Dreams Of Their Friendship

My sister is my best friend and we have dreamt about our kids being best friends! Sage is 5 months younger than Tali, which has always big difference in the development stages... until now! Now, they are finally at a point where they can play and interact well together! Yay!! They have been such good buddies during this whole visit.

Tali showed Sage all her toys and Sage was so excited that Tali was actually paying attention to each other this time. They would take each other's hands and go jump on Tali's mattress (the frame to her bed is at Poppie and Mimi's)

Can't forget about baby Raden! He is so smiley and sun-shiney! He really liked James.

This is my niece, Sage. Isn't she adorable?! She let me get her ready for the day.

Hmmm... what should we do? What should we do....? Let's go to the park.

Tali has started to be little more adventurous and go down the slide on her belly.

Sage knocking on the window.

More of their playing to come!

To The Mountains!

Last Friday, we got together with some of our friends and headed up to Millcreek Canyon. There are little pockets everywhere off the road with fire pits and picnic tables.

Tali was SO excited to go to the mountain!

She quickly grabbed this hat as we were getting ready to go.

I found this whole outfit humorous. I think it was the socks for some reason. And the hat.

I was ready an hour early because I was so excited.

I didn't get any pictures until we had packed everything up and were heading back. Sad. We cooked hot dogs and marshmallows over the fire. The boys got the fire started and kept it going. Tali ran around gathering twigs, rocks, and other fixings from the forest for the fire. Pam and I tried to keep baby, Eli on one of the six blankets that we brought. It was so much fun! Plus, an inexpensive activity and we got to be out in the fresh air!

We had so much fun with the Niessink's!

The best part was that this is just 10 minutes away! We love that about Salt Lake!

More Sweet Singing (Tali's, Not Mine)

Posting another video of Tali singing (stick with it, I promise it is different than the one I posted yesterday). I thought my family would enjoy it!

I sing the last ant song incorrectly, :/ please excuse it!

The Sweet ABC's

Atalia has been singing the ABC's nonstop around our home.

We caught her in the act.

Handsome And Sadie

We've been boring lately. Therefore, nothing interesting to blog about :(

BUT...

I did come across a video that I wanted to post!

A few weeks ago, Poppie and Mimi stayed with us and brought their cat, Handsome and their puppy, (every dog, no matter how old they are, is still a puppy to me) Sadie. This was all kinds of excitement for Tali.

Bookshelf Improvements

I LOVE having photo albums.

I think it's harder to keep up with them these days. What with the digital camera and the hundreds of photos you can take and downloading them on blogs and

Facebook and so forth. I try really hard to keep up with it, but it ends up being a once a year thing that I catch up with and print off about a thousand pictures and put them in photo albums (in chronological order of course) (What? I don't have any OCD in me).

Now, I have a ton of photo albums.

I would really like to have them out and more accessible though. Therefore, we got a cheap bookcase to put them all in. The problem is that some of those photo albums are bright pink, orange, and yellow. Not the color scheme that I wanted to go with in our living room.

What is the solution!?

I knew we needed some book covers!

I found some wrapping paper for .36 cents at Michael's (Holla!) (Sorry, that was weird. I never "holla") and I wrapped those photo albums up, just like I covered my school text books up with paper bags from the grocery store when I was little. It made such a difference! Check it out!

Before:

After:

Ahhh...that feels so much better!

I had my friend, Pam come over (she's studied interior design) and help me make a few adjustments to make it even more easier on the eyes. (Thanks Pam!) I want to add a few more decorative things to it eventually, but that will have to wait till we have some extra money.

So, what do you think?! A pretty easy, inexpensive trick to making a bookcase more... cohesive? Is that the right word to use?

My brother didn't like the lack of Tali pics in the last few post's. So, here she is! She grabbed all of Daddy's ties out of the closet and sat in them and played. That reminds me, I still have to clean those up.

Blanket Fort

I made a fort out of blankets.

I made a fort out of blankets for Tali.

I showed it to Tali.

Tali wasn't all that impressed.

I was sad because Tali wasn't impressed.

lol

My Fort!

The inside of our fort.

(A wide opening so we could still see the TV from inside.) (We know where our priorities lie.)

Tali showed more excitement about it later, bringing a bunch of her toys into her teepee.

Wasn't it smart thinking of me to add her teepee to our fort, like a separate chamber? It would mean a lot if you acted like you were impressed.

We pulled out the Bugles (something I recently discovered that I love) and tried to get a picture of the two of us.

Hmmm... this is proving to be difficult.

Tali could you keep your eyes open?

I must have been going for the dreamy-face-look here...

Not sure what Tali was going for.

TALI! Open your eyes!

Oh, forget it. I'll just take a picture by myself.

Daddy brought home some pizza! We ate it in the fort.

I guess we didn't feel like getting plates out. That's never happened before.... possibly....

Three Samples, Please.

Last Monday, we went over to Great Harvest to get some free samples for our family night. We each got a slice of their pumpkin chocolate chip bread. Yum.

I always feel so uncomfortable getting free samples (not that that stops me).

1. Rarely does it ever make me decide to buy that product (it's just exciting to get a free snack).

2. It's the worst when there is someone there handing it out. I never know what to say to them afterwards. Do I pretend that I'm mulling it over wether to buy it or not or just make a quick getaway? I think they are on to me from the beginning.

3. What if I don't want their free sample? I'm a picky eater and sometimes I don't really want what they are offering, but I suck it up, eat it anyways, and tell them that it was very good. Yes, yes I do.

4. What are the rules for children? It was awkward when I asked the Great Harvest guy for a free sample for my toddler too.

Someone needs to lay down the etiquette laws of sampling for people who entirely think about things way too much, like me.

In the end, we bought a small jar of raspberry jam too. Entirely because we felt obligated after our free samples. That's how they get'cha!

Are You Ready For Some More Quiet Book???

I spent a good two days googling Quiet Books on the internet and coming up with Quiet Book page ideas. I wrote down everything that I wanted to do (far too many ideas) or my own variations and would make basic little sketches of what I wanted a page to look like and proceed!

Here is the rest of what I have done so far:

Counting Page

Counting the caterpillars page.

We tell Tali that the little one is her or the baby, the next biggest one is Mommy, and the biggest is Daddy.

Tali loves this page. We either count the stars as we move them across or name the colors.

Our Seasons Page!

You build the snowman, the rain drops have movement, hanging by the string, you add the sun and flowers to summer, and the leaves fall off the tree.

Our good ol' shoe page... I had such a hard time figuring out how to construct the shoe, but finally came up with something and now I really like it.

Our glove page!

Pretty much only Tali can fit her hand in this glove, I should have made it a little bigger.

Those cotton balls are supposed to represent snow. I always feel like I need to clarify that.

You can clip the butterflies on the flowers, leaves, or grass.

And lastly, the alphabet!

I still plan on adding more!

My Quiet Book: It's Just The Beginning

Okay, so I'm making a Quiet Book. I've been making it for the past few months and I am very ready to be done with it, but the perfectionist inside me won't let me. (Curse you, perfectionist Laurissa!!)

I still have to bind it and sew the pages back to back.... and I want to add about 10 more pages. I may have to turn it into 3 different Quiet Books. Right now, it is about 5-6 inches thick. All hand stitched (partly why it is taking so long) and it is made up of mostly craft materials that I already owned out of my craft box. Can you tell that I'm trying to impress you before we move on and actually see it? lol

Okay, this is just a third of what I have done... more to come...

Are you ready...

BAM!

lol I hope I didn't talk it up too much and now you are disappointed. (Can you tell all my insecurities of sharing my handy work are coming out?) So, that is the cover. The 'Q' is for Quiet Book (I know I've already had to explain that to the few (and privileged) that I've shown in person.) I'm not camera savvy and the glare of the flash made it all smudgy.

These two color pages took me FOR-EV-ER! Lots of hand stitching.

This is our ribbon page.

What do you do with this page? Braid it? Feel the different textures? Name the colors? I don't know, but I like it.

Our balloon page!

One of my more favorite ones. You match the balloons to their colors.

Shapes page!

One of the more boring ones. I tried to add different textures to some of the shapes to make it more interesting, it helped maybe the tiniest bit.

The barn.

With farm animal, finger puppets!

And buttoning on the matching fish! This is one of Atalia's favorite pages for some reason.

There will be more, so stay tuned!