Spring Break in Houston

A few months ago, we discovered that Pete and his brother, Brian (in medical school in Houston) had overlapping spring breaks! We were able to find some cheap flights and decided it would be super fun to go visit Brian and Ashley. It was sad that Ash wasn't on Spring Break too, but I was so glad she spent as much time with us as she could amidst the busy-ness of nursing school. It was so fun to be with family, and Brian and Ash were excellent hosts! They let us sleep in their bed, gave us cool Texas T-shirts, and had a never ending supply of fun activity ideas and yummy food plans. They also made arrangements to have a high chair and pack-n-play for Ems which made the visit go very smoothly. We had such a great time with them and I really hope we can see them again soon!

Our adventures included:

A trip to College Station to have dinner with Aunt Kath. Pete and I hadn't seen her since we got married, so it was great to visit her. She fed us Deee-licious food and gave us a tour of her little bakery. Anyone who knows Aunt Kath knows that she makes amazing food. She sent us home with leftover dinner and her famous cinnamon rolls.

Me, Aunt Kath, Ems, and Pete standing outside the bakery: "Mrs. T's Big Buns" :)

I love this face of Em's...her mom makes her eat squash...life's rough.

RODEO! We had so much fun watching mutton bustin', sharing delicious barbecue/Mexican/everything fried, and my favorite---the petting zoo. Emery was so excited to see and touch all the different animals

Between the 4 of us, we sampled a lot of fried goodness: fried red velvet cake, fried cookie dough, fried oreos, and fried snickers (the best!)

All of us, watching mutton bustin'

Pete's dream car ;)

Eating yummy barbecue with my cute husband :)

Can you see her "excited hands" in the upper left corner? She flexes her arms, clenches her fists, and shakes when she gets reeeeally giddy :)

Strawberry Picking. We went to a U-Pick Strawberry Farm and picked strawberries to make homemade jam with. We may or may not have also tried a fried pie made with fresh peaches. And it may or may not have made my life complete. Mmmm.

Emery especially loved strawberry picking. From the pictures, you can easily see her transformation: cautious, curious, ecstatic, and...a big mess :)

On our last night in Texas, we put Emery to sleep and hung out at home chatting and playing Jenga! We had so much fun and came home missing Brian and Ashley. Hope to see you guys again soon!

Emery's First Birthday

We had a little family birthday night for Emery and it was so fun! She opened a couple presents, we sang her Happy Birthday, and then we gave her a cupcake. 

I took the picture above as we sang her "Happy Birthday." You can tell that she wasn't too excited/impressed with the song. What she was excited about, however, were the balloons: 

She and I went to the grocery store in the morning to pick them up and they were all she wanted to play with all day long. I wish I would've known sooner that balloons would be such a big hit! The grocery store worker was really nice and threw in an extra, free balloon since it was Em's birthday :)

Emery's "digging in" to the cupcake was a little too dainty, in my opinion. She cautiously stuck one finger in the frosting, licked it off, and continued to eat the frosting bit by bit between offering bites to us. 

12 month stats:

weight: 17 lbs, 11 oz.

length: 28.3 in.

head circ.: 17.5 in.

We sure love our little Emery Jane! 

Random Birthday Thoughts

(I meant to post this on Emery's bday, but it just didn't work out. Better late than never!)


I feel like the culture here in the South is pretty different than where I grew up. People here speak their mind---simple, blunt, and honest. While I'm used to getting lots of "beautiful baby" type comments when I'm out and about with Emery at the grocery store or running errands (she's been called everything from a simple "cutie" to "sweet potato pie" by those passing by), lately I've been the one getting comments---and not about my beauty (haha), about my age: "Is that baby yours?" "How old are you?" and my favorite today while I was at the store with the baby: "You look just like a baby yourself!"(make sure to read that last one with a heavy southern accent for full effect). I never know quite how to respond to these abrupt comments---do I say thank you? Anyhow, I guess it's nice to hear, because I'm feeling a bit old now that I have a 1 YEAR OLD!

I can't believe how quickly a year has gone by and how quickly my sweet tiny baby has become not so tiny and progressively less a baby (but she's still very sweet) :). She gives me big, wet "kisses," points to her nose, tries to comb her hair, puts the phone to her ear to "talk," plays hide and seek with me around the house, and thinks she's grown up enough to be the sole keeper of my car keys. It's so fun to see each new little step she makes into growing up. She has such a sweet, fun personality and I can just tell she's a thinker---quietly but confidently curious about people and things. She also likes to be silly, and when she notices me quietly laughing at something funny she's doing, she gives me a big grin and keeps right on doing it. She's recently developed a little attachment to her stuffed dog and won't leave her crib without bringing her "gog" along with her.

I love that Emery's birthday is right on the brink of spring. Budding tulips and brilliant daffodils take me right back to those early months of Emery, when I would often take her out for walks. I hope warm weather and the pretty flowers that come in early spring will always remind me of the birth of my little Emery. Today in the grocery store, an older woman stopped me, told me my baby was "just beautiful" and then looked me straight in the eyes and pointedly charged, "you enjoy every day of her." I guess sometimes those grocery store comments do hit the nail right on the spot :)

I sure love my little Emery Jane and hope that I continue to enjoy her more with each passing day.

Dog Watching

Say the word "dog" and Emery speed crawls to the window :)

10 months

Dear Emery,

Happy 10 months + 2 days! I often think about all the fun things I should be recording about you and hope to do better at it this year. For the past month of your life, we’ve been traveling and visiting family members. You’ve been a gem through all of it---plane rides, lots of new faces, and even the bumpy, off-roading trip to the desert (in fact, you didn’t complain nearly as much as I did about that one).

Here’s just a few quick things I want to remember about you:

4 teeth at 8 months

Pushing yourself up to sitting position at 9 months

Crawling (finally!) at 9.5 months

Pulling yourself up on furniture and cruising at 9.5 months

Eating solids like cheerios and bread (without choking) at 9.5 months

Drinking water from a bottle at 9.5 months

10 month stats: 17 in head circumference,17.2 lbs, and 27 in. long

You have quite the array of little tricks these days. My favorite is probably waving. You started consciously waving to people around 8 months and have since been perfecting your wave. You used to just wave by folding at the wrist, then you started folding your fingers down with your palm facing you (it was so cute how you waved to yourself!), and now you’ve put it all together to fold your fingers down and face them toward the person you are waving at. Basically, anything moving gets a nice hand wave from you these days (including animals, the flames of a fire, trees, etc.) It’s so cute and fun to watch how social and aware you are of the people and things around you.

At about 9.5 months, you started doing a funny little bear crawl in addition to your normal crawling. While all this moving around makes more work for me, I honestly don’t mind, because it’s so neat to see you gaining more skills and more control over your tiny little body. Another trick is what we call “crazy face,” where you either smile or open your mouth wide and then shake your head all over the place. It evolved while we were on a long car ride. I think you wanted out of your car seat, so you started flopping your head around. Your dad copied you, you thought it was funny, and what could’ve been a meltdown turned into a game. Now you do crazy face just for fun, or to music.

You recently started doing the actions for your favorite “Popcorn Popping” song, and you love to clap your hands together. During our stay at the Hoyts, all the boys were up in the loft watching a football game and even though you couldn’t see them, you heard their occasional bursts of yelling and clapping and would face the direction all the racket was coming from and add your own clapping to it. So funny! You’re also really fascinated by books these days...you love looking at them, playing with them, and turning the pages.

Reading with Aunt Hailey.
She was your best friend while we were at the Hoyt's!

In other news, you’re still not sleeping through the night (vacation didn’t help that), but I’m not too worried about it at the moment. It’ll happen someday. Eating and everything else is going great. You recently decided that sneezing or watching people sneeze is pretty funny and you are constantly “ga-ga”-ing and “ma-ma”-ing and “da-da”-ing. You took a particular liking to the Hoyt’s dog at Chrismas time and I’m pretty sure you try to say the word “dog.” Most times it comes out like “gog,” but pretty exciting nonetheless. Since your dad and I hate dogs, I’m not counting it as your official first word yet. J Everytime you see a dog (they're quite prevalent in our apartment complex) your whole body goes rigid and you flap your arms around excitedly saying "gog, gog."

Just playing :)

You got spoiled with all kinds of attention over the break from family members, it was so neat to watch you get acquainted with all your extended family and so sad to have to leave them all behind. You seem to gather smiles from everyone: great-grandparents, grandparents, aunts, teenage uncles, young cousins, etc. I’m constantly amazed at how many smiles and how much laughter a sweet baby like you can bring to all and especially to me.

With the Hoyt fam

With the Jensen fam

Sometimes your dad and I jokingly debate about who loves you more, me or him. The funny thing is, each of us is pretty sure that we’re winning. Thanks for being such a sweet, happy baby. While I want you to be little forever, I can’t wait to watch you grow up!

Love,

Mom   

My kind of pretty

Often when I tell people that I'm from Oregon, I get comments such as, "Ohhh, it's beautiful over there," and "I love how green and pretty Oregon is." And then I proceed to tell them that I'm actually from the other part of Oregon. The desert part.  But you know what? I still think it's pretty, and while it's not green and rhododendron-scented, I think sage brush smells great too.

Over Christmas break, my dad convinced us to go for a drive out in the desert. 

It was long. 

It was cold.

And the dirt road had pot-holes the size of  the suburban we were piled into.

(well, that may be exaggerating just a wee bit) 

But...

Nate thought he was the coolest person ever because he got to stand on top of this rock.

And Wyatt got to shoot guns with his dad and Pete

And we trekked up a frozen river to find...

A frozen waterfall.

 Which was actually pretty cool.

So it turned out alright after all. It was great fun to be in the car complaining and getting lost together. Ahem, I mean, spending time together. 

Okay, all joking aside, thanks Dad! Even Emery had a good time---she doesn't give out her full, four-toothed smiles for just anything.

My Favorite Gift

I'm feeling oober overwhelmed with the amount of blog-age I want to do about our vacation. I reeeeeeally want to get it recorded, because we made such good memories, but I think it's going to take a little while. For now, here's a little spur of the moment photoshoot I did with Emery amongst the leftover wrappings on Christmas Day.  

Hey Santa...

Emery meeting Santa for the first time:

First, she checks him out (or maybe she's just looking for some face in all that white fluff)

Then she looks at me wide-eyed as if to say, "Mom, who is this guy?"

Next, she looked at him again and that cute little hand (aka "iron gripper") went straight for the beard.

 Not sure if tugging Santa's beard is going to win her "nice" points down the road or not, 

but I guess we'll find out :) 

Too bad we didn't get a picture of that part.

In other news, the Ward Christmas Party (which I've been working on for the past few weeks) is now over and the only thing separating me from home are 5 days and a lot of cleaning and packing. 

Oh, and 2,222 miles. 

Gee, I'm far from home.

Sunday Pictures

Finals week is allllmost over. Pete's last final is Monday and then we get the rest of the week to just all play together. We have a big list of plans. Last week was pretty good for a finals week. Emery and I entertained ourselves pretty well while Pete studied. A few of our week's events included:

-A little shopping with Emery. I found some cute PJ's and outfit for her.

-Having our friend Dan Neff over for dinner while his wifey was away in Utah. We had him over on Sunday and dinner was, well, an epic failure. A delicious dish I've made several times just didn't quite turn out right. Dan was brave enough to come to dinner on Wednesday as well, and I think the meal turned out a bit better 

-Making cupcakes! Not a big deal...but I had been craving them for two days and the finished product just really hit the spot. I've been wanting to do more baking but it's seemed kind of overwhelming with a baby (I'm usually lucky to get dinner made). This was the first time I had made cupcakes since Emery was born--I like to think of it as a "mommy milestone"--so hopefully that means bigger and better things are ahead!

-Speaking of mommy milestones, Pete and I went on a date this weekend---without Emery! The Ford family graciously offered to watch her. Though I felt bad adding to their clan of 4 kids, they said Emery did awesome the whole time and we could leave her with them anytime. Hopefully they let us return the favor in the future, we love their 3 boys and little baby girl that is Emery's age. We had a hard time leaving Emery, but I think it was good for us.

-Finishing reading aloud "The Hunger Games." Ready for book 2 just in time for Pete's week off!

-Got ready for church early enough to make it there on time and even snap a few pics beforehand. The morning light was beautiful and the forest-y area right by our apartment was so lush and green looking. Georgia is starting to grow on me I think...if I could somehow get past the bugs, the process would be much speedier :) 

Happy Sunday!

5 months

 

Dear Emery,

Happy 5 months! I'm amazed at how much you change in just a month's time. These days, you love playing with toys and you make sure I know it if I take one away before you're done with it. You also love paper and plastic...and it's probably not a good thing...but if I let you crinkle a piece of paper in your hands (closely supervised to prevent it going into your mouth) you are the happiest, most excited little girl on the planet. The soft, stuffed bunnies that Grandma Hoyt got for you and the bright pink poodle that Grandma Dana/Jensen (not sure what we're calling her yet...) got for you seem to be some of your favorites. Up until now, you haven't shown much interest in books, but these days you seem to love looking at the pages and helping me turn them.

Guess what else? Your sleeping and eating seem to be improving greatly. For the past week, you've slept around 11 hours at night, only waking up once around 3 am. I hope you keep it up and getting better and better! Also, you are nursing better than you ever have before. Life seems to be looking up around here these days :)

In the past month, you got your first haircut (just a little trim from me...it was time for the natural mohawk to be tamed), tried a few solids and so far only like squash, have been giggling and smiling lots, and love being in the center of whatever's going on (cooking, cleaning, crafting). I'm starting to think you're growing up too quick! My favorite part of each day is coming to get you out of your crib when you wake up---you smile and flap your arms around, looking at me like I'm the coolest thing since sliced bread. It's so cute!

Love,

Mom