Kaylee Girl

Kaylee Joy, Now almost 15 months old!  How time flies!  She is absolutely beautiful.  The most beautiful little girl!  And she is growing up so fast and learning so much!  She brings joy into our home in so many ways!  She is talking so much too.  She has told me several times now that she needs her diaper changed.  I always ask her "Do we need to change you?" and I pat her bum.  So she will look at me and say "Change You" and pat her own bum!  Its' a trademark!!  She also loves to climb...she has figured out how to climb stairs like a pro!  She is so very fast! And she enjoys climbing up onto the fireplace and exploring the ashes and wood in there!  Oh goodness!  Kaylee has lately been experimenting with stools.  She attempts climbing up on the stool in the bathroom to wash her hands, but everytime since, her attempts have been unsuccessful and result in a tramatic fall.  But she keeps on trying!!  I try to keep the laundry room door closed, because otherwise, she just loves going in there and finding things in our cubbies.  Usually she will find goodies the boys brought home from school in their school bags.  She will sit there and work on opening packages, or bring them to me and say "bite? pease?" in her own cute voice.  Or she will get to the markers and crayons, find a piece of paper in our piles in our cubbies, and go to work coloring!  Needless to say, she is in to everything!  She is in explore-mode!  And messy, yes, though it is so fun to watch her explore and learn!  

 Now only a mother could love a face like this one!  Refried beans everywhere!  What a cutie!

 We took a bike ride one evening at the elementary school across the street.  We still don't have a infant carrier or a bike trailer to pull behind our bike yet, so she brought her own trike and spent her time waddling around exploring with her helmet on!  Since she's really good at walking and running now, she had to find a new skill to master.  So she would take my finger in her hand and make me help her step up the curb onto the sidewalk, walk a few paces, and then step down the curb.  Up and down the curb we went all the way around the parking lot.  This was something she was seriously interested in figuring out, and it was tricky!  She's got the determination of her daddy!

 Speaking of Daddy, she loves her daddy!  She gets so excited when he comes around.  If he is in his upstairs office, she follows him there.  Peeks in at him, goes in over and over and over, just missing him!  Nate will make her "fly."  He will throw her up in the air and catch her and she gets nervous, but loves it.  So he will fly her up one time while she squeals in laughter and smiles.  He will ask her "More?" and she will immediately shake her head no and say "uh uh, uh uh" as if to say "no way! that was too scary"  But then he'll throw her up again anyway as she squeals in delight, followed by an "uh uh, uh uh!"  It's pretty funny!

 Here is Kaylee with Grandma Routsong, whom she has gotten to know well.  Luckily, her stranger anxiety problems were very short lived, lasting only a few months.  Now she is pretty good to go to anyone and even be left without me around.  Jaxton never had any stranger problems or separation anxiety.  Cooper had a very very bad case of it.  So Kaylee is kind of inbetween, having a short lived bout of it.  I'm sure glad its over with.  It is fun to see her enjoy herself with Grandma and Grandpa and feel comfortable and happy with them!!

 Who is the shopper in our family?  Oh yeah, its Nate.  No, Tara does not shop.  And who has become quite the bargain shopper with a little encouragement?  Yep, Nate!!  Nate will stop in at Von Maur in between alarm jobs to check the sales racks, where he picks up great deals for both he and I.  He buys me all my clothes and shoes!  Amazing hu!  On the flip side, I would never attempt picking out an outfit for him.  It just wouldn't fly.  Anyways, he is so excited to take his little girl shopping!  What a sight!!  I'm sure she will love shopping with dad, who will cave in and buy her anything her little heart desires!! No, I'm training him NOT to do that!  But I'm sure he'll be tempted to!  

St. Patrick's Day

 Green Eggs & Ham?  Yep, only for St. Patrick's Day!  I've been finding all sorts of fun ideas for holidays, and decided that it was time to actually put into action all the ideas I had found.  So we did!! The entire week of St. Patrick's Day, we did something fun related to the holiday every day!  So we made green eggs!  The boy's were a little leery, but thought they were cool!  We also put green food coloring in our milk.  They also thought this was neat.  Whether it was pregnancy or what, I'm not sure, but I could just not bring myself to eat green eggs or drink green milk.  It just made my stomach churn! Not that it would have tasted any different!  So I made myself a couple of regular yellow eggs, just for my stomach!  The boys put their green milk in their cereal. They loved it!!

 We used cookie cutters in our sandwiches almost every day of the week.  And I attempted to make Irish Corned Beef & Cabbage.  It was very very easy in the crock pot, and actually tasted pretty good!  It may become a St. Patrick's Day holiday meal tradition! 

 I found that we could make anything routine extra exciting just by adding food coloring.  So we added a bit of green food coloring to the master bathtub!  I was afraid to add to much because I didn't want to stain the tub, or the kids!  But they loved having a light green bath!!!  

Pinewood Derby 2012

 Our Elder's Quorum had their annual Pinewood Derby.  This is the first time I have ever participated in the Pinewood Derby, and kind of learned what it was.  I don't think I had even heard of it till last year when Nate participated in it, and this year was a family activity, so we all were invited!!  The boys helped Daddy make his car, which he cheated on by buying a premade one from the store instead of using a saw and tools to shape a rectagular block of wood.  He put eyes on it to match the kind of eyes the cars have in the Pixar movie "CARS," and named his car "The Humble Rider."  He drilled a hole through the car and inserted tiny alarm system magnets into the center of the block to make it more heavy.  When the kids at the derby saw that regular magnets stuck to Nate's car, they couldn't figure out how they stuck to wood!  It was pretty funny!  It still qualified for the weight limit, and actually did win as "The Heaviest Car!"

Date Nights...

Nate and I love our Date Nights!!  We try to make sure they happen at least once every couple weeks.  We are both so very involved in work and kids all day that we look forward to our date nights so much!  This particular date night we went ice skating with some friends from our ward.  It was a lot of fun!  We realized as we were skating that the last time both of us had skated was at Seven Peaks back in Provo, UT when we had just been dating.  That was a good 8 or 9 years ago!! Holy Cow! Has it really been that long since I skated!  Yep, it has.  Wow, how time just flies.  We had a lot of fun, but couldn't stop thinking about how fun it would be to bring the kids next time we came!

 A couple weeks later, we did another thing that neither of us had done since probably high school!  We went and played laser tag!!  It also was a ton of fun!  We went with our friends Cathleen & Keith, who really made it a fun night!  Once again, though, we couldn't stop thinking about how much fun the boys would have at something like this!!  We'll have to bring them when they are a bit older!!  It's silly how we go on our date nights, but the main thing we are talking about and thinking about the whole time, are our little ones at home.  We are so grateful for them, and for each other, and for our happy little family!  Date nights always help us remember this.  :-)

Disney's Magic Kingdom: Pirates of the Caribbean

We were advised to not miss the Pirates of the Caribbean performance with Captain Jack Sparrow.  So we fit it into our busy day and were so glad we did!!  We were some of the first to arrive at the set, and while sitting down eating a snack and waiting for the pirate performance to begin, one of the pirate workers asked Jaxton to help him secure the rope around where the audience had to stay behind.  He was thrilled to help with this pirate job!  

 And then, once Captain Jack Sparrow arrived on the set, an actor completely transformed to look just like Johnny Depp in the movie, he called out for volunteer pirates to help him out and learn how to fight!  Cooper and Jaxton raised their hands high.  Since we were towards the front, his eyes rested on the little boy blue and he called Cooper up!  Cooper has showed lots of shyness lately, so I was very surprised that he went up there.  Nate and I both thought he would get fearful and decide to just come sit back down, or start crying and running off once he saw the audience that had accumulated!  But he didn't!  He was sooo brave out there!  Captain Jack Sparrow had called up 4 kids, of which Cooper was the very tiniest to say the least.  But brave he was!!

 Captain Jack Sparrow and his pirate friend helped each volunteer pirate learn how to fight with a sword.  They gave the kids some techniques, allowed them to practice for a moment, and then each child got a chance to pretend to actually fight!  They fought the other pirate while Captain Sparrow helped them on the sidelines, reminding them which sword move to do when.  Cooper listened, learned, and performed like a pro!  Captain Jack Sparrow loved him!  And Cooper was oh so proud!!

 After our pirate adventure, we went on the ride, Pirates of the Caribbean.  It was super fun!  A Disneyworld classic!  After the ride, we were walking past the pirate show which had begun again. (It went every hour or so and the line for the ride had taken about that long!)  As we were walking by, Cooper really wanted to go talk to Captain Jack Sparrow.  He and Jack had become great friends, so Cooper thought.  So Nate put Cooper on his shoulders so he was high above all the other spectators, and Cooper waved his arms ferociously to get Captain Jack's attention.  Indeed it worked, and in the middle of his show, he waved to Cooper and said, "Helloww Cooper!"  Cooper just beamed!

Disney's Magic Kingdom: Highlights

 The kids got to ride in the NASCAR car races!  The cars are on a track so they can't get off the road, and there's bumpers, even though we were advised not to bump!  They both were still too short to qualify to drive, but they each got to push the gas pedal while we steered.  It was a lot of fun!  Cooper rode with Grandpa, Jaxton rode with me, and Nate got to drive on his own!!  Fun times!!

 Here are Grandma & Cooper wearing their 3D glasses getting ready to watch the well renowned "Fantasmic!"  It truly was amazing with the most enormous movie screen we've ever seen, 3D images, and a few fun tricks they did on us.  We got squirted with water somehow when Donald Duck jumped in the river, and at the end, as Donald was trying to escape, the show ended and we saw his behind get stuck in the back theater wall and then disappeared.  Definitely more than just a movie!! It was neat!

The boys are way into Toy Story, so the Toy Story Buzz Lightyear ride was a huge hit!  The kids actually got to handle a laser gun and attempted to shoot at Zurg throughout the ride.  They got some kind of score at the end of how many times they hit Zurg as they went through the ride.  It was super fun!  Even Kaylee was excited to see all the bright neon lights and cool sounds!!

Disney's Magic Kingdom: Tom Sawyer Island

 The highlight of Disney's Magic Kingdom was Tom Sawyer Island.  I remember loving it when I was a kid, and indeed, the kids all loved running around exploring the island!  We had to take a small ferry raft across from the main street over the lake to the island.  Once there, we found a fun playground and a very clostrophobic pitch dark underground cave.  Of course we had to go through the cave several times since it was so neat!  And Kaylee loved being able to walk around and explore the playground on her own a little bit!  

 Next, we encountered a rickety bridge that jostled and wiggled at each step, as if Tom Sawyer had made it himself.  The boys thought this was super fun! The pictures don't do it justice how awkward and wiggly the bridge was, it was tough to walk on, especially with a baby in my arms!!  We had to go over the bridge several times as well!  

 We crossed a real bridge to the other side of the island and found Tom Sawyer's fort.  It was a huge fort with look out points on all sides and corners.  And this was the most exciting place of all for the boys.  Each lookout point had rifle guns that were available for the kids to maneuver around and made shooting noises, as if they were shooting at bad guys from their fort!  Jaxton and Cooper went from look out point to look out point trying out every rifle!  For a while, Jaxton seemed to have disappear, but he was just hiding away in one corner, keeping an eye out for bad guys and trying the rifle out on trees and birds!!  It felt so real!!  We could have spent all day just at this one fort!!

 Since the fort was all enclosed on the upper level, Kaylee got to go walking on her own around the perimeter of the fort.  She loved the freedom and really enjoyed herself!!

 This "Escape Tunnel" took us out to the outer side of the island rock!  It was a tunnel/ cave-like trail that was pretty dark, apparently used by Tom Sawyer and his gang to escape when trouble came to the fort!  :-).  This was pretty fun!!

 Here we are on the ferry raft floating across the lake to Tom Sawyer's Island.

Disney's Magic Kingdom

 Disney's Magic Kingdom, the ultimate Kingdom of Disneyworld.  When people think of Disneyworld, this is what comes to mind.  The Magic Castle.  Similarly, when people come to Disneyworld, this is the first park of choice for everyone in the world.  Crowded? Yes!  Magical?  Yes!!  We could have spent a week here!  This park was definitely at our kids level, and they loved every minute of it!  We had beautiful weather and fast passes made our day totally successful in being able to see and do just about everything we intended to, despite the crowds.  Here we stand at the Magical Castle, where every dream comes true!!!

 Kaylee, our little princess in front of the Magic Kingdom castle.  One day we will have to return and experience the princesses at Disneyworld to lighten up her little world.  She is our princess!

 One of Jaxton's most favorite events, he said, was this show that took place on the castle.  It featured all the major princesses, as well as Mickey Mouse and friends.  Peter Pan and Captain Hook even surprised us with a battle on the castle grounds!  It was pretty exciting!

 Right after this show we were able to eat at the Crystal Palace, an American buffet style restaurant in a crystal-like beautiful building.  Food was amazingly great!!  The kids got to see Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, and Piglet there.  Of course Kaylee wouldn't have anything to do with them though! 

 After our meal, we came outside to loud music and found this parade going on.  What fun! The boys were excited to see Woody up on the float, and they couldn't get over the characters and super tall stilts.  We had a whole lot of fun at this park!!