their cousin Presley's wagon! It was fun to be home and see everyone. My dad, sister, and stepmom came down from CA to spend Thanksgiving with us! So everyone in my family was there.

This is the very first year I've done Black Friday shopping! There were some deals going on that I couldn't resist! So of course I roped by best friends into going with me! Our malls in AZ opened at midnight so we were there at 10:30 waiting to get in. I'm so glad because they let us into the mall at 11:30 and we could line up outside the store we wanted to go in. Thankfully we were there early because the line to the Disney Store was really long and we were among the first in line! I was done shopping for SWB and Bay by 12:15! I saved 50% on the princess castle Bay wanted which I thought was well worth the 12 am shopping time!

Here Jessica, Tangi, and I are in the Children's Place capturing our 12 am shopping spree. Thanks so much for going with me guys, it was so fun!

After leaving the insanity at the mall we grabbed some food at Denny's for old times sake! We were a little slap happy by this point and found quite a few people staring at us!

The Friday after Thanksgiving, Spencer's aunt Jeanine had us all over to her house for dinner and games. It was a lot of fun and I found that we must get some of these little cars that she has. My kids loved them! Above is Bay and her cute cousin Anna! They are such good little friends.

Here SWBy is! He loved this little car! Luckily there were 4 of them because he absolutely did not want to give his up!

The Saturday after Thanksgiving Spencer had the opportunity to go to the ASU game with his brothers & brother-in-law! He had a great time! Thanks BJ and Ev!

One of my friends thought it would be fun this year to make PJ pants together. So last Friday a few of us got together and made PJ pants. I made some for our entire family! Spencer's and mine were way too big and we had to rip out the seems and cut them down a bit! SWBy's I didn't use a pattern for and had to rip out his "seat" seam to give him a little more room in the bum. Bay's were the only pants I didn't have to do over! I was thankful for that! Oh, well! Live and learn! Hopefully next time will go smoother!