Summer Vacation - Part 1

We took our summer vacation to Utah last week spending time with my brother, some of my extended family and with Tyler's family. We had a great time! I have so many cute pictures I'm going to have to break our trip up into multiple blogging entries. This entry will include the drive out west and the time we spent with my family. So our first story begins at the very beginning of our long 2-day car ride. We hadn't been in the car very long when Tessa starts fussing and whining. And if you know our Tessa, she can be quite loud when she's upset. When we finally calmed her down, it wasn't even 5 minutes later when Aubrey started to cry and I looked back and saw this:

That's Tessa for you. She's plugging her ears because she thought Aubrey was being too loud, but it seriously was like 2 minutes before this that she was the one making all the noise. Too funny.

Abby's favorite story to tell anyone about our trip is the waterfall and bridge found in our hotel. It was pretty cool. The little waterfall and small stream was actually in the hotel and our lucky room was only accessible over a little bridge. The girls loved it even though we were at this hotel for only a couple hours to sleep and they didn't even get to explore it all that much. We had to at least stop for a picture.Our first stop once in Utah was to my Grandmother's house where we met up with my aunt and cousins and their families. Two of my cousins had babies shortly after I had Aubrey, so we had to have a photo session with the three cute girlies.

Can you tell my Aubrey is the oldest? She's only "slightly" bigger than their girls right? Right. The older kids had fun playing together too. Here they are playing croquet, which is the game I always remember playing at my Grandma's house when we'd visit when I was kid.

And finally, more entertainment from Tessa. I was holding Tessa on my hip and talking to my Grandma when Tessa decided to pretty much bear hug my Grandma around the face while still clinging on to me with her legs. Luckily, I had my camera in hand and whipped it out for this cute pic:

Thankfully, my grandma survived the squeeze, but man alive, check out those baby blues. Gorgeous!

Now you may think this is an adorable face, but don't be deceived. Behind the beautiful blue eyes and curly locks is a daredevil girl who's already learned to fight for what she wants. And when she's not happy, beware the "evil eye." I have now taught her to do this on command, so it's pretty funny when she goes from adorable smile to evil eye in a split second. Luckily, I caught the split second for all to enjoy.

My brother thought it was hilarious and wished he could have been the one to teach her this talent. Every time he saw Tessa, he'd ask to see her "evil eye" and just laugh and laugh. And to add to the pleasure, he tried to tell Abby to roll her eyes and say "whatever" whenever I ask her to do something. Thanks John! You've got to love uncles. :)

Trees, Birds, and Whales

We had some random events occur in our lives the past couple of weeks, and luckily I got pictures of some of them. So, we start with TREES because it was the most devastating. We had a quick storm rush through last week that inlcuded very high winds. The girls freaked out thinking a tornado was on its way, but we were fine. However, the tree in our front yard was not.

No tornado came through, but the winds did and besides taking out our tree, it also blew things around our backyard. We ended up with our neighbor's plastic pool and Tyler's grill blew all around the porch and ended up in the yard with a broken door. We saw some fences down in our neighborhood, so I guess it could have been a lot worse for us. We count our blessings it was just our tree and grill.

Next, comes BIRDS. Tyler promised the girls a birdhouse, so we went shopping. Abby wanted a rainbow one, so we bought two cheap houses, one for each girl to paint herself.

They had fun painting them, and Tyler came home from work and put them in the backyard. Now they spend a lot of time looking out the window waiting for the birds to come (Tyler included.) We haven't seen any birds at the houses yet, but I'm wondering if part of that has to do with the fact that we used washable paints and after our spinklers went off, some of the paint has washed off the houses and mixed in with the food.

Hopefully, the birds will come soon. We'll be watching and waiting.

And finally, WHALES. The summer has finally arrived and with that comes swimming. We bought Tessa a whale pool for her birthday so we were finally able to set that up and the girls have gotten good use out of it, using it almost every day. Here are a few shots from their first trip in. Aubrey even had a turn. And I also have to include a blurb on the girls, specifically Tessa. She loves being a big sister. Her latest adventures as the big sister inlcude giving Aubrey a doll to cheer her up: NICE. But they also include Tessa using Aubrey as her own paper doll where she gave Aubrey a necklace and... wrote on her with pen! NOT NICE.

(but funny)

Abby's Dance Recital

So nothing makes you feel all grown up more than when your daughter has her first dance recital! We spent a full day, and I mean all day, doing dance recital stuff. All morning at the dress rehearsal and all night with the performance. But it was well worth it to see Abby all dressed up and performing. She did an awesome job. The audience was full and she wasn't scared at all. She was the leader of the group, leading her class on stage (since she was on the very end - no tall genes in our family) but she did all her dance steps and she smiled a lot. What more could you ask for?

We weren't allowed to take pictures with a flash during the rehearsal or performance, so unfortunately all the pictures we have of Abby on the stage are really blurry (our camera's no good without the flash). All of our pictures were in between numbers and after the performance. But at least you can see how cute they are. Abby did the class with two of her best friends, Maisy and Lexi. Here they are after the performance.

Their number was titled "Texas." Can you tell? They danced with cowboy hats. It was so cute! They also participated in the finale where they had to wear all black. I took this picture while we were waiting during the dress rehearsal. At least they had a nice outside area for the girls to run around during the long morning. We signed Abby up for dance next year. She seems to like it that much.

Great job Abby.

We love you!

Aubrey's Blessing and My Birthday

The day finally arrived! May 24th!! We blessed Aubrey. And the special treat was that it was on my birthday! So not only did I have the present of a beautiful daughter in her beautiful white dress but also lots of family to celebrate with. Tyler's parents came down from Utah and brought Tyler sister's, Tiffany and Tara, and also Tiffany's four kids. Abby and Tessa were looking forward to this part the most - enjoying time with their cousins! Here's Aubrey in her very own beautiful blessing dress!

Here's the family. This was the best shot we could get since Tessa was bound and determined to run off.

Here's the whole family that was able to be here. Here's those cousins. They had so much fun this weekend playing, running, swimming, and doing whatever else to entertain themselves. And for five little girls, they actually did really well together.
And for my birthday, Tyler and the girls got me the two best presents I could think of:

1. A freezer - YEAH - finally!! On the waiting list from last year, we finally got one, and put it to use immediately when we bought four ice cream containers for a dessert night.And...

2. DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) for the Wii. I love this thing. A total surprise from Tyler, and I was very happy about it.

And for my yummy birthday cake (I started cutting it before the candles - oops) can you guess how old I am?

If you guessed 29 you're right! It's the cheap way to do birthday candles. Instead of buying a new number this year, Tyler came up with the math equation 28 + 1 for my birthday cake. Pretty clever if you ask me! :)

Thanks all of you for your birthday wishes and compliments on the blessing. It really was a great birthday and blessing day!!

Mom's Old Toys

My parents left a mystery bag at my house this weekend, and only said, "we've been holding this for you for years. It's some of your old things." So, the girls and I opened the bag to find out what was inside. It brought back many memories for me. It was full of my old barbies and clothes, cabbage patch dolls and clothes (which I think consisted of some of my own baby dresses), my little ponies, and a few other random toys.

The biggest (and by biggest, I mean BIGGEST) discovery we found was my old Cricket doll. If you've never heard of the Cricket doll, don't worry. It took me awhile to remember I even had this doll too. But seeing the tape player in her back brought it all back. This "life-size" doll actually talks complete with moving mouth and eyes! Check out the size of this thing...Almost the same size as my two-year-old. And yes, I noticed. Isn't it weird that this doll that I had over 20 years ago is a pretty close resemblence to my Tessa?!? Look again:
Blonde, curly hair, blue eyes, small, petite frame. Yes, I know it's weird - and that's before you even mention the whole bride of chucky scariness going on that Tyler and my brother Scott both have already pointed out. :) Oh well, the girls like her. More toys to add to our ever-growing collection. It's nice to know that all that money that was probably spent by my parents on these toys of mine could be used again in this house full of girls.

Practicing for the Big Day

So there has been a lot of decision making regarding Aubrey's blessing. When to have it? What dress to use? etc, etc. After a couple date changes, we finally settled on May 24th, but that meant Aubrey would be 3 1/2 months old. Not a big deal except that her sisters where both way younger for their blessings (8 weeks and 5 weeks). Still not a big deal, except for me who has a picture display of the girls in their blessing dresses by a picture of mom in her wedding dress, so I kind of wanted them near the same age for this picture. So, I thought as long as I had Aubrey's blessing dress I could just take the picture early and have it taken care of, except that when we went shopping for a dress, we found nothing that we loved that was in our price range. Blessing dresses are ridiculously expensive for that one-time usage. We were about to purchase one after "settling" for an okay looking dress but not loving it, but then the lines at the store were super long, so we decided against it. Plus, Tyler asked why we were paying for another dress when we had two perfectly good dresses at home. I just figured that since we had made the decision with Tessa to get her her own blessing dress, we needed to do that for each of our girls. However, I LOVE both blessing dresses we already had, so it did seem a little crazy to be buying a dress I didn't LOVE just to have a third dress. So, then I looked into making the dress myself, but by this point I had a picture of the dress I wanted in my head and there were no patterns resembling this vision, so no go on that. So long story somewhat shorter, I found a dress online I really liked at a dress store in Utah, so I had my brother go and buy it for me to send to us. We are currently waiting for the dress to arrive, but in the meantime I still wanted pictures of Aubrey in a blessing dress before she got too much older, so I pulled out the other two blessing dresses and we had a photoshoot. Here's some of the results of Aubrey in Abby's blessing dress. This first picture is my favorite of the bunch. It was the very first picture I took - of course!

A picture to see the full dress even though it's a little blurry because by this point Aubrey was getting a little anxious to be done I think.My attempt at getting a cute closeup of Aubrey's face like they do at the studios, but not haveing the right equipment/backdrops so you can see too much background. However, Aubrey still looks cute! (Abby was my assistant. She was there to keep Aubrey from falling out of this position). Here's Aubrey in Tessa's blessing dress. I took these during a time when Aubrey had some kind of eye infection, so they weren't the best picture-perfect photos, but at least she was happy for the entire photoshoot.

I'm sure there will be plenty more pictures in Aubrey's actual blessing dress when it comes.

And to finish this post, I couldn't help but search through my cds to find pictures of Abby and Tessa in their dresses. I always get asked who Aubrey looks like more, so now you can decide for yourself. My picture choices were limited, so I think they look more different in these pictures than they really are, but who knows. They're all beautiful to me! And in case you need help, Abby has the purple background, Tessa has the navy, and Aubrey has the blue.


I don't think you could get 3 girls any more beautiful than this! :)

Our Newest Addition

With Abby's awesome photography skills, we can play the game "What's this a picture of?" to find out our newest addition. Not too hard is it?

It's a NEW CAR!!!

Or van I should say!!
It's a Toyota Sienna. Used, but looks brand new.
Leather interior, power everything, and the main reason for the new addition...
lots of space!
I'm still getting used to having Abby so far behind me, but we all love it!

And here's my latest photo shoot with the girls. The pictures are labeled "bigface." Because, with adorable girls like these, how can you not take close-ups for everyone to enjoy?

Abigail

Tessa

Aubrey

Please excuse the drool. :)