Green Beans

Lenna and I have been crazy busy the last few days. On Friday after a walk with a friend we headed to Costco to get her a passport photo. Which if you ask me turned out really cute! Costco had a great set up to take the picture they used a child's car seat with a white towel to get her photo. It was super smart! Now all we have to do is go to the court house and submit her paper work, and hopefully in a month or two have a passport for Lenna so we can go to Canada or anywhere our hearts desire.

Then after all that we went on a wild goose chase to find boxes for some people in our ward that needed things packed up. After going to Seattle, and then to Redmond we collected over 40 boxes and a lot of packing paper too. My car was full! After arriving home from the second trip I took Lenna's carseat out and folded down the back seats and basically filled my car full of all this packing material. I would have taken a picture but I forgot.

With my car full Lenna got to go on her first trip in daddy's car. Dad's car is a lot smaller then mom's car so we had to move the passenger seat forward just to fit in her car seat. But she fit and that is the important part!

Today we basically stayed home, but our neighbors had a yard sale so we went and dad picked out some books for Lenna. He is very excited to read them to her. Dad really likes to read to Lenna.

Also today Lenna tried her very first non-white food, and very first vegetable. She tried green beans. Before feeding her she was very happy because she was well rested from her afternoon nap.
But when the green beans came to her mouth she wasn't so thrilled.
Actually she was upset and wondering what in the world we were feeding her.
But dad was determined for her to keep trying.
And trying and trying even if Lenna really was unsure.
But after a few bites I think she decided it wasn't so bad after all and started to help dad try and get the food into her mouth. See her hand around dad's?
She even opened wide and helped dad. This must mean she liked green beans!
Dad took the bowl away and she was reaching for more.
By the end she wasn't even all that messy!
If you want to see the green bean action live check out this video.

After her green bean experience we decided to head outside to get some yard work done. We took Lenna's excersaucer with us and she played in it with no complaints for around 45 minutes. I am SOOOO glad we bought the excersaucer it truly is a great toy! Jared pulled weeds and I cleaned off moss from our siding of our house. Here is before and after. I think it looks much better.Have a great rest of your weekend everyone!

Reverting back to old ways

This week has been pretty all over the place well for me...in all honesty my life is very easy so I really don't have much to complain about. Anyway so this post will be lots my ramblings and maybe some rantings but hey this is my blog you get to chose if you read it or not ;) For pictures of Lenna scroll down to the end.

So Lenna has decided that she wants to go back to the way things were like when she was 2 months old. I have read in books when she was first born that sometimes they revert back to old ways before doing something awesome. Kind of like the 2 steps back 3 steps forward process. I truly hope this is what is going to happen! Maybe she will start rolling over or something I don't know. But she has been getting up either at 2 or 3 or 4 am all over again. I really miss sleeping straight to 6:30am! My goal today is to put her down to bed earlier aka like 6pm instead of 6:30pm to see if this helps. I was going to try that yesterday but sadly enough Lenna and I took a nap from 4:30-5:30pm yesterday so that means she wasn't tired at 6pm...I have high hopes I can try the early bed time approach today!

Another example of reverting back to old ways is Lenna a few weeks ago decide it was okay to put herself to sleep for naps instead of needing to get rocked to sleep. I was uber excited since this meant more spare time for me! However today she has just screamed till I gave up and rocked her to sleep. Sigh. On a plus note she is sleeping right now which means I have time to upload some photos for those who want to see.

Oh another fun talent Lenna has gained recently, but this is not a reverting back to old ways thing, is she has an ear piercing scream! For those who have talked to me on the phone recently have heard it. She has decided this is her favorite way of communication right now. I think I might end up with permanent hearing loss!

But with all of this I still love Lenna. My motto you got to have some bad to enjoy the good! She has a crazy busy personality. I did not luck out with a calm baby, but oh well she is teaching me patience which I definitely need to gain.

On other random news apparently there is a craigslist ad for a house to rent in North Seattle the ad lists our house number as a contact info. It is very irritating since we aren't renting a house and the phone keeps waking up Lenna. I emailed the person to fix their ad, but we are still getting phone calls. I still like craigslist I just wish people were more responsible with their ads.

Okay on to the pictures! Earlier this week we went visiting teaching and the son of the lady we were visiting put his sunglasses on Lenna. She looked so awesome. I was trying to reenact the scene for Jared, so he took a picture. I think Lenna will like sunglasses just as much as her mom does!
Yesterday Lenna had on her denim skirt with her pink baby legs. I thought it was adorable. We had just woken up from our nap that afternoon and her hair was crazy, but I figured it was a good time to get a picture in her cute outfit. Again I was just going to post one picture but her faces are just to funny in all of them. They are in the order I took them.
Happy girl when she is well restedOh the flash went off!Dad came in so she was saying Hi DadOh ya mom is taking picturesI don't like pictures much, so I will look like a dinosaurShe is now wondering how many more pictures I will takeI told her just one more and I got a smile!
Okay there are my ramblings for the morning. I have high hopes that Lenna will sleep through the night tonight and we will make it to Walmart to go shopping since that is the only thing on our to do list today! Yay it is almost the weekend!

Grandma's request for more pictures is granted

So this morning I was gmail chatting with my mom also known as Grandma Princess and she asked me if I was uploading more pictures for her while we were chatting. I promptly said no; because I truthfully wasn't it. I think that Lenna has looked basically the same for the last week or so, and we haven't been having uberly exciting adventures just nice relaxing days at home, so the camera hasn't come out unless pictures are requested. Anyway after this conversation and Lenna woke up from her long (2.5 hour) morning nap I grabbed a few pictures while making her brunch or whatever meal she was on for the time being today. I was just going to post one or two but as I looked at them they kind of told a story about Lenna and her not so much love for the camera, so with that I am posting them all, and telling you the story that I see.

Here is Lenna chillin' not knowing I was taking pictures yet, and amazingly she is staying on her stomach. She normally last like 20 seconds on her stomach before rolling over.
Then she realized I had the camera and while smiling quickly looked away.
But I started singing to her one of her favorite songs (ABCs) and she looked in my direction. However you can see on her face she is not sure if she should be happy I am singing to her or upset I have the camera.
Up close shot of the I am happy but confused and not really sure what to think face. Notice her hair is getting longer but still standing straight up!
Then she started to have the look like really mom you can stop taking pictures.
After laughing with her she made a very brief smile. Notice she is starting to get on her knees. She is no where near crawling, but it is cute to see her progressing in movements.
Then she goes back to the stop looking at me face!
Followed by fine if you aren't going to put the camera away I just won't look at you.
So I put the camera behind my back and she looks back at me with a smile and I get a quick shot.
The end! Okay hopefully you liked the pictures. The story not so interesting. The only awesome part of this whole thing is Lenna stayed on her stomach for like 2 minutes without crying and without incentives of toys.

Speaking of toys. Yesterday Lenna and I went and got these awesome toys from a lady selling them off craigslist. I didn't put the legs on the activity table yet because it is easier to store without the legs, but I think she will like this toy. Plus the choo choo train is awesome! It makes noise and moves and has balls. I played with the train toy yesterday for like 20 minutes! I love getting cool stuff off craigslist. Lastly here is a video. Lenna stays on her stomach if I give her a toy, and then really only stays on her tummy long enough to explore the toy quickly and decide if she wants to take the toy with her when she rolls over or not. Also at the end of the video you can see she is trying so hard to figure out how to roll back to her stomach. She will get it one of these days and then she will be rolling all over the place!


Just a few more weeks till it is Disneyland time! I am getting very excited!!!

What is going on in Mallory's world

I will just preface this blog post that there are no pictures of Lenna and it is just me rambling about my random thoughts of this week. (Hey everyone needs a random rambling every once in a while right?)

This week has flown by! Actually looking back on the last few months I feel like this summer has flown by! We had some rain off and on recently which reminded me that in a few months or even weeks the winter or what we all call the rainy season will be upon us! This means walks around greenlake or anywhere get more difficult or simply wanting to spend time outside is more difficult. But I have figured out that I can walk malls when I need to not be in the rain, and I should consider getting a waterproof see through covering for the stroller so Lenna can still scan everything she sees, and I can just keep walking in the rain.

Yesterday we went to Amazon picnic # 2 for the week. Last week we had the whole company picnic and yesterday was just Jared's work group. The picnic was held on lake sammamish, and it was lots of fun. A bunch of Jared's coworkers just had kids so it was fun to see all the new babies. It was also really fun to hang out with our friends the St. Clairs again, and to see Jared's senior manager Rajiv and his family, as well as Ian and his fianace Sylvia. I am not sure why but I always look forward to seeing those specific people. Probably because they are super nice people and Ian and Sylvia tell great stories.( On a side note it is strange everyone at Jared's work had kids, and everyone at church is having kids....maybe I am just entering the realm of life where everyone has kids...just as a few years ago it seemed like everyone was getting married strange how life has different phases!)

Today we met up with our friends the McDaniels. Melissa took family pictures of us. I am very excited to see how they turned out, and I am very grateful she would come up and take pictures for us! You can find her photo-blog right here. Plus it is always fun to have a picnic at Richmond Beach! There little girl Abby is just adorable and it was just so great to catch up. It had been forever since we had seen them!!!

The rest of this Saturday was filled with getting my witch broom completed, and random chores like vacuuming getting done. I think my broom turned out nice. The only down fall is the hot glue gun won the battle with my thumb, and so the burn on my thumb doesn't feel so good. I guess next time I will just have to be more careful.

My ginormous sun flower has started to turn yellow. It is going to bloom any day! I am so excited!!!!

The last thing we did before putting Lenna to bed today was we all went on a walk. While on my walk I was telling Jared how it seems so silly that I am trying to get back into good shape by running and doing sit ups and whatever else; because eventually we will probably have another kid and thus I will loose all my ab muscles again. I guess it is just a part of being a mother.

My last random thought is I started doing a blog every day just for Lenna where I pick the highlight of the day. It has been great. I love sitting down after Lenna is asleep and thinking of the highlight and writing it down. It helps me always end my day on a postive note with Lenna and I am sure that in a few months I will be glad I jotted down what was happening because it all happens so fast! Okay it is Zelda time now! Hope everyone who reads this is having a great weekend!

Teething maybe?!?!

Either Lenna is teething or maybe she is just the age of putting everything in her mouth, maybe both! But today Lenna tried to chomp on everything and she was pretty drooly. Anyway here are a bunch of pictures for the family. Here is Lenna attacking the monkey named "Mallory" (no joke).
Later in the day I was changing Lenna's sheets and she was all giggles.
Then she got tired of the flash.Then she got tired of me changing her sheet, so she was just vegging.Then she started to squirm down on the chair. This is her way to say she is done hanging out and wants a new activity.And then this picture is just funny.Then here are some videos to watch. One is Lenna trying to get the hippo, and the other is her in her exersaucer with her hair flying in the wind.

This week we cleaned out the rain gutters, and have just been hanging out. Have a great Friday!

Amazon Picnic and Sunflowers

Last weekend was the annual Amazon family picnic. It is always a blast to go out to North Bend eat as much food as you want, and run around the farm doing all the cool activities. This year they had a photo booth. We took a picture of just Jared and I at first because Lenna was asleep but when we were headed home she was awake so we snagged a another photo shoot so we could have a few pictures with her.

We met up with our friends the St. Clairs. Luke is Jared's coworker and him and his wife had Leah a month after Lenna arrived. So here is a shot of the proud dads. Leah likes Lenna's binky holder, and Lenna doesn't even seem to notice she is sharing.
Here is a family shot (thanks Jen for taking it) we hardly ever get pictures with all three of us in them!While at the picnic we mainly played bingo and ate food. Mostly because I love playing bingo. Even if I don't win I just love to play. But we did wander around a bit and played mini golf using pool sticks.

Every kid got a kite (including Lenna) and it happened to be a great day to fly kites.
We had such a great time at daddy's work picnic and always look forward to going. Thanks dad for taking us.

On to the sunflower part of this blog. Our sunflowers are getting HUGE! One is taller then the fence and taller then me with Lenna on my shoulder!
We also have some smaller sunflowers that are still just taller then Lenna.
But truthfully Lenna likes to be taller then the sunflowers, she was much happier on my shoulders.
My sunflowers aren't blooming but at pikes you can get sun flowers. I have a perfect vase for huge sunflowers. So every August/September Jared gets my sunflowers to have at our house. Thanks love!


On projects so far this week. I fixed our door lock. It was really sticky and frustrating when I needed to get in and out of the house fast. But Lenna and I took a trip to Home Depot today and I sprayed the graphite lubricant into the key hole and ta da the lock works great! And as an added bonus mom and dad are much happier entering and leaving the house.

I am also working on my witch broom. I have had the material for this for like 2 years and now I am just finally getting around to it. Anyone who knows me well knows Halloween is my favorite holiday to decorate for. Which is strange since normally I don't like the color orange, but I digress. Since October is only a month and half away I figured I should get my witch broom in order. I will show the finish project, but as I stared out the window I couldn't help take a picture and tell you all that I kept thinking of the swifter mop/broom commericals that they have the old broom or mop singing the song "don't you want me baby...don't you want me baaacckkk" I hanged the broom so it was easier to spray paint and not have issues with the grass. It was Jared's idea but a good one in my opinion. That's the weekend recap. Over and out