Rylee update

I haven't done a Rylee update in a while so I thought it would write down some stuff I want to remember

Rylee 8 1/2 months old

• Loves to give kisses. She has to grab your face and with open mouth on your mouth or noise then holds it for at least 10 seconds. 
• Now says Uh-oh when she drops something.. or throws something over the edge
• Has to always be jumping. Now in her hair chair she can scoot it forward because she is jumping around so much
• Wiggles so much its hard to hold on to her
• Loves peas. She laughs the whole time she eats them. I guess it's funny to catch it and eat it
• Understands sign for more and eat but isn't close to doing them
• Laughs when you bark like a dog
• Loves "Down on grandpa's farm" and "Old McDonald" and "Bingo"and "Baby Beluga" when played on youtube
• Loves her puzzle book with farm animals
• Loves going on walks at night
• Not a fan of baby food. She wants to feed herself
• Eats bananas, yams, green beans, bread, yum yums, peas, anything really
• Loves to drink water hates juice
• Fake laughs to get peoples attention
• Has to have everyone look at her 
• Knows how to make people smile
• Finally has hair to put bows in and leaves them in
• "talks" like crazy
• Growls at us.. don't know where that came from
• Thinks Daddy is sooo funny no matter what
• Happiest when both mom and dad are home
• Still sleeps through the night
• Gets slap happy at night and laughs like crazy
• Found her toes and will eat them
• Has to have a diaper in her hands when we change her
• Loves bath time or taking a shower. Washes her own hair. Drinks the water out of her wash cloth
• Hates getting dressed
• Hates her car seat
• Will snuggle when tired
• Pushes her lips out and makes angry faces
• Will imitate any noise we make
• Copied us blowing on hot food and will blow on her food sometimes
• HATES Tummy time 
• Still not mobile
• Now rolls over again when put on tummy
• Trying to pull self up but hasn't yet
• Loves her magnets 
• Loves pulling the books of her shelf
• Understands ledges and will scoot to get over or throw something off
• When she is done eating will pull her food a part into small pieces and throw it off her high chair
• Loves cords and yarn balls
• Has 2 bottom teeth
• Shakes her head all the time
• Loves to pull stuff out of the diaper bag or toy box
• Just started putting things back into bag or box
• Pretty much happy all the time. Only cries when tired and thirsty 

We LOVE being Rylee's parents. We had one night where we think her ear hurt. She wouldn't lay down at all and kept touching her ear. I fed her and fell asleep around 10-12 with BJ playing with her. Woke up to her crying and I tried putting her to sleep but she was not happy. We gave her some meds but she just wanted to snuggle. I walked around the house (SOO happy to have a house I can walk around in!) for an hour. I passed her off to BJ to sit down for a minute but she just wanted me. I sent BJ to bed at 2 turned on Beauty and the Beast. She isn't into TV but loves music now. She fell asleep snuggling me so I slept in my rocking chair. She woke up crying every 45 minutes and I would walk around with her until she fell back asleep. She woke up around 6 happy and wide awake. I woke up BJ and passed her off and fell asleep until 9:30. I woke  up to them asleep in the rocking chair. It was a long night but not that bad. 

We love watching her learn new things and we laugh all day long at funny things she does. She is such a ham these days and always fun to be around. 

Project Table

I sanded down my table. That took a long time. I did it all by hand. 

I think it turned out good. I didn't take a close up of the table because it isn't done yet. My sister Kim said to try stain to make it the color I want. We haven't found the right stain yet. Hopefully our next trip into IF I will be able to finish it. I think it is fun having a bright spot in my dining room. I love how my chair turned out too. 

This is where I got my idea from. My sister Kim sent me the Ball picture for Christmas. I loved the color of it so thats why I painted my table blue. My mom also gave me a blue tinted Ball jar for my wedding that I have always loved. I love my dining room. Now I just need to do something with the rest of the place!

New place

Our living room is HUGE! It is about the size of my old living room, dining room, and kitchen put together!!! I love the fireplace, which we can't use for some reason, and built ins. The heat comes from the ceiling. I guess there are a bunch of coils that heat up and send it down into the room. It feels like the sun shining down on you. I just hope it doesn't cost too much to use!

Our stuff looks so tiny in this huge room! I also found drapes at the thrift store for my big window. The table is not in this room we were just moving stuff around.

Our dining room. I love how big it is! The built in china cabinet is awesome! I got a ton of white serving dishes when we got married so now I can display them! We also put our desk in this room. Its nice to have a place for the printer now.

My kitchen is already amazing! It didn't have a dishwasher so we sold our old snow tires and got a portable one. Its nice because I can push it off to the side and fill it up then bring it to the sink and turn it on. It also acts like an island for extra space when cooking.

This is 3rd bedroom space. It doesn't have a heater so we just use it as our storage/ pantry room. I'm going to set up my sewing machine in here too.

The laundry room is shared and downstairs but it is large and nice to have.

The backyard isn't fenced but there is a ton of space. We are hoping the lady lets us put in a garden this spring.

I have my linen closet! Our room is about the same size as our last place but Rylee's room is bigger. We finally tracked down 2 dressers to use. Why do they have to cost so much?!? Thankfully we found great deals at D.I. and other thrift stores.

The tub is bigger than the last place and has cool little shelves too. 

I found these gems at the thrift store. I'm painting my table blue so these will be perfect to add some color to my china cabinet! $5 for a set of 6. You can't go wrong with that!

We bought new chairs because we broke 2 of our chairs that go with the table. I upholstered the seats to match my table.

BJ found this fabric and I was so excited. It reminds me of things I see on HGTV.

In the process of sanding and painting. So far the blue I picked is brighter than I wanted so I'm trying to find ways to mute it a little. I still think it will be an awesome pop of color though.

All in all we love this new place. Rylee adjusted really quick. She loves that she can play with her toys in the living room and still see me in the kitchen and vise versa. We have already had our neighbors come visit us too. An older lady lives under us in the basement and she is kind of crazy but we rarely see her. Unless of course we park on her side. She will come tell us to move every single time. If you want our new address let me know!

SUPER BOWL

Giants going to the super bowl! YEAH BOY!

prince amukamara #20 DB

I still say he owes me for all those ankles I taped, all the ice bags I made, all the heat packs, filling all those water bottles. 

Way to make Apollo High School proud!

Super bowl party here we come!

Internship

In my Child 310 class we were asked why we picked Early Childhood Development as our major. I thought about it and at first I thought, " Well I like kids. I do well with kids. That's why!" Then I had to dig deeper and I wondered why I did choose to learn about children. 

I realized that the real reason I wanted a bachelors in  this major was because I feel that children deserve the best. If we can enrich their lives early on then we can help them to become more successful and achieve more later in life. We need to give them the best foundation possible. Everyone knows how to play with children but not everyone knows what milestones they should reach when and why and what to do if they don't or how to disciple in the best way. There is no set right way how to raise a child but there is a for sure set way on how to NOT raise a child. I want to help children be able to grow up in happy non abuses homes. It's not enough to just raise my children that way. I want to help my community as well. 

Idaho has a great program called Parents as Teachers. When you have a child they ask if you want to sign up for it. I did and love it! What is it you ask?

http://www.parentsasteachers.org/about/what-we-do is a website that explains it better. Mostly you get home visits each month and someone will bring information on the age of the child to help you better connect, raise, and play with your child. 

I found out that they were doing training here in Rexburg for the first time in 8 years and I could do it as an internship! I get trained in Feburary then I will get 5 families that just had a baby and I get to take information to them each month and help them give their child the best resources that they might not have been able to give them otherwise. 

I am so excited.This is the reason I am still in school. I'm kind of over the whole nursing thing. Mostly because I HATE being away from Rylee the 5 hours I am at school. BJ has been a great help but for some reasons Dad's just aren't as good at the Mom job. He is great with Rylee but can't seem to figure out the whole keeping up with the house part too. I told him since we are both in school and working we needed to split the house work too. He agreed but I still seem to stay up doing everything. I think its funny listening to him say how hard it was to make phone calls with Rylee yelling at him. I think its good that he gets to see why I have been struggling figuring out how to do stuff. He gets it now. I just chuckle when I come home and do the dishes he said he was going to do 2 days ago. At least he will never be the husband that asks what I've done all day =]

School

This is the first semester in my entire life that I have not wanted to start school. It makes me sad but then I do homework at night and realize that it's ok to be over the whole school thing.

I know I will finish even if in my head I am already done. It has taken me sooooo long to do school. Its my fault for moving around so much but goodness I didn't realize how much it would take out of me.

After a day of cleaning and taking care of BJ and Rylee I really don't want to spend hours on the computer doing homework. I want to read my book and do nothing. Tis not so anymore.

I started reread the whole Inheritance Cycle again. The 4th book was released in November and my brother in law Matt had the whole collection so I figured I'd read it over Christmas break. Since it has been a year or so since I read the other 3 I re read them and sadly I realized I can't read like I used too. I can sit and read an entire book with only food and pee breaks. It took me 2 weeks to read 3 books. It never takes me that long. Now I am on the 4th book which is the one I haven't read and school has started. I'm sad it will take me all semester to read it. I've never had to read a book so slowly before. I hope I don't lose interest in it. The only reason I read Eragon was because everyone said it only had 3 books and I wanted a quick read at the time. Since I hate books that aren't in series it was perfect. I got to the end of the 3rd book and realized there was going to be another and  I was mad. Now that it is out it is going to take forever to get through it. Oh well maybe this will help me learn to read a book in more then 3 days.

I recommend the series if you like magic and olden days with elves and such. I'm not a huge fan like Lord of the Rings but these books are fun because its about a kid learning to be an adult so quickly and learning about the world. I like them even if I skip whole paragraphs at a time because I don't care what the sunset looked like.

I think I also am doing an internship this semester too. I need to make sure I still can. BJ dropped some classes so that he can help take care of Rylee and milk cows too. Plus he didn't get good grades last semester so we figured it would be best to go slowly and get good grades then fast and get bad grades.

Lets hope we make it through until April!

Christmas

Rylee's Christmas dress was from her cousin Lili. We went through her old clothes and found this. I'm glad Lili was the first grandbaby and that Kim kept all her clothes so Rylee can have cute stuff.

She is such a ham these days. Sticking her tongue is normal around here.

BJ had Rylee help him decorate the tree. She loved it! 

She played with  tree almost everyday. She broke one of the ornaments by accident but that was my fault since I have her a wooden one to play with and it flew out of her hand on accident.

Christmas Eve we went sledding. She didn't mind as long as someone was pulling her while the other sled down the hill. We had a lot of fun. There was hardly any snow but it was perfect for sledding. We then rented Cars 2 and Super 8 to watch that night.

Christmas morning was fun. Rylee loves grabbing everything so we just put her gift in front of her and she grabbed it and once we got it open she played with each thing before she opened the next gift. She loved the boxes too. I love how she learns so quickly. Kerri sent her a train that you push a button and balls go around inside. It took her less than a day to figure out how to push the button to make the balls go around. At first they went to fast for her to grab but she figured out all she had to do was push it over and they would roll out. I love watching her play with it. 

We had fun opening presents from our family. BJ got his gift early which was shot gun and .22 bullets. I got my steam mop and have been loving it! Aunt Marsha gave us money for an exersaucer and with some money we got from my parents we went for the jumping one. She loves to jump and she figured out how to turn around and play with each toy. Whenever she jumps it plays music. She loves it! 

For Christmas Eve we wanted hamburgers so we went and got a camping grill. We made Cheeseburgers on  ciabatta bread with Henry Whinehart Rootbeer. I'm pretty sure we will do this every year!!! 

Christmas day we went to Church which was amazing! We had our own concert with french horns, violins, cello, oboes, piano, with amazing singers. I was so impressed! We came home and had lasagna with Matt and Camelle (who by the way are having a girl!!!!! and Marie is having a boy and and girl!). We had a lot of fun and enjoyed our time as a family. We hope we can make it down to Phoenix next year since we wont get to be there this summer. 

I wanted to take pictures out in the snow but there wasn't really very much. It hasn't snowed in awhile and right now there is non to be found at all.