Beans and Rice

After working hard to get a good food storage supply, I realized that it was time to learn to cook with the food storage food. So this week, I decided to try making Brazilian Beans and Rice. I volunteered to feed the missionaries this week and after finding out that one of them is a vegan, I figured I would just make it the night that they were coming. I was impressed when the meal actually looked and tasted how I remembered it. Unfortunately, the Elders had to cancel, so we had a lot of leftovers. And after about three days, the smell of garlic was finally gone from the kitchen, fridge, and trashcan. Danny's comment was "Next time, maybe you should stick with garlic powder." I write that because I agree with him. The smell was pretty strong. It was fun making them and now after tasting beans and rice again, I wonder how I managed to eat it every day for 18 months. But I can't complain because at least we were fed.

Meeting the Baby T-Rex

We took Alyssa to a free promotional event for Walking With Dinosaurs this week at Danny's work. They had a coloring contest and a trivia ticket giveaway and then they brought out the baby T-Rex to meet everyone. Below is a link to a video that gives you an idea what it was like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92Mkic_pjBA

Alyssa loved the T-Rex. She laughed everytime it would roar and go up close to people. She didn't even get scared when it came close to her. We think she is going to like the show on Friday night a lot.

Our Little Ashley Girl

We haven't posted anything about Ashley in a long time, so here is an update on her. She is now sitting up very well and she is grabbing at anything that is withing her reach. She especially loves really small things (like all babies) such as pieces of lint, crumbs, or anything else that the rest of us tend to overlook.

Last time I measured her, she was 28 inches long and between 20 and 21 pounds, but those aren't official doctor visit measurements. She has bright blue eyes just like Alyssa and her Daddy and very blonde hair unlike any of us. She is, however, still pretty bald.

She is pushing up very well on her hands and she can get to most anything on the floor by rolling and scooting. She can even reach stuff on the lower level of our coffee table. She is looking like she is close to getting those knees up under her, but it still could be a long ways off. Who knows.

She is a very good eater if you can't tell from her chubby face and rolls. She loves baby food a lot more than Alyssa ever did which is good since she hasn't cut her first tooth yet. We've tried giving her a few finger foods, but she still gags on them, so she probably isn't ready for them yet.

She finally slept through the night for the first time in 6 months this week, and she did it twice!! She has been a better sleeper than Alyssa. When I do get up with her during the night, I've just fed her a bottle and put her right back down, so I'm not losing much sleep. Alyssa always liked to stay up for 2 hour stretches in the middle of the night.

She is a sweet baby and we are glad that we have been able to enjoy the non-mobile baby stage a lot longer with her than we did with Alyssa (who crawled at 5 months!!). We love you Ashley!

Preschool Field Trip

For Preschool we decided to do about one field trip per month. The first field trip was on Thursday. Someone knew the Dairy Manager at one of the grocery stores close by so he gave the kids a tour of the back freezer, behind the milk shelves, and then walked them through all of the other dairy products in the store. He talked about where it all comes from and what they do at the store to get it ready to sell. The kids thought it was pretty cool to walk inside of the big freezer. Afterwards, he gave them some chocolate milk and suckers that they ate at some tables at the front of the store.

I attempted to save her white shirt from disaster by tucking a napkin in it, however the following picture is evidence of why she ended up with a big chocolate milk stain.
Here is a picture of Alyssa later on the day (with a very nice smile I might add) showing that she didn't only get chocolate milk on her shirt, but also the blue sucker.
I think that she had a lot of fun on her first field trip. Next month, I'm hosting the field trip to the combination fire and police station. I think they are going to love that.

The Blank Park Zoo

We had a beautiful week of weather this past week, so I decided it was the perfect week to take Alyssa to the Zoo. We haven't been at all this year and she got a free pass from the Library summer reading program. The day we chose to go was the best weather day of the week too. We invited another little girl and her mom to go with us. They had a lot of fun together, but I forgot to take out the camera until after they left, so all of the pictures are just of Alyssa. Here she is getting a drink from the Hippos mouth.

Alyssa is finally learning how to smile somewhat normal for picture taking. We are so happy.
This giraffe was so close to the fence and there weren't any other kids around, so I took a lot of pictures. Even Ashley is staring at it.
There is that smile again.
This area of the zoo has all of the smaller things like fish, insects, snakes, and birds. Alyssa is trying out the rope bridge.
It turned out to be a very good day for the zoo. Ashley and Alyssa were very good for me. Ashley even took a fairly long nap for the stroller which was nice. And both girls concked out after we got home.

STICKERS!!!

Every time I get stickers in the mail I let Alyssa have them (they usually come with stuff from the different clubs I try out occasionally. This set was from my newest club memebership - The Creative Home Arts Club. If you are wondering, it has been a waste of time and money). She loves stickers. This sheet of stickers had at least 100 stickers on it with a bunch of different phrases. She put less than half of them on her before we took them away and she is still covered.

Here is a close up of her leg.

Labor Day

On Labor Day we decided to take Alyssa to Chuck E Cheese. This is the second time that we have taken Alyssa there and she seemed to enjoy it a lot more this time. She loved sticking the tokens in the games and pulling out the tickets. She had a lot of fun with the games too. We didn't take our camera along this time because we got a lot of pictures from the last trip, so the picture below is from April, but the pizza still looked the same. I think our favorite part of the whole trip there and back was listening to Alyssa call it "Mac N Cheese." It made us laugh every time.

We also took the girls to Fuddruckers on Friday night and we were very pleased with how well they did. We would probably go out more often if they were always like they were that night.

Alyssa in Preschool

I didn't write about this last week because I didn't have any pictures to show, but Alyssa started preschool during the last week of August. It's kind of a Joyschool program that I am doing with 6 other Moms in the ward. The kids meet for two hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays and we take turns teaching them. It's kind of a nice deal because I get 4 hours a week to run errands with out Alyssa and only have to teach once every 7 weeks. We do also take one turn as the teachers aid too. The nicest thing about it is that Alyssa is too young for the state preschools, but our ward one set the cut-off for the end of the year, so she is barely old enough.

Here she is sitting with the other kids in the class. There are 5 girls and 2 boys in the class.

Here is one of the Moms singing songs with the kids.
They all dressed up in costumes without being prompted. It was cute, so I took a picture.

My Little Green Friend

I finally got sick of pulling weeds in this one area in front of our house so I tackled the project of clearing out the weeds laying down some landscape fabric and pouring mulch over the top. In the process of pulling out weeds, I took away the home of two praying mantises. The largest praying mantis that I have ever seen was maybe 1-2 inches long. One of the ones I encountered was at least 6 inches, so I had to take a picture. I am not a bug person, so to get this close to a bug was a big accomplishment for me.

Here he is looking at the camera (and me).
I had to continue pulling weeds and laying mulch while avoiding having this creature jump onto me (I learned from watching him that they can jump fairly well).

Here are a couple of pictures of the finished project.

Oh Where, Oh Where has Danny Been?

During the first part of this past week, we didn't see much of Danny. On top of work everyday, he also had different activities in the evenings. On Sunday night, being a Scoutmaster, he planned and carried out an Eagle Court of Honor last minute for a young man, Jacob, who's family was moving to Switzerland the following day. (On a side note, as a result of the family moving, our whole bishopric was changed last Sunday since Jacob's dad was our Bishop). The Court of Honor turned out well and there were more people there than we expected.

The pride of Iowa in the past six weeks has been a 4'9" gymnist named Shawn Johnson. Due to her winning 4 medals during the games, she is now known throughout the world (I might add that we were very sad that she didn't get the gold in the All Around, but we were glad that at least she lost it to another American). On Tuesday night, Danny was in charge of her Welcome Home event at the Arena. This was also somewhat last minute and kept him very busy for a few days. The other two people in the picture are Danny's boss and his little girl.

Here is a link to a live video of the welcome home event if you are interested in watching a little of it. Just to warn you, it is like an hour and 15 minutes long and it takes awhile to buffer before you can skip ahead. You can see Danny right away at about the :45 second mark interrupting the Emcee. http://www.whotv.com/Global/category.asp?C=90994&nav=menu100_5_1

He also had a softball game and another Court of Honor both on different nights of the same week. He was also supposed to have a boxing event one night that was fortunately postponed until next month. Needless to say, we have enjoyed having him home for this three day weekend.