June

I hereby present to you a messy blog post with very jumbled, out-of-order pictures and video.  Welcome to blog posts during the month before we move to Paris!

Speaking of, let's see, what's going on with Paris?  Well, on the next post I'll talk about our trip to San Francisco to get visas.  But, basically, we're officially going!  Thank goodness.  Now that that's over, we're mostly down to selling nearly every thing we own.  We've been working on it all along, but it was more of a background activity and now it's the forefront.  Moving is tricky I tell ya.  Lots of coordinating.  I really hope we manage to sell as much as possible, and especially the cars!  

Funny Harper things:

- We went to get donuts to eat in the morning for our camping trip and I asked her which one she wanted.  She pointed and said, "the one with the sprinklers (sprinkles) on it!"  She called them "sprinklers" the whole trip.

- We were driving to meet up with Tom at City Creek and she was saying, "is that Daddy's work?" And I said, "no, you can't see it yet."  And she said, "I can see it!  I have flashlights on the front of my shoes!"

- We were getting ready to go to her friend Victor's house and she was putting all her Little People into her Little People bus and driving them to "Victor's house" (Little People Schoolhouse).  She was calling one of the Little People "Victor the boy" and she would narrate the whole thing like it was a book.  Ex. "Victor the boy said, 'Let's go pet the dog!'" and so on.

- We were at City Creek and she was going potty and she just said, "Mom, poo poo is a boy and pee pee is a girl."  Then, a little later, "Mom, more boys are coming out!"  Then reflectively, "Mom, do they have mouths?"

- Lots of nasty humor this month.  Another time we were driving in the car and she had picked a big sticky booger and was stretching it between two fingers.  I said, "ew, can I wipe your booger?"  And she said, "no!  I'm having fun with it!"

- And, as if I didn't need more mom guilt, one day I was trying to get something cooked before we have to leave and she was begging me to play with her (a very very common scenario these days) and I said, "Harp, I'm sorry but I can't play with you right now because if I don't cook this food it'll go bad."  Her response? "Mom, if you don't play with me I'll go bad." (said in the most pity-inducing voice you can imagine)

It really has been hard this month to find a good balance between chiseling down the mountain of things that need to be done before we move and giving the kids (Harper, in particular) as much attention as possible.  Harper has never been a real independent player.  She's SO social.  She basically wants me to play with her constantly and will tell me how lonely she is when I'm not playing with her.  She will literally ask me to play with her 5 times in one minute sometimes.  As soon as I say, "sorry, I have to finish doing this" she'll say ok, then ask me to do something else with her.  It breaks my heart but I also know that I can't play with her constantly, especially right now.  I keep telling her that I'll play with her a lot more in Paris and I really hope (and think!) it's true.

E has been pulling up obsessively all month.  There is rarely a moment when I'm around him that he is not standing up holding onto me, or endeavoring to.  He's pretty good at standing up and only holding one with one hand and he has started cruising.  No steps yet, but I'm not concerned about it at all.  He has just recently started saying, "Ba!" or "Baba!" for bottle.  We give him one whenever he wakes up and when we go open up the fridge he says, "Baaa!" in such an adoring little voice. Sometimes I think he says, "hi" as well, but I'm just not sure.  He is a master crawler now and has started to become a little destructo.  He definitely likes to get into things more than Harper did at that age.  So, that should be fun.

This duck was just waiting for us when we got out of the car.

Went to the 7 Canyons Fountains with our friends one day and it was really really fun.  Love that place.  Harp ran around and played with her friend and E had fun splashing.

Harp is a master pretend player.  Here she is, in action:

E turned 1!!!  I still don't feel like he seems like a 1 year old, even though he's actually 13 months as I write this.  But it was a pretty fun birthday!  In the morning we went to the pool.

Eating lunch outside, at the pool.  This video shows a couple of E's unique characteristics.  One is that he likes to take food back out of his mouth once it has gone in.  My favorite.  The other is that he is ALWAYS flapping those arms!  We call it the E dance.

E's a water baby, so we basically had a water day.  For his party we invited the family over and set up a slip and slide in the backyard and had a BBQ.

He was a pretty big fan of the BBQ food and didn't tip the plate over for a surprisingly long time.

He was a BIG fan of the corn.

I made a little cake for E and some cupcakes for the cousins.

Here he is destroying it!

I took these next photos before the party, but they randomly ended up here and I'm too lazy to go through the trouble of moving them.  Isn't he cute?

Sad story is that she ended up falling off the table, in the baby chair.  So sad.  Bad mom.

Since we're moving to Paris we didn't really get him much in the way of toys.  We'll be buying toys for both kids when we get there, since we don't have room for many in our luggage.  Instead, we wrapped up presents we already had since the wrapping paper tends to be all they care about at this age anyway, right?

Pretty much the only new thing he actually got was this sweet backpack (with leash!) from my parents.  Now both kids have them and I'll strap them on when we're in Paris so I don't loose them.  Harp was a pretty big fan of it.

 Yes, I already put the videos of him demolishing his cake, but somehow these ended up here, so...

So very attractive.

E gets all the attention at church!  He's the little darling of our class.

Put out a big tarp with some paint and let her go to town.  Put her in old clothes that were super stained already so I wouldn't have to worry about her getting her clothes messy.  The only rules were that she had to stay on the tarp and couldn't touch her hair.

She clearly enjoyed herself.

So sweet.

Harp always has lots of fun with her friend, Sophia.  This day we took her with us to the park:

Harp always covets my computer, so one day I opened up a word doc for her and let her press all the buttons she wanted.  She was SO into it.  Bonus: it organically turned into alphabet practice.

He found my scraps bin.

How the cool kids sleep.

Metal tunnels make for the best photos:

Washers are fascinating:

Pretty much every morning E chases H down the hallway to her room and lots of giggling ensues:

Harp and Sophia - such sweet friends:

We took Sophia with us to the Natural Curiosity Museum and the girls had a blast:

Harper's face :)

Now that we're trying to sell our Mazda and have already had it detailed and everything we're not driving it anymore.  That makes the drive to church really fun because we take Stacey with us and there aren't enough seats in the car for everyone.  As a result, Stace and I share the front passenger seat and Tom drives real safe and we pretend to be conjoined twins if we pass any police.  It makes for some good bonding.

E is a very animated eater:

E's favorite toy:

Harper's new favorite thing to say:

Beautiful baby:

Went to 7 Canyons again and had SUCH a beautiful afternoon.  Both kids were in the best moods. E was just munching on snacks and climbing all over me and H was "exploring."  She collected leaves and found a stick to run through the water and so on.  I just couldn't help but take a zillion pictures of my loves:

Pretending to sleep and also enjoying the leaves above us.

A shorts flag!

After our 7 Canyons outing the kids took naps.  I heard Harper say, "Mommy, come get me (what I've trained her to do)" over the monitor and when I walked in she was right in the middle of her bed in the box.  She said it was her nest:

Pretty hilarious watching her trying to get in and out of her nest:

My pretty car that I miss.  Who wants to buy it??

 Harp and her cute co-op friends.  We'll be so sad to say goodbye to these little buddies and their moms!!!  Even though I can't imagine it now, in case I ever forget their names they're Victor, Sophia, Riley and Ronan.

And here's E with his little baby buddy, Eric (Victor's bro).  Would you believe E is 2 months older than Eric?  And would you believe tan little E is darker than 1/2 Brazilian Eric?  They're all unique!

I can't get over how cute Harper's "anticipating the baseball" face is:

 Oh, and her "caught the baseball" face too:

So, I really enjoy camping and would love to do it a lot.  Tom isn't as big of a fan as I am, but likes it in theory and tries to be supportive.  We haven't gone nearly as much as I've wanted to, but I was determined to go one more time before we moved.  You can ask Tom how he felt about it (as it may have been different from how I felt), but I thought it was a great little trip.  Reserving a spot seems to be almost impossible and we can't figure out not camping at a campsite (as in, where we're allowed to) for the life of us, so we opted to head up to Tanner's Flat Campground early in the morning on a Saturday and just hope to get one of the non-reservable sites.  We succeeded!  But, the previous camper wasn't quite out yet, so we went up the Brighton (I think) and did a little hike.  It was...hot. But good.

Our only photo from the hike.

I thought our campsite was pretty sweet.  It was very secluded (for a campsite), very pretty, very spacious, and close enough to the river to provide good white noise for when the kids were sleeping but with enough barriers between us and the river for me to not be real worried about Harp making her way there alone (as if she ever leaves my side).  I took a video of it:

I was amazed with how often there were moments like these where the kids were so content that we could actually...sit and read!  Never pictured that happening.

Harp and E loved playing outside.  Harp is in a stage where she loves "exploring" and pretending and both of those were easy for her to do.

E had a blast playing in the dirt with rocks and sticks.  He got plenty dirty and was sooooo happy.

Poor kid.  But hey, it was cold at night!

He was so cute playing on his toy blanket, in his snow suit before Harp and Tom got up.  We brought 2 tents and Tom and Harp slept in one with E and I in the other.  E is a VERY light sleeper.  I couldn't even hear myself, but he'd wake up every time I moved and cry.  It was a fun night.  Tom said Harp woke up around 5am and just stared at him til he got up at 7am.  She's so cute and funny.  And such a good girl to just sit there and wait for 2 hours.

As mentioned earlier, we got donuts for breakfast.  E got a donut hole.

Harp ate all the "sprinklers" off the top first, of course.

We went on another hike after we packed up, on our way home.  Stopped by a little stream and had a picnic:

We hosted coop and hung out in the backyard:

The kids found some ants to watch.

 I filled some water balloons and set up a basketball hoop.  They LOVED it.

One awesome outing was that our friend Jan treated the kids to rides and ice cream at Liberty Park.  I even let E ride the airplanes and he LOVED it:

He wasn't quite as big of a fan of the little car ride.  It had a lurching start and was a bit bumpy, but he kind of warmed up to it by the end?  He'd cry, then see me and smile, then cry, and repeat.

Harp and Jan enjoyed the Carrousel:

More airplanes:

After the rides we got ice cream, then the kids wrestled and generally occupied themselves nicely while the grown ups (Jan, our other friend Rachel and I) talked.  It was actually quite bizarre being able to hold a conversation with the kids around.

The kids were so exhausted afterward that I could not keep them awake on the ride home for the life of me.

Also selling Mo, our Civic.  Will also be sad to say goodbye to him.

Harp while she was sitting on the potty at City Creek and we were pontificating on the gender and properties of poop and pee.

A delightful Saturday morning:

Was reading a book about Paris and was surprised to come across a picture of our street sign.

She put on the necklace and said, "I'm grandma!" then added the hat.

E and H had a joint ophthalmologist appointment and I was unduly terrified of it.  I thought it would be so terrible and that both kids would be crying and screaming throughout.  We've had some like that.  Instead, both were on their best behavior!  They just charmed the heck out of everyone and were so unfazed by the examinations.  In fact, when it was time for Harp's exam I was distracted with E for a second and before I knew it she was just up there in the chair all by herself, looking as casual as can be.  I was so proud of her! The carrot helped.

The appointment was in the same general area as The Train Shoppe.  We came across it a month or so back and have been watching to check it out, so we went there right after.  It was a lot cooler than I thought it would be!

They had a very well done little train ride.  You sat on a real mini train with several cars and it took you through some scenes with a little narration.  It was very Disneyland-ish, in a good way!  Harp was, once again, brave and sat in a car all by herself while E and I were in the next one over.

They also had a couple of quarter rides, like this cute little mini-carousel:

Can you see the stagecoach ride?  That's what they're riding in the next video.

They both rode the stagecoach ride and E LOVED it even though it was jerking him around a bit.  It actually seemed like he was trying to be jerked around because he liked it.  He's starting to appear to be a little daredevil.

They had lots of little toy train displays and you could put quarters in them and watch the trains go for a couple minutes.  This was my favorite.  All the rides moved.

As cool as the train shoppe was, though, Harp's favorite part my have been playing with the rocks outside while I cooled the car down.

 Waiting on the front lawn for Daddy to come home:

I was very impressed that I was able to capture a well framed selfie with all three of us looking and smiling.  Skills!

Was brave enough to try out 7 Peaks with the 2 kids and it wasn't as hard as I thought it might be!  H is much less daring than she used to be and E doesn't move around as much in the water as he does on land, so it all works out.  Ended off the trip with some ice cream to share.

And that was June!