Fourth of July

We spent 4th of July weekend up in the mountains near Park City with Tyler's family.  We went fishing and crawdad trapping on Strawberry Reservoir and had a quiet weekend up at a cabin.  Fourth of July day we went to the Park City Parade and went back into Salt Lake for the evening festivities.  It was a memorable weekend.

    

Top 5 - August

Payton Millie - 4 Years 2 Months

1 - Payton loved swimming this summer and as long as she is in her floaty she has no fear.  I tried to do my own version of swim lessons with her without her floaty on and people probably thought I was torturing my child.  When she is very afraid of something there is no way to rationalize with her.  So I gave up on that very quickly.  She has made such progress this summer so I am happy with that.  Next summer we will try again.

2 - We have a dog in our neighborhood that Payton loves to take on walks.  Even since she started doing that she asks me constantly for a pet.  She found a snail in my moms garden and brought it home.  She tortured the poor thing and spent hours in the backyard playing with it.  But it was the highlight of her summer.

3 - Payton got to spend 2 months straight with her cousins from Scotland and loved every second of it.  They both love super heroes and they persuaded Payton to step outside the box of princess land.  Payton asked to be Iron Man for Halloween!  It's fun to have a little change of scenery around here.  

4 - She has making friends down to a science.  Everywhere we go she has a best friend within 5 minutes.  One day she even gave me a 10 minute explanation of how she makes friends so fast.   

5 -  Payton mastered her balance bike this summer.  She loves to take it down steep hills and is awesome at balancing.  I think she is ready for a real bike.

Cooper Seth - 16 Months

1 - He finally learned to walk last month and he couldn't be prouder.  

2 - He is seriously the biggest cheese ball.  He laughs at everything.  Even when he just sees people laughing.  He laughs right along with us even though more than half the time he doesn't know why.  

3 - He takes the word HANGER to another level.  If we don't get him a banana to eat within 10 minutes of waking up he gets MAD.

4 - He loves to hide in our kitchen cupboards and play peek-a-boo.  He also loves playing hide and go seek.  Payton will hide and Cooper will be the first person to find her.  

5 - This boy is all about sticks, rocks and dirt.  He is not afraid to get dirty.  We went camping and within minutes he was covered head to toe in dirt. 

Payton's Birthday

Payton turned 4 this summer.  We sure love this passionate, fun-loving, outgoing, nurturing, silly girl.  We are so lucky to have her in our family.

 She is very easy to please when it comes to birthdays.  Her only two requests were that she had donuts instead of cake and that she had a piñata.  This was the first year that we had a birthday party with friends and she absolutely loved it.  

After her party, Tyler and I took her to see an outdoor performance in the park of The Little Mermaid.  She loved it.  I will never forget when she asked me to stand up when Ursula was singing and tell her to stop singing about mean things.  She is so funny.

30th Birthday Trip

I have always wanted to go to the Pacific Northwest, Oregon in particular.  So for my 30th Birthday we spent a weekend in Portland and it was amazing.   

Top 3 reasons why we LOVED Portland:

1 - The food.  Usually when I go on a trip I have to stay somewhere with a kitchen because of being Celiac I don't have many eating out options.  We didn't use our kitchen once.  Seriously.  Almost every place we went had a gluten free option and I didn't get sick once from cross contamination.  In addition to all the awesome GF options, the food in general is AMAZING.  I wish I would have taken pictures of all the great food we ate.  When we first got in we went to the downtown Farmer's Market.  

  

This is a picture of Payton after trying a shot of oyster in spicy hot sauce.  This was the first and last taste she had but she is really good at trying different foods.   

2 - The people.  They are seriously so nice.  Before coming here I read a lot of blogs and even though everyone mentioned how nice the people are in their blogs you don't really believe it until you experience it. 

3 - The green.  It is so green there.  The pictures don't do it justice.  We went to these amazing Japanese gardens that are 5 minutes from downtown.  It's crazy how close this beauty is to the city. 

We also went to the famous Multnomah Falls.  Wow.  That is all I can say.  But unfortunately our phones died by the time we got to the very top.

Portland Temple

Almost every blog I read said to go to an ice cream place called Salt & Straw.  We drove by the first two days we were there and the line was wrapped around the street.  We came back on the last day and got lucky with no line.  I think it was because it was a monday morning.  It was AMAZING.  Like seriously amazing.  They had some really cool flavors.  And we tried just about every flavor. Some of my favorite were: Pear & Blue Cheese, Honey Lavender, Strawberry Balsamic with Black Pepper.  They sound weird but were so good. 

Portland we loved you and we will definitely be back.  A lot.

Top 5 - June 2016

Payton Millie

 4 Years

1 - Payton had her first birthday party with friends this year.  She was so excited to invite all of her friends and the day of the party she asked me every five minutes when it was going to be time to go the park for her party.

2 - Payton has cycled through 3 different names she wants to be called now instead of Payton.  First it was "Kissa" then "Kenna" and finally she has been set on "Lucy" for a week now.  Everywhere we go she tells them that is her name.  She is pretty adamant about it.

3 -   She finally LOVES swimming.  She will go in all by herself and swim around as long as she has a floaty.  But seriously....that is a HUGE accomplishment for her.  This summer will be a water filled summer for her.

4 - We took her to see The Little Mermaid musical on her birthday and during the Ursula song she told me to stand up and ask Ursula nicely to stop singing because she is singing mean things. 

5 - Payton is very lovable.  People seem to gravitate towards her.  She has an infectious energy and is very expressive.  When we went to her doctor's checkup, he spent 10 extra minutes just talking to her and asked me if it was okay if he took her on a tour of the office.  He wanted to show her off to his wife who was painting murals on the walls of the rooms.  I love seeing her be LOVED by so many people.

Cooper Seth

14 Months

1 - He has learned how to blow kisses and wave and it is the most adorable thing ever.  

2 - He can't say very many words but he sure is good at communicating what he wants.  All he needs is his finger to point and his cute grunting noise.   

3 - He can stand up all by himself now without climbing up on anything.  He has taken one step but I think it was on accident because it hasn't happened in a few days.  But he loves to walk everywhere as long as he is holding on to my finger.  Tyler thinks he won't walk until he is 16 months old, but I'm pretty sure it will be sooner.

4 - This boy is SILLY.  He loves to laugh and make people laugh (especially Payton).  

5 - He has a special love for anything animal.  100% of the time he will bring me any book with an animal to read him.  If I read him a truck book or car book or train book he shuts the book and gets off my lap to get an animal book.  

Spring is Here

Easter this year was a lot of fun.  This is the very first Easter Sunday picture that I have ever taken with my kids.  We took it after church and I made Tyler get back in his church clothes but we finally took one.

Easter morning.

Payton insisted on changing into her Easter dress before she started the easter egg hunt.

Cooper helping daddy build a dresser.  Cutest thing ever.

I've lived in Utah for about 10 years now and this is the very first year I've been to the tulip festival.  It was so pretty.  

Payton's new obsession is taking pictures with my phone.  I came out from my room and she had found our family camera and took this picture of me.  Not bad for a 3 year old right?

So I decided to take a picture of her taking a picture of me.

Her are some more of her work.

She even figured out how to change it to black and white.

Enjoying the sun..

This is the only picture I took on our first hike of the season.  Of course no one is looking but me. Payton was afraid a fly was going to land on her and Cooper was concerned.