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...

Something New

Kaiya's Grandma brought this over for her yesterday. She was pretty excited to have something new to do outside. Thank you grandma Ginger for the new toy!

Is this MY daughter??

Fun, yet Terrifying...

When Patrick started doing this with Kaiya the other day, I was terrified. But Kaiya's excited plea for "more!" at the end of the video says clearly how she feels about it. Needless to say, I was outvoted two to one and the terror continues.

Kaiya's Animal Sounds

Kaiya is starting to learn animal sounds. You can hardly hear her "sssss" for the snake and her panting for the dog over our extremely loud air conditioner, but she does them so cutely. We aren't sure why she thinks a cat laughs; maybe because she makes that sound when she sees a cat. We have some cows that live across the street and she moos at them every day and they even moo back at her sometimes. She loves animals and loves to make the sounds, but I do wonder, does mommy really say, "ahhhhhh"? I better work on that.

Twin Falls Temple

Last Thursday we visited the Twin Falls Temple for the open house. The temple is so beautiful! It was a really nice feeling to be able to tour it with Kaiya. She wanted to explore a little more than we wanted to let her, but overall she was really good. The open house runs until the 16th of August and then the temple opens at the end of August.

Sleeping Beauty...

Flag Cake

Patrick and I made this cake for a ward dinner last Friday. I saw a picture of it somewhere a few years back and have wanted to make it ever since, but was never able to for one reason or another. This year, since Patrick was gone for the fourth of July, I thought I would have to postpone my cake dreams for yet another year, but happily the ward was having a fourth of July/Pioneer Day celebration last weekend. We made the cake and I think it turned out pretty cute, thus the blogging of it.

So Lazy...

Patrick is in Denver for a conference on Japanese Americans. He has been gone for five days. He won't be home until tomorrow afternoon. Today I feel so lazy. I feel like what's the point of doing all the normal housework stuff if nobody is coming home to notice. Don't worry, I'm still living in the land of laundry, dishes, and picking up toys, but I'm having to force myself to do it way more than normal. Good thing Patrick comes home tomorrow, because I need to get out of this laziness funk. Plus, I kind of miss the guy. Okay, I really really really miss the guy.

Happy Birthday, America!

 

Kaiya's first experience with corn on the cob

 

Watching the parade

 

This was so funny. Apparently anyone who owns a car from the 1980s or older can be in the Middleton parade, because that's mostly what we saw. But this beauty of a car was trying to keep up with the others by reving the engine and such things, and totally stalled right in front of us. They couldn't even get it started again, so they had the truck in front of them give them a tow. This picture is them hooking their car to the truck in front. We had a good laugh about it.

 

For the fourth of July, Kaiya and I went to Nampa to spend the holiday with Ginger, Meghan, and some of the Larsens. We had a great time and Kaiya loved every minute of it. She loves her Grandma so much so she was so excited to be at her house again, and she didn't seem to remember much from when we lived there, so it was all new and exciting to her. And since the house is no longer baby proof, it was fun for me too to chase her around and redirect her from all the fun things she found to play with (like the dog food). In the morning we went to a parade, then in the evening we had a barbecue and once it got dark we set off fireworks (along with the rest of the neighborhood) in the front yard. Kaiya wasn't able to stay up for the firework show, so we did a few while it was still light so she could see them. I thought she would be scared, but she seemed to enjoy the lights, and none of them were too loud so she did fine. Once I put her to bed I was sure she would wake up during the fireworks because it was so loud, but she slept right through it all. I was so amazed. Normally this girl wakes up to whispering. She must have been really tired from the day's festivities. We had a really great holiday, even though Patrick wasn't able to be with us. Thanks for inviting us Ginger!

Goats!

We now know that Kaiya was meant to be a farm girl. Unfortunately for her, her parents were not. I guess she'll have to wait until later in life to realize that goal. A lady that Patrick works with breeds goats, and she let us bring Kaiya out on Saturday to see them. Kaiya was totally at home and not even a little bit aprehensive. She would run toward the goats trying to pet them and they would run away from her. It was so funny. She probably could have stayed there all day hanging out with the goats, but once she discovered goat poop, and that it was absolutely everywhere, we knew it was time to go.



Patrick put Kaiya up on this horse and she was thrilled! She didn't even want to get off. We asked her a few times if she was ready to get down and she kept shaking her head and holding on. By the way, Patrick is holding on to her in this picture. He wanted to make it look like she was up there all by herself so he's hiding behind the horse. Just so you know we aren't neglectful parents.