Peach Pickin' Pictures

Thanks to Joleen for sending these pictures my way. Stay tuned for pictures of Miss Hollie Margaret meeting her Great-Grandma Margaret (and my Aunt Sherry and cousin Livvy) who came all the way from Florida and Mississippi for a weekend trip. Thanks to my own Mom, Dad, and brother Will for driving all the way down from Utah, too. We miss you guys already.

The Peach-Pickin' Gang. I did not dress to get my picture taken. I've been watching a lot of What Not to Wear at the gym recently, so I feel like I need to make excuses for my too-big jeans and unflattering maternity top (yep, still haven't put those maternity tops away yet. They're just so darned comfortable. But, hey: at least my jeans are a size too big! That's progress!).

The taste of summer. The rule was, you got to eat as many peaches as you wanted to while you picked them. I think I ate about five. Little ones. Well, one big, four littles.

Even the best of moms and dads sometimes forget to bring a hat for the baby. Fortunately, we never forget to bring a change of clothes for diaper blow-outs. Don't worry: I slathered sunscreen all over her. I just can't slather it on her shaggy little scalp.

Nine Months Old and Walking....almost

Hollie at 9 mo.

Hollie at 8 mo. (for comparison. I never got around to that post after all.)

It's been a thoughtful, tender, bittersweet week. In the wake of the Aurora shootings and the accidental death of a past roommate, my little baby turned nine months old, took her first early steps, and is in the process today of getting her very first tooth (we can only just see it jutting up through her gums, but we can definitely feel it. It's there). I'll admit that I have felt a few fears for Hollie as she seems so bent on growing up and moving closer to the kinds of fears and pains that I want to always protect her from. At the same time, I've found myself feeling guilty at times for having fun with Holls and Dave, laughing boisterously together when I know that there is so much heartache and pain seemingly everywhere around us. Anyway, it's been a thoughtful week.

But this post is not meant to dwell entirely on deep thinking. This post is meant to record and share the things that our little Baboo has been learning this past month or two. Let me put it this way: when David and I saw two alligators uncomfortably close to us on a hike in Brazos Bend National Park, Hollie cooed and smiled at us as Dave and I exchanged cautious glances and lickety-split our way backwards down the trail before Alligator #1 reached the shore just behind us, which would have effectively pinned us between it and Alligator #2 (who was sunbathing his/her-self across the path in front of us. David and I may be well aware of all the dangers that threaten the well-being of our little family, but Hollie is blissfully innocent of such worries. (Or maybe that isn't entirely true. We do, after all, leave her in a darkened room by herself to sleep at night. And she hates that.) In any case, regardless of any grumpy interludes by anyone of the three of us throughout the day, we have really been enjoying a summer full of silly giggles and fighting-back-tears laughter as Holls has learned to clap, play Peek-A-Boo, play Steal-Mom's-Glasses, and crack up when she sees she has inadvertently made us crack up. Nine months old is my favorite months-old so far.

Here's some stats:

Weight: Somewhere around 20 pounds. I don't know her height. But basically, we need a new car seat. We can almost just barely buckle her into her infant car seat.

Hair: Getting longer and shaggier. Sometimes we call her Simba because her hair looks like a lion cub's baby-mane. (And let's face it: her personality is way more Simba than Nala at this point.)

Favorite foods: Her staples are bananas, apples, sweet potatoes, squash, and, of course, her beloved carrots. But we also found out recently that she really likes avocado. This last week, we also drove out to a farm and picked fresh peaches (a buck a pound! how great!). I gave Hollie some pureed fresh peaches cut with some plain yogurt, and I have never seen her go after a food with such gusto before. We almost always have to trick her into eating anything past the first four or five bites of anything. But she ate a whole bowl of peaches and yogurt, and her mouth remained open between bites. I've never seen that before. (Oh, yeah. And I also made this awesome peach pie. I've always wanted to be a real master at baking pies. This pie was one baby-step closer to that goal.)

The best (and second) peach pie I've made yet.

Favorite songs: She still loves Ducktales, but she also gets really excited when we sing the "Eency-Weency Spider" (help me out: "eency-weency"? "itsy-bitsy"? Which is it? I rotate between the two on a daily basis.) and she also loves this song about the sun that the playhouse her Aunt Sarah gave her plays when you rotate a certain circle on the roof of the house. She's obsessed with it. Sarah: best gift ever. She also loves the songs that play during the credits of any television show Dave and I watch. She'll play with her toys while we watch the program, and then as soon as the music starts, she stops what she is doing, turns around, bobs to the beat, and watches the black-and-white letters run down the screen.

Favorite books: Any book with pages she can touch, especially if the pages have fluffy things to touch. She is also getting really good at pointing. She points to the mouse on her That's Not My Fairy/Penguin books, and I found out today that she will consistently point to the baby hippo on every page of Kiss Kiss, a board book from her Aunt Erin and Aunt Kate (Erin, if you're reading this, we love those books!).

Reading with Grandma Grover on the 4th of July.

Sleeping habits: Still wakes up every three hours to nurse. We've been trying to wean her from the 3:00 feeding, but then she started teething, and she just can't seem to fall back to sleep on her own. Yeah. I didn't do a really good job of sleep-training her. Hmm. It's extra hard now because she can stand up in the crib and yell, "Mamamamama!" and "Dadadadadadada!" Plus, my boobs hurt if I don't go in there. So.....there.

Hollie loves to dance. We've been trying to record her so that we can tell her she danced before she could walk, but it is hard to videotape her (she is really interested in our camera and has a hard time focusing on anything else when it is out). When Dave or I get up with her in the morning, we will turn on some music, lie down on the sofa, and watch her dance and dance and dance, grinning away. She loves dancing. She will dance to any song. Even fake songs. She will dance to whistling. She will dance to a repetition of beeps. The girl has the music in her. She can't help but dance.

Hollie really wants to walk. She can stand by herself pretty well now, at least for several seconds at a time, and she can take anywhere between two and six steps toward David or me on her own. When she isn't dancing, she is practicing walking. Crawling can get her around, sure, but she basically uses her ability to crawl to reach us so that we can help her practice walking. When I was a baby, I learned to walk when I was about nine and a half months old. I think Hollie is going to beat my record.

Here is some video documentation of Holl's early steps and dance moves. It's a bit longish, but I kept it all in because I know Hollie's grandmas won't be bored watching it. Keep in mind that we take most of our videos in the morning, so be kind to David's ridiculous clothes, my ridiculous laughter, and all the times you hear our voices in the background sounding a bit sleepy or loopy. The most boring part of the video is during the ABBA dancing scene when Hollie can't decide whether she wants to dance with Dad or crawl over to the television stand and dance on her own. She finally picks the latter. I then cut to the transition to the next song, but trust me: she danced all the way through "Money, Money, Money." This baby does not tire easily.

Finally, here are some pictures of our trip last month to visit family in Houston. Thanks to all of our family who took us in for two weeks and played with our baby (especially when it let David and I go on some dates, including one to see Moonrise Kingdom! Thank you, thank you!).

Brazos Bend State Park

Playing with Cousins Minnie and Luke.

Dancing to Dad's singing.

Reading with Cousin Faith.

Dancing with Cousin Luke.

Reading with Cousin Madison

Walking with the help of Cousins Charlotte and Claire.

Mixed feelings about being surrounded by several (but not nearly all) of her boy cousins.

My Dear Friend

My beautiful, dear, hilarious, intelligent, brave friend Ali passed away this morning. She lost her life when she stepped into the street to help a woman in a scooter accident; she didn't see the bus that was coming down the street as she stepped off the curb.

I don't know what do to with this thing that has happened. I feel that I want to record a few of my favorite Ali stories here so that I know that they are safe, so that I know that they can't be forgotten. I write this post for the girl who was in my cell phone as Ali Baba Nookie for the past six years, for the woman who was only just married this last November, who had everything ahead of her, and who has now gone ahead of all the rest of us here. Ali, I don't know what to do with you not being here, and I know that I am not alone in this sentiment. These stories are me missing you, us missing you, and hoping you are close, and hoping that you are warm, and hoping that you are smiling somewhere.

Our Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Adventure to Bear Lake. "Put these on," Ali said as I got into the car. "They're adventure hats." Yes, that's right. Ali had emergency adventure hats in the backseat of her car. How great is this woman? How irreplaceable!

I met Ali at Utah State. I was in my final year of my MA degree, and I was trying to find a cheap place to live for my last two semesters. Our town house was cheap and cheap. All of the roommates already knew, loved, and had lived with each other—I was the outsider. "You were supposed to find us," Ali told me once. "You are supposed to be our roommate."

I loved those girls. I loved Ali. Ali, Kaitlin, Lo, Yessica, Megan, and should-have-been-roommates-with-us Nicole. My abs and cheeks constantly hurt from laughing. We always stayed up too late.

I remember one night I was stuck in my office writing papers until after midnight. It was winter. There was fresh snow on The Quad, and I knew I would be lonely when only my footprints would mar the otherwise completely blank expanse of white under that bitter clear starry sky that only Logan-ites can really appreciate. As I collected my things, Ali sent me this text: "Come home quick! Kaitlin had a bad day so we are going down the stairs in cardboard boxes!"

I didn't get home in time to go down the stairs in a box myself, but I was welcomed home by a group of girls all piled on each other with broken remnants of boxes all around them. Midnight emergency roadtrips through nearby canyons were also not unheard of. I still have, in my iTunes, our "carpe diem" song list that we would sing-shout to as we drove through the forest in the dark. These are the songs that Ali, Yess, and I selected:

1. "Hakuna Matata" from The Lion King
2. "Fernando"—ABBA
3. "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun"—Cyndi Lauper
4. "A Horse with No Name"—America
5. "Bohemian Rhapsody"—Queen
6. "Smells Like Teen Spirit"—Nirvana
7. "Seize the Day"—Newsies
8. "Message in a Bottle"—The Police
9. "Changes"—Bowie
10. "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"—Rolling Stones
11. "Edge of Seventeen"—Stevie Nicks
12. the Duck Tales theme song
13. "I Think I Have a Chance with This Guy"—Strong Bad
14. "Under Pressure"—Bowie and Queen

Ali introduced me to a million great things, including Bear Lake's famous blackberry shakes.

Ali introduced me to Freaks and Geeks, and we watched all the episodes at least twice one semester. Later, when I was somewhat secretly in the LDS institute show choir, Ali and the gang came to one of my concerts and held up a big banner that said something like, "Our Car Bumper" in honor of the episode where Lindsay Weir wrecks her dad's car and then goes to a Mathletes competition. The "freaks" gang brings a bumper and holds it up to support her. Well, you just have to see the episode yourself. Ali's banner said, "WE LOVE YOU, EM!" on the back.

(I should also note that it was Ali who was always willing to watch my favorite part of Pete's Dragon with me when I was having a bad day, the "Money, Money, Money By The Pound" number that Dr. Terminus sings. THAT is real friendship.)

Spontaneous Cave Exploration

These following pictures document the time that we tried to make a Better-Than-Sex-Cake for Yess's birthday. The cake was gorgeous, but as it was cooling on our completely ghetto and safety-hazard back balcony, the worst happened—a gust of Logan wind blew the cake off the railing and face-down into the snow. "It's still good! It's still good!" Lo shouted as she dove into the chocolate disaster. Ali immediately jumped in, and I followed with a camera.

After eating half of the cake (without poor Yessica) on the balcony, in the snow, we finally salvaged the rest and returned inside.

 

 

 We ate the rest of the cake pretty cordially, but it didn't take long for things to turn into this:

I don't remember whose birthday these next photos document. All I remember is the orange cone that I think Lo might have had for some reason. Leave it to Ali to be the first to wear a cone-as-lampshade at a party.

Ali, do you remember the time we found a bird in our heating vents? Fear not, readers, it was still alive. We had heard banging in the pipes all morning, and we couldn't place the problem. I was eating cereal in the kitchen when my mouth dropped open and I found myself staring face-to-face with a small sparrow in the vent; the little guy kept poking his small beak through the vent, confused and lost and scared.

Ali unscrewed the vent to let the bird out, but it got spooked and flew deeper into the vents. She tried to coax it out with "here, Birdie birdie birdie," but that didn't work either. We thought bread might work, but, alas, none of us were very good at grocery shopping, and there was no bread in the house. Someone had, fortunately, baked a cake the night before, so Ali cut a small piece and placed it at the edge of the vent.

About twenty minutes later (dangerously close to when we all needed to leave to make it to class), the little bird emerged from the grate! What followed was a lot of laughing, screaming, and waving our arms to guide the bird not upstairs or downstairs as it seemed to be very keen on heading, but out the back door. Ali was the one to finally shepherd it to safety. I don't remember if we ate the piece of cake on the floor or not.

After Lo's concert.

These next photos document the day that Ali came home dressed as a Wookiee. I don't remember why. It doesn't really matter.

Only Ali could still look this adorable dressed in a monkey suit.

After we all graduated and moved on, we kept in touch. I'm so glad these girls kept me in their loop, even though I was technically the outsider, the girl who came at the very end of the adventures, who graduated and left earlier than the rest. When I got married in '09, Ali was the one to throw me my bachelorette party. And what a party it was. We carved cucumbers and danced without reservation to '80s music. It was so much fun. It was such the perfect night to my last evening as a single gal.

The next day, Ali and the gang came to my wedding reception and were my only guests to truly appreciate that David and I played Bowie's "As The World Falls Down" from Labyrinth for our newlywed dance. Thank you, Ali, for dancing at my wedding. Thank you for being there for me, for being such a selfless friend to so many of us, to people who will never be able to thank you enough.

Ali, Ali, Ali. My dear Ali Baba Nookie. You are so fearless. I want to be that fearless, that enthusiastic, that loving and giving. I hope it is okay with you that I share these stories here. We love you so much. We miss you miss you miss you.

Epilogue: Day 31—Celebrate David's 31st Birthday with a BBQ

Note: I began this post on June 7, Day 31, the night of our joint birthday party that completed our 30 Days of 30 Things. David left early the next morning for Kentucky in order to grade AP English exams (Hollie and I stayed home and kept each other company for the next week and a half). Upon David's return, we left for Houston and stayed an unexpected two weeks. We just got home yesterday. I never finished this post. That's why it took so long.

Note, continued: Furthermore, Blogger wigged out on me, and my pictures got all wonkadoodled as I tried to mash them into the right order with the right captions. This frustrated me. I have decided to scrap the first attempt and just give you a string of pictures with captions that will narrate a party we threw over a month ago.

*sigh*

What I tried to talk about in my original posting is the way that David and I were both able to bring our creative energies together with this party—in other words, one of us wasn't the leader and the other the follower (which has happened to us in the past....we usually just take turns playing Leader). It was almost effortless putting it all together, getting the food made, the decorations up, the house cleaned, etc. Considering that we are usually a family that finds the adage of "Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth" only too true, we were very pleased with undertaking a project in which our minds were constantly following the same vibes. It was truly a lovely ending to our 30 Things.

At the end of the evening, David said, "You know, we should just keep doing awesome things everyday.......we just don't need to blog about it all the time anymore."  Apparently I took this statement to heart. But we both love keeping records too much to quit blogging altogether, so you can expect updates on this thing from here on out, you readers of mine (they just won't be daily occurrences—for your sake and mine).

The spread. We made the banner at 1 a.m. the night before. We were quite proud of it.

I made three different kinds of cupcakes: chocolate cake with white frosting, vanilla cake with chocolate frosting, and snickerdoodle cake with vanilla/cinnamon-sugar frosting. The snickerdoodles were the most popular, surprisingly (I'm a chocolate cake girl, myself).

David came up with the idea to make a display using books and records. We learned that morning that Ray Bradbury had passed away, so I made sure that Dandelion Wine had a prominent place. Also, one of the cupcakes had a plastic soldier baked in it a la Mardis Gras King Cakes. The person who found the soldier won one of our grand prizes. (Note the baby crawling around in the right-bottom corner.)

A cute little girl from our church turned eight on the day of our party, so she brought her birthday cake, too. Barbie's dress was made of rice krispie treats. (She also brought her birthday dinner—delicious tuna casserole! Adorable!)

We thought we had more colors of crepe paper at the house, but it ended up that we only had cool colors (cool colors as in not warm colors). It sort of made our living room seem like a cheap Under-the-Sea-themed prom setting. Not that that's a bad thing.

I was the most proud of this banner (also made at about midnight the night before). I finally found a use for the heap of scrapbook paper I have lying around. David was so impressed with my banner that we decided to keep it for future use. I think I'll make a new pennant banner for every party we throw until we can string them all through the neighborhood.

The game that was the biggest hit was the one where you have to open presents with oven mitts. The people next in line toss quarters until they get Heads, then they get to take over. It was hysterical. Our friends are such good sports.

You know it's a good game when both big people and little people get excited about it.

The good ole' trusty "Guess How Many Candies Can Fit in This Jar?" game. I'm the worst at this game. I'm always the one that makes the embarrassing guess. I've decided I like giving the jars of candy away much more than guessing to get a jar of candy myself.

Our last game was a bit Grover-centric, but it was our birthday party, after all. Papers were provided in which guests could fill in the blanks concerning some important event in mine and David's courtship, and then they could draw pictures of said event and hang them from a clothesline provided above them. Prizes were awarded to our favorite drawings.

My favorite part of this one are our strong necks. I also like the ratio of boys to girls in our 18 children.

This was the winning drawing. We really liked the idea of David riding the Starship Enterprise like a horse.

This one is both sad and funny. The hands make me want to watch Ponyo.

Let's safely assume that David is thinking about the literal meat on the shelf in this picture, shall we?

This was a runner-up for favorite (we are both English majors, after all), but the disembodied heads are too unnerving for me. But David and I do feel strongly that people should know the difference between an em-dash and an en-dash. That part is spot on.

It was a really nice time, with really nice friends. Thanks for all who came and brought so many delicious side dishes!

To my family who has waited for pictures of our shin-dig for a month now: sorry for the delay.

Hollie's belated eight-month stats to come! *type type type type type type type*