Twenty Five and First Food

The past couple weeks have been lots of fun and we have been busy. Taylor and I got to go on a date! Just me and him, which is the first time since Taylor's work Christmas party. We got some friends from the ward to watch Fife and went to eat at Old Country Buffet with my free birthday meal, it was delicious. And then we went ice skating! It was a lot harder than we both remembered. I had fun, Taylor says he is never going ice skating again, we shall see. 

The next day we went in to the city with our upstairs neighbors Kirsten and Mike and went to a Persian New Year Festival at one of the Smithsonians.  The festival was super crowded, it took us like 30 minutes to find parking, and then we had the stroller so we had to find the elevator every time we wanted to go somewhere new and maneuver through the crowds of people, so we wished we had brought the moby wrap. But it was fun to just spend some time out and get to know our neighbors better. They had fire jumping, and mask/crown making, and storytelling and Persian food, and a scavenger hunt. We spent a bit there and then the crowds got the better of us so instead we just walked around outside through the art garden. It was a beautiful day.

Taylor and I made this crown for our little prince... who are we kidding, he is the king of the house.

The 12th was my Birthday and I turned 25! I can't believe I'm that old, or young. It's weird, I feel much younger than 25, but then at the same time I feel like I've lived longer than 25 years. I spent the day with Fife, he is the best company. That night we went to dinner at Denny's to bring back the good times in Provo. We went to Denny's when we were dating a couple times, to celebrate Taylor getting a job, the night we found out I was pregnant to celebrate, and for my birthday last year for breakfast where I threw up both before and after my free grand slam (yay for morning sickness!). This year Taylor ate my free grand slam and I got dinner food, I didn't feel like breakfast for dinner.

Afterwards we went to Krispy Kreams and then to Walmart to get cheesecake and ice cream. When we got home we ate the cheese cake and ice cream while we watched 24. It was a pretty awesome day.

Taylor and my mom sang to me, it was beautiful

Fife is now 5 moths! He can't really do too many "new" tricks, he's just been refining working on his old ones. He is as cute as ever! We love him so much! He has started on eating solid foods. So far he has eaten baby oatmeal, and butternut squash. I've made up some apples that he is going to try tonight! I think he likes eating real food, and he LOVES making a mess while he does it.

This is the first time Fife ate food, it is baby oatmeal. 

playing with daddy before bedtime

                                                                Fife hard at work

This last weekend it was very nice out so we went on a walk to the farmers market to get our produce for the week and then afterwards drove to a park to play some frisbee. It was fun and refreshing. We joined Taylor's work team and will be starting games soon!

Fife made some spectacular dives, we happened to get a picture of one of them.

That is some frisbee player

We went to Chevy's last night to use one of my birthday coupons, it was delicious and it was nice not to have to cook!

Update from Alexandria

We have been up to a lot since the last post! Doing projects, going on walks, going to ward activities, organizing play groups, doing community and ward service, me being sick, basketball, and other things I can't remember. Here are a few of the things we have been doing.

I finally repainted our microwave stand! We bought this when we moved in here from a yard sale for $5, it is a great little stand. I like the drawers and the extra shelf and the best part is it has wheels, however, we weren't really feeling the black and gold. We got the paint to redo it a few weeks after buying it but I never got around to it until now. Here are the before and after pictures.

 

I used a stencil to do the blue flower design to put some color into our kitchen. I am thinking of doing a design down the side but not sure yet. I will either do the same flowers down the side or a couple blue and yellow stripes with different widths.When the microwave is on it covers up about half the design. 

Since our Ward doesn't meet until 3pm now we decided it would be good to get out and go for a walk once in a while before church. So last week we decided to go to Theodore Roosevelt Island. I have seen it a few times from the road as we drove by and thought it looked like a fun place to go look at. There is a walking bridge to get on to the island and then there are trails that go around the island (1.4 mile loop) and in the middle of it there is a big statue of Teddy Roosevelt and a bunch of other concrete stuff. We went here a few days after the snow storm so there was still snow everywhere and it made the stroller really hard to push. It was a fun walk. 

Daddy and Fife relaxing before bedtime

For playgroup we had a valentines day party and I made these rolo brownie bites that were soooo good. I really wanted to decorate them cute so colored the frosting and put it in a ziploc bag, cut off a corner and made these designs on them. 

That got me wanting to try out cake decorating, so I got a cake decorating kit with different tips and made some reeses brownie bites, which were even better, for our ward movie night. I didn't have time to make homemade frosting like with the rolo ones so the frosting was a bit runnier but it was still so much fun to do and I got to test out the different tips. I am hoping to do a cake next.

We had a snow storm here a few weeks ago! They said it was supposed to snow more than a foot but it ended up snowing about 8 inches. It would snow a lot and then rain and melt the snow and then snow again and freeze all the rainsnow and snow more. Taylor got to work from home that day and we all built a snowman together. The snow was very wet and heavy, it took some serious muscles to build this guy (snowy is his name). 

This is poor snowy after a few days. The snow didn't last long because it kept raining. If you look closely you will see his right arm (on the left) is still intact. The top fell over about 30 seconds after I took this picture.

There is still a tiny ball of him left today. It snowed about 3 inches last night and this morning so we may rebuild him again later today! Taylor is working from home today because they closed a lot of the transportation in anticipation for the big storm, which ended up being not so big after all. I'm not complaining!

We normally give Fife a bath in the tub, but Taylor wanted to show him what it feels like to take a bath as an adult (being crammed in a tub). Fife loves baths so much I don't think he minded at all. He is going to be a hot tub guy, I can already tell.

Fife is doing great. He has yet to be sick, even though I have been sick probably 3 times since he was born. He is a tough guy. He is still rolling and loves to play. He can be very loud at times, testing out his voice box, he loves to squeal and laugh and has recently started making short staccato grunts which he thinks are very funny. He had his checkup around 2 weeks ago. He was 25.5 inches tall (65th %ile), had a 16.75 inch head circumference (77th %ile), and was 15lbs 7oz (49th %ile). We love our boy!