Birthday Boys!

Wow, I cannot believe it has been over a year since I last updated the blog. I guess I missed a few months and then never felt like I could catch up so it was all just too overwhelming. Well, I've decided enough is enough. I won't be updating for the past year, I'll just start here. 

As many of you know, Taylor and Fife had a birthday on this past Friday! Taylor and I woke Fife up with a balloon and a happy birthday song, they both opened a few presents before Taylor went off to work, but I really think the highlight of his morning was the balloon! Fife got a car rug and it was pretty funny, when I rolled it out he immediately curled up on it like he was going to take a nap, just like a cat.

While Taylor was at work, Fife and I cleaned the house and got last minute things ready for the party we would have Saturday. Fife is really getting to be a good helper with housework. He helped me do the laundry and loved to help me dust and wash the windows.We went and picked up Taylor at 4pm from his office then headed over to a Fall Festival. We got to spend about 40 minutes there before it closed and it was a fun family time. We went on some big slides, fed goats, climbed hay bales, and picked out pumpkins. Afterwards we got some pizza and ice-cream before going home for bed.

Fife feeding the goats

 Saturday we woke up and finished setting up for the party at 10am. Since Fife has been loving cars lately I decided to go with a car theme. The party was a lot of fun and it was fun to see all the kids interacting together. I made a few different games and things but once again I think the highlight was all the balloons. Here are a bunch of pictures of the party details.

cookie decorating station

Even Taylor joined in on this game! I made him spin around 27 times :)

stop light bean bag toss: there were bean bags in red, yellow, and green and you had to try and throw the colors and get them to match.

                                                                         The Cake

Fife was super excited about something :)

This one is for you Troy boy!

I can't believe how fast time has gone and that my baby is already 2 years old! Happy Birthday to Taylor and Fife. I love you guys!

Memorial Day Catch Up

It has been a long long time since my last post, I have been thinking about writing a post for a while now but could never actually bring myself to do it. It is probably going to be a little crazy, but here it goes. So I went to California and Utah for a couple weeks and it was awesome. It was a really fun time and I was so happy all of my family was finally able to meet Fife. Fife loved meeting his cousins and it was so cute to see them all interact.

Memorial Day weekend we decided we needed to get out and go somewhere. Initially I told Taylor we could go anywhere he wanted but I wasn't going to camp. But I changed my mind a few days before after we still hadn't come up with a plan. We ended up having a pretty awesome time. Saturday morning we went to our ward breakfast and that afternoon we packed up all our camping stuff, and our bikes, and headed out. We stopped at Shenandoah Caverns and spent some time there. They had this warehouse full of old parade floats, it was kinda creepy, but fun. Some of them were pretty cool.

Go Texas!

Fife loves America

Then we went and took the tour of the caverns. They were huge! And very pretty. I especially liked the colorful lights they put on some of the walls. It was great to be down there on such a hot day.

After this our plan was to go to Shenandoah National Park and camp for the night but by the time we got there all the campsites were full (they didn't allow you to make reservations). So we spent the next couple of hours looking for a place, in the dark. We finally found a place, there were no more campsites but the guy let us just camp by a pavilion. It actually turned out pretty nice! On Sunday we hung around the campground until 1pm. We went on a bike ride, took a walk, and relaxed by the pond for a while.

 We went to church and afterwards headed to Powhaten to camp for the night. Because we didn't want to be stuck without a campsite again we made a reservation online for a place. When we got there it turned out to be a pull out back in some woods. No bathroom, no water, no nothin. We were glad we had all our water containers filled and we made it work. One thing it did have was ticks, and Taylor got one in his knee socket.

Monday we headed to the Virginia Capital, Richmond. We rode our bikes all around the city, hills and all, and did a few loops around the capital grounds. It was a nice day. We went to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts which was very good. I guess we looked suspicious because there was a security guard who followed us through half the museum, every time we would go to another room we would look back and there she was. We also stopped at the Fredricksburg battlefield visitors center before heading home to take a quick dip in the pool. Taylor and I both concur, this was one of our most memorable memorial day weekends.

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!

Rollin' with the gangsta's

This past week  Fife has learned how to roll! It has taken me this long to get a video of him since he always seems to do it when I have my back turned or right when the camera turns off. He did roll a while back when he was only a few weeks old, and a few other times, but this week is the first time he rolled without one of his arms underneath him or laying on a slope. I guess he made up his mind that he wasn't going to do any rolling until he could do it all at once.

Here's a video of him going tummy to back

And now back to tummy

He loves rolling and has been rolling everywhere! Sometimes I go into the kitchen and when I come back he is halfway across the room! He is so strong and so much fun! I love spending my days with Fife, he always makes me laugh.

I did a couple of simple projects the past couple days. First, I have been looking for a yellow clock to put in our bathroom for the past 5 months but haven't found one and Taylor has been asking and asking for a clock in the bathroom. So this last weekend I got a $4 clock at Walmart and then used the yellow paint from the nursery sign I did to paint a stripe around it, it is a little lighter yellow than the rest of the bathroom but it goes well enough.

I found this mirror at Ross on Clearance for $4.50. I was white and had some black scuff marks on it. I thought it would be a nice addition to our place. I then got some paint from freecycle and got the idea to paint it. I like it, I was originally going to put it in our entryway but now I'm thinking maybe our bedroom since the color matches our bed and curtains.

This has gotten me in the mood for more painting! I may finally tackle our microwave stand and then onto the kitchen table! We shall see.