Kadri's First Birthday!

Yup. It's true. Kadri's first birthday was yesterday. Where did the year go?

We had a small birthday party for her at our house, and my sister and her family came for dinner, presents and her first birthday cake. Here are a few photos of the festivities.

Birthday Dinner - Spaghetti! It was a hit, as you can see.


One big pile of presents (they multiplied when the Shannon crew showed up) and the cute birthday girl (with spagetti remnants on her nose).




Opening presents



Presents received: 2 baby dolls, a bottle for the babies, a "CD Player", a book (The party pretty much stopped when she opened the book. We had to work really hard after that to get Kadri to finish opening presents.), and a new outfit.

What could possibly be more exciting than such presents?

Well, Howie's nasty, dirty rope toy for one!


And birthday cake for two! (It's supposed to be a daisy. Please forgive my botched first attempt at a cute birthday cake.)


Finally, a photo of Kadri with her first balloon. Which we found in the card from her Grandma, which we forgot to open until the day after her birthday. Oops!

Family Photos

Earlier this month we went and had our first professional family photos done. This was inspired by my brother and sister-in-law's very effective use of the free portrait and no sitting fees deals that are going on at Sears all the time. I jumped on-line and found a coupon for this photo collage...



Then this picture was so cute I just had to pay the $10 it cost to have it printed for forever. I haven't had a moment of buyer's remorse!



And I have a coupon for a free 10x13 with no sitting fee. I'm thinking that for Kadri's first birthday we may have to do something with that...

Back by popular demand

So, I've had lots of people requesting that I update my blog in the last month or so. I suppose that is a reasonable request, since it has been two months since my last post. Lame? Yes. Even Cat says so apparently. But I'm over it. I have no good excuses for not blogging, particularly now that we are on a TV strike at our house. We were wasting way too much time in front of it. I've just made other projects priorities - like cleaning, learning to play my guitar (again!), pilates, STUDYING the scriptures when I can stay awake, etc. But tonight, I will post. Mostly photos, but I guess that will be okay. I do have the cutest baby in the world!

If any of my readers don't know, Courtney, my youngest sister, came to spend the summer with us and to act as a nanny for Kadri. While Courtney was with us...

We hiked once...

Howie came too!

Kadri LOVED Courtney!

When Grandpa came to take Courtney home...

Grandpa and Kadri snuggled.

Now that Courtney is gone...

Kadri helps Daddy with the dishes...

Kadri's outfits don't always match...

And Kadri has to play with Howie when she wants to have fun!

Also, just to let it be known, Kadri does walk now. I would love to post some video of it. But I can't. Conveniently enough, every single rechargeable battery in our house has stopped recharging. Just in time for Kadri to start taking her first steps... If I didn't have so many projects to work on, maybe I'd make it to the store for more batteries...

Just Photos

No Batteries!

Kadri just had the cutest conversation with herself in the mirror of the closet in our office. I tried to capture it for your viewing pleasure. But alas, no batteries in the camera! *sigh*

At least Kadri is feeling better though! She's been running a fever for the last couple days, and it seems to finally be gone. Hooray! I don't think that Kadri will appreciate that this means she has to sleep in her own bed again though... This could be ugly!

Pretty little peasant girl

So I took Courtney shopping at the outlets in Anthem this last weekend. While there I met up with my high school friend and her husband and their five-month old. Since we both have babies, somehow we ended up in a baby clothing store, and while we were there I found a little dress and matching head scarf that I couldn't pass up. We put them on Kadri for Sunday, and someone made the comment that she looked like a little peasant girl with her cute dress and head scarf and her bare feet. She sure makes a cute peasant girl though. What do you think?

This is the best photo of the dress itself. Kadri is really wiggly these days. It's hard to get a good photo sometimes.

This is the cutest photo of Kadri in the dress - although a little blurry. She was moving.

Just look at those blue eyes! Gotta love 'em!

Best Buds

Howie is jealous of how much time Kadri gets from mom and dad, no questions, but he really is a good boy and really does love her. He tries so hard to play with her! I wish I'd had the camera out a few seconds earlier when they were both trying really hard to play together. They haven't got it quite figured out, but soon...

Also, in case you didn't notice from the video, Kadri crawls! She's been a crawler for about three and a half weeks now, and it's taken me a long time to post video or blog about it because I've been busy, busy, sick and busy.

She also climbed all the way from the second (main) floor of our house all the way to the third floor, which is no small feat for someone as small as she is, considering we have nine foot ceilings. That's 18 stairs x 2! She's an animal!

This evening her aunt, uncle and cousins came over and we all swam in the pool (including Aunt Courtney who has graciously agreed to spend the rest of the summer with us [we hope!] and help watch Kadri while Tim tries to work from home). She is one tired girl tonight. Hopefully she'll sleep well and be ready to play cheerfully and hard in the morning.

My little narcissist.

Need I say more?
I suppose just a quick Kadri update: She is still not crawling. She has been "this close" (imagine me holding my thumb and index finger as close together as possible without touching) for three weeks now. She just can't seem to get out of reverse into first gear though. Needless to say getting around is a little frustrating for her as she moves away from objects she'd prefer to move toward, and life is really frustrating when she gets stuck under the furniture. Silly girl!

A quick brag on my girl.

It's been about a week ago that the story I'm about to share occurred. Why, one may wonder did it take me so long to share this story? Because I don't get enough hands free time when I'm home in the evenings to do much blogging. I have a five month-old after all!

Well, here is the brag: My five month old managed to get from her tummy to sitting all by her little onesie last Wednesday! She's so rad! The disclaimer: It was totally an accident and I'm sure it will be quite some time before the feat is repeated. All the factors in the universe of our living room just happened to line up at that point in time: She was on her tummy, she was scooting backwards like she tends to do, she found just enough resistance from my foot or from grabbing the rug between her toes, and ba-da-bing ba-da-boom! She was sitting up. Without any real assistance from me.

Finally, someone did mention to me the other day that my blog doesn't change often. This is true. I don't deny it. However, as mentioned before I have a five-month-old. And blogging takes too long with one hand. At any given time I usually have four or five blogs I intend to post sloshing around in my head. Sometimes they just spill out of my head before I find a chance to blog them. What can a mommy do?

Baby's first trip to the beach.

A week ago we had the opportunity to take a much needed weekend vacation to beautiful San Diego. It was so fabulous! Here is a quick run-down of each day of our weekend and then I'll post a few of the many great pictures we took. This will probably be a photo heavy post!

Thursday - We left for San Diego and made it as far as Yuma before we were falling asleep, so we crashed at Tim's sister's house for the night.

Friday - We woke up and drove the rest of the way to San Diego. Spent a brief amount of time at Balboa Park where we met up with Tim's sister and her family, then drove to the condo where we were staying in La Jolla and took an evening stroll on the beach down to the pier.








Saturday - We slept in and didn't make it to the Temple which was covered in scaffolding and apparenlty the atrium was covered over so you couldn't see it anyway. Poor brides having their wedding photos that day! We spent the afternoon at the beach. So fun! Ate Greek food for dinner - YUM! Then we took a walk down San Diego Bay to see the big ships. To finish the evening we went back to the condo and watched "Fantastic Mr. Fox" (or something like that) which was super-funny and I highly recommend it. What the cuss?














Sunday - Church in the morning, then off to Balboa Park for the afternoon, where we attended a few minutes of the free organ recital at one of the largest outdoor organs in the world, the we swung on a tree-vine like monkeys and took a stroll through the conservatory. In the evening we drove to the "Children's Beach" which has been taken over by seals.











Monday - We woke up, cleaned the condo like mad and drove home. Along the way Tim and I both commented on how therapeutic the weekend was for us. We wouldn't mind moving to San Diego if it didn't come with such a hefty price sticker!