August

There are 30 pictures in this post. But if it makes you feel any better, I have taken 152 pictures since my last post, so I'm not posting all of them. :) Not even close.

This has been such a fun summer. We have done so much. It has also been a blast living with my parents. We make fun dinners together, eat out on the deck, help each other with the cleaning, and of course my parents have babysat for us a lot which has been awesome.

So anyway, let's get started.

Mckinley fell asleep in her carseat on the way home from somewhere (I don't even remember what we did that day anymore) and Brandon enjoyed every second of her asleep on his shoulder.


Mckinley is loving all the toys my mom's house has to offer. She just runs around all day playing with different things and going upstairs and downstairs and just enjoying all the space.


Brandon has softball games once a week that we try to go to. Of course I never see any of the game because I spend all my time chasing Mckinley around. But it's still fun to go. Here's Mckinley with two of her cousins, Mady and Austin.

Ross turned 56 I think on August 17th. Mckinley helped him blow out his candles. Sort of. :) Mckinley does blow whenever she thinks something is hot. She also says hot, but without the t sound at the end. She blows whenever I put food in the microwave or cook something on the stove or have something in the oven.

We are enjoying being 3 houses away from my last living grandparent, my Grandma Bishop. Mckinley found this doll over there the other day and didn't want to let her go. She loves loves loves dolls and babies and constantly kisses and hugs them.

We hit up Thanksgiving Point's $2 Tuesdays and went to the Gardens. I met up with some of my high school friends that I hadn't seen in a while and our babies played in the water together and had fun. Mckenzie is going to send me some pictures soon (hint hint) of Mckinley in the Noah's Ark splash pool. My new camera arrived that day and I didn't have it with me yet. (I know I said we got our new camera a whiel ago but we ended up sending it back because the shutter sounded weird when it opened and closed so they sent us a new one.)

We went golfing at Trafalga one day and Mckinley was in need of a nap so you will not find her smiling in any of her pictures but I think she enjoyed herself at least a little. It was the first time I had tried the XD theater and I thought it was pretty cool. There was no line so we just went again and again.

Fishing down pretty far to get her ball out of the hole.

My grandparents with a bunch of their grandkids at Trafalga. These guys are so amazing and are so willing to babysit their grandkids anytime. We are going to miss them when they go!!!

Mckinley and Brandon having a Lady and the Tramp moment.

Mckinley and I have been to Seven Peaks quite a few times this summer and we always have so much fun. Especially when we go with enough people that I can leave her and go on the mat slide ride. It's my favorite! I did go on the boomerang once and it scared the crap out of me. :)

This picture is seriously awesome and you just HAVE to click on it to enlarge it to see Mckinley's facial expression. She loves that little slide in the kiddie pool. She jumps off the side of the pool to me now too.

Getting a drink after all that fun in the water.

We went to the demolition derby with Brandon's family. We've gone to the rodeo in the past but thought we'd try this out this year. I think I prefer the rodeo, but Brandon is hoping to go to this one every year.

We've been having a hard time getting this girl to smile for the camera lately.

Mckinley did well for the first 2 1/2 hours as long as she had some FOOD to eat. Ha ha ha. We ended up going home a little early because she was just DONE.

We took lots of pictures and videos but I'll just put one on here.

We have been finding Mckinley asleep like this a lot lately. She'll stick one leg or both out of her crib. In fact, we have a sweet set up here, because there are two doors to the bedroom she's sleeping in, so we are able to peek through one of the doors and watch her in there and she doesn't know we're watching. I took a video of her in there one day when she was supposed to be going to sleep and she was just having a blast, running from one side of the crib to the other and playing with her blanket and just talking to herself. She is so stinking adorable we can hardly stand it.

Here she is getting tickle tortured. The blanket we are on is one my parents got for their wedding and it was always one of my favorites to snuggle in growing up. Have I mentioned that I love living at my parents' house? It's so fun.

Oops, here's another picture of us golfing. This one is out of order. Mckinley was so frustrated because she wanted to hold her club and couldn't bend down to get the ball at the same time. It was really funny.

A couple days ago I was painting my mom's toenails and Mckinley seemed interested so I did hers as well. She held really still so it was super easy.

Then of course I had to do my nails as well.

All three of us were matching. If you ask Mckinley to show you her pretty toes she'll lift her foot up in the air. It's so cute!


Oh, by the way, this is my parents' house that we are living in. We built it when I was a baby, so it's 29 years old. I never thought I'd be back here with my husband and baby. And I didn't think I'd like living here very much, maybe that's why I'm loving it so much, I had low expectations. :)

Yesterday we went to Thanksgiving Point again for $2 Tuesdays but this time we went to the farm. Here's Mckinley looking at the baby chicks.

Most of the time we were there this is how you would see Mckinley - pointing. She really liked looking at the horses and cows and other animals. It was super hot but it was fun to be there.

I could not for the life of me get her to smile, but I did get this cute shot that I just love. It might be time to change the desktop background again...

Here we are next to a horse that she didn't dare pet. :)

After we saw all the animals we sat down in the shade for some food and Mckinley and Bryce enjoyed a few kisses.

So this morning after breakfast Mckinley was walking around and she came out of the bathroom with all this toilet paper and was wiping her nose with it. Ha ha ha. It was so funny. She is really good with having her nose wiped. She will just sit patiently while you wipe it, and obviously as you've seen here, she sometimes wipes it herself. And while we're on the subject of bathrooms, Mckinley will also tell me when she has pooped. She comes and finds me and makes a grunting noise like she's trying to poop. She doesn't do it every time, but it's awesome when she does. She is so smart! I love it.

Mckinley's big kick lately is finding my shoes or my mom's shoes and putting them on and walking around in them. She thinks it is so fun. Love the messy bed head!!

And that brings us up to date. Can't believe I had that much to blog about it in just a week and a half! Summertime is so fun. We are enjoying every minute.

A Few Things

Mckinley is loving playing outside in the backyard with my mom's toys. She figured out how to get in and out of this car, but still doesn't know how to make it move. :) She gets so excited though just to sit in there and honk the horn. For some reason when I told her to smile, she decided to put her mouth on the steering wheel instead.

This girl is so grown up. She pretty much feeds herself all the time now. Here she is this morning eating a bowl of cereal.

Shoving the spoon into her mouth to make sure she got ALL the cheerios that were on it.

PS. I forgot to mention that at my work party last Saturday night I won a Nintendo Wii with Mario Kart!!! How cool is that? I never win anything and I was so excited about it!!! My work party was at the Lindon pool but we didn't take any pictures. Brandon decided to pass on the FlowRider this time, and that's usually the funnest thing to take pictures of.

Cuteness

Anyone who knows Mckinley knows this girl loves her food. Here she is biting in to a Costco slice of pizza.


Get ready to be jealous, people. This is where we eat breakfast these days. Out on the deck. My parents have a sweet deck and a beautiful backyard. I love when the weather is nice enough to eat outside.

Now tell me this picture isn't adorable. I was letting Mckinley play in a bucket of water. She started out with her hands, then I thought I'd let her stand in there and dip her feet in. She decided she wanted to sit down in her clothes in the freezing cold water and play that way. She loved it. This picture is going on my desktop background. :)

Life is good. We are enjoying being at my parents' house even though they have been in training all last week and this week so we don't see them much. Once their training is done this week though, we will have two weeks to soak up all the time we can with them before they leave us for 10 months.

Goodbye

Well, it's done. We are out of our old house forever. This was our first home as a couple and as a family. We went through so many experiences in this house and it holds a lot of great memories. We will miss it.


Mckinley is having a blast living at my parents' house. She loves all the little chairs that are her size and the baby stroller and she loves this little black doll so much. She just goes from one thing to the next and is in heaven with all the toys. She is growing up so fast!


And speaking of growing up, for some reason Mckinley felt like she should be the one to feed her cousin Bryce his banana. He's only two months younger than her. But she would give him a bite, wait patiently while he ate it, then give him his next bite. It was pretty cute.



Some of Mckinley's new things these days are:

• Knocking on doors. She loves to knock (er...pound) on the bathroom door when you're in there. And any other door that she sees that's shut. Somtimes even closet doors.


• Giving hugs. She gives hugs all the time, even when you don't ask for them. And the last few days she has learned how to give a "squeeze." Instead of just laying her head on your shoulder to hug you, she will wrap both of her arms around your head and give you a squeeze. It feels awesome.


• She loves to give fist bumps. And if she gives one, she always has to give another so she will go find someone else she can give one to.


• She is wanting to go down the stairs forwards and it is freaking me out! She'll stand on the edge of the stair with her foot half way off. She thinks she is a lot more grown up than she is.


• She HAS to feed herself. She gets mad sometimes if you try to feed her. She wants to do it all by herself. But if it gets hard to get the food on the spoon, she'll just grab handfuls of it, even if it's oatmeal. It gets quite messy but she's learning a lot and getting pretty good at it.


• She is so scared of dogs and screams when they get anywhere near her.


• She is starting to like swimming a lot more and loves to walk around in the wave pool all by herself, even when the water is up to her chest. She always ends up falling under and it doesn't seem to bother her.

I know there's more, but she's waking up from her nap and we've got things to do so I have to run. Until next time...

Babies

Last night we stopped by Nielsen's Grove again and saw some new baby ducks. We have been to the park so many times this summer to see the ducks and I absolutely love it! They are so stinking cute.


I think these ones are a new batch of ducks, newer than that last big batch we saw.


Mckinley had so much fun in the swing and kept shaking her head "no" when we asked her if she wanted to get out.


Mckinley and I went to Seven Peaks twice this week and had a blast. She is loving the water so much more now. She loves to go walking in the wave pool all by herself. We also went down the big waterslide and the little waterslide in the kiddie pool that she loved. She loves taking baths too.


Speaking of babies, there is a bird's next in the corner of our covered parking, right by our car. We always felt so bad because when the mom was sitting on the eggs, we would always scare her away when we got in our car. Yesterday when we left I noticed she was standing on the ledge next to the nest, but not on the nest, and then I saw her feed her babies. I'm pretty sure they just hatched yesterday. When we got home last night, she was already gone, so Brandon got up high and took a picture of the two little baby birds. I love baby animals! Hopefully these birds don't get hurt when they try to fly, since if they fall out of their nest they will fall on the pavement instead of on grass. Probably not the smartest place for the mom to build her nest.


Today is moving day! I'm off to go pack up the whole house so we can move it tonight. I'm so excited for this change!

Camera is Here

Our new camera is here! So of course we had to get started right away videoing some of the adorable things Mckinley is doing these days.

Here's what she does after you put chapstick on her lips.

I finally went to seven peaks when it wasn't busy. Wahoo! You just gotta go first thing in the morning. Kristen, my mom, and Shellee came with me today which was awesome because for the first time I actually got to ride some rides. And there were NO lines. It was sweet. I even took Mckinley on one of the water slides with me. Our seven peaks trip was right during her first nap and she totally zonked out on the way home.

Isn't that precious?

This will be the last post from our first home as a family. We are moving in to my parents' house this Friday. We've moved a lot of stuff already and our house is looking SO empty! When we moved from Jason and Shannon's basement to this house our total move time was 30 minutes. This one will most definitely be longer but we are pretty darn prepared so I bet it will be quick.

Pics

A new camera is on its way in the mail!!! Yay for online shopping. Gotta love it. I seriously can't wait till it gets here. These might be the last few pics from my sister's camera. We'll see.

Anyway, so I put on a Baby Einstein video for Mckinley the other day and then for fun I pulled out her old bouncer chair to let her sit in it. She loves sitting on anything that is her size. It was crazy to see how stinking big she is now. The front of the chair was touching the ground when she sat in it!


Here she is a year ago in the same chair watching a Baby Einstein video. I can't believe how much smaller she was, yet she just looks like the same Mckinley.


This picture is too cute not to post. Haley got Sam and Mckinley up on the piano bench with her and they were all playing. Adorable!

Brandon and I realized that the day we saw those 12 little baby ducks was probably the first day of their lives! They were even newer than we thought. We are a little obsessed and went back to the park 3 more times last week to try to see them. Some of them have died and the rest of them are so much bigger and braver and just swimming all over the pond. It's crazy to think that on Tuesday last week when we saw them they were all snuggling together and falling asleep on each other. They must have been so new and we feel so lucky to have been able to see and watch them that day.

Anyway, one of our trips back to the park was the day that Harry Potter came out. There were some weirdos at the park setting up a Quidditch game. Wow people. Really? If you care, you can click on the picture and see the hoops they had set up. Brandon and I did go and watch Harry Potter on Saturday and we both thought it was really good, but we are in no way obsessed. Oh yeah, and that's Mckinley in the picture wandering very far away from us. We are going to have to keep a close eye on that girl! She'll walk away from you and not look back and I'm pretty sure if we let her she'd just keep going and going.

Another look at the hoops...

A Good Day

Yes, I am posting twice in one day. So sue me. There are two reasons why I just had to post. #1, I didn't want to end on such a negative note. #2. Look at these cute baby ducks we saw today!!!

Well, let's back up first to last night. Brandon and I took our leftover brownies to his parents house to share (aka get rid of so we didn't eat ourselves sick) with them. His dad decided to go on a little food run so we all hopped in the car and went to Sonic, Broiler Express, and Jamba. Can you say "yum?" This is Mckinley laying down on the couch before we left. She was so ready for bed!


So that was last night but now we come to today, which in my books has been a perfect day so far. Mckinley didn't wake us up this morning till 8:20 which was pretty awesome, so that was a good start to the day. I guess Brandon would argue that his day started at like 1 in the morning when Mckinley woke up crying for some strange reason. But being the awesome husband he is, he let me sleep and he went and got her. He brought her in bed with us and she fell asleep with her head on my stomach (double awesome) which she never does, so she slept with us for a bit before I brought her back to her bed. We are always wishing she would have the occasional sleepover with us in our bed but for some reason she won't fall asleep in there. So we enjoyed it while it lasted.

Anyway, moving on. So we had a good morning, ate breakfast, Brandon went to work. Mckinley napped while I blogged and wrote to Amy and cross stitched and stuff. Then as soon as she woke up I called Brandon and asked him if he wanted to have a picnic at Nelson's Grove. We were there sometime in June and saw all these ducks sitting on eggs underneath the rocks. So yesterday we were saying darn, we should have gone back so we could see the babies. I knew there would be babies but I didn't know how small they would still be. I wanted to go check it out so I decided I was going to bring Mckinley, even if I went by myself.

Brandon said he'd come though so he picked up some Subway and I brought a few things from home and we met in the park and had an awesome picnic and saw those adorable little ducks pictured above. There were 12 of them and 2 were pure, bright yellow. They were so perfect they looked fake. It was so fun to see them! Here's Mckinley pointing at the baby ducks.


Dad and Mckinley. It was a perfect day at the park too. A little overcast but still very warm. We practically had the whole giant park to ourselves.


We took Mckinley for a ride in the swing and trust me, she enjoyed it a lot more than this picture shows. :)


I think her favorite thing to do though is pick up handfuls of dirt (or wood chips) and throw them back down. She could do it forever.


Check out her cute smile. I love it! I never thought my kid would be able to smile on demand this early. I love it. The only trick is having a camera good enough to catch it! One good thing I will say about my sister's crappy camera: the screen is so tiny that after you've taken a picture, you really can't see it very well so it kind of brings you back to the old film camera days when it was a surprise to see what pictures you've got on there. When I load the pictures on to the computer, I get to really see them for the first time and see if they turned out or not.

Now Brandon is back at work and I'm at home with the babe, she's in bed falling asleep and I get some more "me" time. Then tonight we have a new little nephew we get to go meet and I can't wait!!! Does life get any better than this? I think not.

A not-so-great weekend

As much as I love weekends, they don't always turn out awesome.

This last weekend we started it a little early and went up to Park City to a timeshare Brandon's dad had reserved for the week. Brandon's mom was already up there so it was our little family along with her. Thursday and Friday were good, we went swimming, relaxed in the hotel watching old movies, went shopping at the outlets, went to dinner, and oh, lucky me, I got my first bladder infection in 2 and a half years. For any of you who know my history, I have had more than my fair share of bladder infections and 2 and a half years without them was nothing short of a miracle for me. Of course it sucks to get one when you're out of town. Luckily the second doctor's office I tried was willing to call me in a prescription. So that problem pretty much got taken care of.

Mckinley all ready to go swimming.


This is the reason I don't buy my child toys. She always finds the most interesting ways to entertain herself. She had fun putting each of the dice in this drawer, one by one. It kept her entertained for quite a while.


Mckinley enjoying a bath in the huge jacuzzi tub in our room.

So on to the next thing. Friday night we went to bed and at 4 in the morning I felt like I needed to throw up. It was pretty weird, I have no idea where I got sick from, but I threw up every half hour for the rest of the night. I had no idea how I was going to make the hour trip home without either needing to go to the bathroom or throw up. Brandon packed up all our stuff and the car and I surprised myself by being able to carry Mckinley all the way down the 5 stories to the car. I was so miserable!

With a prayer and a miracle, I survived the trip home only to run to the bathroom at Brandon's mom's house to throw up. Then finally we were home and I didn't leave the house for 2 days. I threw up all day Saturday and then Sunday I just felt crappy with sore muscles and a head ache all day. So poor Brandon was not only stuck home for a boring weekend, but he did EVERYTHING for me and Mckinley. I don't know what I would have done without him. I guess if I did have to get sick, a weekend was the perfect time to do it.

Man, I seriously hate being sick. And couldn't I have at least lost a pound or two from throwing up 20 times in one day? No such luck.

Well, not the best blog post, but at least you're all caught up. :) We haven't been taking very many pictures lately because my sister's camera is so ancient and crappy. I really need to get a new one!!!

PS. For any of you who know Amy, she has been in Hong Kong for like 4 weeks now and she is doing great! She ate a fish eye that was the size of a pea and she said it was hard but didn't taste like anything. G-R-O-S-S!!!

4th of July

Life without a camera is hard. There are so many things Mckinley is doing that I want to get on video.

Anyway, thanks to my sister-in-law Shellee for all these pictures from our 4th of July weekend.

Friday we woke up early and went to see the balloons. I love doing this every year and I really don't mind getting up early for it.

Just because I can't help it, here's a comparison picture from last year. Mckinley has definitely changed the most!!

For the most part she was pretty mellow all morning since we woke her up so early but we got some good shots of her looking up at the balloons in the sky and pointing at them.

I think the Darth Vader balloon was everyone's favorite. That thing was massive.

What do you call the opposite of a bird's eye view?

I love the coca cola balloon too.

We borrowed Melanee's cute little headress to see how Mckinley would like it.

Doesn't she look cute?

Later that night we went to a ward swimming party at Scera. We forgot to bring Mckinley's floatie but she was happy just walking around in the shallow water. She would walk all the way up to her neck and not want me to touch her. Then of course she would fall and I'd have to catch her. It was fun, but we don't have any pictures from it.

The morning of the 4th we got up and went to the parade. We love the sweet spot we (er....Lincoln) reserve every year.

Family picture.

And the one from last year...

We spent our afternoon and evening on the 4th up in Park City at a timeshare Brandon's dad booked for the week. Mckinley had her first taste of corn on the cob.

She LOVED it.

Now, back to our camera problem, my sister let me borrow her camera until we decide what to buy for our next one. Wow, her camera is old school, the kind with 2 aa batteries. I charged them yesterday morning and they're already dead. So they lasted about 10 pictures. Fun. Anyone love your camera? What is it and how much?