Happy 26th Birthday Steve

I want to take a minute to brag about my husband.  My husband is SOOOOO extremely talented!!!  Not only is he going to law school at BYU on a partial scholarship, but he is also doing a joint program, so he is still taking a few accounting classes as well.  Plus, he is working.  He continues to work because he loves his job and he is really good at it.  So, not only is my husband really smart, but he he is a hard worker, will do anything to provide for and take care of his family, is a handy man and changes his own oil and fixes our cars and computer, builds things, invents things, knows everything about computers, works really hard at his job and his bishopric calling, and looks so handsome in dress clothes, but he is a great husband and father. Thank you for working so hard at everything that you do honey.  You amaze me with all of the things that you are able to accomplish.  I hope you know that we support you one hundred percent.  We don't love the fact that we hardly ever get to see you, but we know that it will only be for a short time and that it will all be worth it in the end.  Keep being the wonderful you! I love you so much and I am so proud of you!

Happy Birthday!!!! He looked so nice today.  He had an interview with PWC later this morning, so he dressed nice for the entire day.

I made French Toast (his favorite breakfast meal) and gave him his presents.

Andrea sat patiently waiting for Daddy to come and eat breakfast with us.

Happy Birthday Daddy!

I played the Beatles Happy Birthday song for Steve while he opened his gifts.  It's one of his families traditions, so I thought I'd try and keep it going.

I gave him three little gifts. One of which was tickets to a BYU game!

On the way out of the house he got to walk through the streamers that I put up the night before.  Yes, I know that is such a little kid thing, but I had to do something a little fun and crazy.  The entire day for him was really busy.  He has a brief due tonight at midnight, so he has been working really hard on that all day.  Andrea and I brought him lunch and dinner and some ice cream from Dairy Queen, thanks to Grandpa Barclay's gift cards.  :-)  Even though it was insanely crazy, I hope you had a great birthday my love.

climbing, standing, drawing, cleaning, etc.

Oh the things that Andrea learns every day! She learns at least one new thing every day and usually a lot more than just one.  She is crawling all over the house on her knees and feet.  She crawls up everything so she can stand up.  She also wants to copy everything that her parents do now. It's amazing how quickly she can pick up on things just from watching us.

Andrea has not only learned how to crawl over to the fridge, but how to get inside of the fridge as well!

She loves standing, so she crawls up everything to get there. Yes, she is gabbering in this picture. She talks all day long.

She was using the rag to clean off the fence.  She sees Mommy clean everything, so she thought she would clean everything too.

On her tippy toes. So cute.

"I got the rag Mom, yea!"

She always has to show me what she's found.

This is the best picture I got of her cleaning the cement.  She cleaned the cement for quite some time with that rag.  She scooted around in a circle on her bum and wiped it all down with the rag.

She was so proud of herself!

Andrea loves to draw now.  She is always taking the pen or pencil out of my hand when I am writing something, so finally I decided that she might as well get to draw too.  She's so funny when she draws because she has to hold the paper up in the air just like she does with her bowl when she feeds herself.

She's showing Daddy how excited she is to be drawing on her own.

On Sunday Andrea learned how to open Daddy's laptop.  She LOVES his lap top.  She absolutely loves to type on the keys.

Even if she can only get it open a few inches she shoves her hands in and starts typing as fast as she can on the keyboard.

Andrea no longer needs the bench to play the piano.  She can climb up the leg of the piano and stand and play the keys. This is much more excited for Mommy too, because now I don't have to worry about her falling off of the bench.

Climbing up and down.

One handed, she's pretty tricky.

"Look at me Mom, look what I can do!"

I gave Andrea chalk and a chalk board today.  She loved it.  It was very easy to write with unlike pencils sometimes.

The only problem is, she also tries to eat the chalk, so I have to make sure I play with her when she tries to play with chalk.

This video shows how Andrea waves all of the time to everyone now.  She waves for and Hi and Bye.

Zumba Certified

I am officially Zumba Licensed. I spent an entire Friday dancing and learning the cumbia, reagatone, merengue, and salsa along with the Zumba formula and specific instructions. I worked really hard the following week and learned several routines and choreographed a few of my own and taught my first Zumba class the following Wednesday. It went really well and I'm really excited about teaching Zumba. I'll continue teaching at the church for free, but here in about a month once I have a little more experience teaching I am going to apply at the Rec Center and Gyms to try and teach for pay. :-)

Feeding herself

Yes, she is at the age now that she is determined to feed herself!  It means a lot more messes, but a lot more entertainment as well. I'm actually quite impressed with how fast she picked up on holding the bowl and scooping into into it with her spoon.  She may not get a lot of food in her mouth, but she does get some.

Really concentrating, "I am going to get this food on my spoon Mom!"

She is so proud of herself! As she should be. :-)

Just look closely at her arms and you will see how messy she was after she was all done feeding herself. Or decorating herself, I'm not sure which one.

We don't get to see Steve very often, but when we do I try to make sure that it is quality time, so on Saturday we went to the park for a little bit and took Andrea down the slide.  She didn't particularly like the slide this day. I'm almost positive it's because we took her down the huge slip n' slide in July way too fast, and it terrified her of slides.  But, I took her down the slide a few days later and she loved it! Her fears of the slide are hopefully gone.

Yea, we loved Daddy time!!!

Here is the best picture of my hair that we have so far.  I know it's kind of dark, but you can kind of see it. I'm the only one that's home with Andrea during the week and I don't really take pictures of myself, so that's why there haven't been any pictures of my hair yet.

Last Sunday I pulled out my violin and started playing.  Andrea was fascinated with it. At first she was trying to crawl up my legs to get closer to it, which is the picture bellow, but then Steve lifted her up so she could be close to the violin as I played.

"I give up Daddy, it's no use trying to crawl up Mom's leg."

Labor Day Weekend

      I know you won't believe this, but now that I am an "official blogger" I always take my camera everywhere! But, I was in a hurry when I actually left for Labor Day weekend and I forgot to grab my camera. The good news is that I realized I forgot my camera right away, so I made sure that Mom and Dad and Kayla and Tyson took a lot of pictures for me. So, there will be pictures of Island Park and Yellowstone eventually.
      I had to leave Steve home this weekend, because he already had a ton of homework and a lot of projects at work.  So, Andrea and I rode all the way up to Island Park. Idaho with my parents.  We stopped on the way and saw Ken, Canon, and Gunner.  We played outside for a while. I rode a bike around the block with Canon. Andrea loved playing outside. She kept trying to eat the bark from the flower beds though, so I had to keep taking them out of her mouth.
     We got to Island Park around 10:00, but a few people were still up.  Andrea got to meet her best friend for the weekend, Kylie Barclay (My cousin Jame's 4 year old daughter.)  Andrea was so excited to play with Kylie and Kylie was excited to play with both Andrea and I, because wherever Andrea went, he mom was sure to go. :-)  Grandpa Barclay has a set of stairs in the front living room, so about every five minutes I was climbing up the stairs with Andrea.  She LOVES to climb stairs. We'd go up the stairs and play freeze tag with Kylie in the loft. Andrea thought this was hilarious, she enjoyed watching it just as much as Kylie and I enjoyed running around. (It's kind of fun having an excuse to be a kid again, I just have to play with my child. :-))
      The next day we went in to Yellowstone.  Kayla, Tyson, and Tyson's brother Matt got there early in the morning, so they  came with us.  We had a great day in the park.  We didn't see too many animals, but the weather was beautiful, we had a lot of fun in the car, we didn't have to wait forever to see Old Faithful, and we got to listen to Andrea call every animal that we did see a, "Da" (trying to say Dog.)  It was so cute. We got back in time for dinner and got to see everyone.  The men watched the BYU football game while the women talked.
     Sunday we all got up early to get our turn in the bathrooms getting ready.  We went to church, which was just a sacrament meeting because they don't have enough room to fit everyone for all the rest of the classes. It was a really long sacrament and Andrea was asleep in her Great Grandpa Barclay's arms, so I really enjoyed sacrament, it was really neat. After church we had our own family devotional at the cabin. It was really good.  I chased Andrea around and had to keep her from going up the stairs the entire time, but it was still really good.  Then we played games that evening. We had a blast!!! I can't wait to play some of these games again. I can't explain them in full detail on here, but my favorite game was a type of cherades game where one round you get to say anything to get your partner to guess the name, the second round you can only act it out, and the third round you can only say one word.  It's really fun because you have to pay attention to everyone's turn in case you get the same name they had.  Matt and I were partners and we destroyed everyone the first round. It was so fun! It's probably because we weren't married or related, so we didn't get mad or upset at each other, we were nice unlike Jacob and Josh. :-) You had to see them. They were hilarious.
     Monday Kayla and Tyson taught all of us how to country swing in the loft. It was really fun. Then we had to clean up and head for home.  It was a great family reunion though. We got to play games,talk, eat awesome food, and spend time together.  Andrea absolutely loved it because there were so many people for her to preform for.  She babbled and said, "Dog" the entire time.  She also loved having a friend to play with even if she was 4 years old.  Thank you Grandpa for letting us all come up to the cabin and working so hard on adding on the loft to make more room for all of us. It was a great Labor Day Weekend.  However, we were very excited to get home and spend Monday evening with Steve because we REALLY missed him. We admire all of your hard work sweetheart. You're amazing. Only two more years and you're done with school!!!!

Live Fantasy Football Draft

Steve and bunch of his friends from law school had a big live draft for fantasy football.  The wives and kids were welcome as well.  We played downstairs while the boys did their thing upstairs.  The kids had a lot of fun together and us moms loved chit chatting. Andrea had two other friends just about her same age. Each child wanted to play with the other child's toys.

She saw the camera and took off towards mom to grab it.  we were playing in the basement, so Andrea climbed the whole flight of stairs at least 7 times while we were there.  She loves to climb stairs.  I'm trying to teach her how to go down the stairs on her stomach, so each time she climbed them she had to be slowly brought down each step. I know she didn't enjoy that part so much, but she's learning.

The boys are very focused on which player they are going to choose next.

Steve brought our TV and laptop, so they could show the picks/results live.  It was actually pretty cool.  Just before this live draft we went to a Law Partners Opening Social. Law Partners is a group for all the spouses of the Law students so we can have friends to hang out with and share the same experiences with.  I love Law Partners! We really have gained a lot of friends and it's nice to know all the wives of the guys Steve studies with. Good luck with school my love, only two more years!!!!

The Derby

Steve absolutely loves the Sanpete County Derby. We've gone every year since we've been married.  Because he loves it so much he also invites all of his friends from work. We had a group of twelve of us this year.  It was a blast.  Everybody loved the derby.  This is a picture of half of us grabbing a bite to eat just before the derby started. If you look close you will notice that my hair is short. Stephanie cut it just a few hours before the derby. I will find a better picture to show my haircut later.

President Hintze pulling a car with his awesome tractor!

You can see the cars in motion. Derby's are intense.

We stayed for a while the next day.  Andrea loves to sit on top of her daddy's shoulders and play with/tug at his hair.

We spent a few hours at Scott and Stephs.  The boys watched the kids while she added some layers to my hair. I don't know how well the kids liked it, but they survived. :-) We had lunch together and Scott played with Andrea for a bit. She was laughing so hard.

She loves her Uncle Scotty.

Playing with Daddy

One of my Visiting Teachers had a little boy and she always brings him when she comes to visit me.  Andrea absolutely LOVES it!!!! She loves other kids. She followed him around the entire time and kept climbing up him to get to her final destination (the entertainment center.) She's so fun to watch interact with other kids, she wants to be doing all the same things they are doing, she just can't quite walk yet.

But, she does walk with mommy and daddy all over the house. This is a picture of her walking up and down the hallway with daddy. So adorable.

Yea for daddy time!!! When she wants to walk, which is quite often she holds her hand up to you to come and grab and take her walking.  Or she climbs up your leg and cries for a while until you'll take her hands.

Time to tickle Andrea. You can almost hear her high pitched squeal through the picture.

One of my favorite pictures.  She loves when daddy comes home!