Hot Chocolate Disaster

My terrific twosome can sure make a disaster in a hurry. In the 5 minutes it took me to answer the phone the other day, Asher and Maddie emptied the lower shelf of our pantry and dumped hot chocolate mix everywhere. I swear they waited for me to leave the room! Luckily it was about ten minutes until Paul was due home, so I just waited for him to help me. I couldn't even get mad, I just had to talk sternly and hide the giggles. Sometimes a mess is just too big to match any reasonable amount of anger. I should know better by now than to answer the phone in the office while these two are in the kitchen.

Isn't this the guiltiest faced boy you've ever seen?

He told me that he took off his clothes because they were dirty, go figure. Notice blanky was his other accomplice. Don't worry, all of the hot chocolate came out of blanky in the wash. You can also see the baby proof door handle cover in the background.

Doesn't Maddie look like she's wearing Halloween beard make up? Sometimes I wish I could roll around in chocolate too.




I just want to say Paul is the best husband in the world. When I called him at 5:00 , in shock, to tell him what the kids had just done, he told me to wait until he got home to clean up so that I wouldn't have to deal with cleaning up the kids and the floor at the same time. Which would have been quite the adventure. Is there anything sexier than a man with a broom? He even mopped!


Mmmmm that bath water looks good enough to drink doesn't it?

A San Francisco Treat!

We had such a wonderful time visiting the Bay area! The main reason we went was to visit Paul's Grandma who lives in El Cerrito. She has a beautiful home and was such a terrific host! It was so fun to see her with our kids. She was so involved and the kids (especially Madeleine) took to her immediately.

She has a lemon tree and Asher was so excited to see the lemons. Gram let them pick some and they played with them for quite some time.

Then they both wanted a bite. Surprisingly, they both seemed to enjoy lemon peel. Madeleine was obsessed with Gram's necklace, she kept putting it into her own mouth and then offering it to Gram to try. Gram politely declined.

Below is a zoomed in shot from Gram's backyard of the Golden Gate bridge. Isn't it beautiful?
On Friday, We went to see my brother Zach, his wife Katie, and their twin boys Ben and Sam. Zach is getting a graduate degree from Stanford. He gave us a tour of the campus, it was beautiful. We had some trouble ordering Pizza in Palo Alto. No one wanted to deliver and a large one topping pizza seemed to be about 20 bucks everywhere. It was so great to see them! The kids had such a great time. They also have an Ikea close to their apartment so Paul was excited to eat Swedish meatballs, Lingon berry juice, and Swedish chocolate (he served his mission in Sweden). We were all excited to be in air conditioning.

Katie actually had her camera with her and posted about our visit on her blog.

Next, we went to Paul's sister Rebecca's house in Pleasanton. Asher loved playing with William and Ian. Here are the three of them in the back of Rebecca's Yukon: Asher, Ian in the middle, and William. Aren't they cute? We went with Rebecca, Paul's other sister Emily, Ian and William to downtown San Francisco.


Below is Madeleine insisting on holding onto the handle on the F train. It was funny because the train was sooooo packed. I don't think I have ever been that close to strangers in my life, and Maddie would not just let Paul hold her, she wanted her very own handle. At one point she held on with both hands and Paul let go of her and she swung back and forth. It was a feat to get the camera out so I didn't get a picture of that adventure.


Below is a picture of us near the Exploratorium.

Madeleine loves playing pianos, Rebecca let her play a duet.
On May 18th Madeleine turned 1! To celebrate, everyone except Madeleine, contracted a horrible stomach bug. I didn't even eat cupcakes and ice cream. Those of you who know me know that I must have been near death not to eat available cupcakes and ice cream, that gives you a pretty good indication of how bad this stomach bug was.

Asher keeps telling everyone that Madeleine got a 1 for her birthday.



Her big present was a baby doll. She loves that doll. She carries it around and kisses it. She is so sweet. When she got home, we gave her a stroller to push the doll around in which she loves. However, Asher often commandeers the stroller to push Dumbo in, we may have to get another toy stroller.

Thank you to Rebecca and Emily for taking such good care of us when we were sick, hopefully we didn't give you this plague.

On the way home we had a layover in Salt Lake and Paul's brother Scott, his wife Kathleen, and kids came to see us. They even brought us doughnuts! It was so nice especially because we didn't have tons of time. We got to meet their new baby and she is so beautiful.

We're Baaaack!

We had a great time in San Francisco! I have a bazillion loads of laundry to fold! I want to blog more about our trip later, but here is a video of Asher and Maddie at a park by Paul's Grandma's house.

Who needs Disney Land?

Vanessa has promoted me from photographer to part-time contributor. So here goes.

Vanessa really wanted to get the house clean before we leave for San Francisco to visit a whole slew of family, so when I got home I offered to get the kids out of the house to give her free reign of the house for cleaning. She actually bought this excuse and allowed me to take off with the kids to the local John Deere distributor. I wanted to check out if they had little tractor toy and I knew Asher would love looking at all the tractors.

This was the "little" combine.

This was the big one.

They were nice enough to let us walk all around the site and get pictures with the tractors and combines and even sent us home with sales materials which Asher thinks are kid books. In the end I opted not to get a toy tractor for Asher because they were pretty spendy and its time for Madeleine's birthday, not Asher's. Besides I think he had enough fun as it was.

Top Baby Names!

I love baby names and every Mother's day the Social Security Administration releases their top 1000 baby names. I love it! The name Asher went from 252 in 2006 to 233 in 2007. Madeleine went from 337 in 2006 to 290 in 2007.

Popularity in 2007

Rank	Male name	Female name
1	Jacob	Emily
2	Michael	Isabella
3	Ethan	Emma
4	Joshua	Ava
5	Daniel	Madison
6	Christopher	Sophia
7	Anthony	Olivia
8	William	Abigail
9	Matthew	Hannah
10	Andrew	Elizabeth
11	Alexander	Addison
12	David	Samantha
13	Joseph	Ashley
14	Noah	Alyssa
15	James	Mia
16	Ryan	Chloe
17	Logan	Natalie
18	Jayden	Sarah
19	John	Alexis
20	Nicholas	Grace

Last Mother's Day...

I can't believe I am doing this, but WOW. This is a puffy version of me last Mother's day. I can't believe I was ever that pregnant.

S'more Fun!

Last night Paul decided that he wanted S'mores, and since they are one of my all time favorite treats, I jumped on that idea. I'm not sure if our little barbecue will ever be the same after burning wood in it, but oh well. Asher did not set his marshmallow aflame even once and no eyes were poked out, so it was a wild success. I love this time of year.

I Heart Paul

Paul and I met in Provo about 5 years ago. I cannot believe how fast the time has gone. I was thinking about how we got engaged and it made me laugh so I thought I would share our story with you.

Paul and I were really good friends from the moment we met at the end of April 2003. Right before we met he started dating someone a week before she graduated and moved to Texas, so he was in a brand new relationship and a long-distance one all at once. We both agree that that was most likely necessary to make sure that we got to know each other before jumping into something.

We hung out constantly with one of my roommates and one of Paul's roommates. His girlfriend broke up with him about 3 weeks after we met because of the distance issues (big surprise).

To make a long story short, he chose to date me instead of my roommate. About a week after we started dating in the beginning of July we went to Arizona with Paul's brother to visit his sister and my parents. The trip was planned months before and was supposed to include our roommates, but they didn't want to watch us playing kissy face all week so they declined the invite.

While there, Paul went out to dinner with my family. My family was really impressed with Paul. They were even more surprised that such a great guy would want to date me. The next day when we were about to go back to Provo, my dad pulled me aside and said to me, "We're going to be out of town for the next few weeks, and I want you to know that if you decide to marry Paul while we're gone that's fine with me". I replied, "Dad, I've been dating the guy for a week and a half, you're crazy."

On the way back to Provo, Paul told me that he loved me for the first time. Two days later we were sitting on the couch in my apartment watching tv while my roommates were in the kitchen and he was being uncharacteristically quiet. I asked him what was going on and he said "nothing". All of a sudden I had the thought that I really wanted to marry him. I asked him again what he was thinking about, and he said 11 words that would forever change my life "I want to spend the rest of my life with you", without pausing I said, "I want to spend the rest of my life with you too." Immediately, my roommates came in, clueless about the words spoken moments before and started talking about something. We said we had to go.

We went outside on a porch swing and I asked "We're not engaged, are we?" and Paul said "No, no of course not". Relieved, we started talking about our goals for life, children, financial goals. It was almost weird how aligned our views were on so many things. After about five hours, night started turning into morning and Paul made the astute observation that he thought we might be engaged. I agreed.

I know our engagement was quick, we only dated for two weeks. It's funny how your spirit just seems to know certain things. One of those things for me was how much I loved Paul. I don't even remember wrestling with the decision to marry him, everything just fell into place and I have never regretted it since.

Oh, and my dad is always right :)

Good Times at The Breakfast table

The aspect of being a mom that I love most is that everyday occurrences such as eating breakfast are now an adventure. And Yes, I made him clean it up himself.