California Love

At the end of May/beginning of June we spent
a little vacation in CA visiting my family.

We went to a wedding, baby shower, and mission farewell.  We also saw the play Wicked, spent some time trying to find my mom's twin brothers' graves, visited with friends, became parents to a 10 month old,
and ate a whole heck of a lot !  

Our days were packed with fun and I loved seeing most of my family and all my nieces and nephews together!  I love going to my hometown.

I never seem to remember to take pictures. But here are the ones I did take.

 Some of the nieces and a nephew

...this is the best one we could take.  haha

And what's behind curtain #1? ......

The DOGS!  Danica loved watching Ella and Sisco

A visit/dinner with Sarah, Jacob, and Nick

Bet you didn't know a bowl could be so fascinating! 

Wicked!

I've had Wicked songs stuck in my head ever since we saw the play!

(Well, actually I've been doing better lately...until we went to Walmart today.  In the baking aisle a girl was singing, "Wonderful.  They call me Wonderful..." Singing is a term used very loosely here.  It was awful!  I thought she was just speaking at first.  It made me laugh, but my ears still hurt!)

The AWESOME stage.  I loved the play!

Tyler got us private balcony seats.  So cool!

Hi mom!

I'm not tired!

Is that drool running down my chin?? 

Such a lady... pinky up and all!

Dani turned 10 months old on June 2nd!

What a crazy, happy girl!

This girl is learning more and more each day!

Words she says in her Danica language:

*Dad *Mom *Baby *Bottle *More (in ASL) *Hi *Bye Bye 

*(and for the first time last Wed.) Peek-a-boo

Danica is understanding a lot more too:

*She knows the word "no"....luckily that word isn't on the list above *She'll hold whatever up to her ear (or the back of her head) when you say, "Do you want to talk on the phone?" *She knows where to look when we say "outside." *She waves hi *She turns off the lights when asked, "Do you want to turn off the lights?" *She does the spider movements for "Itsy Bitsy Spider" *She loves to copy us

Dani's got talent:

*She's started singing (I'm pretty sure that's what she's doing... it's different than her talking) *She'll pull herself onto ANYTHING and start walking all around *She can stand on her own for a few seconds *She took 3 steps on Tuesday (granted it was basically her falling to the ground, but she's on her way) *She eats all sorts of food and loves to do it by herself! Earlier this month she even had the garlic sirloin at Tucanos and loved it!

Danica laughs at the most random things:
*dropping a pencil (or similar) on our coffee table *Tyler fake hurting himself *The beginning of my workout video... I think it's because she knows what's coming and thinks, "haha!  mom think she's going to look like them?... she looks so silly!"

Danica loves:

*Babies/kids.  She gets super excited and screams.  She scares my neighbor's daughter and makes her cry... it's sad.  *Shoes (still) *To watch... she's a people watcher and she loves watching the cars drive by *To be outside *Baths...she gets so excited when I turn the water on.  She even tried to lift her little bath tub into the big tub the other day.*To be a social butterfly *To smile :)

There's a whole lot more I could share... it's just fun to see her learning more and more and being proud of herself for understanding... but I'll stop here!

2,102,400 minutes

I feel like I should be singing the title of this post

or

1460 days

or

208 weeks 

or

126,144,000 seconds

or

3 years, 11 months, 30 days

since

June 30, 2006

or

1 day

until

Our 4 year anniversary!  

Yay!! 

Oh the comments

I love receiving them... I think we all do.  

It gets us excited to check our blogs,  

but I'm so bad with comments/commenting.

I don't know the proper etiquette.  

Do I comment on your blog or on mine?  

Do I write back in one comment or to all indiviually?  Doesn't it matter?  

Well, I want to be better about it from here on out.  

I've decided to comment back on each post 

(as far back as the ones that are showing on my blog page right now).  

So if you've commented on my posts in the last few months, 

I tried to comment back.  For each of these posts, 

I commented to all in one comment.  

Don't know what I'll do in the future.

What do you guys think?  What do you do?

What a man, what a man, what a man, what a man...

....what a mighty good man!

(So...I'm a little late)

Tyler is a great man and a wonderful husband.
And he happens to be a fantastic dad too!  

I hope he had a wonderful father's day!  He's such a good dad to Danica.  

She grins ear to ear when she sees him.  Plus her first word was Dad! 

She loves him so much and so do I.  

I couldn't have asked for a better father for our children!

8*2*09

8*11*09

9*27*09

10*11*09

10*11*09

3*4*10

4*2*10

6*5*10

Happy Father's Day!!!

I saw this on a friend's blog and I believe it's from the book,
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell.

"A man is to me a higher and a completer being than a gentleman.... I take it that 'gentleman' is a term that only describes a person in his relation to others; but when we speak of him as 'a man', we consider him not merely with regard to his fellow-men, but in relation to himself, -to life - to time - to eternity."

Has anybody seen him?

He looks a little something like this

It's what I see when looking at the inside of my eye lids

It's A Good Night's Sleep and he's MIA!

Danica's been teething for the last week.  Though she's been a little clingy and tired she's been perfect during the day.

At night and naptime, that's another story.  The poor girl is in pain.  We can't leave the room without her screaming like no other.  It's sad and frustrating and exhausting.  We've been giving her Tylenol, but she's still clingy.  So...

It takes the Squirminator forever to fall asleep and it has to be in our arms.  And you know how that goes... she falls asleep and as soon as you put her down she's awake and screams. 
It's been a rough few nights with about 3 hours averaging in sleep for us each night.  Her two naps a day have been about 20-40 minutes.  Not so much fun.

I went to Danica's pediatrician yesterday because we thought she might also have an ear infection. Luckily, no ear infection!  He recommended Orajel for her gums  (blogger's telling me "gums" is mispelled...interesting).  I'm beginning to love that stuff.  It basically numbs your gum....and we know this because Tyler tried it on himself.  Haha. 

She slept pretty well last night (I only woke up with her twice!) and though it was tough to get her to fall asleep for her nap today, she's now been sleeping for about 45 minutes...knock on wood.

I wish teething wasn't so rough, but it's pretty exciting too.  Her bottom left tooth has cut through and we can see that her bottom right tooth will any time.  Her top gums are pretty swollen too, but we don't feel anything (that is when she actually allows us to stick our fingers in to feel).