Family Photo

Here is our latest family photo update. A hearty thank you to Tim for photo shopping my stupid hair so that it looks decent enough to post for everyone to see! (And no thanks to the rotten photographer who didn't bother to tell me my hair looked stupid.)

Anyway, aren't my kiddos cute? :-)

Birthday Fun!

Miss Kadri-cakes turned three in December. I believe I promised my mom that I'd get photos of her birthday posted within a week. Well, that didn't happen, but in my defense it was a VERY busy and exhausting week.

The birthday girl requested pink presents, and pink cake with pink frosting. So we delivered.

She was actually asleep when I got home from work so I had time to arrange her presents nicely.

She ended up starting in on four different cupcakes before we managed to sing to her and have her blow out her candles. Actually, she had cupcakes for dinner that night. Only for her birthday will I let that happen.

We didn't have any birthday guests for her actual birthday, but this little man sure is handsome and drooly these days, as you can tell from this photo.

She likes her present. The markers lasted less than a month because I couldn't convince her to put the lids on when she was done with them. I have since discovered dry erase crayons. She also drew all over the chalkboard side with her markers because she is going through the terrible threes and refuses to listen to or obey her parents.

Kadri playing with her birthday presents - Candyland, dinos and lollipops.

That's it for the "Official Party." Now for the unofficial, "Unbirthday Party" that my mom sent for the weekend when my sister and her kids made it to our house!

Party goers. They are pretty cute!

 She's a party animal!

 Kadri loves her Very Fairy Princess book from Aunt Janelle and family.

 I think she likes it!

 Love the cheese face smile!

He definitely liked his present.

Thanks for the party in the box, Grandma Philips! :)

I have been trying to post for days!

But technology hasn't been cooperating. We'll see how far I get tonight.

This is a collection of photos of us from the last six months, in no particular order. I'll try to get a few indroductory captions for each of them and some commentary on what has been going on in our lives, but I don't promise much.

This is Little T when he was just a few days old. He was born March 21 @ 5:03 p.m. It was a long, boring day spent at the hospital, because I chose to be induced (and incidentally the epidural didn't work on my left side for this round either) but I was ready to be done being pregnant and this way he definitely got to have his own birthday. One day after his great grandma turned 100.

Big T and Little T

Thanks to Grandma Philips for taking this sweet photo of our days old little man!

And thanks to Grandma for getting this photo also.

If you couldn't tell from Kadri's face in this photo, she LOVES her baby brother. Some adjectives she uses to describe him: so cute, pretty, too funny, wonderful.

Teo loves Kadri too. (We've been potty training Kadri for almost eight months now. She does better at getting to the toilet if she's not wearing clothes, so she doesn't wear clothes most days and is very happy about it.) Teo's first smile that I saw and count as a real smile was for her. 

Kadri and her daddy. He's the best friend this two year old could ever hope for!

Kadri and her daddy dancing at the Pulley family reunion. It had been raining and Kadri's hair was CRAZY curly and awesome!

Kadri and cousin Ethan playing in the fire pit during the Pulley reunion. They were two dirty children, but they had a great time.

Isn't he darling?!?!

This one is for Micelle, who gave Teo these cute red pajamas. Love the flap on the backside!

Teo chilling in his crib on the quilt Grandma Philips made for him.

How is still here too.

This is a face we see fairly often from our drama king. He could be yelling about any number of things when he makes this face. He's being tickled too much. He's not being tickled enough. Mom isn't holding him. No one is actively engaged in feeding him. Etc.

Here are Kadri and Tim with Tim's Dairy Queen Ice Cream Cake he chose for his birthday dessert. That was some seriously blue frosting.

This is Teo and mommy on his blessing day.

Here is the little man in his blessing outfit that Grandma Philips threw together for him to wear. It was SO CUTE. But I barely got his little arms and shoulders into it. I should have been more diligent about getting a photo of him in it without our milk-stained couch as a backdrop, but oh well!

What a grin!

This is Kadri and I playing with her "colors" one day while waiting for Daddy to get home from work. 

This was us over Labor Day weekend in Yuma. I'm making a nasty face because Tim is touching my sunburn from floating the river two days prior.

And here we are floating the mighty Colorado river two days prior. Tim and I got sunburns. Miserable sunburns. Even after applying sunscreen. The sunscreen we put on the kids worked though. We all had a great time, including Teo. He's such a cool baby! He's already way ahead of me as far as accomplishments at six months old. He's floated and river, been on an airplane and seen the ocean.

Did any of you know Tim wears a monacle to swim? I didn't until after this photo surfaced.

Some other tidbits:

I stepped on a gecko on my way out the door to work one day this summer. He (or she) had been hanging out in one of my shoes. Also, I've received legitimate flowers delivered to my office from a florist three times in the last six months.  That never happens! Once from Tim and twice from my favorite clients.

Kadri loves learning about letters and is learning to spell some words, like her name, and that L-L-E-D spells computer. Someday we'll teach her that we read from left to right, unlike the Greeks and the Arabs and lots of others. Until then it's kind of cute that she does.

Teo went to his six month check-up on his half-birthday. He still has a pinhead (25th percentile), he's pretty average for length (48th percentile), and he's gotten skinny (12th percentile).

Tim is enjoying his job and his calling as ward media specialist, which apparently gives him an excuse to stalk people on Facebook. He left his scriptures on our car before we left for church today and surprisingly they remained there for the entire drive.

We're really busy between having both of us working, and trying to keep up with and spend time with our growing kiddos, and keep up on church responsibilities (at which I pretty much always fail), and keep up on a house, and still have time for family adventures, but we feel really blessed for all the good things have come to our lives in the last six months and pray that good things come for all of our loves ones as well.

A post is coming... Someday

I've had several requests for a blog update with lots of photos. I've had good intentions in the last three months of posting, just no time, or no motivation, or a card reader that intermittently stops working. But I'll get some photos posted someday. I thought about posting some tonight, but it is too late and there are way too many to choose from. But here's a little teaser from when Teo was around 2 months old. (I only know that because Kadri is wearing clothes in the photo, therefore this was taken during the 4 week period - 7 to 10 weeks old - that the kiddos were going to a babysitter after I went back to work.)

Meet Lil Zephyr*

* FINE PRINT : Zephyr is Child #2's Pre-Birth name. Otherwize, we'd call him/her "Child #2". Tim is the author(ity) of all pre-birth names, but Kira retains absolute veto power in Living Names.

Kadri's 2nd Birthday

So our little girl is two. I don't know how it happened so fast, but it did. Here are a few photos of her special day. (Well, here are most the of still photos of her special day. I'm pretty sure I'll end up posting all but the one blurry photo we took. If I had the patience I'd probably do all the vidoes too, but I seriously doubt I have that much patience.)
Birthday Dinner was spaghetti, for the second year in a row. Lame? No. I don't think so. We knew she'd eat it. After all, who wants to have their special day dinner be something they aren't willing to eat?

This year she has moved up to a "big person" stool and ate her dinner with a fork, thus NOT requiring a clothing change between dinner and present opening.

Birthday guests at 9:00!!

Play-doh! Which Mom and Dad still haven't had the guts to let her play with. She did get to play with some at Nursery today and seemed to do okay. Maybe someday we'll break it out...

Opening the dump-truck and Mega Bloks she pulled off the shelf and didn't stop playing with for the duration of our last trip to Ross.

Playing in the tent from Grandma Philips.

Playing peek-a-boo from the tent from Grandma Philips. Incidentally she was quite excited about the two dollars she recieved in her card from Grandma and Grandpa Pulley. She showed them off to everyone and immediately gave them to Uncle Brian. We assume for safe keeping because she knows he works at a bank.

The birthay treats. She blew out her two candles on her free Barnes and Noble/Cheesecake Factory Cupcake and chowed down on the frosting (we only have video of this part of the party), while the rest of us had Chocolate/Strawberry Revel Bars, because Mommy wasn't in the mood for cake.

And finally, this photo had nothing to do with her birthday, but it sure did make me laugh when I saw it!

I just can't decide...

...which of these darling photos of my beautiful daughter to post for the viewing pleasure of Kadri's Grandma Philips, so I'll just post them all.



Don't those blue eyes just about knock your socks off?

And thanks Aunt Janelle for the hand-me-down outfit. We've had a lot of compliments on it.

Just to take a few moments and update (brag) these are a few of Kadri's latest achievements:

1. She recognizes all of the capital letters of the alphabet, and can mostly tell you a word that begins with each of the letters. (Thanks Aunt Janelle for the alphabet puzzle that has made this possible.)
2. She can mostly count to ten. She used to leave out the number 4. Now that 4 has made it into the sequence, she leaves out the number 7.
3. She is learning some of the words to I Am A Child of God. We can sing part of a phrase and she can fill in a lot of the words.
4. One of her Mommy's favorite phrases she says is, "Where is Daddy go?" when she notices he has walked out of a room.
5. One of her Daddy's favorite phrases is "Howie's stinker." (He also likes it when she calls things "icky".)
6. She loves fruit. LOVES IT! We're talking she'd already eaten four clementines before 10:00 in the morning today.
7. She can name most of the animals we see at the zoo, and says hi to them by species. i.e. Hi, Giraffe. Hi, elephant. Hi, monkey. etc.
8. She literally wakes up bouncing almost every morning, with a chipper "Boing, boing, boing" to accompany each bounce. We know first thing if it's going to be a good day.
9. It has been sixteen months since she has learned to go up and down the stairs and she hasn't yet taken a spill. (Knock on wood! We've got a lot of stairs! And the stairs are the only place she likes to play catch, which Mommy DOESN'T love.)
10. She loves babies. She gets excited every time we see a child she assumes is even a day younger than her and wants to go ooh and aah over it. We think this is a pretty good thing, since TKPulley Baby #2 is due to arrive at the end of March (for any of you who don't already know - ANNOUNCEMENT! ANNOUNCEMENT! People started noticing in church today so the news is out).