Owen at 2

JOY.

That's the best way to describe Owen and what he brings to our family.

He's hilarious, he giggles and shrieks with delight and even laughs at himself when he knows he's being funny.  He loves to sing and dance and do anything his sisters are doing.  He is usually very happy and obedient and easygoing, although he has been having an occasional two-year-old moment lately where he is very opinionated and stubborn!  He loves to play games and play trains and Legos and play basketball with Dad.  He loves to help with chores and he's the best person in our family at putting things away when he's done with them!  He may be kind of compulsive about it actually haha.  He loves to SING and can often be heard singing the BYU fight song or various other songs he knows- mostly church songs.

He has a pretty good life, I wanted to describe a typical day for him.

He wakes up, on average, at 8am, probably 1/3 of the time earlier and 1/4 of the time later, depending on how much of a nap he took the day before and when he went to bed. (This was on his birthday, he woke up with one arm out of his neck hole haha)

He spends his morning with mom and Whitney, eating breakfast and reading a scripture story, helping Whitney with music practice and homework and reading, maybe unloading the dishwasher, and occasionally going visiting teaching or to the store.  And playing.
This was an especially fun morning we had a few weeks ago when Uncle Donny, Aunt Christine, and Evelyn were here!

Whitney's kindergarten starts at 11:45, so we eat lunch and then drop her off and the next hour is Mom and Owen time!  Sometimes we go shopping at this point, but mostly it's just playing in the toy room with toys, games, and puzzles, until it's time for reading stories and singing songs and taking a NAP around 1-1:30 pm.  Then it's nap time for the next 1 1/2-3 hours, depending on if I have to wake him up to pick up the girls or go somewhere!  So here's a lovely picture of mom -me- at 22 weeks pregnant (last week).  I know I'm not huge, but I am huge for 22 weeks!!  We have a long way to go...

 Owen's favorite time of day is probably when he wakes up from his nap, because usually that means his KATELYN is home!!!  He ADORES her and is always begging to play with her, even though often she'd rather just read... she really does love to play with him too most of the time though.  Here they are at the pool in Provo the Saturday before Owen's birthday.  We love swimming!

 So the rest of the afternoon is filled with Owen playing with his sisters, refereed by mom.  This is Owen and Whitney on his birthday when he got a mini primary songbook to match Whitney's and they spent a half-hour sitting here singing together- Whitney picking a song and Owen trying to follow along. :)

 5:30 can usually find Owen standing on a chair by the counter "helping mom make dinner"- aka playing with all the neat gadgets in the silverware drawer.  And then Dad comes home!  and we eat dinner! (represented by this picture of our girl party, when we found out our new baby is a girl!) Owen is not a big eater, but he does enjoy sitting at the table with us and he ALWAYS wants to say the dinner prayer!  He says adorable prayers though, coming up with really cute stuff.

 In the evenings Owen gets to play with everyone, including DAD, who loves to wrestle and play basketball and catch and watch sports on TV. (This is at the BYU basketball game.)

Then at about 8 we get ready for bed and read scriptures and read stories and sing more songs and go to bed, sometimes not until 9!  Often Owen can be heard singing to himself in his bed, so cute.

Owen blesses our family by making us laugh and smile and showing us how to delight in simple pleasures.  We are so grateful for him and so excited for him to be TWO and have an exciting year.

January faves

First we have to rewind- somehow I missed this picture from Thanksgiving, and Lydia did play with Caleb and Whitney several times, so I wanted to document that she's making the transition to the big kids!  Cute.

 Also here is our new fridge!!  Love it!!

 And Super Owen in his sweet pj's from Grandma and Grandpa Murray- he loves them and never wants to take them off!

Okay now onto our 

January Faves

Our favorite pastimes of 2014 so far!  

1. Sledding

Here are Kate and Owen all ready to go- Owen refusing to wear snow pants as usual.  Luckily it's been like 20* warmer in january than is was in December, so we let him go without them.

 We spent a bunch of time on the little hill because the girls can get up it so much easier!  But they do love going down the big hill with Eric.

 To our delight, Owen decided that he loves sledding after we forced him to try it.  He cried that first time down, and then asked to go again and again. :)

 This last time it was a gorgeous sunny day- and we found a big patch of grass to relax on!

 2. Legos, legos, and more legos!

Each of the kids got multiple Lego sets for Christmas, and it was been so much fun to build them!

 There have been many hours of this at our house since Christmas: Lego heaven!

My mom also gave us a big set of my old legos, which Owen has kind of claimed.  he loves playing with them even though he's not very good at it because they are so tiny!

 3. Our annual BYU Basketball Game

We usually go to one every year, whereas football has only been about every-other year.  We lucked out and picked a great game to see, BYU dominated Loyola Marymount even though they were supposed to be pretty evenly matched.  So that was fun to see.  We knew Owen was going to love it, but to our happy surprise, Katelyn really enjoyed it as well! When BYU started to pull ahead Kate had a lot of fun telling us "now we're 13 points ahead" "now we're winning by 18!!!" it was awesome. We got to stay for the whole game since we had 4 out of 5 happy campers, yay! (Whitney just played on Eric's phone for most of the second half.)  Oh and Derek sat by us, that was fun.

 So when Owen and I went to buy the tickets a few days beforehand, we got them and started to leave and Owen burst into tears-"I want to go to the BYU Basketball game!" and it took me a while to calm him down and explain that there wasn't a game that day, no one was there to play or cheer!  So then when he saw the real thing he was pretty mesmerized for a while- all the people and the music and the cheering!  He LOVED seeing Cosmo and singing the fight song, even though it was a little fast for him!  He is fully indoctrinated to love BYU and it is adorable.  Also he got good at shouting things like "Go defense" 'Go Cougars" and "Make noise!"(since Cosmo held up that sign a couple of times)

 Singing the fight song!

 Proud of himself after he finished the fight song

 Trying to get Whitney into it

 dancing

 our little basketball fans :)

  Good times.

Eyes

So this is post is going to look hilarious!  As my pregnancy moves forward and I'm finally not feeling sick (YIPPEEEE!) and I've finally felt the baby moving (I felt Owen as early as 16 weeks but my doctor said my placenta is in the front this time so I won't feel the baby as much until she's bigger... that's right we found out it's a GIRL but that's a different post!)  I've been thinking about what this baby will look like.  There's always the question of hair color, now that we've proven we can actually have a blond child.  But my real question is eyes.  Eric and I both have hazel eyes, but all three of our kids have big beautiful dark brown eyes.  So I was wondering if brown eyes were the majority among our siblings... which led to my bizarre request of my siblings, on facebook, to give me a picture of their eye so I could compare them.  I have the best family ever, or I should say the family the least fazed by bizarre requests ever!  (I totally would have asked Eric's siblings but figured they would think I was a little crazy!! Plus I'm pretty sure Ryan and Kurtis are brown and Elizabeth has gorgeous greenish eyes.)  So here are all the pictures I collected:

Starting with Jenae, the only cool one who got blue eyes from Dad!

Allison, who I didn't know has the least brown besides Jenae!

My eye!

 Then the 3 boys:

Derek

 Donny

Jonathan

 Katrina's very cool eye

 And Melissa who is the most brown!

 My mom, where we obviously got our green, but hers are more green than most of ours!

 Katrina's kids, Ryder and Lydia

 and the best I could get of Owen, who wanted to squint

 Whitney, whose eyes are basically the same color as Katelyn's

In light of all the hazel evidence, I give you the verdict:

 I'm holding out hope for a hazel-eyed child. :)

Christmas

What an awesome, classic Christmas morning!  The kids did us the favor of sleeping in until 7:30, and then we came down to ...

Owen's first Christmas, all over again!  He doesn't remember last year, so it was all new and exciting. I only took a few pictures though, this is literally all of them!

 Whit's favorite thing- her mini primary songbook!  She keeps looking through it and trying to read the songs.

 YES! CHOCOLATE!

 Owen's own little Book of Mormon, "little tiny scriptures" as he calls it, which he frequently opens and "reads" things like "Jesus said...Go to the Temple!" or "Jesus said... no no no!" silly boy.

 cousin present- stuffed airplane that talks from Jenna!

Beanie Boo cat from Grammy!

 very cool flashlight from Great-Grandmom and Grandad!

 All of this and more!!  It was really cute, Owen was so excited about EACH piece of candy he took out of his stocking, and with each present he opened had to open the box and take out the toy and play with it, missing a couple of his present turns while he did so.  Whitney and Katelyn had so much fun, and it was so fun for Eric and I to watch them and LISTEN to them chatter away.  They loved all their presents and they really loved their presents from each other and were so excited to give Eric and I and Owen gifts.  Hopefully we can keep emphasizing the GIVING part of Christmas!  

It is so fun being a parent of little kids on Christmas, I really didn't even anticipate my gifts much, but I got really thoughtful and wonderful presents from everyone.  The most surprising was from Eric- we gave ourselves a new fridge for Christmas, so I wasn't expecting anything from him, but he got me these really nice running gloves that are not only super warm, they have little touch pads on the fingers so I can use my phone (I have a sweet running app) while running, and they have grippy stuff so I won't drop my phone either. :)  He's so awesome, what a perfect present.

On Christmas afternoon we went up to the Murrays for dinner and more presents!  Thankfully Mary took these pictures, I am so bad at remembering to take pictures when we go up there!

 Brad got these adorable Panda hats for the girls in China, so cute!  They've been wearing them to school, and Whitney said her teacher was leading her class into their room and the teacher said "okay, time to start, kids and panda!" Which of course delighted Whitney!  (She has the best teacher ever!)

And Owen and Cleo got panda slippers, so cute!  Along with many other wonderful gifts.  Cleo is a cutie and I'm excited for her and Owen to be friends. :)

 And late Christmas night the girls' favorite people flew in- Elizabeth and KJ!  Who then proved their awesomeness by spending HOURS the next morning helping the girls build a giant Lego house!  They are so much fun.

and to finish off a really great year, Eric and I went to the Anniversary Inn for our 10th wedding anniversary!  We got a jungle room and it was so fun to sleep in a treehouse and have a waterfall/hot tub. :)

And now the year is over!!  On to another exciting one!!