May 2010-1st Half

Ok so here goes our bi-monthly posting-and it's only been 6 days since the middle of the month! I must be slacking off on my other chores, like doing the dishes......cleaning the kitchen....pulling weeds......hmmm. Oh well. This is more fun.

Early on this month we discovered an awesome new source of entertainment: Putting the oscillating sprinkler underneath the trampoline and turn it on full blast. The mesh of the trampoline turns the streams into shorter softer streams of water with a mist. It's so much fun! Justin and I especially love it because it's not like you're getting completely soaked in 2 minutes, and it's so nice when it's hot out. Plus it keeps the grass under our trampoline nice and green (unlike the rest of the yard, which sadly is not so nice or green).

We went to Chuck E Cheese a couple times too. Sarah calls me the day before my birthday and says she wants to take me out for lunch. Well I picked Chuck E Cheese. No laughing. I used to work there, and I loved it. I actually like the pizza there-even though its gross cold. She laughed at me but said OK. We ended up being super late because of Amaia's dentist appt, but once we got there it was nice to have a place to let the kids run around and play while the food was cooking, since it was like already past lunch time for them and there was no way they would have behaved at a sit down restaurant. We got some tokens for the kids, but they mostly just ran around and climed in the rides. We didn't play any games and saved most of our tokens.

Which turned out awesome, because we went back to Chuck E's for Sarah's birthday on Friday! She paid for me on my birthday, and this time I got to pay for her :) We got more tokens with a coupon we had, and a ton of our friends came with their kids to play. This time I actually took Amaia around and let her 'play' the games (meaning she put the 'money' in and I hurried and pushed the button before she could get another one in). We won some tickets, got some cheap prizes, and were home before the kids could throw a fit. It was a blast.

(Silly Tip: if you buy string cheese, at Walmart (at least, not sure about other stores) they sell a pkg of string cheese that's like 'Chuck E Cheese' brand. It's got the same # of cheeses in there, is cheaper than the Frigo brand, or whatever it's called, and comes with a coupon on the back for 12 free tokens, and a coupon for 1 large pizza, 2 drinks, and 33 tokens for 18 bucks. Good deal. And the cheese tastes the exact same as any other string cheese)

So far this month, new things Amaia's been up to:

Has to help with EVERYTHING! I can't do the dishes, laundry, or even pick out her own clothes with out her going "Amaia ulping". She'll throw a tissy fit sometimes if I don't let her help, or do something for her; When she wants me to get something for her (usually it's candy or chapstick, which are in the same place in a cabinet) she'll pull on my legs or my hands and tell me to "mommy out chair". Then when I stand up she'll start going and tell me to "mommy walkin'"; she's also been known to just yank on my neck in the direction she wants me to go, if I'm already standing up and holding her; She remembers the fact that "Amaia's little" and will go around saying it (I told her once she was too little to reach the lights to turn them on); Ask her what a horse says and you'll get a "rush-achoo!"; ask her what a dinosaur says and she'll say "shee-shee-saur, rrraah!"; We've been practicing counting to ten (don't try to tell her that it goes 1-2-3, or she'll get mad. Apparently it's 1-2-5) and when we get to ten I'll ask her "How many is 10?" She'll hold up both hands with her fingers out and yell "Many!!" at the top of her lungs; She finally goes pee on the big potty. haha, finally. She's only been peeing in the potty for like a month now. But it's sooo nice to not have to cart around a little potty and wipes everywhere I go; She knows her friends names and sometimes asks to play with them. Sophie & Chloe are known as 'Yophie & Dote-ee'. Abby & Hannah are "Abby & Nana" (and somehow every little girl she sees at first is Abby). Ian & Joseph are "Awny & dih-dish" (which is exactly how she says 'laundry' and 'dishes'). And of course she's known "Adjoo" for quite some time now; now when she tells me she has to go potty it's "potty 'din" (again); she loves 'this little piggy' and will stick her toes in my face asking for the 'diddle dig' :)

Ha. You thought there would be a video. :)

Well I decided that the videos aren't like insanely long. There were a couple in March that were just insane, like more than 6 minutes each, but a LOT of stuff happended that month. I should have broken them up a little, but too bad for you :)

So you'll just have to wait until the end of the month (or who knows how long it will take me....you know how i've been in the past) to see the videos.

April 2010

Ok so here's April. I'm pretty sure nothing exciting happened. At least nothing I can remember off the top of my head. It's late, so be nice.

Oh ya! We started potty training Amaia! We started probably the 3rd week in April, and she has only had a few accidents since that very first day.

Oh wait-there is one funny story. It goes along with that. So-she won't go on the adult potty. Even with the little seat we put on it. So we have these 2 potties that are sitting on the floor at our house. I only get the car 1 day a week, so I only had to worry one day about her peeing all over, but that also meant that I would be out all day. So I stuck her potty in the trunk, grabbed some wipes and we went. Well. We get to Wal-Mart, I make her pee before we go in. We're in there for about an hour, and we're almost done, and she starts telling me she has to pee. I knew that it was pointless to take her to the public restrooms there because I knew that no matter how bad she had to go, she was not peeing on one of those things, and I was almost done shopping and didn't want to drop my cart, go all the way out to the car, and come back to finish. So, I kept going. I had gotten all the stuff onto the belt at checkout and had started putting bags of groceries back in the basket. Amaia was standing in the basket because she helped me unload it, when all of a sudden she starts saying "Amaia pee dee-dee-dart (shopping cart)". I can't even tell you how much pee there was. It was insane how much she had been holding in there-no wonder she couldn't hold it any longer. She was standing up facing the front and holding onto the back of the chair for dear life-she hadn't budged from the slightly bent over and squatting position she was in when she peed. I felt soo bad-she knew she needed to go in the potty and she was so upset that she peed on the floor and in her pants. For like a week after that (and every time we went to the grocery store after that) she'd always tell me about the time that "Amaia pee dee-dee-dart". Poor thing.

This month Amaia:

Asks for me to hold her-she'll say 'mommy eee-ooo' (mommy hold you) and we'll always wait to pick her up until she says 'mommy ohm-eee' (mommy hold me); says orange (aggie); goes around singing a song that sounds just like the tune of "I love mommy she loves me..." but with her own words; says medicine (shee shee shin) and asks for it whever she gets an owie; won't say prayers unless Teddy is sitting and folding his arms too (we wedge him in between the crib bars so he stays sitting up and then she'll sit right by him); she used to say 'wahw', but now says 'water' the right way; used to say 'paw-eee' but now says 'potty' the right way; she goes around saying gross (dose) especially after she's pooped in the potty; she's starting to name her drawings now-it still looks like scribbles but now she at least thinks she's drawing a butterfly or an airplane; When I sit at the computer to do stuff, Amaia has to have her own keyboard-which she calls Amaia's buttons-and her own mouse on the mousepad; says boogers (boodlers) and sometimes picks Teddy's boogers for him; she likes to feel the 'baby mooming' in mommy's tummy; started saying "Daddy's Home!"-Justin told me he's been waiting 2 years to hear that :); Knows the color orange and can pick the orange one out of a pile of crayons; she calls her food and drinks "amaia's nummies"; every time I ask her if she wants something, like more juice, she'll go "yeah, otay"; by the end of April is pretty much fully day time potty trained!; instead of saying that she pooped in the potty, Amaia will tell me "Amaia Kinky Potty" (stinkies in the potty); she'll come find me and tell me she has to go when she has to go-I don't have to constantly ask her if she needs to go, which is awesome because sometimes I forget that she can't just pee in her diaper anymore; for a little while Amaia thought that 'ring' and 'rain' were the same-she'd point to my ring and say it, but then she would sign'rain' at the same time; if i tell her she has a booger in her nose, she'll freeze so I can pick it, and then she'll say "dose Amaia boodlers"; every time she poops she'll sing a little song "Amaia kinky potty, yay yay yay yay yay"; excited about the new baby and will randomly say 'baby sister!!' all excited like; when someone is crying she'll always get all pouty, and (while signing 'cry') will go "andrew crying" (or whoever) and act so concerned; Amaia thinks that everthing is Mom & Dad. For example, Mom is the pictures of the ladies in our bathrooms, the painting of the African lady with a basket of grapes on her head at the doctor's office, etc. Dad has been George Washington on the $1 bill, a McDonald's Happy Meal toy of one of the blue guys from Avatar, and the Iron Man printed on the side of her sand bucket.

Here are the pictures-there are 2 videos at the end: One is the April video, the other is a video Justin made in like 5 minutes, that you should not watch if you love little kitty cats :)

Easter Egg Hunt:

Amaia Potty Training:

Here is the video via link to YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm2-4nbyNlA

Cruise to Mexico-March 2010

Go ahead and be shocked-yes I am actually getting two whole posts out in one day! Here is the low-down about our cruise.
From the March post you learned that I dumped Amaia at Justin's parents house. It was good to see my parents and his parents even though it was just a short trip. At least I was able to drop Amaia and not worry about her. Doug and Jo had 2 of thier kids (and resulting grandkids) living with them at the time, so Amaia had 3 little friends to play with and distract her from missing us too much.
We went on this cruise with 4 other couples from our ward: The Hales, Kearns, Chappells, and the Griffins. It was so much fun to get to know them better, and after this I'd never go on a cruise as a couple. We'd have been so bored if we didn't have those guys to hang out with in between the on-board entertainment and the all you can eat buffets.
The cruise left Saturday, and let's get real here, I don't remember what happened when and I'm sure you don't care. But, there was an awesome talent show, where 3 of the guys from our group performed a choreographed dance to the "My Little Buttercup" from the 3 Amigos, Karaoke night-where all 5 of the boys got up and performed "I Will Survive", miniature golf up on the top deck, formal dining for dinner, a formal night where we all got to get all dressed up in our fancies and take pictures. Lucky for me the dress that I wore to 'Chevron Prom' rigth when I found out I was pregnant with Amaia still fits-even though I was 3 months pregnant with #2 on the cruise!
We played lots of games: card games, board games, maffia games where the boys somehow ended up shirtless (don't ask me...) and it was all just a blast!
At the very end of our cruise we got stuck on the boat an extra day. We were supposed to debard on Thursday, but we woke up (all packed and ready to get off) to find out that there was so much fog you would't have been able to see anything off the side of the boat if there had been anything there to see! We got a whole extra day of cruise, but it would have been nice if we were told from the get-go that we would be staying the night. We ended up just sitting in one of the lounges with all our luggage waiting for the all clear (they kept telling us it would just be a couple more hours, over and over). That way we could have put our stuff back and actually done something. It was good to get an extra day of kid-free & free-food fun, even though some of us were having a hard time with the kid-free part. We'd been away from them almost a week! The longest I'd gone without Amaia was overnight the weekend before the cruise when we left Amaia with the Hales as a test run. Plus, we knew that Doug and Jo had gotten into Houston Thursday morning and were just sitting at our house waiting for us to come home.
But anyways, here are the pictures and a video at the end!
These are in alphabetical order based on the file names I gave them, not in any way the order they were taken or what not.
Still shots from the 3 Amigos dance:

The Water slide on top of the boat (the took out the volleyball courts for the slides. Good trade, or no?)

The boys playing shuffleboard:

The formal night pictures-I dressed up two different nights-that's why we're in there twice with different clothes on:

Pictures from Progresso: We had too much fun lounging around on the beach getting massages that we didnt' really take too many pictures:

Pictures of us "off the boat":

Pictures of stuff with no people in them:

Still shots from the karaoke-including one of Jay, the DJ who was probably not straight and at the end of every song would go " Two words: Absolutely brilliant". And you must say it in the most homo voice you can conjure. I know it's not PC to say that, but I'm not kidding.

Justin had fun with some long exposures in the crappy lighting while we dealt cards:

Pictures of us playing games:

Pictures in the crazy fog:

Pictures from Cozumel:

Pictures of us and the Kearns at the pier in Cozumel:

Pictures of us at dinner. And as I look at this I realize I should have put this picture at the beginning, or at least at the top of the pictures, but no way am I going to move it all around now:

And the video: Some Karaoke and the whole 3 Amigos Skit-link to YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYyXtVLG2Co

Oops

Oops! Looks like I forgot to add the pictures from when Amaia and I went to Colorado. Here they are!
These are from the short trip we took to Colorado to drop off Amaia:

The Denver Zoo-Just Animals:

Just Hanging around the house:

The Denver Zoo w People Too:

Swimming at the Rec center because it was too cold to do anything else:

Playing in the snow:

The Butterfly Pavilion:

March 2010

Yay for March! Too bad it was two whole months ago! Man...Well I finally got all my videos and pictures from March compiled. It took so long because some of the stuff I needed was on my mom's camera in CO and we had to figure out how to get them. Anyways....This month was CRAZY!
Right off the bat was Justin's birthday on the 4th-but too bad for him Amaia and I were on an airplane to Colorado! Sad day :( So he went out and bought himself some nice new work clothes. Fun fun.
Amaia and I got to Colorado Thursday morning and my parents picked us up from the airport. We hung out with them for the day, and then we did the old switcheroo and got picked up by Justin's parents. We stayed the night there and the next day I flew home ALONE while Amaia got to stay with Justin's parents. I cried, like, the whole flight home.
Saturday morning Justin and I left for our cruise to Mexico (which you'll just have to wait until the next post to hear about, I'm not writitng a novel here).
When we got back, Justin's parents flew down with Amaia and stayed the weekend with us.
Two weeks later, Amaia and I are on our way back to Colorado to spend a few days with my parents. We had tons of fun: Denver Zoo, Butterfly Pavilion, playing in freshly fallen snow and making snowmen, and the rec center for some nice indoor swimming. It was tons of fun and great to get to hang out with my family since it's been like forever since we've seen them. Justin stayed home though, to work, since he's saving up as many vacation days as he can to help out when the new baby arrives.

And now for the monthly "Amaia Can..." recital :)
Every old person is 'Ma-maw' and 'Bamp-aw'; All of a sudden she's scared of everything. She used to love holding the cat from next door but now gets all skittery if it even gets close!; tylenol (ne-ne-nol); trampoline (win-o-ween); so apprently when Amaia was with Doug and Jo, they saw a horse and it sneezed at her. Now if you ask her what a horse says, she'll say "achoo!"; noodles (neenles); diaper (bidi-boo); when we sing "popcorn popping" she'll do all the actions, even doing the finger waggle before I get to the 'wasn't even so' part, and ask to sing it again by saying 'more pop'; says 'happy face' ; yogurt (eee-yote); if she sees something broken she'll tell me 'uh oh bote-it'; When she talks about her friend Hannah she will sign 'banana'; somehow she knew what music notes looked like, because one day she's taking off her diaper, looks down at it, and (pointing to the music notes) yells "minick!" (music); if the 3 of us do a group hug, Amaia will grab Justin and I behind the neck and make us kiss each other; she started signing 'train' when she asks for the tray to her high chair; we started Amaia on time out-she finally learned what was supposed to happen after she saw Jason's kids in time out when she was with Doug & Jo for the cruise-she calls it 'nigh-nout'; sometimes, if we say "amaia I'll send you to time out if you don't stop" she'll get up and stick herself in time out; started tickling people, or rather grabbing at their stomach with her bared claws; had a phase where she wouldn't take snacks out of my hand, I had to pour them into her hand straight from the container, which of course would make a mess everywhere; answered her first multiple choice question, wether or not she wanted the flower bracelet or the turtle one (she picked turtle); loves the 'i spy' game-she'll point out everything she can see: teddy, blankey, mommy, daddy, bed, diaper, etc (usually right after she wakes up) and if I don't repeat each one as she says it, she'll repeat it until I do; when i start setting the table for dinner, Amaia will run to Justin yelling "daddy boof!" (food); says boobies, Amaia bart (farted), boom! (when she falls), i poop, doesn't know her up from down still, uses "out" for out & off & down, duck (when she's stuck), neen nup (clean up) in a sing song voice just like the song goes, is starting to say sentences (3 words or more), dee dew (thank you), oh neh-ness (oh goodness), she's always wondering 'where'd (blank) go?', mine-uh (pajamas), money (bunny), bay-tin (raisins), dee dee dart (shopping cart), minick (music), eee-uhl (cereal), betty-bear (teddy bear), dying (when she's crying, or anyone else for that matter). She'll actually stop in a middle of a fit to tell me that she's crying (and she'll sign it) and as soon as I awknowledge it, she'll go right back to crying, ahn-ee (laundry), ah-wuhn (the other one, or another one), dee-deen (candy), says 'ummm' sometimes when you ask her a question, if she sees a bug it's "EEEEWWW bug!", if she burps, etc, she'll go "uh bee bee!" with a huge inflection on each syllable, dee duck (chapstick), butta-bye (butterfly), when we take pictures of her, she'll say EEEEE instead of 'cheese', every night in the shower Justin gets Amaia all soapy and gives her crazy hair styles-Amaia calls it "eh-duh-air" or crazy hair.

Ok I feel like that was way too much information for one go around. Soo...starting in MAY I'm going to try and do at least 2 posts per month. Maybe I'll even be like most people and do a post in the middle of the month if we do something of interest, instead of just waiting until the end of the month. Maybe. But for April you'll just have to tough it out with me one more time.
And I added captions to the pictures below so I didn't have to go through and explain them all this time :) Maybe I did that las time too, I can't remember. And if you can't see the pictures very well (since they're a little smaller because of the collage) you know you can always click on them to make them bigger :)

Here is the link for the March video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZW6HFSiytY

Here is the link for the video of us in CO with my family:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHmI0_1xdzg