One Year Older, and Wiser Too!

Ellie celebrated her first birthday on Dec. 20th! I tried making grandiose plans including fun outings and delicious food, but Ellie decided that what she wanted most was sleep. A daughter after my own heart! She took 2 very lengthy naps during the day, but we did manage to squeeze in some celebrating!

I cannot believe she kept the hat on as long as she did!

This is her new "excited" face, which Mike and I absolutely love!

We set the cake in front of her and she had no idea what to do with it. But as soon as I gave her a little taste, she realized, "Hmm... this is delicious." Forget the hands... she went face first into her cake with mouth wide open! Hilarious! We eventually stuck her hands in the frosting to get the classic "Messy Birthday Cake Picture."

The success of her birthday was directly proportional to how much of her little 1 year old body was covered in chocolate cake crumbs and pink frosting.

Here are a few of my favorite things about Ellie:

1. Basically she's the best, most relaxed, and cutest baby we could've ever asked for!
2. She likes to lean over and stick her face in front of yours when you're holding her, just in case you've forgotten who you should be paying attention to.
3. She points to herself when she says "Mama"
4. Her new love is balloons! My parents got her a balloon for her birthday and she'll hold on to the string while doing EVERYTHING! Eating in her high chair, playing with her other toys, drinking her bottle, crawling around the apartment. And she'll cry when she accidentally lets go and it floats to the ceiling.
5. She knows a few signs and can say "more" and "please." She does "more" very emphatically when we feed her oranges.
6. She can walk, but she chooses not to. She's no dummy! Crawling is WAY more efficient.
7. She mimics facial expressions.
8. She loves to brush her teeth!
9. Ellie can't help but dance when there's music on. Everything from classical to pop has her bouncing up and down.
10. My favorite is the way she scrunches up her nose when she smiles!

We love you Ellie! Happy Birthday!

Twins?

Well, they might not look like each other, but thanks to Stacy they always have adorable matching knit hats. Thanks Stacy!

They are going to be the best of friends when they grow up! You can just tell by looking at this picture!

Happy Holidays!

Here are a few holiday photos, with many more to come!

FESTIVAL OF TREES

Ellie would make a super cute Elf.

Neglected

I have to start off with an apology to Mike. Poor guy is so neglected on this blog. So here is an entire post dedicated solely to him (even though he never reads this). He's had some big accomplishments in the past month that deserve to be acknowledged.



In November, Mike became a 32nd degree Mason! He went through the Scottish Rite, which is "one of the appendant bodies of Freemasonry that a Master Mason may join for further exposure to the principles of Freemasonry." (courtesy of Wikipedia) I might have to correct myself on this later, but he went from the 3rd degree to the 32nd degree in a 3 day long process. He really enjoyed himself, and Ellie and I are very proud of him.

One of the things he received was a hat. Funny though, cause the only picture we took was of Ellie wearing it.

Mike's 2nd big feat was defeating the Sensuous Sandwich Challenge. When we lived down in Provo, we really enjoyed eating at Sensuous Sandwich. They blow Subway out of the water with their sandwiches! And you know how Mike is about food challenges. We can't watch "Man vs. Food" because he always says, "I could do that... easy!"

This challenge consists of eating a 24" sub in under 30 minutes. The prize? A free gigantic t-shirt and your picture up on the wall.

Mike finished in 16 min 34 sec. His cousin Dan finished in 21 min.

The lady timing them said if they could beat the record, their sandwich would be free.

What's the record? 1 min. 54 sec.

Seriously? Less than 2 minutes to eat a 24" sub?!? She told us the guy ordered a french dip sandwich and poured the au jus sauce all over it and basically swallowed everything. She said it was the most disgusting thing she'd ever seen.

Adventures in Knitting

I've been trying to teach myself to knit, and boy what a long and slow process it has been! Crocheting is just so much faster. I can pump out a hat in an hour! But I've been working on knitting a darn dish cloth for months and I'm not even half way done.

Someday, I aspire to be able to make something like this:

BUNNY SLIPPERS!

My co-worker at Timpanogos Hospital made these for Ellie before she was born, and they finally fit her! I absolutely love them! They are adorable!

I've got a long ways to go before I can knit like that, but practice makes perfect!

Not a very good picture, but this was me getting sick of knitting and falling back on my crochet hooks to make Ellie a wonderfully warm winter hat.

Up!

This is probably one of my favorite pictures of Ellie!

Somebody said she looks like the old man in "Up!" with her square face and the glasses.

Gilgal Gardens

Some friends in our ward told us about this tiny little park in Salt Lake called Gilgal Gardens. They were interested in taking a tour of the Masonic Temple, and offered to show us this little place while we were downtown. I'd never heard of it, but it was really neat!

Gilgal Gardens is a little park located on 749 E. and 500 S. It was created by Thomas Battersby Child Jr in 1957 and he worked on it until his death in 1963. For years, he was the bishop of the 10th ward in Salt Lake which met in the beautiful meeting house located directly north of the gardens. And he built the garden in his backyard. He named it after Gilgal, a biblical location where Joshua told the Israelites to place 12 stones as a memorial.

So there are all these statues and sculptures and everything is very symbolic. Child said, "You may think I am a nut but I hope I have aroused your thinking and curiosity." In addition to the statues are scriptures and hymns etched into stepping stones. I'm not really a deep thinker, but I think you could spend hours in this garden trying to figure out what the sculptures and the scriptures he attached to it all mean.

Here's Joseph Smith's head on a sphinx.

This was a self-sculpture, and yes... his pants are made of brick. So cool!

We came up with a lot of good interpretations about some of these scultpures, and I can't remember them.

All in all, this was a fascinating place! If it hadn't have been freezing that day, I think we could've spent hours there! I recommend seeing this place if you're ever in Salt Lake.

In Between Sacramento & San Francisco

Suisun City, CA. That's where Mike's brother & family live. And the only way I know how to describe where it is? In between Sacramento & San Francisco. Not wanting to spend all of my 3 week vacation filling out law school applications, we decided to go visit Zeke, Natalie, Caroline, Miles, and baby Ivy. We had a lot of fun, and are so grateful for their hospitality! What an eventful trip too!

First off, Ellie needs to be commended for being such a trooper in the car! She only spent 1 of the 12 hours in the car screaming, which was better than I was expecting!

We had fun playing with the kids, going to Larry's produce (which is sort of what I imagine heaven to be like: any kind of fruit and vegetable you can imagine for super cheap!), going to church, picking pomegranates right off the tree, and watching really strange foreign films.

We also went to San Francisco. My favorite part of San Fran was Musee Mecanique: "one of the world's largest privately owned collection of mechanically operated musical instruments and antique arcade machines."
This is "Laffing Sal" and you can pay a quarter to see her come to life and laugh at you. Creepy, yet historical. There were the old fortune telling machines, the arm wrestling machines, marionettes, and mechanical pianos. It had a very old-timey feeling to it, and it was really fun to walk around and see all of the antique games. I kind of wish I lived in the 1930's and could go to the carnival with a pocket full of change and blow all my money on those games. Kind of interesting to see how much entertainment has changed since then!

Right next to the Musee Mecanique is Fisherman's Wharf. Ever since our trip last year, Mike regretted not trying the fresh crab they sell on the wharf, so this year he bought some.

Bleh! No thanks! I don't like eating anything that looks like a spider, but Mike sure enjoyed it! And apparently, the cocktail sauce was to die for!

This is Ellie in her stroller. You can tell by her face that she wasn't all that happy. You see, the entire time we were in San Francisco, it was pouring rain. So she had to stay inside her stroller with the cover up and a blanket on top of her.

And who can go to Suisun City and not stop at the Jelly Belly Factory, which is in the neighboring city of Fairfield?

Their brand new jelly bean flavor is Honey, which was pretty good assuming you like honey. At the end of the tour, they give you a good sized bag of Jelly Bellies, and there's also a Taste Bar, where you can sample any flavor you like. Mike made me try Millipede. It was disgusting.

And just down the street from the Jelly Belly Factory was the Budweiser Factory, so we thought, "Why not?" This tour was a little less exciting. (Although if you drink alcohol, you get 2 free drinks at the beginning of the tour. We had lemonade instead). It was kind of interesting to learn about how they make their beer.

This was a refrigerated building which housed their Fermentation Tanks (I don't know if that's what they're really called), but each of those metal tanks was 72 feet long. This building was massive! Oh, and did I mention there were 4 floors above us with the same thing? The beer ferments in there for 30 days or so before it's ready. Children under 5 could only go on half the tour due to safety reasons with the big machinery so Ellie and I hung out in the gift shop, but Mike said we didn't miss much. Jelly Belly definitely beat out Budweiser in my book!

Ellie also had her first playground experience. Riding zebras...

Rock Climibing...

Monkey bars...

What a stellar facial expression!

We had a great week in California and were sad to leave. We decided to break the trip home in half and spent the night in Winnemucca, Nevada. What a great name! Winnemucca. After striking out at several hotels/motels we finally found a place to spend the night. And speaking of great names, this was called Scott's Shady Corner Motel. Have you ever spent a night where "shady" was part of the name? We figured we had a 1 in 7 chance of making it out of there alive. But we lived to tell the tale.

And that was our trip to California!

Trick or Treat

If you've known me for awhile, you must know how much I love cows. I've been waiting (literally) 10 years to use this costume. I bought it when I was 16 years old, when somebody brought it in to Kid to Kid, where I was working at the time. I must say, Ellie is the CUTEST COW EVER!

Fiddler Crabs

We had 2 new additions to our family this week! Meet Tevye & Lucky, our Fiddler Crabs. (Tevye because of Fiddler on the Roof, and Lucky because everything including the crabs, the aquarium and all its accessories totaled exactly $24, which is Mike's lucky number.)


They're pretty cool dudes! As you can see, Fiddler Crabs have one ridiculously large claw and one small one. They are scavengers so they walk around picking up algae/food/decaying matter with their small claw, and use their large claw to intimidate each other. I had high hopes that they'd be friends, but alas... they avoid each other if at all possible. I guess it could be worse.


But they're kind of a fun, yet smelly additon to our family! They've survived an entire week now, and hopefully they have many more weeks ahead of them!

Escalante, Population 850

We went and visited our favorite residents of Escalante, UT: Stacy, Bryan, and Baby Ada! This was my first time visiting them even though they've lived there for 5 years or so. We had a lot of fun! Stacy & Bryan have a small (but absolutely gorgeous) place so we didn't stay them, and instead stayed in a giant cabin owned by their friends. Ellie had a fantastic time breaking in all of Ada's toys. I can't wait until they're both a little older and can start playing with each other.

Ada has changed so much in the month and a half it's been since we saw her last. She is rolling over (3 months before Ellie could) and she'll probably have teeth before Ellie too. She is a super cute baby! Her little baby squeals are by far my favorite thing about her.

Stacy and Bryan took us to Devils Garden, just outside of town. It was a really neat place where you could just wander amongst the rock formations. Really, really beautiful!

This is my favorite picture we got of Ellie. She looks so grown up, standing up all by herself (kind of... you can see Mike's arm behind her if you look really closely).

We had a really good time visiting family! Stacy & Bryan are excellent cooks and we enjoyed lots of vegetables picked from their garden. Mike ate a Santa Fe Pepper, which was pretty spicy. I touched my tongue to it and boy did it burn! I can't imagine what it would feel like to eat a big chunk of that.

On our way home, we stopped at Bryce Canyon with my parents.

Here's Ellie, posing in front of the majestic backdrop of Bryce Canyon. The only thing separating her from the sheer cliff below was her papa's arms. (Actually, she was very safely seated on a post, securely held by Mike... but it sure felt like she was flirting with death to me. I hate heights.)

This is at the Inspiration Point Overlook. When we headed back to the parking lot, Mike pointed at a car and said, "Oh! Someone's missing their license plate. Poor people!" As we got closer, we realized WE were those poor people.

Someone stole our rear license plate! And they even stole the bolts that attached it to the car. Really? Who does that in a crowded parking lot in the middle of the day? We had to go to the Visitor's Center and file a police report and then they gave us a copy of our signed affidavit so if we got pulled over on the way home, we'd have proof we reported it. By some miracle, we didn't get pulled over at all on the way home and we went to the DMV the next day and paid $10 to get new plates. So to you, Mr. License Plate Stealer, I say, "Thanks a lot! I could've bought lots of delicious ice cream for that $10."