Brynnlee update and bathroom change finally

This post is more for me to keep as a record than for anyone interested but if you would still like to read about our family read on. Brynnlee is almost 2 and is learning so many new fun things everyday. I am so impressed with the new things she does. She has always loved looking at books but now loves to be read to. She pulls out books every day and will sit and listen for probably close to an hour. I made a bunch of file folder games for her a few months ago and she has also really started getting into working on those. Before she could maybe complete one, and even that needed lots of assistance. Now she blows through so many of them and never loses interest. I love it.
The other day we were driving home from the store and about a block away from our house she yelled out "at home". I couldn't believe that she knew that we were pulling up to our home. She loves getting close to home and saying "at home" or "at house". She makes me laugh so much.
She also loves dogs and looks for her neighbor dogs all the time. She has been funny lately though by calling them "Dobbies" instead of dogs, and even sometimes "pubbies". She knows how to say the "g" sound so I don't know why she calls them "dobbies" but I love it anyway. She is so good at hearing them too and whenever a dog barks she yells "stop" or "no" to them. It stems from when my parents' dog was still alive and the neighbor dog would bark at him. The best is that whenever we are driving to my parents' home when we get close Brynnlee will start saying "Ani" which is the neighbor dog that she loves to see.
The best new thing we have seen from Brynn is that she is now fascinated with letters. She sees letters all the time now and can point out correctly many of them. She started with the welcome sign on our stairs and so quickly learned the letters "O" and "M". She then took off from that and now has favorite letters "Y" and "F" and can correctly identify "B, C, D, F, G, I, M, O, P, R, S, V, Y, and Z". We bought her a letter puzzle and that is now her favorite toy. I am so excited to see what she learns next.


  I also wanted to post about our bathroom. When we moved into our house 4 years ago, the last owners had painted many of the rooms really crazy colors. We quickly painted our bathroom and bedroom a nicer light beige color, but then life got busy and we never got around to painting the other rooms. Well the one that we both hated the most was our hall bathroom. It was a deep red with trout wallpaper along the top. We never got around to it, but I hated it every time I walked in. Well Jeff finally approached me about it about a month ago, and we decided it was a perfect time to repaint. We ran to the store, bought paint, and got it done. It was a pain of a task because I had to first take down all the trout (which wasn't easy), then paint multiple layers to cover the red, and all this in a small bathroom with no windows and a crazy daughter that wanted to help way too much. We finally got it done though, and even though every time we turn on the light we feel blinded because we were used to such a dark room, we love the new color and way our room now looks. I think next I want to add some cute pictures of Brynn along the wall to add some personality to the room.

Bathroom Before Picture

 Ugly Trout Wallpaper

 First Task Done - No More Fish

 Jeff Painting the first Coat

The new bathroom with no fish and no red!!!

 

We love the yellow!!!

5 YEARS and fun at Grandpa's Birthday

 This last weekend Jeff and I celebrated our 5 year anniversary. We decided to do something new and stayed in Park City instead of the usual Salt Lake. Brittany's husband's family owns a travel agency and we were able to get an awesome deal on a condo at the Silver King Hotel in Park City. It was huge, beautiful, and perfect for us. We started the weekend with a great dinner at Tucano's and a movie. Then up to Park City for some relaxation. The next morning was a day full of firsts for Jeff. We started with breakfast at Kneaders (he had never been), and a ride on the Alpine Slide(another first for him). Breakfast was awesome, but the slide was insane. We stood in line for 1 1/2 hours to ride on it. We had 2 sets of tickets but decided that there was no way we were going to wait in line again like before. We came back a few hours later and the line was much shorter. We had a great day. The last day we went shopping a little and then came home to see our sweet little girl. We were also celebrating my dad's birthday. Brynn was a hoot and we got some real cute pictures of her enjoying her Grandpa's birthday. It was a wonderful weekend, and I am so grateful to be married to the most wonderful man I have ever known.

 Our huge awesome room!

Our fun ride on the Alpine Slide

Brynn and Jeff loving Dad's Birthday

Brynn helping open the presents

 

 She decided that the wrapping paper was fun to wear

 

Happy Birthday Dad!

Summer Fun

We have sure been preoccupied lately. Ican't believe it has been over 6 months since I have made an update, but I finally had time today and a lot to share. Brynnlee is growing up so fast and is learning and experiencing new things every day. She loves to play around the house and hide in the closets. She is so funny that way. She will hide in them and then come out saying boo. I think she learned that from her dad. Jeff took her to her last doctors appointment and she is still in the 90% for height and 7th for weight. I think she will always be that way-tall and skinny. The doctor also asked Jeff at the time how many words she says. He told her around 20 and I said that he was far underestimating it. Because of that I started counting and got to about 50. Since then she has picked up a lot more words and has started phrases as well. Her new favorite word was "owme". I couldn't figure out what it meant for the longest time. She would run around the house saying it. I thought at first it was "owie" or "yummy", but neither of these seemed to fit. Jeff suggested that it was "help me" and he was right. She thinks it is so funny to run around and yell "help me, help me" all day long. She also loves to point out pictures of her mama and dada. I think her "dada" is her favorite person, but since the summer she has been quite the mama's girl. This summer we have had so much fun. We have gone to the zoo, swimming, the Treehouse Museum, played with dad, visited lots of family, and played with our new outside toys. She absolutely loved the zoo and all the animals (especially the monkeys). She runs around pointing at them all and yelling "look!" She also has so much fun swimming. She loves getting splashed, going down the slides, blowing bubbles, kicking, and everything else at the pool. Her little body is so skinny that she shivers the whole time, but every time we leave she still cries because she doesn't want to leave. She is so funny. Here are some pictures of our family from the last few months that we have missed.

 Having fun with Christmas Presents

 Reading her fun new Christmas Books



 Getting ready to play in the snow

Reading Mama's books is so much fun

 Being silly

 I love my Dada!

 Having fun at both family's Easter Hunts

 Reading to my doll (showing off her new I don't smile for the camera look)

 I love playing in the pool. Even if I'm freezing.

 Aunt Bitty's wedding

Playing with her new summer toy!



Brynnlee Update

Our little Brynnlee is growing up so fast. She is doing so many new things every day and I wanted to take a minute and write down all the new things she does. First she is starting to make noises and try to talk more and more. I was really worried that she wasn't talking but I know that it is in there and one day she will just explode with words. She already says mama and dada really well. She wakes up every morning and runs into our bedroom looking for her dada! She also loves to make noises. She roars like a lion, and makes monkey noises, and Jeff has taught her to hohoho like Santa. It is so cute. She even knows when to say it during the song Up on the Housetop. She is also running everywhere. She loves to explore and you can't let her down in a store or she will take off. She did that the other day when I was at See's Candy. She took off out the door and I practically shoplifted to run after her and drag her back in the store. She thinks it is so fun to run as fast as she can and have mommy and daddy chase after her. She is so smart with remembering things. She can tell you where her eyes, nose, mouth, and ears are... we have also just learned belly button and she loves to fold her arms when it is time for a prayer. She picked up on the last one after just one day of mommy showing her. She loves the movie Tangled and will watch it intently all day long if you let her. She doesn't show much interest in any other movie or show, but Tangled she'll watch over and over again. She loves to explore, loves to sit in big kid chairs, loves to give hugs and kisses, and absolutely loves spending time with her cousins. She plays pattycake, and head, shoulders knees and toes, and imitates her Grandpa Stephens. She also does the cutest thing now with tissues. Jeff taught her to blow her nose, so now when she can get ahold of a tissue, baby wipe, or even towel she will blow her nose in it and then throw it away. She actually loves to throw anything away we let her. She will throw her diapers in the trash, wrappers, and anything else we give her. Luckily right now she only throws away trash and not her toys. She also likes to brush her teeth (the few she has), and wipe her face off on a towel. I can't believe all the fun things she does every day. We are so lucky to have such a fun little sweetheart! I am so glad I get to be home with her so much!

Home from New York

While I was in New York with Jeff's mom and sisters, Jeff and his brother Drew decided to scare up our house for Halloween. Jeff has never really gotten into decorating so I even though I knew that he was going to add a few things I had no idea what I was going to see when I got home. They had make tombstones for our yard. Have spooky ghosts that fly, rats that run across the porch and this stuffed mask guy to put in the tree. Well the masked guy can't be in the tree until Halloween so for now it is in our kitchen and has make a new friend out of Brynnlee. She reads to it, gives it hugs, jumps on it's legs, and all around loves it!!! What kind of crazy girl do we have. We even took her to the Halloween shop when I got home and she loves the creepy things in there as well.

We have also discovered that we have a little closet drinker in our family. Brynnlee loves to get into our pantry, grab the sodas off the shelf and will just stand in the closet and pretend to drink them. She has never been allowed to have real soda, but she must have just picked up on what her daddy and mommy do. It's so funny. She does it every time we accidentally leave the pantry door open.

Brynnlee's Books

Brynnlee has recently really taken to her books. She has always liked books, but had the atttention span of about 3 minutes with reading them. Lately though books are her favorite toy. She pulls them out of her box and will spend tons of time just looking through them herself. At night she loves listening to mommy and daddy read, and even when she is getting her diaper changed will grab a book to look at while we change her. She is turning into her mommy! What a cutie.

She pulled all her books out of the box!

Then sat and read them all to herself!

Brynnlee's Birthday

I know I am super late on this post. I thought that by only working part time I would have so much more time to do things like this, but the beginning of the school year has been crazy and I find very little free time to do anything. Anyway last month was Brynnlee's 1st birthday. It was a great celebration filled with lots of presents, family, and cake!!! Brynnlee loved the attention until it was past her bedtime and then decided she had enough. So we put her to bed and continued with the party. It started out with just daddy, mommy and Brynn opening up her gifts from us. She wasn't much into it but played a little with the things we gave her. We ended up just putting most of the presents away and will probably give them to her again for Christmas. Then all the family arrived. Almost everyone was there and Brynnlee was loving the attention. She had fun cousins to help her open her presents and enjoyed watching them play with most of her toys. The big toy of the night was a car for her to ride in. She absolutely loved it, until she got a little too much attention and had a little meltdown. We decided at that time it was probably time for cake and bed. We stripped her down put the cake in front of her and let her go at it. As you can see in the pictures she was pretty hesitant at first, but once daddy pushed her hands both in she realized what was going on and started gobbling, pausing only to share a little with others. After that we cleaned up and sent Brynnlee to bed and the rest of us enjoyed a nice bonfire and some socializing. It was a pretty good night. I also wanted to post what Brynnlee can do now that she is 1 year old. We took her to the doctor a few days after her birthday and she has grown from the 6th percentile in weight to a whopping 7th weighing 18 pounds. She did grow though in height now measuring 30 inches and coming in the 80th percentile. She is developing in so many other ways as well. She mastered walking at 11 months and is now everywhere!!! She loves climbing up and down the stairs and putting her arms out like Frankenstein and running. She is also always talking-mostly sounds of course, but has mastered mama and dada! She loves waving bye-bye, playing patty cake, and showing how big she is. She also will blow kisses, point to mommy's nose, eyes, and mouth, and clapping all the time. I can't believe our little baby is sooooooooo grown up.

The pictures are a little out of order. Here she is playing with the cake

Daddy getting the ball rolling.

Sharing with family

Loving the big car!!!

Lots of presents

Cousins helping. Thank you!

We love Bracelets!

Celebrating with lots of family

The delicious cake

Mommy and Daddy's Presents