My summer is over!

I love this picture. She had a food face!

Now that we are back from Washington everything I am in panic mode. Somehow I lost a week in my summer. For some reason I was thinking I had two weeks to play before I was PLANNING on going back, but NOPE only one week!! I had two weeks until I HAD to be back. I am making myself go back on Monday and Tuesday to start everything then have a DHH teacher conference Wed, Thurs, and Fri. Then back to REAL work where I am required to be there. Grrrrr.

O’lena is starting daycare too on Monday. Our sitter told us last month that she would not be able to watch her in the fall. Luckily there was an opening at one of the places that we looked into when we were first searching. We went in this week to do all the paperwork and bring her stuff in. We were supposed to have met her teacher, but she had car trouble and was not there. That means we will meet her on Monday when she starts. I am very nervous for her going to a daycare. I guess the thing that bothers me the most is that I know she will get sick. She hasn’t been sick yet and I know she will get something. I am rational enough that it will happen and that it is a good thing, but mommy doesn’t want her baby not to feel good. L The kids in her class are big too. She will be the youngest for the first few weeks, and then when public school starts everyone will move up. She will stay in her room and the older infants from the younger infant room (the ones more her age) will be there with her. They thought it would be better then moving rooms again in three weeks. The good things are that she will have more structure activities, projects, and they go outside and play twice a day. I just know she won’t have the one on one anymore. Worried mommy…..Not only that...I am going out of town for that conference too. It will be the first time I am leaving her for more than a few hours. I not sure why I have to punish myself and leave for three days, but it should be good. Man, I am going to miss my baby! And my husband, of course, but I have been away from him before.

Oh man, she is scooting all over the place now! She is has gotten up on her knees are few times, but she has gotten the army crawl down pretty good. I don’t like the fact that I put her down somewhere and she comes to find me. She is really moving around. She is also WHISTLING! Yes, really whistling. We think she got it from her Grandma Bryant. She puckers up her mouth and blows and whistle comes out. It is soooooo cool!

What else is going on?.... My mother-in-law let me barrow this “Cook for a month” book. You are supposed to make all your meals for a month then freeze them until you are ready to eat. I really liked that idea so I am going to try it. Well I am going to try the two week plan first. I went grocery shopping and will cook everything tomorrow. Mom is going to help me. I am kind of excited to try. I think it might work. Since my summer is gone I coaxed my brothers into helping me finish all my chores around the house…since I only had a week left. They were awesome! They cleaned the baseboards, dusted, swept, mopped, watched the baby, and whatever else little job I have for them. They have been great.

I don’t want to go back to work!!! I am not ready. This summer did not happen. It is gone. I cannot believe it!! Well here are some more pictures of the baby….

Here are the boys with the baby. This was out at the beach before we left for Washington. She had a blast. She was in the water most of the time. She LOVES water!!

Passed out on the chair she loved being there. She just played and played and then passed out.

So we are one step closer to getting a shower. Derick grouted!! Now only three more steps left to go….

Our water baby. She is sitting up so good that she can take big girl baths now. I think this is my new favorite picture!

Hanging out with uncles. I think they all had fun :)

Over to the other side of the country and back again

We had such a good time in Washington I didn’t want to come home! We did so much and had such an awesome time that I can’t put it all down in words. We have so many stories and memories that it wouldn’t do it justice. I wanted to put the pictures into a Smilebox (online scrapbooking thing) but my computer is being dumb…so that didn’t happen. I am just going to have to captions all the pictures to tell the story….

She is playing and sleeping at the airport in Atlanta. She did very well on the planes. I think the worst parts were the layovers. We had a long one on the way there. We were originally supposed to go to Cincinnati but with a big storm and mechanical errors we ended up in Atlanta, twice. Otherwise she was great! She only got loud when she couldn’t hear herself on the plane. It was cute.

Here she is with her Great-Grandpa Tighe. We stayed at his house the night we flew in. I think he really liked her.

While we were still in Seattle we went to see Derick’s sister Rochel, her husband David, and their new baby Evelette (I’m not sure if I am spelling that correctly.) Oh man, was that baby adorable!! She was so smiley. She was only two months old and all she did was smile at you.

We took the long way back to Ferndale and went on the ferry. It was really cool. I realized that this was O’lena’s first time on a boat. She loved it! She loved the wind in her face. She just laughed and giggled. That is the ferry behind us.

Okay if you don’t know Derick has 8 brothers and sisters. There are nine total, so to try not to confuse everyone I will give the rank where everyone is in the lineup. For example: Derick is 6^th of 9. His sister Rochel is 4^of 9. One night we went to brother Josh’s (3 of 9) house for dinner. I got to meet him, his wife, and their two kids. They were great and I really enjoyed meeting them. I know Derick was really glad to see them too. It had been a long time. Derick’s brother Wesley (9 of 9) went with us.

One of the days we went out to meet up with sister Rebecca (7 of 9) and her family while they were camping out at this river. It was so beautiful. You looked up and the foothills were right in front of you. It was real rustic camping. No real bathrooms. Yeah they had a bucket and a shovel….We women did learn that there was a port-a-potty on the property next to us so we trespassed and made use of it. O’leeny had fun playing in the water. The boys had a different kind of fun in the water. At one point Wesley got his jeep stuck (twice) and some nice people helped him to litterly dig it out.

This was the first time O’lena met her other set of grandparents. She took to them instantly. I think they kind of like her too. You know how sometimes people have habits that they don’t know that they have? Well…..my mother-in-law whistles. When you ask her she doesn’t know she does it. And you know when spend so much time with someone you tend to pick up some habits….well her granddaughter is whistling! No joke she is puckering her lips and blowing. She evens get sound. It is quite amazing! Here she is spending time with her grandma and grandpa. :)

We went to this farm where they grew a whole bunch of things. The coolest were the beautiful and huge flowers! You could cut your own beautiful bouquet. They had huge blue berry bushes too. Actually everywhere in Ferndale there were flowers. I have never seen anything like it. Every house has a vegetable garden, rose bushes, and hydrangeas. It was very beautiful there. I really enjoyed it.

We went to Lynden, a cute and quaint town next to Ferndale. It was very pretty and flowery too. Anyways, it was settled by the Dutch and had this big wind mill in the middle of the town. It is actually a hotel, but it was cool. They were having a raspberry festival with a car show, venders, raspberry everything, and even kid basketball tournament. It was a lot of fun. We went to eat at the Dutch bakery too. That was really yummy.

The one Sunday that we were there we went to Derick’s home Ward (that is the LDS church meeting house for those who don’t know.) We had the honor of having Derick’s father (Mike) give O’lena her blessing. Mormon’s don’t baptize infants because it is believe that they are not held accountable until the age of 8, so they give them blessings. It was so beautiful. I cried. Of course this is the only picture we got of O’lena in her blessing gown her grandmother made her! I need to go take some more before she grows out of it. It fit her perfectly that day, like we were meant to wait that long. The second best thing was having a lot of the family there (everyone that was in town.) I felt very blessed myself that everyone made the effort to be there for her.

This is us back at the house after church. Yes, I planned us to be matchy matchy.

I think this turned out to be the best picture of the bunch! She was actually chewing on it. Don’t worry; it is a pellet gun not a real one.

After church everyone came over for supper. We ate on their beautiful back patio. It was great to sit and hangout. This is Derick’s sister Rebecca (7) and brother Lee (1). Rebecca has O’lena in her arms and her daughter Aubrey sitting with her.

Derick with his nephews Adden and Mason. He is showing the how to load the pellet gun. Yeah, there was a lot of gun talking and gun shooting while we were there. The cool thing was that they were out in the country so they could just shoot on the property. You didn’t have to go to a gun range.

Derick, Patty, Mike, and O’lena hanging out after eating.

I love these pictures. Maybe it might have to do with the natural lighting. The grass was amazing there too! You don’t have the weed grass or the fake squishy kind there. Just beautiful, full, almost like long gulf grass, grass there. It was so nice she didn’t need a blanket or anything. I just plopped her down and she was in heaven. She only ate it a couple of times and I didn’t have to worry about fire ants.

Here we are with Aunt Hope (married to D’s oldest brother) and cousin Mason on the monorail in Seattle. Hope was kind enough to show us around.

We had to do the very touristy things. We went to Pike’s market. You know the one where they throw the fish. It was pretty cool, but the best part was the flowers. They had the most beautiful and HUGE bouquets for sale for like $10! Anyone in FM knows you can’t even buy carnations for $10 here. We also ate in the restaurant where they filmed Sleepless in Seattle. It was very good and we had a great view of the sound.

This is Derick eating his mammoth cake. Can you believe it….he ate the WHOLE thing!

Here we are in front of the Space Needle. We didn’t go up because it cost $18 a person! It would have been cool, but that is a bit ridiculous. I dunno, maybe I’m just cheap, but I can think of a lot of things better to do with the money that it would have cost us to go up.

That was actually about the end o f our trip. We caught the red eye out of Seattle and headed for home. She pretty much slept the whole way back…mamma didn’t…but baby did. We really did have a great time. Like I said I did not want to come home at all! I still don’t want to be here. I could be back there sitting on the porch looking at the hydrangeas and eating pie. Oh well…………

PS: I dont know why there are several different fonts. For some reason I cannot get them to stay the same!