two-year anniversary

randy and i celebrated our two-year anniversary today. it has been a wonderful two years, filled with so many fun memories with randy. he is a wonderful husband and provides a perfect balance for me. he is everything that i wish i could be and always inspires me to be better with his example. he is such a good father to madeleine and i am grateful for all of his hard work for our family. thank you for two years of music, laughter, and greater love than i could have imagined. i love you randy.

congratulations audrey!

audrey graduated from byu with her masters in math education today and we are so proud of her. i wasn't able to go to the university commencement yesterday because of work, but did get someone to cover for me for her convocation this morning. it was so fun to go and see audrey graduate - a huge accomplishment. she has worked so hard for her masters and has definitely earned it. here are some pictures in front of the math building, my old home away from home.

madeleine listened quietly and intently during the convocation. so well behaved!

flashback

i overheard a conversation between randy and one of his piano students the other day. it brought back memories of my own piano lessons:

randy: i want you to use the metronome more.
ben: but i don't like the metronome.
randy: the metronome is your friend.
ben: the metronome is not my friend. the metronome is my enemy.
randy: it's not your enemy. the metronome is my friend and i want it to be your friend, too.

i don't think that i thought of the metronome as my enemy, but it was certainly that annoying friend that you don't really want around if it was my friend.

a trip to the family barber

as you may have noticed, madeleine's hair has been looking a little scraggly lately. mostly, this is because she has a few hairs from birth that have not fallen out, so those have been sticking up above the rest. so, i finally brought myself to cut her hair. actually, i had audrey do it. audrey has become quite the family barber. she cuts all of her family's hair, and ray and randy's hair, so i figured that we'd just keep it in the family. we stripped madeleine down, i held her, and we let the hair cutting begin. she did surprisingly well with it.

a typical tummy time

usually, i'm fine with madeleine progressing at her own developmental rate, although that is probably because she has generally been on schedule or ahead (as with her size). however, for some reason, i am really anxious for her to roll over. i don't know why, because i know that it will only make life harder on me. no more leaving her unattended on the bed, etc. still, i want to see this baby roll over. to facilitate this, we have frequent tummy time. this is about how it goes every time:

she does okay on her tummy for a little while.

she gets pretty tired.

she gets ticked.

i give her a lesson in rolling over by positioning her and letting momentum do its thing. she ends up on her back...

and she is MUCH happier.

adventures in being 16 weeks old

i did a better job of getting the camera out this week to make up for my poor performance last week. our poor second child will never get this many pictures taken of them.

i haven't put her in a nightgown in a while and forgot that it's hard to wear a nightgown fashionably and sit in a carseat.

but it's not hard to be fashionable and strike a pose when you're sleeping in a onesie.

i'm not sure exactly what is happening in this picture because randy took it. it appears to be some sort of face off between madeleine and her stuffed lion toy. a fight to the death? perhaps. who knows what goes on while i'm not home.

i have a confession: sometimes i take pictures of madeleine, not because she's engaged in any activity that is worth capturing in time, nor is it because she's making a cute facial expression. it's just because she's wearing a cute outfit that i really like. this may be such a picture.

i love this picture because it kind of looks like she's pretending to sleep. she really was sleeping though, she just had this smirk on her face.

backlit? perhaps... but still cute.

this is madeleine's first time bowling. i tried to get the bowling balls in the back so that you could tell that it was bowling and not just her sitting in her car seat. she didn't like bowling too much. it was too loud for her, and her dad and i tried not to touch her the whole time because, although we are not usually germaphobes, let's face it, bowling alleys are not the most sanitary places in the world.

this is a frequent scene in madeleine's crib.

madeleine has gotten very good at standing up. with a little help from her parents, of course. this is an adorable dress that beth's mother-in-law gave us. it is 6 months. where did my little newborn go?

diego's

randy and i found a great little place to eat in provo called diego's. it is a taco shop and they have deliciously authentic tacos. i wasn't so impressed with the burritos, but the tacos were fabulous. definitely made by someone who knows what they were doing. they also have fresh chips, made there. randy and i like it so much that we've been twice in the past week. i recommend it to anyone looking for good tacos. their prices are really reasonable too.

yardwork

my clothes are dirty
my body is sore
i am tired
and i only broke one sprinkler pipe

i spent the beautiful afternoon outside in the yard, prepping my plot for my garden. i built the planter last week and was so proud of myself (it's really nothing special, but i did it all by myself) that i decided that i wanted to take on digging up the plot for where the planter was going as well. i was doing really well and then i hit a sprinkler pipe. i was pretty frustrated because i was only about four inches down, which means that the sprinkler pipes really were not buried far enough down. i still maintain that this was not really my fault. fortunately, i have a handy husband and he says it should be a cheap and easy fix. phew. i will post pictures of my garden once it's done. it's been a satisfying project... for the most part.

spring is here?

while looking out the window in court this morning, i noticed that the trees right outside the window had blossomed since last week and it was beautiful. it made me very excited for spring and all of the beautiful flowers that come with that. i'm especially excited for the magnolias to bloom and wish that they didn't have such a short-lived blossoming period.

about two hours after noticing the blossoms, i looked out the same window and it was snowing.

johnny jump-up

well, i didn't get the camera out much this week, so i pretty much only have pictures from one day of her in her johnny jump-up. i'll just post all of those. she is liking it much better now and lasts for about 20-30 minutes in it before she goes limp from trying to hold herself up and just can't do it any more. she's not really jumping in it yet, mostly she just shuffles around, but she enjoys it.

she is getting so big. she's in the in-between size right now for a few things. her 3 month clothes are getting too small, but she's swimming in her 6 month clothes. i finally couldn't stand squeezing her into her 3 month jeans anymore though (i felt like the button was going to pop off and hit me in the eye and her belly was spilling out over the waistband), so she's in her 6 month jeans and they're actually not too bad. she's also between sizes in her diapers. i had bought the size 2 diapers at costco and still had a bunch left, so i didn't want to switch to size 3 yet, but she finally had so many blowouts that i just couldn't take it anymore (i'm giving the extras to a woman in our ward who has twins that are about a month younger than madeleine, so they're going to good use). i finally bought 3s and put her in those, but she's still having blowouts because they're a little big on her. it's a frustrating phase and i feel like we go through 4 outfits a day.

here are the pictures of her in the johnny jump-up:

i took this picture to show her hair line in the back. she has a bald spot she's rubbed off, but it looks like i took scissors to it or something because the line is so straight. she's about ready for a haircut. you can't tell in this picture, but it's starting to look like a mullet. i need to just be strong and cut it, but it's harder than i thought it would be to cut my baby's hair.

when she got too tired, i pulled the johnny jump-up up so that she was suspended in the air. she liked this and just kind of swung there for a while.

general conference weekend

this last weekend was general conference and we had a great weekend, as always.

randy has described conference weekend as being like christmas, and i'd have to agree. all of my family stays up at my parents for the whole weekend and we sit around and talk, eat, play games, and of course, watch conference. what could be better than that?

we managed to get in a few games of hand and foot, some pound pound, scrabble, and even trivial pursuit. the weekend wouldn't be complete without constant food intake and this year, the menu included shirley's sweet rolls, pesto bites, hot cheese canapes, meatballs, spinach dip, black-eyed pea salsa, caramel pull-aparts, and cheeseball. by the end of the weekend, i didn't want to see another piece of rich food for a while.

but the best part of conference weekend was, of course, conference. for those of you who are unfamiliar with it, twice a year, the lds church has a church-wide conference. about 20,000 people gather in the conference center itself, and the conference is also broadcast on television, radio, and satellite all over the world.

this conference was especially memorable because we had a solemn assembly as part of conference to sustain our new prophet, president thomas s. monson. with president hinckley's passing, it was time to sustain a new prophet. i was alive when president hinckley was sustained, but i was younger and don't remember it that well. it was such a powerful experience to stand and sustain president monson as our new prophet, seer, and revelator for the church. i was a little worried that it would take me a while to get used to him as the prophet because president hinckley has been the prophet for most of my life and i had such tender feelings for him, but president monson has stepped right into his position and the mantle has clearly fallen upon him. he is an amazing man and such a great example of lifelong service. he has lived his life in a way so that he is worthy to have the spirit and always heeds its promptings to go and seek out the one. i hope to have a fraction of the influence he has had in the lives of others by the time i die. it was fun to enjoy some of his humor as he addressed us this weekend as well.

the rest of conference was also wonderful. we had some great talks from all of the church leaders. i especially enjoyed elder bednar's talk on faith and prayer and elder ballard's talk on women. how blessed we are to hear the word of the lord through his ordained servants.

double trouble

we had a great conference weekend with my family and madeleine had a great time with her cousins, austin and matthew.

these two boys are quite the handful right now and keep their parents quite busy. they have way too much fun together and are constantly entertaining us. a couple of illustrative stories:

a few times this weekend, i found matthew pushing austin around in the "boat," shown below. you would think it might be the other way around, but matthew is equal to the task. austin has already mastered the art of using his younger siblings to do his bidding. does he get this from his mother? perhaps i'm not a good one to ask... childhood memories can be inaccurate at times. i hope that he and matthew continue to have as good of a relationship as audrey and i have maintained over the years.

on friday night, audrey and joseph went to joseph's mission reunion and mom and i were watching the boys. we suddenly realized that it was very quiet... a little too quiet. those with children know of the feelings that accompany this alarming silence. i went downstairs to find matthew, wielding an uncapped blue highlighter, shirt off, with blue highlighter all over his belly. austin was standing by, rummaging through a drawer filled with other office supplies. at first, i thought that matthew had done it. this seemed a logical conclusion, as he was the one brandishing the marker. however, upon closer examination, it seemed to be a little too neatly contained to just his belly and not the furniture that he was sitting on (which, thankfully, remained unscathed) to be his own doing. no, this was the work of some skilled tattoo artist of age 2. i asked austin, "did you color on matthew's belly?" he quickly replied, "ness" (translation: yes). at least he's honest. since i hadn't read him his miranda rights, i figured that i couldn't admit his incriminating statements and didn't incarcerate him in his room for a time out. plus, i'm his aunt. that's just not my job. i'm here to indulge and spoil. here's a picture of the crime scene:

austin wanted a picture of his belly too.

too cute.

growing fast

the weeks seem to fly by. here are some pictures from the week: