shoe girl

Little Whitney loves shoes! For a couple of months now she has always wanted to be wearing them, and she cries when we take them off, because shoes=going outside.

This is Whitney trying on shoes today after her bath. She does this regularly, gets all the shoes out of the box in her closet and plays with them, finally selecting a pair and bringing them to me to put on.

Funny girl :)

we love summer!!

We've been swimming in our little pool a couple of times lately, it's super fun. Also, Whitney likes to spit. It's hilarious.

love this cute girl. I didn't get any good single pics of Kate.
After "swimming", Katelyn taught Whitney how to lay on the cement to get warm. She loved it!

father's day present

the girls and I made this shirt for Eric for Father's Day. Can you find anything wrong with this picture???

That's right, I'm an idiot. It's been 2009 for how many months? The best part is that I didn't even notice, Eric pointed it out to me after we gave it to him. :)

A Wonderful Birthday Present

My mom promised me she'd come visit for my birthday, and last week was when it worked out best for her to come. She brought Jonathan, Melissa, and Jenae (Derek and my Dad had to work) and it was the best birthday present! We had lots of fun, and I loved having them all here to play with the girls and talk to me. And help me do chores. :)

Here we are with my cousins at a house in Provo where my great-grandma and her parents lived for a while.

We went to jumpin jacks and had a blast.
The look on my face is ridiculous, but I had just got a plastic burn on my arm going down a big slide, ouch!


Katelyn had the best time playing with everyone. They were all so nice to her and went along with her many exciting ideas. Like racing of course.
I love how Katelyn's looking at Melissa.
Thank you so much for coming guys!!!

Brenna!!

This week I got to spend 24 hours with one of my favorite people in the world- Brenna came to visit me! I haven't seen her since her wedding day almost 5 years ago, but before that we were roommates our freshman year and again our senior year at BYU. We've kept in touch since then, but it was so fun to see her and her cute son and talk and catch up. We didn't even go anywhere or do anything, we just sat around and played with our kids and talked, it was great!

The evening she was here it rained a little ( as it has almost every day this month, since we live in Seattle, oh wait I mean Utah! What's up?!?) and we got an awesome double rainbow. As you can see in these pictures. Oh and here's Brenna's little boy, he was holding his hands up feeling the rain looking like "what is going on??"
By the way he is a sweet boy with amazing musical talents for an 18 month old. My girls loved playing with him. And it was so fun to see Brenna as a mom, I was reminded of some of the things I learned from her example back when we lived together- she is so kind and patient and uncomplaining! And hilarious! Plus I learned a great new diaper-changing technique for a squirmy child. :) And Eric and I taught her how to cut up a quesadilla for a child into tiny pieces with a pizza cutter. :)
Anyway, thanks Brenna for coming!! Hopefully you'll move out west eventually and we can see each other more often.

Laundry detergent for 1 cent per load!

I keep forgetting to post this, but it's awesome!! My amazingly creative cousin Kendra showed me, and I finally made some! It is SO EASY and it works great! Your clothes come out with no smell though, which is not bad just odd. But my friend Heather told me she makes this laundry soap too and she just puts a tiny bit of fabric softener in each load to give it a "clean laundry smell". Do it, it's easy and I'm going to save $30 this year on laundry detergent ( I used to buy the cheapest I could find and I estimate I've been paying 10-15 cents per load).

Here's the link:

http://iamfrugal.blogspot.com/2008/10/doing-laundry-on-budget.html

Not that we're like dying for that extra $30, but this stuff was fun to make and I felt cool for trying it. :) And now I'm going to pay to run another race this summer with that money. :)

Katelyn is the big 3!!

Here she is, the birthday girl!! Isn't this outfit adorable? Check out the shoes. Thank you Aunt Elizabeth and Grandma! And isn't this girl adorable? I know this is cliche, but I really can't believe she's three. Yes she's been the size of the average three year old and speaking as well as the average three year old for almost a year. And I haven't thought of her as my baby for a while now. But three is a pre-schooler. Three is OLD!

So we had a great, although long, day. We had this big swim party planned, but it was raining, so we had to go with plan B. We just had a little party at our house with a few friends, and I completely forgot to take pictures. I'm still new at this whole "having a child old enough to have a birthday party" thing. But it was a fish-themed party, in honor of Finding Nemo. My favorite part was all the kids fishing off my balcony thing at the top of the stairs. Here's her last couple of friends before they left. She was really cute with them and shared really well during the party.
We picked up Eric from work early and went to our favorite park in Provo.
Whitney loves the tunnels, and I love Eric's face sticking in on the edge of this picture. :)
Kately made a new friend at the park- statue girl! She's so funny, I just found her doing this. She likes to hold other kids' hands.
Then we went out to eat, and then met Elizabeth to go bowling! Luckily Kate thought that was just as fun as a swimming party.
Whitney kept trying to pick up the balls. :) Katelyn could barely do it.
Whitney wanted to bowl really bad, so I let her have all my second turns. She was really good at pushing the ball!
We brought Katelyn's last present from us to open there, and it was... Lighting McQueen (and friends) PJ pants! I got the fabric at Walmart. SO exciting!
She was so excited to be "all matching" when we got home. And Eric says thanks to his mom for getting him, I mean Katelyn, this basketball hoop for her birthday. :)

Thanks to everyone for all the great presents!!!
and our last act of the day, cake and ice cream of course. And a Lightning McQueen cake of course.
One more treat for ya- a video of Katelyn opening her tractor. I love how she's talking the whole time she's opening- listen from the very beginning. Yay for birthdays!

Oh and I wanted to list a few of my favorite things about Katelyn right now.

She is such a good sister, always concerned about Whitney and trying to make her happy. Even when Whitney steals her toys and she freaks out, she still ends up sharing most of the time.

She is very enthusiastic. I love her "o-kay!!" when I ask her if she wants to do something.

Just the last couple of weeks she has been praying! It's the cutest thing in the world. She doesn't really ask for anything, she always just names off all the things she's thankful for: "we're grateful that we got to play outside, for Whitney, for dad coming home, etc. Eric and I just peek at each other and grin during her beautiful prayers.

She is so creative in her play. I love to see all the things she makes up with her cars, trains, animals, and dolls.

She loves to learn. She just soaks up books and scripture stories and she LOVES Family Home Evening.

She's really into matching clothes. She wants to wear the same colors or matching train shirt and underwear. She wants to wear a necklace so she'll "look cute".

She's so silly and I just love her laugh.

I love you Katie girl!!

first race in two years!!

me with my medal!

I ran a 5k last weekend and it was AWESOME for several reasons.

#1 we got to see our friends Benjamin and Emily again before they move away. (see picture above)

#2 the race was a fundraiser for an adorable little girl (who happens to be Emily's cousin) who needs her third heart surgery (learn more at www.helptaylor.com) and the atmosphere was great. Such a spirit of love and uniting to help someone. I almost felt foolish doing well in the race, because that's not what it was all about. Which brings me to the last reason the race was awesome:

#3 I ran one of my fastest races since high school!!

Here's the play-by-play for all you running people out there who might be interested and know what I'm talking about. :) So I start the race and within like 100 meters there were only 10 to 15 people in front of me, and I wasn't going fast. (There were only 100 or so people in the race, may of them walkers) We're running along this beautiful trail and I was trying to just take it easy, because usually my racing instincts kick in and I want to focus and try to go fast and pass people. But I hadn't raced in so long and I don't really think of myself as being in shape, for a runner, and so I didn't want to push too hard in the beginning. But I noticed that I was catching up to a girl, then passing her, and then I looked up to the next group up ahead, 4 girls. I couldn't help myself! I started to slowly "reel them in" as I have taught many a high school runner. I also remember thinking after I'd gone about a mile "it seems like we've been on a slight downhill, darn, that means it will be uphill on the way back!" During that middle mile I passed that pack of girls, which had spread out, one by one. Just when I passed the last one there was a big hill, and near the top, little Taylor who the race was for was standing there! So sweet! That just made me run faster! So then all of a sudden we're going back on the same trail we came up on, and I realize that I'm going downhill fast, and that the whole first mile had been uphill!! I guess I was so used to pushing a double storller full of 50+ pounds of little girls uphill that I didn't even notice the hill by myself! WOO-hoo!! So now I was cruising all the way down, passing walkers just coming up still, and I felt great. Like I could have kept going forever. Or at least for several miles :) But then too soon it was over and we were turning back into the park to finish and I got to run past Eric and Katelyn cheering "go mom!" and Whitney walking to me with arms outstretched, so cute. Too bad they distracted me and I got beat at the finish line by some guy. At least it was a guy. I understand they don't want to get outkicked by a girl. :) Anyway my time was 20:30 which is insanely fast! The race organizer insisted that it really is a 5k, but I heard some other people saying it was 2.79 miles, which makes me think they must have had a GPS watch. I should have brought mine so I could know for sure! If it was 2.79 then that's about a 22:40 5k, which is still REALLY good for me and I would be totally happy with that! Either way I was the second woman across the finish line, so I got a MEDAL and everything, it was so fun.

The moral of the story: If you want to run a race really fast, just push your kids in a stroller for 3 miles a day and you'll feel great when you get to run the race on your own!

zoo!

We went to the zoo on Saturday with some of our playgroup friends!!  It was fun, but after going three years in a row now I think we'll wait a couple before we go again.  Half the animals were asleep, it was a little hot, and the girls get just about as excited see horses and dogs around our neighborhood as they were to see the animals at the zoo.  But I'm glad we went.

Katelyn and our neighbor and friend Allison.  They are SO cute together, except that Katelyn thinks it's her job to be Allison's mom.  She also has a little sister a few months older than Whitney, they're cute friends too.
Eric and Kate and a giraffe (kind of)
These were the only big cats we saw, they were all out of sight!

Whitney's latest

She can finally wear pigtails in the back!  Way cuter and older-looking than on top of her head!

back view
eating yogurt view
She's also finally walking more, it's so fun.  Unfortunately, she has also developed a rather loud, fairly annoying shriek the last couple of weeks.  And also unfortunately, I paid a lot of attention to said shriek the first few days she was doing it, and now she knows it's an instant attention-getter.  The last couple of days I've succeeded in stopping calling "Katelyn!"  every time I hear it, although it's still her fault half the time :).    But really, I don't know how to make her stop besides trying to ignore it..... any ideas anyone??