Any Ideas...?

... For making toddler tooth brushing easier? Lately Kaiya will open her mouth for me to brush her teeth, but then she curls her little lips over her front teeth so I can't even get to them. If ever I get her to open so I can brush them, I will hardly have the toothbrush in her mouth before she turns her head and clamps it shut. We bought her a cute pink toothbrush and some of that toddler toothpaste in hopes that she would enjoy it more, and even try to let her do it herself for a little while before I start, but we haven't had much luck. I'm afraid her teeth are going to be rotten and she'll be one of those kids with all the silver front teeth. If anyone has any ideas on how to get your child to let you brush their teeth, PLEASE HELP!!

Lime Face

Beautiful Lake Tahoe

Here are some pictures from our trip to Lake Tahoe. We went with our friend Keri and two of her boys. One is the same age as Kaiya, so they had a lot of fun together. We had almost forgotten how beautiful Tahoe is!

Ancestry

If anyone is interested in genealogy, I just thought that I would pass along that Ancestry.com is doing a free 14 day trial right now. This is great news because they have millions of records and are usually kind of expensive. You do have to put in your credit card info, but if you cancel the membership before the 2 weeks is up you won't be charged. Happy hunting!

http://www.ancestry.com

Anniversary

We celebrated our fourth anniversary last week at the Boise Shakespeare festival. I already mentioned this in the last post, but I wanted to put up some pictures, and also say THANK YOU to Patrick for the last four years. They have been amazing, and I feel so lucky to have an eternity to look forward to with you. XOXOXO!!

This is us at the Shakespeare festival. We had a lot of fun eating Cheesecake Factory food and sitting in our lawn chairs waiting for the play to start.
Here's us on our wedding day in front of the Reno temple.
And a picture from our honeymoon in Las Vegas. Don't we look young? I'm feeling older just looking at these photos.

We're Back!

We are finally home from our journey across the west. We had a ton of fun visiting friends and family, and Kaiya did so well even though we were travelling and spending nearly every night at a different place. Here's a rundown of the trip:

August 5th: Left home, visited Temple Square in Salt Lake, and spent the night with the Christley's, friends from BYUH, in Springville. I'm still mad at myself for forgetting to take any pictures with the Christleys.

August 6th: visited more friends from BYUH, the Greenleafs, and Patrick's old roommate James and his family.

Us and the Greenleafs

Patrick and Kaiya with his old roommate James and James' mom Sandy

August 7th: travelled to Delta, Utah, where we visited Patrick's great aunts and he toured the Topaz internment camp from WWII for work.

We didn't take any pictures with the aunts, but here's the post office in Leamington, Utah. I thought its size was so funny I had to get a picture.

August 8th: travelled to St. George, where our friends from BYUH, the Peltons, let us stay in their home while they were up north. Thank you so much! We went to the pre wedding celebration/birthday party for our good friend from Carson Mike Fontano.


August 9th: Attended the wedding and reception for Mike and Lianna Fontano (Congratulations!!) and travelled to Las Vegas where we stayed with more friends from BYUH, Josh and Stephanie Barney.

The "oops, I wasn't ready" picture (sorry guys, it was funny!)

The good picture

Us and the Barneys

August 10th: Left Las Vegas. Kaiya and I flew up to Reno where we visited my brother and grandmother, and Patrick drove to Manzanar, where he had to tour and do some research for work.


August 11th: Patrick drove up to Carson and joined us at my grandmother's house. Kaiya and I visited a good friend Angie Davis.


August 12th: We visited Patrick's grandparents and had a barbecue with his dad and sisters and their families.





August 13th: We spent the day at Tahoe with our friend Keri Lawson and two of her three boys. One was born on the same day as Kaiya, so it was so fun to watch them play. At night we had homemade ice cream with my grandma and brother and his family.



August 14th: Our fourth anniversary!! Kai and I flew to Boise and Patrick made the 7 hour drive by himself. Ginger babysat for us so we could go the the Boise Shakespeare festival and see Macbeth. More pictures to follow.


August 15th: We stayed at Ginger's house another night and she watched Kai again while Patrick took me shopping for an anniversary present.


August 16th: We returned home and unpacked... mostly.


August 17th: Dear friend Chelsea and her husband Derek stopped to spend a day with us on their way from Oregon to Utah. We had a ton of fun!


So as you can see we have been busy! It has been so fun to see people we don't get to visit with often enough and get out and do things. But it also feels nice to finally be home and getting back into the routine.

Patrick is famous

Well, maybe not yet, but he was in the paper! There was a picture of him with the article in the Boise paper and the Twin Falls paper, but here's the story online if you're interested. It's about what he's doing for work. We were pretty excited about it!

http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=5461039

Goats... The Sequel

One of Evelyn's goats had quadruplets a week or so ago, and she wanted Kaiya to come over to see the new babies. So we once again braved the poop and visited the goats. The little goats in these pictures are only a week old! Kaiya was excited at first, but the following sequence of events may have ruined forever her love of goats after all:

Kai sees the baby goats

Kai begins to pet the baby goats

The baby goats jump on Kai and knock her down

Kai cries for Mommy to save her from the goats

Eventually she decided to teach the goats some manners by hitting them with a stick

We got to bottle feed the babies

It was really fun to see the babies and they were even cute (who knew a goat could be cute?)! They liked to jump up on us and also to nibble on our clothes. Nothing really happens in this video, but I wanted to show how loud the goats are. It sounds like they're screaming!

Sneaky

The other day I caught Kaiya sneaking books into her crib. She always gets to take the book we read right before nap or bed time into the crib with her and look at it until she's ready to go to sleep. I guess she figured out that if she smuggles some books in before nap time she'll have more options or something. So she ended up with about 10 books in the crib before she got tired of it and left to play with something else. I decided to be sneaky too and remove most of the books when she wasn't looking. I let her keep a few so she felt like she had accomplished something, but I had to take most out so there would be room for her to sleep! So nap time came and we read our story. She seemed overly excited to finish the story and get in her crib, but when I carried her over and she saw that the books were gone, you could see the disappointment in her little face. I felt bad, but she was fine after a minute. Every day since she has continued to put books in her crib, and I am continually taking them back out. I wonder if she hopes that one day they will all still be there when nap time comes around...