Family Pictures - Thanks Shari!

Shari was nice (and patient enough) to take our family pictures over Christmas vacation in Idaho. I love how they turned out. :) Ryan said as long as we got a couple of good ones, the mission would be accomplished and we got way more than that! Shari did a great job and was very patient with all of Nyah's energy and not wanting to hold still. She also suggested we do them in the spring next time because it was kind of cold but this is how it worked out this time around. We'll have to get them again next summer when there are four of us. :)


There is one picture where we told Nyah "freeze" to try and get her to hold still and she put both hands straight out in front of her. Funny girl. Anyway, thanks Shari for being willing to take the pictures. It was at least one million times better than our last picture experience.

Nyah has an Announcement....

Nyah is going to be a big sister! The expected time frame for her to see her new little baby brother or sister is June 15 (I'm 14 weeks so you don't have to count backwards). We are super excited and wanted to share our news. :)

Forget Catching Up

So I've decided I'm not going to try and go back and catch up for now. Maybe I will go back at some point and there will be some posts out of order, but I decided I need to just start with what's going on right now. Ryan got me a laptop for my birthday (and toy budget money I've been saving) so I'm enjoying blogging on my couch downstairs. He stood in line at 3:30 am the day after Thanksgiving and was #27 in a line with 29 laptops. Lucky!

I'm so excited for the Christmas season this year. Nyah is loving everything, and it's been so much fun. We put up Christmas decorations this last weekend which is early for us but it's nice to have them up.

Our neighbors across the street put up some lights on their tree in the front yard and Nyah wanted some of our own. Turns out, Ryan can't tell Nyah no (as we know) so we put up Christmas lights on Saturday. :) I teased him that he wouldn't do it for me the last few years so it's nice when Nyah and I want the same thing. He did a great job and it makes me so happy to drive up at night and see all of the lights.


As I mentioned, we put up decorations over the weekend and Nyah was the biggest "helper". She loved doing all of it. For my birthday, my Mom and Dad gave me a Christmas advent calendar. I know my Mom spent a million hours making it. I told her last year that's all I wanted this year and was so excited to get it. I cried when I opened it seeing how similar all of the ornaments are to those we had as kids. So we hung up the tree over the weekend and since today is the first of December, we put up the first ornament tonight. Nyah was excited with the whole process. Here is day 1 of the advent calendar. :) Didn't my mom do a great job? We love it.

My Little Sleeper and Shopper

So a few more fun things about Nyah. First of all, this girl loves to sleep. She sleeps 10-12 hours at night and still takes a 2-3 hour nap every day. Sometimes when we wake her up in the morning she likes to "snooze" us and basically wants us to come back in 10. Plus she wakes up super happy which is lots of fun. I don't know how I got so lucky to have such a good sleeper but it is greatly appreciated. :) Here are a couple of pictures of me waking her up from her nap on Sunday afternoon (evening since our church is so late) a few weeks ago .




She went with me shopping a few weeks ago and when she got back she was excited to show Ryan all of her new clothes. She even wanted to try some on. So here is a picture of her trying some on and modeling for us.

We sure love this girl. She is so much fun and I can't believe she is already 2 1/2!

Bike Trailer

Okay, so this is my first blog in a while and I'm going to attempt to catch up - slowly but surely....

So we have been thinking about buying a bike trailer for a long time, but I would look at the price of them and decide maybe we didn't need one after all. However, I really missed riding my bike so we decided to start looking again a few months ago. We looked at lots of places (especially Ryan) and then I decided to look once more on Craig's list and we found an amazing deal. It had been posted less than an hour ago and we jumped on it! We called and headed right over there (clear on the other side of Denver) and bought it. It's a Chariot, the quality is great and it's hardly been used. The tires still had the little spikey things on them. :) In the beginning Nyah wasn't so sure what she thought but now she tells me, "Mommy.. Faster!" It's lots of fun and I've enjoyed riding my bike again over the last month or so. Plus it's a much faster way to venture to the park, library, etc.

Fun in July

We have really been enjoying the summer. We have spent a lot of time at the park, at the zoo, and in the back yard playing in Nyah's pool or on the swing set.

Here is Nyah in her swimming pool. It has a little slide (I remember a frog pool as a kid with a slide and it was the best) that she loves.



Then here are a couple of her at the zoo.



And then the Fourth of July. We went down to the park by the library and it was good times (even though it was kind of cold). Nyah loved the fire works and told us all of them were her "favorites" but they didn't keep her attention the whole time so she kept jumping on us and giggling. I'm sure the people around us were wondering what was so funny. :) Ryan's friend from work, Tamoya, came over for the evening as well and participated in celebrating an American holiday (but with Mormons so it was probably a bit different....). We also remembered the glow-in-the-dark sticks so those provided a distraction for Nyah while we were waiting for the fireworks to begin.

Swing set Project

So last fall Ryan started talking about a swing set for Nyah. In the beginning he was thinking he would just make one for her from "scratch" instead of buying one of the kits to try and save some money. Then this spring when we started to think more about it, I suggested a kit. I could envision our summer turning into one big swing set project rather than having time to do anything fun. So he agreed and we got a super deal on a swing set at Toys R Us. Little did I know that even with a kit, it would be a big project. In retrospect, I think if we didn't have a kit, it would have been a multi-year project. :)

So this first picture is of all the wood once we opened the boxes in the garage. The first big project was to sort out all the wood so you could even identify which "part number" everything actually was. I know we started this project over a month ago. We worked on it many evenings. Then on the fourth of July weekend we got serious about it and spent basically all of Friday and Saturday on it. On Friday night I even talked Ryan into building the bay windows inside the house once it was too dark to work on it outside. Here are some pictures to show progress that weekend.







Then we were gone the next weekend so we finally finished up this weekend. We are both relieved to have it done and Nyah is thrilled to have her swing set. She loves it. She told Ryan "thanks for my swing set" and I think that and seeing her excitement made it all worth it. :)

Last is a picture of the finished product as well as one of her having some fun using it. Yay!

Father's Day

I am so very grateful for the amazing fathers in my life and I love them so much! First of all, my Dad. Anybody who knows him knows how amazing he is. He has always been an example to me of dedication and commitment. If he says he is going to do something, he does it 100%. I remember even as a child if I committed to a team or an activity, I was always expected to follow through. I think this is a great lesson and hopefully one we can pass on to Nyah. He is also a great example of faith. I admire his dedication in his church callings as well. He truly magnifies his callings, no matter what they are. He has always shown total respect and love for my mom as well. He is always telling us how beautiful she is. Thanks Dad for all you have done for me over the years.

Ryan is an amazing dad. Just this last weekend Nyah and I drove to Boise and then Ryan flew in that night and met us. So Nyah had seen Ryan that morning before we left but when we picked Ryan up from the airport that night, you would have thought Nyah hadn’t seen him for weeks. It was so cute. She loves her daddy so much. I tease Ryan that she has him all figured out, but I love to see how much he adores her and can’t resist her cute little smile with the plea of, “just one?” Watching Ryan and Nyah play together is the best. Since Ryan and I both work, he ends up helping a lot with Nyah and around the house. I appreciate his willingness to jump in and help. Thanks Ryan.

Ryan got a grill for Father’s Day. This is his first grill of his own. His last one he “acquired” from his mom’s house (and actually built when he was a kid). The first is a picture of Nyah helping Ryan put his new grill together. Then I thought it would be fun to post pictures of Ryan with the old grill and then the new one. I'm still reminding Ryan that he is supposed to be getting rid of the old one - he's kind of attached. :) On a side note, there is a benefit to Ryan having a grill he wants to use - him cooking dinner and no dishes! Yay!

Ragnar Relay Weekend

We had the Ragnar Relay June 19 and 20th. We drove to Idaho on Wednesday so we had a little bit of extra time before the relay. Thursday evening we celebrated Mom's birthday and Father's Day since they were Saturday and Sunday and we didn't know how celebrations would go with the relay.

The relay was 188 miles from Logan to Park City. This is the second year we've done it. Our van consisted of Ryan, Cindy Austin, Tom Mortimer, myself, Lisa, and Cory Briscoe with Dad as our driver. The other van was Andrea, her dad - DuWayne, her sister - Kelsey, John Bilquist, Josh Hill, and Jordan. It's sad that we don't get to see the people in the other van very often so it was fun that it got mixed up a bit this year from last year.

The training can get a little demanding at times but the actual event is a lot of fun. We started Friday at 11:30 and ended 31 1/2 hours later. At the end of the race it was pouring rain and poor Lisa and Cory (the last two runners) definitely had some tough runs in the rain and it was cold by then as well. I didn't envy them a bit. You will see from my picture that I was grateful to be done after I had completed each of my legs. I also need to thank Mom, Shari, and Aaron who took care of Nyah so Ryan and I could both run. Thanks! I "borrowed" the pictures below from an amazing journal Cindy and Andrea put together. I think Shari has more pictures so I might end up editing this post and adding those as well. :)

This is Nyah...

So here are some typical pictures of Nyah these days. The first one is her doing "thumbs up". The picture is obviously blurry but I can't get her to hold still these days! She did this for Ryan lots last weekend because Ryan made his weight goal for his new life insurance policy. Congrats to Ryan! I never realized what a trick it is for kids to make their fingers do what they want them to do. :) It's cute. Anyway, she also does "two" and says "peace out". I love it.



The next is just her with a cute smile and you will also notice the stickers on my new oven. We have stickers in all sorts of interesting places. She absolutely loves stickers (and it's amazing what I can get her to do for a sticker)!

The last one is her playing the piano naked. She's done better the last week or so but for a while she didn't ever want to wear a diaper or a pull-up. She has been using the potty quite a bit and I figure we'll focus on it after this next weekend and the Ragnar relay.

So this last week at church she informed me during sacrament meeting that she needed to go potty so I took her out and sure enough, she did it (Ryan thinks it's amazing she can go every 30 minutes). Anyway, we're walking back into the chapel and she's still about 10 or 15 feet from Ryan when she says (not in a reverent church whisper but with a loud voice and lots of enthusiasm) "Daddy, I go potty!" Nice - in sacrament meeting. I'm sure we are quite the distraction at church these days...

We also bought Nyah a new swing set and until Ryan gets it built, this will have to do:

Hopefully we'll be able to start building this weekend. :) She keeps telling us how she wants her swing set and the days of hoping she will forget about things are long gone.