Sidney at 18 Months

I will add a picture later. Lazy I am.

I figured that since she is 18 months we should try the 18 month clothing. Most of the 12 month still fits, but we need to do laundry. I put a way cute outfit on her this morning, its too small. How does that work? We just might be into the 24month/2T before too long.

Sidney is learning new things all the time. She LOVES talking on the phone. She used to YELL MA! at me all the time, now I am "mommy" that almost sounds like Mammy. Syd loves dancing to music. She loves just talking in general. Some people look at us like, "I don't understand what she is saying, please translate." Still mostly baby talk. We don't know what she is saying either. Sometimes it sounds like something. Often it sounds like she is saying "what are you doing?" She gives great hugs! Her smile just lights up her big blue eyes. Her hair is starting to have a little natural curl. Her eyebrows have gone brown so I guess she won't be staying blond. She loves baby dolls. She has pretty much taken all of Libby's dolls. She gives them hugs/loves and feeds them. She is starting in on her 2 yr old tantrums. Its funny, she actually does the whole throw herself on the floor and pulls really sad faces. Too bad it just makes us laugh. She is much more adventurous than the other two. She likes to open cupboards, doesn't pull anything out thankfully. She likes to go into my parents house and call out, "Bampa? Bampa?" She is also learning how to help clean up. She tried to help unload the dishwasher the other day. I don't think I have ever unloaded it so quickly before.

We love her tons and can't wait till she actually starts talking so we know what she is saying. We will probably still want her to stop because it is so much, but she is so cute you just put up with it!

new baby

Every is so nice! So here are some details. Due June 29th. So I am about 10.5 weeks along. The morning sickness is so bad that the unisom didn't work this time, the first prescription I got didn't work and the one I am on now only kind of works. :D Hopefully it will all be done in a just a couple weeks, right? I had a quick ultrasound on Monday, the baby has arms, legs, head, a heart that beats, and it moves!

Anything I am forgetting?

The trips? Yeah, um, I will get to those. I promise. I just don't know when. Sorry!

A great sign of imagination!

I was sitting on the stairs with Sidney today, she was playing with Henry's farm music thingy. (there is a name for it, I know there is . . . ) She gets up, walks over to me, grabs my hand and turns it palm up. I am thinking she is going to grab my hand and take me somewhere or steal my spot. She then proceeds to pretend to take something out of my hand and eat it. Not just once like she is making a mistake thinking I had something but she kept doing it! It was just too cute.


Someday I will tell you more about the trip . . . .

I am busy with other things.

Like trying to keep food down. Stupid morning sickness. :|

Sidney 15 Months

I will get back to the trip sometime soon I promise. In the mean time there has been two big races. . . oops!

Sidney had her 15 month Appt today.

Her weight started out at 10% when she was 2 weeks old. She is now up to 27%. This is pretty good for my kids. That is the highest she has been for her weight.

Her Length/height started out in the 25%, she is now up in the 53%!!! Holy cow!. At 12 months she was only 9%. Hopefully that was the lady measuring doing it wrong.

Her head Circumference started out at 9%, thank heavens. She has gained every time it has been measured! She almost doubled her head % in the past 3 months. She is up to the 81%. She must be a Gibson, she sure didn't get it from me!

She started walking 2 weeks ago, 4 months sooner than the other two learned. She is learning some sign language and loves beeping anyone's nose or giving high fives. She also loves "talking." She sometimes even looks and sounds like she is yelling at you for doing something wrong. She gets sad if you tell her no but can usually take it. She is almost alway happy, most everyone is jealous of that one :D She gives great hugs and is so much fun to play with.



Love you Sidney!

Random Road Side Attractions

Looks like this is going to be in reverse order of how we saw them :D

This first picture is in South Dakota on our way up to see Mt. Rushmore. Apparently we had perfect timing for the motorcycle rally:

This was also in South Dakota, it is a really large Bull head on the side of the freeway. Shrug

This says Adrian, I promise. I got this for you Adrian since we were finding all sorts of other signs. I am going to have to steal the other pictures from Josh and put them in another post. But, you Adrian, are special. You get to be the first one up on here ;)

We weren't intending to see the Jolly Green Giant, we just stopped for dinner and it happened to be right next door. BONUS! It is in Minnesota as the sign says.

We were told that while in Minnesota we had to try cheese curd. Deep fried cheese curd that is. Here is what it looks like with Mike and Henry trying them out!


We borrowed a GPS from my brother because I was paranoid about the maps that I had printed with step-by-step instructions and our phones with GPS not getting us where we needed to be. What was I worried about? My google map sure didn't have us driving right down the middle of the Mississippi river!

We have driven a long way and can assure you all that our country is in fact covered in corn. So, here we have "children of the corn" in Burlington Iowa.

After the Nauvoo Pagent we just went the path of least resistance to get out of there. But then I realized that the temple was now lit up and we would like to see it one last time before we moved on. So the GPS had us going on some strange roads to get turned around. This is the narrow dirt road that we ended up on. It was dark. It almost felt like we were lost in "Lord of the Rings" in the Fellowship when they are going through the forest and are hiding from the Wraith.

Mike wanted to go find several cemeteries while we were in Iowa and we ended up in Gibson Iowa. So here is the Post Office in Gibson Iowa. Kind of a mash-up between the Gibson's and the Golightly's.

This was right outside Amarillo. They are Cadillacs buried in the ground. If you want to see what they looked like before all the spray paint and what they symbolize, go here. It is picture number 9. We also say picture number 10 as we drove by. We would have stopped but really wanted to get to the hotel.

Our Summer 2010 Trip

This is basically what our trip was. This alone was about 4,100 miles. So add to that all the driving around town and whatnot that we had to do! Totally worth it, though we will never do something like that again. Well, maybe if the kids are a lot older and we can drive farther in one day . . .


View Larger Map

New Mexico

We made it to New Mexico. Here are a couple pictures that we took today. The rest are on the camera and I will do those when I get home.





Mattie and Dan are my Great Grandparents. And the school sign you ask? That school is names after my Grandma's Teacher. They apparently kept in touch for quite a while.

Zoo

Warning! Lots of pictures
My three kids and my nieces Niki and Z

The gang at the zoo.

Almost wishing we could have just played with the animals. They look so friendly.

Z

Henry

Niki

Libby

We went on a path we normally don't take. We came up behind the tigers and were able to see them REALLY well.

The Giraffes were being rather playful

I have seen people ride ostriches in movies I think, I didn't realize that they would really be THAT big.

The tortoises were rather awake and moving around a lot.

Baby Zuri! She/He is pretty cute. We went back this last weekend and Zuri was playing in the mud, even blowing bubbles in the mud. So fun to watch.

We went back that night to crash my brother's work party. Henry and Andrea.

Stephanie
Lisette, the goofball
Libby
Libby as a giraffe, her favorite animal
Henry with his brachiasoauraus. (sorry, its a dinosaur that I can't spell!)
Sidney on her first ever ride, she LOVED it!

Laundry

I had a goal today. I was going to get all the laundry done, get it all folded, AND get it ALL put away. I had that goal accomplished.


. . .


Right up till Mike decided now that all the laundry was put away he was going to do some cleaning.


There went that goal. Does this ever happen to anyone else? Kinda makes me want to never go for that goal again.

4th of July 2010

I LOVE Sidney's look in this one:

My Family

What is with my kids and goofy faces?

I know Henry's socks don't go, but you do have to pick your battles. It adds character :D

Meet Sorn-sorn

We finally took the kids to get a Build-A-Bear. They have never done their own. I was a little worried about Henry being able to find one that he would like. We found the perfect one very quickly.



As we were getting ready to head home Henry informed Mike that the bears name is Sorn-Sorn. Some day he might let me know that I have spelled it wrong, but he did have to tell us several times before we could say it correctly ourselves.

Love you buddy!

Cowgirl Sidney

Not much to say but: Sidney wearing Mike's hat and "talking" on my phone and having so much fun!

Sidney shows off. (Taken today, July 1st 2010)

Talking on the phone

Sidney just stole my phone. She held it up to various parts of her head and was "talking." Then she tried to put it in her back pocket. Too cute!

The Deck

When we bought the house our deck was under feet of snow. But you could tell that it was big enough that we could really have some fun with it. That and the view from there, well, we love it. :D

We came to find out that it was painted with about a rust color of paint. I don't like how it looks with the brick, the paint was peeling all funny, and I just didn't like it. My grand plan was to strip off the paint and stain it. I for some reason had it in my head that stain will protect better than paint. That and I can't imagine stain peeling like the paint has. (Lets hope I am right :D )

So we have talked to people over the past two years, just small talk, about our plan. As people do we got suggestions on how to go about achieving my goal. Notice how I say my goal, apparently Mike was against this, too much work.

Starting about three weeks ago we got plastic putty knives to start scraping off the paint. I was thinking somehow that we could scrape it all off, just so you know it really only works with the already lose paint. The plastic knives were only sort of working. In looking for our painting supplies I came across an old metal one and decided to try it. SO MUCH BETTER! So we promptly went out and got more.

We kept working. My dad came over at one point to help. His statement about all of it? It went something like this, "This is the worst job ever, it is pointless." I do have to admit that he was working in probably the worst area. He was working where the sun hits the deck the least. So it really had the least amount of paint coming up. Sorry dad!

We finally split the deck in close to half. We figured that maybe making the job smaller might make it less daunting. I would come home after work and scrape and scrape. I felt like I was getting a lot of paint up, then I would stand back and take a look at my progress. I don't think I was really doing anything. I was getting frustrated.

That first Saturday Mike and I were going to work on it together. I distracted him with wanting to go yard sale shopping! HAHA! It turned out to be a great idea since we found an electric sander for $7! We promptly went and bought sandpaper and got to work. Why oh why did we try to scrape when sanders exist?!?



I had to stop working on the deck for a week, it rained a lot. So I finally got caught up on my house work. When I could get back to the deck this week I went and bought some more sandpaper. I got a different kind than Mike originally got and decided to try and re-sand some of what he had done. I was able to pull up a lot more paint that he did. It turns out he was basically just buffing the paint instead of stripping it :D So I re-sanded what he had done on Monday. Tuesday morning I painted all of that. So at this point it was about half way done.


Tuesday night Mike started sanding the second half and Wednesday morning and afternoon I got a huge portion of that sanding done.
Mike finished up the sanding as I got home from my cake wrecks party. I really wanted to be done with the project so I talked Mike into staying up and getting the rest of it painted/stained. We started at about 10 pm and finished shortly after midnight.



It only took the two of us two hours. I kind of liked doing it at night. The sun wasn't beating down on it and drying it so fast that it gave it funny lines. That and we weren't having to play whack-a-mole with the kids.


While we were staining last night a ladybug decided to join our party.

But we are very happy to now say that the biggest portion of the deck is finished!!!

It looks slightly odd with some of the paint not having come up but it will look better as we repeat this process for the next couple years.

After all of that I am proud to say that I am no longer hesitant to use a power tool. The only war wounds are:

• a couple paper cut like cuts from the putty knife
• Sun burned the back of my legs
• and slightly stained hands

For me using an electric sander for so long I am really surprised that we didn't damage anything. I am somewhat accident prone.

Next, build a fence. Our neighbor is going to help us and seems amused that I want to help do that. I will show him! (I hope :| )