5K Completed!

I have reached my first fitness goal. Yay! The race went right past my house, so Werty got the kids up and waited patiently on our front steps for me to run by. It ended up being longer that we planned, because the race was the opposite direction it was last year. I looked at the map online, and there was no way to know it was going to be that direction! So, instead of being at the beginning of the race, our street was near the end of the race. But BooBear got to see his mommy running in a race, and that was the point. He decided he would rather play on the park playground rather than run the kids race. Oh well. I guess that means I will need to run other 5Ks in the future if I want him to have that experience. I know that I came in about a minute under my goal time, but I don't know my exact time...I will have to use someone's smart phone to scan the code and find out...because everyone has a cell phone, rt? Um, everyone in the world except me? (you can stop laughing now, Ddonn).

A Visit from Ddonn!

Ddonn called on Friday to ask if I was busy on Saturday. She had an unexpected opportunity to drive to Orem with her SIL and wanted to crash at my house. Yay! And she brought cute Jack-Jack with her! Jack-Jack walks around, of course, whereas Little Miss doesn't yet. So, BooBear followed her around and offered to "watch her" for us. He has been excited to teach his little sister how to go up and down the stairs, but I keep telling him she has to walk first. Well, he was so impressed that Jack-Jack could do the stairs and he watched over her whenever she did to cheer her on and make sure she was all right. It reminded me that BooBear does really well with younger kids. They played in the sandbox and pushed the toy lawn mowers around together for a little bit. And I had a jolt of reality about how soon Little Miss is going to be running around outside playing with her brother, instead of being my cuddly baby. Jack-Jack and Little Miss are only 5 weeks apart, although Jack-Jack is quite tall for her age.

While she was here, she decided to get my facebook account up and running. She was kind enough to post and invite my first friends while I was out of the room taking care of kiddos...ahem. I had been promising to get on FB for nearly a year, and it has been fun to reconnect with people. My blog will continue to be my place for pics and anecdotes for those interested in my family and kids (Hi Mom!). Werty is still not on FaceBook, but you can't blame him. He has already been through the process of reclaiming his identity and email account from someone who used it to set up a dummy FB account, for what nefarious purposes, we don't know, but it was still a violation of his personal information. He found out about it when FB started sending him email alerts. It was a little bit of a shock. So, his first encounter was not a positive one.

We had a great visit. Thanks Ddonn for coming!

One Year Stats

Little Miss went to the doctor this morning. She is pretty cheerful considering she had shots. Here are her stats:

Weight: 20 lbs 4 oz  40%
Length: 31 in  95%
Head: 18 in  60%

She says, Mom, Dada, a version of her brother's name, up, ow, uh-oh, oh yeah, I did it, along with parroting a lot of what we say. She has 8 teeth, 2 of which are molars. She has started pulling herself up, but since she is in a sitting position rather than a conventional crawling position, she has only succeeded in getting stuck so far. No walking yet.

Happy Birthday Little Miss!

 Little Miss is now a Little Miss 1! The weather warmed up just in time, and we had a great Little Miss Sunshine party. Ddonn would have loved all the yellow. I think we finally figured out how much seating is enough when both mine and Werty's family are invited.. Here are the pics I promised.

  Little Miss in her party dress.

 A Little Miss Sunshine cake, of course. It was a yellow cake, three recipes worth (every time I swear I will save time and use a boxed cake mix, but then I make it from scratch because it tastes so much better! I think this is the first time I didn't hear any complaints about food, even from the teenagers. I will have to remember that yellow cake is the flavor everyone can agree on.

 I saw this idea on Pinterest, individual 7 layer dip. We skipped the guacamole, of course, for my MIL's comfort. (Nothing says party like an epi-pen, rt?)
                                       
                                   
 Little Miss' smash cake. OK, so she isn't really the "smashing" type, and the fondant made a spoon necessary. I was planning on frosting her smash cake with buttercream, but I only had just enough buttercream for the crumb layer on the big cake. So, there I was with no more buttercream and plenty of marshmallow fondant, so she got the fondant with a chocolate outline of Little Miss Sunshine instead. Um, and I forgot to add the chocolate pigtails. I had them, but I left them in the freezer because they wouldn't stay on. One of the teens did point that out, but I shrugged and said, "They're in the freezer."

  She managed to eat half of her cake.

 Ovaltine and Maeby, both have started new jobs this week. Ovaltine is working at the city cemetery, he gets to dig...and do other stuff.

 Rena and Mecedes. Congratulations on Rena for graduating with her Master's degree earlier that day. Mecedes once worked at a cemetery. He got to dig too.

 Little kids had fun in the sandbox, while older kids threw a ball around and played in the yard. Yes, that is the remains of the tree we dug out. Yes, Werty was supposed to move it before the party. But in his defense, he has a huge deadline next week for a project he has been working on for the last 6+ months. He also spent the day at Rena's graduation, which at BYU the FHSS college has the LONGEST convocation, and as Rena put it, without all the cool musical numbers and videos that you get to see at the college of Music and Visual Arts convocation, like when Werty graduated.

 My sister, bro-in-law, and my youngest niece.

 Family from ID came for Rena's graduation and the birthday party. They stayed with us for the night. The teenage twins even came. They were happy to get out of school for a day.

 Thanks to everyone who came and showered Little Miss with love and attention. She had so much fun.

Downer Abbey

There are a number of people out there who follow D0wnt0n Abbey on M@sterpiece Theater. I used to be one of them. But season 3 has me so annoyed that I am DONE with that series! Werty started calling it "Downer Abbey." Any character you reasonably like will die, and anytime something good happens, karma kicks them in the butt and kills them. When they killed off one of the main characters in the season finale, Werty declared, "Well, they just killed off the only character that any guys watching this show can relate to" and I think he's right.

My Brand of Crazy for TODAY

Everyone has their own brand of crazy, and today, mine was looking through my house to make sure a chicken hadn't wandered in. Because sometimes life is that random.Our neighbors have chickens, and they have recently taken to letting them be free range chickens. Two days in a row I have found the same chicken in my flower beds. Yesterday I went over and asked them to come get their chicken. Today, I was dealing with kiddos, and by the time I went outside to go tell them, the chicken was gone. Then I saw that my son had left the back door open when he went outside. Hence the wandering through my house to make sure there was no chicken inside. Thankfully, one of the kids next door had seen the chicken on her way home from school and had picked it up. OK. Chicken poop on my driveway. OK. Six foot gap in their fence, because it is technically a driveway where they have their broken down boat stored, that at least one chicken has discovered. OK. At least the chicken didn't poop INSIDE my house.

Brief Trip to WA

Last month I went home to Tacoma and saw my childhood home for the last time. My parents were moving and a friend was getting married. Since my parents house was in that in-between-half-moved-stuff-everywhere stage, Little Miss and I slept at their new place with my sister Crayola. I did go through some of my old stuff from the attic. There was so much stuff from myself and my siblings in the attic that just needs to be thrown away, and I ran out of time to get everything done that I wanted to. I feel bad that I left a pile of stuff that needs to be hauled out and tossed for my parents to deal with, since they both have physical limitations these days (hence the reason they are moving to a smaller, one story house instead of a tall, skinny three story house).

 Here are pics from Nan's wedding:

 Ddonn and three of her girls.

 Candid of some of Ddonn and Nan's family.

I loved her veil, so I took a picture of it.

 Ddonn with Little Miss.

 Ddonn and I with our baby girls.

While I was there I visited with an old friend and his cute family.



Little Miss with Grandpa at their new place.

By the end of the trip Little Miss had decided that she really liked her Aunt Crayola.

Grammy even managed to put Little Miss to sleep for her nap once.

I returned to UT for Easter and my birthday. Here is Little Miss in her Easter dress, enjoying a sucker from her Easter basket. Unfortunately, she got sick from the trip, and I spent the day home from church with her, while she threw up everything, even water, and of course, this sucker. But she looks happy, doesn't she? This was the first sucker that was HERS, not her brothers, but HERS.

 Werty bought me a snickers cake from my birthday, since I had no desire to bake a cake the day after flying home...with a sick baby. I was on a chocolate fast during March, so I was ready for some chocolate cake, yum!

Aunt BBug made this headband for Little Miss at my baby shower. Whenever I put something on Little Miss's head, her big brother usually says, "Look, she's a princess!"

 And Spring is finally here! My new daffodil bulbs are in full bloom, and the tulips started opening up this weekend. This is what they looked like last weekend: