Walking in Vegas!

We went to Vegas last weekend to visit Dan's sister and her family. Like always, we loved it!

Logan started walking better while we were there! Probably because there is so much more space in Charlene's house than our condo. At the end of the video you will be privileged to see Logan doing the bug crawl on his hands and feet.. it's pretty awesome! Cooper, and Cassidy are also in the video..they are the cutest lil 3-year-olds...and Charlene is pretty cute too I guess :p

This is more of Logan walking and playing with a ball..

Now at home Logan is brave enough to walk across the room (as long as there is a destination close enough to where he feels comfortable). He's growing up so fast it's crazy!!

Whistling

Logan randomly started whistling the other day, and I was able to get barely a few seconds of it on video. The first two whistles are me, and the rest is him..

Fall Fall Fall!

I LOVE the fall! Especially this fall. The weather has been gorgeous, the leaves are falling, and the fall colors are amazing! Fall also gets me excited for the many holidays that fall in the fall.. and I'm actually going to have fall decorations this year! What a terrific fall this fall has become!

Another thing that has been going on this fall, is the rise and fall of Logan. He loves to walk around the furniture, but that inevitably comes with falling. The only problem is that he hasn't figured out how to get back up! The poor kid. On a happier note, he is almost walking on his own! We'll see which one comes first: being able to get up, or walking by himself. Should be interesting if the latter comes first! I have a feeling there will be a lot of crying involved. If anyone has any suggestions on how to assist a baby in learning how to get from his back to his bum to his feet, I'm all ears!

Here is Logan going for a walk with his friend, Billy, to a playgroup on a beautiful fall day.

My cute neighbor brought us some awesome Halloween sugar cookies. I thought they were so cute, I just had to post them.

Logan is such a cute sleeper.. but then again, what baby isn't?

I have a billion other pictures to post, but most of them are on Dan's phone so it might be awhile until I get a hold of them! Until then..

Happy Fall!

Birthday Surprise.. Kinda.

So I'm a month late on updating about the awesome anniversary of my day of birth, but what I really want to do is brag about the amazing people in my life who made it such a special day.
First of all, my husband. Dan knows me SO well it's almost scary.. Everything he did for my birthday was exactly what made me feel the most loved. We decided to do dinner the night before, so he took me to Tucanos (our favorite restaurant, and free for me during my birthday month) where we had a delicious meal. I'll get to what happened after dinner in a little bit..
The next day, my actual birthday, he had an anonymous sender text me riddles to find presents he had hid throughout the house. Now if anyone knows me, they know I LOVE riddles and scavenger hunts and surprises (even if the surprise is just a mixing bowl). Is was SO much fun to find measuring cups, hair elastics, tupper ware, mixing spoons, and all the other little practical things that I needed. Logan loved them too..

That evening he came home with flowers, Sour Patch Kids, and 3 more presents! Yipeee! Before I got to open them we went to 7 peaks for the very last time (so sad) with Byron, Tracy and little Carston. The weather was perfect! Little Carston fell asleep in Byron's arms. Isn't that priceless??

 THEN, once we showered and got Logan to bed, I got to open my last three presents! I am such a little kid when it comes to presents. I try to act like I'm not that excited, but Dan can always see through it. He could give me a spoon and I would be so happy, as long as I got to open it! Fortunately, none of my presents were a spoon.. he gave me a gift certificate to Olive Garden, a gift certificate for a massage, AND blown up family pictures to hang on the wall. I LOVE HIM! He could have given me nothing and my day would have still been great, but the fact that he knew EXACTLY what I needed and wanted just made my day. He loves me :) Oh and I need to thank Tracy who got hired on to be the present wrapper.. you're a trooper!!

Here are the pictures he blew up for me.. the family picture was supposed to be the big one in the middle, but the order was messed up. I guess it makes sense though.. Our world revolves around our Logie Bear!

SO, now that I've bragged about the Hubby, let's go in order of time and move to the roommates. Jenni Sumner planned on throwing a surprise get-together with our group of friends from sophomore year. I say "planned" because it kind of got ruined when I found her standing on the grass outside of our apartment as Dan and I were coming back from Tucanos.. and a few seconds later Kristi (another roommate) comes walking out from behind the building looking like a deer in the headlights! IT was so funny!! I guess you can say I was surprised! Just not in the way that it was planned. Later, the rest of the group came, and it was fun to have everyone together again!

Here is the group minus a few that don't live in Utah anymore who couldn't come...

Blowing out candles feeling stupid like I always do when people sing Happy Birthday to me, thus, the face.. Jenni's confetti cake was amazing!!

He loves me!

On my birthday, my amazing in-laws (Michele, Amy and Tracy) took me out to Kneaders for lunch. It was so scrumptious! I wish I had a picture so you could see that I was in my happy place!

The Saturday before my birthday my loving family made the excursion down to Provo and we went to Cafe Rio, then to a park. It was fun to have them be in my environment, rather than us going up there like we always do since they all live in the same area. No pictures :(

As you can see, I am so blessed to have so many amazing people in my life! Thank you all for making me feel so loved! 

The Adventures of an 8-Month-Old

The other day (8/16/11) was a huge milestone in the life of our Logan... drumroll... He said his first word, "Dada"! At first it sounded like "zha zha," and he would say it really quiet, then it turned into "tata", but now our little chubby boy has mastered the "dada" sound.

Logan has made another improvement. He is okay with being on his tummy for longer periods of time! Doesn't sound too exciting, but if you were to witness the screeching, the squealing and the blood curdling cry that came spewing from his mouth every time we put him on his tummy, I'm pretty sure you would be jumping for joy right along with me. He still refuses to roll back to front, because of course, why would he want to roll ONTO his tummy when his whole goal in life is to roll OFF of it? Makes sense to me I guess, I just wish he would have the motivation to move! It is so much fun to watch him while he's sitting up. He reaches as far as he possibly can with his bum planted to the floor, bending in half pretty much to grab a toy just so he can avoid the possibility of potentially falling onto his hands, knees, and the dreadful tummy!

Waving hello and goodbye has been something we've been working on too. It is sooo cute when he actually does it. He was lucky (or unlucky) enough to pick up the stubborn trait from his mom which means he does things when he wants to do them, not when other people want him to. So instead of waving when everyone is trying to get him to, he waves to the entertainment center when we walk into the family room, the random people walking by in the hallway at church, and the fridge when we take a stroll through the kitchen.

He also loves to walk (with the help of my two pointer fingers with which he applies the death grip to)!! He is SO wobbly, but is SO happy when he's walking! We'll see what comes first, crawling or walking. We've been working on both, but he definitely seems to favor the latter!

I'm going to start off with a couple videos.. they make me smile.. They were taken on my phone, and for some reason turn up sideways on the computer, don't know why.

I was trying to cook something on the stove, but Logan refused to let me and kept screaming for my attention. I decided to stick him in his highchair and see if the magnets on the fridge would entertain him.. they sure did..

This video was taken the first day that Logan started to say "dadadada." Since it's the only thing he knows how to say, he uses it for everything. He uses it the most around Dan though, so maybe he really does know what it means. The first few seconds are silent because I was covering the speaker. Whoops!

Something is going wrong with my pictures so I'll post them in a day or two.

Bedroom Makeover

So these past few weeks Dan and I have been working on our room- trying to make it look not so boring and ugly :)
It's still a work in progress, but I'm so excited about it, so I have to show a little preview of what we've been working on..

First off, here is our inspiration..

I love EVERYTHING about this room! Rug, pillows, colors, etc. etc. Our room will look completely different because of our little resources (lack of mula $), but I'm pretty sure it is still going to look great!
Without giving the whole thing away, here is a sneak peek of some things we have already finished.
The headboard
Dan was able to use extra foam from work to create the skeleton of the headboard. He did a great job! For some reason I'm a very confident sewer, even though I only started a few months ago and most the things I make don't look near as good as they could. So with this project I took my confidence and just ran with it! Dan wanted squares on the headboard, and I thought I could do that easy. Turns out it was not-so-easy! When we put the fabric covering over the board with only one thin layer of padding, it was barely big enough to stretch around the whole front and sides to the back.. we stretched the fabric as tight as we could, but any way we did it, the squares looked completely off, and it barely fit!  It looked horrible and we were about to scrap the whole thing all together. Luckily, we are both really cheap and couldn't bear the thought of wasting all that fabric that I had sewn together, so we took a little trip to Joann's and bought some extra padding, extra fabric, and some buttons to hopefully save this thing... and.....IT WORKED! We are so happy with it!
I don't want to show the whole thing yet, so here is the corner of it..

Next up, I took some of the fabric from the headboard and made some pillows.. I'm planning on making TONS of pillows since they are so easy to make! For some reason the picture makes it look like I did a really crappy job.. I swear they look better than this :p

We went to IKEA and found some really cheap, cute lamps that we are going to put on our nightstands if we can ever find any cheap ones to buy. If anyone knows of any ( preferably black) nightstands that are for sale, let me know!

Well folks, I hope you enjoyed this tiny tiny preview to the up-and-coming room of the decade (our room of the decade at least, since we won't be able to afford redecorating for awhile)! I'm probably going to regret talking it up so much.. please disregard this post if you don't see the end result in the next few weeks!

Vegas!

We went to Vegas over the 4th of July weekend and had a blast! For some reason I LOVE Vegas. I can't really pinpoint one reason why, but I think it's the combination of being with my fun in-laws, the hot weather,  the cultural diversity (sounds lame, but it's so nice to see people who aren't just white, Mormon college students), the palm trees, and the most entertaining of all, the stories that Dan tells me about his childhood, usually consisting of his construction jobs that he's had since the age of 12,turning off his lights and running stop signs to make it home by curfew, being chased by the cops through the desert, etc, etc.
But this time, the main reason we went down was to attend Kara's baptism, which was so special! She looked so beautiful in her white dress! It was also really nice to get away since we hadn't gone on any kind of trip since a few months before Logan was born.
The pool was so much fun! Logan was a little hesitant at first, but once he was in for awhile, he was loving it!

Dan was of course having fun jumping off everything into the pool. It was so much fun to watch Cooper, Charlene's 2-year-old boy, try to copy everything that Dan did. When Dan jumped off a big rock, Cooper jumped off it into his dad's arms. When Dan did a backflip off of the diving board, Cooper stood backwards on the edge and said, "jump backwards, jump backwards!" Such a brave little boy!

The girl's also loved utilizing Dan's strong arms by having him pick them up out of the water..

Cute Mya will NOT go into the water, but she had fun getting splashed. I LOVE these pictures of her.

Steve and Amy. What a cute couple! 

Logan LOVED all the attention from his cousins

 One morning when we came down, all the kids flocked around me and Logan. It was so cute!

Dan with cute Cassidy and Mya

The first night we were there, we went to Gardunos.. YUM!!

And finally, the most important event of all, here is the darling miss Kara on her baptism day!

  

6 Month Milestone

We FINALLY made it to 6 months! It has actually gone by really fast, I'm just grateful that we are here instead of where we were a few months ago :)
Here are a few things he's accomplished and/or loves to do these days:

He sleeps through the night!!!!!!!
He takes longer naps
He can sit up on his own, with a few tumbles here and there
He can roll over front to back
He talks a lot more (not so much when we're around other people because he loves to listen to the conversation)
He gives the BEST cuddles
He gives the biggest smiles, especially when he's home and me and Dan are both with him. It is his absolute favorite thing to hang out with the two of us. I need to cherish it while I can.
He gets SO excited when Dan walks through the door. His face lights up, his arms start wailing, and he does this fast-breathing, grunting noise. It's the cutest thing, but once Dan holds him he acts like it's no big deal and looks around for something to do. I will never get sick of seeing that!
He got his first hair cut! We buzzed his head, hoping it would grow back a little more evenly, but it didn't :)
He loves walks and being outside
His favorite thing about going on a walk is watching all the cars drive by
He is very observant. Ever since he was a month or two old, we have noticed how he's always observing things he looks at, and loves to listen to our conversations. A few weeks ago I was feeding him in his high chair and he kept looking over in the kitchen. We couldn't figure out what he was looking at until I realized that the cupboard was open and he noticed it! When he's kind of fussy and wants me to pick him up, I pretend like I'm talking on the phone and he immediately stops and stares at me. It's pretty awesome.
He still loves his baths
He is eating solids and loves them.. as long as it isn't rice cereal, oatmeal, or green beans. He absolutely hates those!
His favorite game is peek-a-boo. When I first started playing with him, he would get scared every single time I yelled "boo!" and he loved it.
He loves getting thrown in the air
He loves swinging on the swing set

Here he is on a walk, watching the cars

He's in his happy place

First time eating any kind of fruit or veggie! This is a before shot:

After Shots:

He had a little fun with it

Buzz cut!

Mommy got her braces off!

 Shopping for hats. Love the belly hangin out.

 He loves playing outside

Dan is trying to hook him on motorcycles early

Looking a little girly?

We still don't have a swimsuit for him, so we have to come up with creative outfits for 7 peaks. I think he looks dang cute in this picture, but everyone else thinks he looks like a girl!

 When we took him into the kiddie pool the first time, he wasn't too sure about it, but a week or so later we went into the shallow part of the wave pool with aunt Tracy and he was loving it!

 I am in love with this picture! ^^

 Playin around!

Father's Day!

For Father's Day, I bought a tie for Dan, and made a matching tie for Logan. Aren't they the most handsome boys you've ever seen??

We took a quick trip up to Trebble Lake in American Fork Canyon one Saturday. It was beautiful!

My sister Kassy had little Anna last month. She is such a sweet baby!

This is Sarah with her baby sister

Logan and I at the hospital visiting his new cousin, Carston Bradley Garvin!

Dan's brother and his wife, Byron and Tracy, had a beautiful baby boy this week!

"Thanks for looking at my pictures, everyone!"