Happy Birthday, Hannah!

So this is a month late, but Hannah is 2 years old now! I wish I could be happy and excited about that, but lately I just want to ask "Who is this little monster and what did she do with my sweet little girl?" Hannah has always been a very well behaved, happy child; not especially whiny, and very silly. But the terrible twos have hit us with a passion. Now it seems like all she does is whine, scream, and do anything she knows she's not supposed to. Ugh. She's still pretty silly, but that's being pretty heavily outweighed at the moment. This too shall pass, right? Well anyway, we had a party for her at my mother-in-law's house so the kids could play in the water. Unfortunately, three of her cousins couldn't come because they had just moved to Houston the week before, but they sent Hannah a really cute Happy Birthday video that she watched about a million times. I made pork barbacoa with rice and beans and burrito fixins. It was yummy. Hannah made out like a bandit. She got lots of princesses, a princess play castle, a water table, a tunnel, Despicable Me pajamas, and books.

playing with Uncle Luke

She finally learned to climb this all by herself!

Emily wanted to help open presents

Princesses! Dan was delighted. Can't you tell? Hahaha

Emily's first Cowgirl lesson

Thank you everyone!!!! Happy Birthday, Hannah!

Smiley Girl

Clara is such a smiler. When Hannah was this age, it was near impossible to get her to smile. She still is really shy, actually. But not Clara. She smiles at everybody. All the time. I can't believe this little one is almost 5 months old already! She's getting so big. She is rolling all over the house and trying to figure out how to crawl. I actually saw her army crawl for several inches yesterday. She's growing up too fast. The good part of this is that she's gotten a lot better at nursing and no longer screams when I try to feed her. Well, for the most part, anyway. She still cries when she's either tired or teething, but I'll take it. She loves to sit up and stand, and her favorite thing to do is look in the mirror. She LOVES to smile at herself. It's so funny. She also cracks us up when she cries. She rarely will open her mouth and wail. Most of the time, she presses her lips together and makes a funny humming sound when she cries. She loves Hannah. Every time Hannah comes near her she lights up and gets excited, wanting to play. She wishes Hannah would play with her more than she does, but Hannah gets bored quickly and HATES to share, but that's a whole separate issue. We love this little smiley thing and we're so glad she's part of our family!

Gotta love that hair!!!

Noah's Arc

For Family Home Evening we have been learning about some of the Old Testament Prophets. The most fun one so far was definitely Noah. We happened to have a huge box hanging around our house that we turned into an arc and tossed all of Hannah's stuffed animals into it. She absolutely loved it and played in it for days before we finally threw the box away.

4th of July- Part 4

Rock Band! While the kids were playing outside, the "old" kids were inside playing Rock Band. Cheri hates it, but we had a good time. After the fireworks, Hannah came in and wanted to learn how to play.

4th of July- Part 3

Fireworks! I wasn't sure if Hannah was going to like them, but she did. Of course, she didn't really sit and watch them. She mostly ran around the yard until it got too dark to see where she was going and then I think she went inside. But for a few minutes she was actually sitting in the tree house swing thing my in-laws have in their yard. They had one of the little kid swings sitting in it and Hannah thought it was great fun to sit in the swing and watch the fireworks. Goof. Clara slept through half of it. We had to take her in pretty soon after she woke up because she was not liking the loud noises. The weather that night, though, was awesome. It was the perfect temperature and there was a good breeze keeping the bugs away. This was the first 4th since I moved here that I wasn't sweating to death the whole time. It was so nice!

4th of July- Part 2

The kids spent the day swimming and playing on the scooters and running around like crazy. Later in the day, the older kids started doing sparklers and other small fireworks. At this point, Emily went over and dumped a bunch of the ashes on her head. That little girl is sneaky!