Visit from Jessica and Colin

This month we had the opportunity to spend some time with my sister Jessica and her son Colin who were visiting from Oklahoma. Bridget loves any opportunity to play with cousins, so she was very excited for their visit. They stayed in Salt Lake with Megan, so we only got to see them briefly 3 of the days they were here. Hopefully it won't be too long before we see them again.

Bridget Learns to Ride Her Bike

After practicing here and there for a couple of weeks, Bridget's finally learned to ride her bike without training wheels! Here's her first solo ride:

 

To aid in the process and make it a little easier for Nate and I to help her (okay, really it was Nate much more than me), we used this handy device. Boy was it worth it! No hunching over and trying to hold onto her seat while running with her.



She was pretty nervous at first, but gained more confidence with each practice session. She probably would have learned in a day or two if we'd taken the time to work on it more consistently. She was doing pretty well at balancing. Today it was focusing on her starting and stopping by herself that gave her the confidence she needed to remove the Balance Buddy. She does great riding in our cul-de-sac, so now we just need to work on riding on the sidewalk. When we tried that, she panicked when she had to try drive straight enough to stay on the sidewalk and kept riding into the grass. I'm sure she'll be fine in a day or two.

 

Another big milestone accomplished! Woot! Woot!

1st Day of Preschool (Year 2)

Bridget was anxiously awaiting the start of preschool for this year as much as I was, and it's finally here. Last week we went to a party at her teacher's house so she could get to know the kids in her class and parents could get all the info they needed. That just made her even more excited to go.

 

This year she's going to a different preschool than last year. Her teacher from last year only does 2 days a week, and I really wanted her to go more since she's almost 5. I also wasn't very impressed with her old teacher's lack of organization and communication with parents. Her new teacher, Miss Cindy, is quite the opposite, and we both love her already. Bridget gets to go Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for 3 hours each day. It should be a great year for her, and I'm sure she'll make some good friends and be more than ready for kindergarten next year.

 

When I picked her up the first day, her teacher said she loves her smile and that she is always smiling. Bridget and I had talked a lot beforehand about being friendly instead of shy and how to introduce herself to others. I asked how she did, and she informed me that she was friendly and even invited other kids to play with her. Yea!

Brigham City Temple Open House

Like many others in our area, we had the opportunity to take our girls to the open house for the Brigham City Utah LDS Temple. We took Bridget to a temple open house a couple of years ago, but she was too little to remember going, so it was fun to have her be a little bit older this time around. Hopefully she got a sense of how beautiful they are as well as a bit of an understanding of what goes on inside. She's seen pictures of the insides of various temples in a magazine we have at home, so she was quick to let me know that she already knew what to expect.

It was a beautiful, hot day, so we got in and out of the hot parking garage where are the pre and post-tour stuff happened. Felicity was super wiggley so trying to get good pictures on the temple grounds was no easy task. She did enjoy looking at all the pictures of Jesus in the temple and the animals in some of the scenic murals. When I asked Bridget what she liked best, she said everything was her favorite.

We are so fortunate to have yet another temple so close to us and to be able to share this experience with our children.

My Summer Project

I'm one of those people that always has a list of "projects" I'd like to accomplish in my spare time. Some of them sit on that list for a long time because daily life and other things usually are a higher priority. This summer, I decided to tackle a project that's been on that list for about 5.5 years now. It was about that long ago that we acquired some old furniture from my parents' house, including a bedroom set consisting of 2 large chests of drawers and a nightstand. They had an oak finish which I do not prefer, and the hardware was in need of some updating. It took me about 6 weeks from start to finish to do all 3 pieces, but I'm pretty happy with how they turned out. The worst part of it was stripping the old finish off. It was a messy, smelly job that was then followed by a light sanding. I used a gel stain (only because the color I liked best only came that way), and it took 10-12 hours to dry in between coats which was partly why it took me so long. I had to do 3 coats, but the difficulty was that the sides and top were a veneer and didn't absorb the stain as well. Most of the veneer took 4 coats.

Here's a before shot of one of the dressers.

Here's what the drawers looked like after just one coat. The bottom drawer is the bare wood.
And here's the finished product. It really looks much better in person - especially since our camera is not the greatest.

Here's the other dresser (sorry no before shot).

And here's the nightstand.

It certainly took much longer to do this than I originally anticipated, but I'm very pleased with the end result. And I'm happy to check this off my project list.

Kimberly's Birthday

Nate knows birthdays are a big deal to me, and since he botched Mother's Day this year, I think he felt the need to make it up to me for my birthday. He did a pretty good job too - especially since the celebration lasted more than one day.

Several months ago, we found out that the musical Wicked was coming back to Salt Lake again. Since we weren't able to get tickets the last time it was here, we were happy to find out that Nate had access to buying tickets before the general public since his employer is a sponser. And we also found out it would be here around my birthday. Happy birthday to me!

We ended up going to the Saturday matinee a couple of days beforehand because we figured it would be easier to leave our kiddos that way. Luckily, my sister Emily happened to be in town with her family, so we were able to leave our kids with her and most of the Williams family at Jennine's house. Wicked was awesome!

As a little surprise on my birthday, Nate and Bridget snuck out while Felicity and I were still sleeping and went to get us Chunky Cinnamon French Toast from Kneaders. We love breakfast at our house, and that French Toast is one of my favorites.

Nate also knows how much I love cake, so he decided he was going to make my cake himself this year (and from scratch I might add). The finished product not only turned out beautiful, but it tasted as good as it looked. Apparently he's learned a thing or two from watching me make cakes so many times.This was the best picture we could get of the three of us together. Felicity just wanted to stick her little hand in the cake so badly as you can tell from the look on her face and her stretched out arm.For dinner, we went and got Zupa's and brought it home to enjoy with the cake and ice cream. We love that place, so it made for a great end to a great birthday.

Random Summer Fun

Our kids LOVE to be outside, so we spend a lot of time out there every day. And Bridget's got quite the farmer tan to prove it. Here's a little of the fun we've been having this summer.
Our neighbors gave us this playhouse a couple of summers ago, and it's gotten plenty of use since then. In the spring Felicity would mostly just go in and out of the door, but now she loves climbing the steps and going down the slide all by herself.

Lots of hot days means lots of fun in the pool. They both love the water, and even Felicity loves taking turns going down the slide and into the pool.

We've gotten the slip and slide out a couple of times too, but they seem to prefer the pool.

Most of our time outside is actually spent in the front yard so that Bridget can ride her bike around and around the cul-de-sac. She never seems to tire of it, and it makes me realize how nice it is to live in a very quiet cul-de-sac so she can ride around to her heart's content.

Oh, how we love summer!

Bear World

With as many road trips as we've taken between Utah and West Yellowstone, it amazes me that we never stopped at Bear World near Rigby, Idaho...until now. On our way home this time, we planned to go because we'd heard such wonderful things about it from many different people and knew our girls would love it and the break it would give them from the car. It was well worth it. And as an added sidenote, you can save a dollar per person if you buy your tickets online. Here's a few pictures from the couple of hours we spent there.

The first part of the drive-through section is a bunch of deer and elk including this very rare white elk.

The second section is the bears. They have over 45 different bears including 3 grizzlies. Before the guy opened the gate to let us drive through that section, he warned us to keep our windows up at all times and not to stop for very long because the bears will climb on vehicles if you do, and they'd been doing it a lot that day. That's comforting. It was pretty cool though. My favorite were the 5 bears playing in the pond together.

Every time we go to West Yellowstone, Nate's always wanting to see a moose, and it's been a few years since I've seen one myself. Nate got his chance at Bear World. They have one moose named Rumplestiltzkin or "Stiltz" as they like to call him.

They also had a stream with fish and ducks to feed which we all enjoyed. The ducks were pretty quick and it was fun trying to see if the fish could beat the ducks to the food.

Both of the girls love animals, so the petting zoo was fun too. They had goats, deer, chickens, and a peacock.

Last was the "amusement park" rides. They only had a handful, and they're geared toward kids ages 3-10. Bridget loved them enough that she kept wanting just one more ride. It wasn't very busy while we were there, so she had plenty of rides and no waiting in line.

All in all, it was a pretty fun place, and something I'd definitely recommend to others. I'm just glad we finally took the time to check it out for ourselves.

July West Yellowstone Trip #2

Our two weeks in-between trips flew by, and before we knew it we were loaded in the car headed for West Yellowstone again. Felicity hated the road trip two weeks before, so I was dreading being in the car with her again, but it went much, much better this time. I couldn't resist taking this shot of her napping:
The purpose of our trip this time was for Nate's family's annual "family reunion" with his parents, siblings and their families. Alysha and her family couldn't make it this time, but the rest of us got to spend one day all together. Bridget and Tanner (who are only 5 months apart in age) were practically inseperable for the short period of time Tanner was there.

One of the favorite activies at Grandma and Grandpa's house is going for RZR rides. Nate took the kids on lots and lots of them. Even Felicity loved it.

The one day we spent all together included a trip into town for lunch and checking out the new ladder truck Grandpa just got for the fire station. The kids loved going up, but only went up 30-40 feet. I got to go up 80 feet with Scott, Brant, and Matt.

And here's a view of the town from up there:

After that, Grandpa took the older grandkids to the IMAX theater to see a movie about bears and then for a round of mini-golf at the town's 9-hole mini-golf course.

Everyone but us left Saturday night and Sunday morning, but we stuck around until Thursday. We mostly just relaxed and ventured into town a few times. We were hoping to let the kids play in the lake a little, but it was so high that there wasn't really any beach for them to play on.

As far as our next trip, we'd love to go up in the fall when the Park and town are much quieter, but I don't know if that will happen this fall. If we don't make it back, at least we'll get to experience it in winter for the first time when we go for Christmas.

4th of July West Yellowstone Trip

Even though we have another trip planned to West Yellowstone later this month, we wanted to make a quick trip over the 4th of July so we would also be able to spend some time with my extended family at the cabin. We got there on the afternoon of the 4th, and spent that afternoon at the cabin letting the girls play on the beach and visiting with family. Sadly, we didn't get any great pictures there, and we thought we'd be doing more of the same the next day. Too bad cooler temperatures and rain ruined that plan. We headed over to the cabin the next day anyway since Nate's mom had to work and his dad was out of town on a forest fire.

On Friday the weather warmed back up enough to be outside, so Bridget got to help Grandma mow the lawn with the tractor.

Later that day we headed in to town for dinner and a trip to the Grizzley and Wolf Discovery Center. We went last summer, but it was fun to go again. The wolves were much more active this time and even howled for us.

We had to take advantage of photo opportunities like these while we were there: (Notice Felicity was more interested in touching the animal statues than smiling for the camera)

And just to prove that I was there too and not always hiding behind the camera:

We look forward to coming back again in a couple of weeks!

15 Months

Our little Miss Felicity continues to keep us busy these days, and even though she's still quite a handful, she's actually improving slightly when it comes to staying out of trouble. She's pretty good at leaving the toilet paper alone now and staying out of the garbages which is nice. On the other hand, her climbing has improved so that she can climb up on couches and chairs (including our counter height kitchen chairs) which sometimes leads to more trouble like playing with the window blinds. She's also able to go down the stairs proficiently and even tries to walk up and down them while holding on to hands or the banister.

Here's a few more random tidbits about her:

• She continues to be a picky eater but is starting to expand her food preferences a little. Her favorites include cheese and any kind of cracker.
• Her vocabulary is limited to about 4 words (and the fourth is kind of a stretch but I'm counting it): dada, mama, hi, and uh-oh (this one actually comes out sounding more like a monkey sound "oo-oo-ah-ah-ah" but she says it for uh-oh)
• Rather than increase her vocabulary, she relies on pointing and other sounds (such as "eh" or "da") to communicate what she wants. Hopefully more words will be coming soon.
• She continues to love stuffed animals and blankets. She tends to rotate through which one is her favorite. For a while it was Pooh Bear, but for the last month or so it's been a Curious George that she stole off a shelf in Bridget's room.
• She loves to drink from straws which was helpful in the transition of getting rid of bottles completely.
• She loves to close doors and cupboards - even if you don't want them closed.
• Her sleeping patterns continue to be a mystery to us, and can be a great source of frustration at times. When she does sleep through the night, it's for 12-13 hours (Woot! Woot!), but when she doesn't, she'll scream for 2-3 hours in the middle of the night. And there's absolutely no reason we can determine why she'll sleep through the night some nights and not others. She's transitioning to one nap which may be playing a part in this problem.
• This one's related to the previous comment. Felicity is as stubborn as can be. I'll be honest and admit she gets that from me, but I'm pretty sure she's worse than I ever was. The screaming in the night is one prime example. And unlike most kids her age, she is not easily distracted when doing something naughty. If you tell her no, she smiles, laughs, and tries even harder to do whatever it is she was doing. I'm pretty sure she's the stubborn child my mom wished upon me many years ago as payback for my own stubborness.
• Even though she's a challenging toddler, she can be a real sweatheart too. She loves to give kisses - especially at naptime and bedtime. She also loves to say "Hi!" when you walk in a room or even to strangers. With her big personality and sweet smile, it's hard not to love her which helps makes up for the stubborness.
• Just like her sister, she loves to play outside, so we spend a lot of time in the yard.
• She loves water - taking baths, showers, playing in the wading pool. etc. If there's water to be found, she's playing in it.

Here's her stats from her checkup:

Height: 32 inches (90th percentile)

Weight: 22 lbs. 7 oz. (43rd percentile)

Head Circumference: 17.9 inches (36th percentile)

So she's tall and skinny (due to her picky eating). And she didn't cry a bit when she got her shot. Yea!

6th Anniversary and 80th Birthday Party

This month Nate's Grandma celebrated her 80th birthday. In honor of the big ocassion, she wanted to have all of her family together so she made everyone save the date a year in advance. Ironically, she had to change the date two more times a couple of months beforehand due to conflicts people had. The final date for the big party ended up being on our anniversary (not ideal to me but oh well). So everyone got together at Brant and Kirstin's house for lunch, visiting, and playtime for the kids which included a bounce house.

Here's the birthday girl with her husband and three sons.

Here's Dorothy with 6 of her great grandchildren (she's holding baby Walker who's kind of hard to see in this picture).

The kids had a great time in the bounce house. Even Felicity got in on all the action and loved hanging out with the big kids in there. I love how this picture of our girls turned out.

Notice the long pants and jackets people are wearing. We've had gorgeous spring weather and it even got up into the high 80s last weekend. Sadly, today was very windy and cold which put a bit of a damper on our outdoor party.

With the party taking up the majority of our day, we didn't have much time for an anniversary celebration, so we dropped our kids off at the hotel where everyone was staying so they could go swimming while we went on a hot date to Applebee's. Not exciting or fancy, but it was nearby and we needed to get our kids to bed at a decent hour. Happy 6 years of marriage to us!

Trip to the Zoo

With Nate's family in town for his Grandma's 80th birthday party, we decided to all head to the zoo the day before the big festivities. We hadn't been for a couple of years and were planning on taking our girls this summer anyway, so it was nice to have grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins to go with too. It ended up being in the high 80s that day, so it was plenty hot. Apparently, everybody else in the state decided to go that day too because finding parking was a bit of a nightmare and the zoo was more crowded than I preferred. I'm assuming the reason for the crowds was that school just let out and that a new arctic exhibit just opened up a couple of weeks ago.

The new exhibit was certainly our favorite. The polar bear was very active and constantly in and out of the water. We even got to see him eat as they threw fish to him in the water. On the other side of that exhibit was a seal who speedily swam all over the place.
When Bridget saw the carousel, she begged for a ride, and cousins Jaxon, Tanner, and Saydee went too.

When we saw this rhinoceros statue, we thought it would be fun to get a picture of the grand kids on it which turned out to be a bit of a comedy with two of them under the age of 2 and trying to get everybody to look at the camera at the same time. This was the best shot I got.It certainly was a fun afternoon, and both of our girls were so wiped out after that they napped most of the way home.

Bridget's Preschool Graduation

The whole concept of "preschool graduation" is kind of funny to me since they didn't seem to exist when I was a kid, but now they seem to be all the rage. And Bridget actually still has one more year of preschool before starting kindergarten, but all of the kids "graduate" even if they still have a year left. It would make more sense to just call it an end of the year program and let those kids who are moving on to kindergarten "graduate," but then you might have a bunch of kids having meltdowns if everything isn't equal. Oh well. It was a fun event nonetheless.

Here she is ready to perform

And here she is quite proud of herself afterward

Here's a video of the Macarena Months song they sang:

And here's a video of her getting her graduation cap while sharing her answers to some questions her teacher asked her beforehand. You may need to turn your volume way up to hear it well enough:

Congratulations on finishing your first of MANY years of school, Bridget!

Memorial Day Family Outing

It's been a couple of years since we've visited Temple Square, so we decided it was time to go again. Here's the girls in front of the Salt Lake Temple

The four of us in front of the reflection pool
In front of the Christus statue at the Visitors Center (I should mention this was Felicity's favorite part because she loves pictures and statues of Jesus. She kept running up to it and pointing and even tried to climb up a couple of times before we pulled her away).

We even went on a tour of the Conference Center

Overall we had perfect weather and a great time together as a family.

Bridget's Half Birthday

Bridget is now officially 4.5 years old. Most people assume she's at least 5 when they see her because she's so tall for her age, but sadly she still has another year before she starts kindergarten thanks to having a fall birthday.

Right now, she loves playing outside and riding her bike, playing games with anyone who'll play with her, dancing, singing (including making up her own songs), and drawing. She continues to be a great big sister and loves playing with Felicity, although there's starting to be a little more fighting now that Felicity expresses her dislikes and frustrations to her often bossy older sister. She also loves to have books read to her and is really into the Berenstain Bears right now. She prefers spending time with Mom and is into doing everything I do such as cleaning, putting on make-up, carrying a purse around, helping in the kitchen, and getting her nails painted. As girly as she is, she still enjoys wrestling with Dad too. She loves treats and chocolate, so we couldn't pass up the opportunity to make some cupcakes to celebrate her half-birthday. She picked chocolate with peanut butter frosting. Yay for being four and a half!