V-Day Envelope

Mya's Valentine's Day envelope is finished and we are now officially ready for February to start tomorrow! I made Bryn's envelope a few years ago during a late-night craft session with friends in California. It's been a fun tradition the last couple years for Josh and I to fill Bryn's envelope with love notes and treats during the first two weeks of February. I wasn't going to make one for Mya yet, but Bryn had a problem with that. So she helped me make one for Mya girl!

 And I'm not kidding about the "helping me make it" part. No joke, this project took about 10 hours to finish because cute Bryn literally helped me poke the needle up and down for almost all of those little stitches. Yikes! Every time she looked away I quickly did as many stitches as I could, but I have to give Bryn some big time credit for the blood, sweat, and tears she poured into this thing. After each stitch she looked up at me with the proudest, happiest closed-mouth smile ever. Ahhh....There's no better craft partner than a 4-year old daughter. Bryn is crazy about the finished product and is so thrilled to have another something matching with Mya. 

P.S. Bryn. Cutest thing ever. 

Ok, I'll stop. 

I'm admittedly a cry baby (I still haven't left the post-baby cry-easily stage? What's going on?), but I seriously got teary seeing that fuzzy little head next to Bryn's tonight at dinner. Josh is out of town til Saturday, but he's going to die seeing these two heads from this view. I don't know if he'll love it to the point of tears, but maybe he'll join me and we can share a kleenex.

V-Day Prep

Bryn is good at a lot of things, but holiday decorating is right up at there at the top. She has been coordinating our Valentine's Day decor this year, and our few decorations from past years just weren't cutting it with her. So we got to work making window decorations and a few new garlands and things for around the house. She especially loved helping me with the garlands and took her job very seriously of deciding the order of each little felt and heart and circle. Each garland took about 5 times longer than it normally would have taken to make, but it was so fun to do it with Bryn.

We needed something for our front window, so we decided to pull out the construction paper make some simple valentines. She was really funny about making these valentines and insisted that I made mine first and then she carefully copied them. I'm sure she could have come up with even cuter designs on her own, but I get a kick out of her copies. She's been so into projects lately and of course I am loving it. 

Bryn makes holidays so fun!

Snow Days

This weekend had lots of stressful, awkward, humbling, frustrating moments. Blegh. Sometimes it all just comes at once, right? I'm going to read a few chapters in my book (Sense and Sensibility....loving it!), go to bed early, and start fresh tomorrow! 

 And hopefully I can focus on the cute, happy moments of this weekend like Bryn and Josh playing in the snow! Last week it was so unbelievably freeeeezing with the below zero temps that Bryn was asking to move back to California and I was thinking the same thing myself. But then she had her first real playtime in the snow with Josh and she completely changed her mind. Now she's asking if our next move can please be to Alaska "so we can play in the snow all the time!!!" That certainly won't be happening, so I hope she enjoys the snow while she can :)

 Bryn had been cooped up indoors all morning (...all week), so once she got her snow gear on she just darted out the door and ran and ran and ran in this field behind our house. Mya and I stood at our back door and watched Bryn and Josh run around and make snow angels again and again. It was so cute. I love watching moments like that.

7 Months

How can Mya be 7 months old already!? It seems like just last week I was posting about her 6 month mark!....oh wait, that's because it was just last week that I posted about her 6 months mark :)

This month I'm a little more punctual in her all-important 7-month post. 

This stage is wonderful and Mya is such a cutie. She's getting way more curious, grabbing everything in sight and barely starting to shimmy her way across the room. Her favorite trick is clapping her hands together when she's happy about something. It's so cute! Her outfits are always, always completely wet with slobber and I'm convinced she's teething (I've been saying that for 3 months), but she still has no teeth to show for it. 

She's gotten great at sitting without help and now we can leave her sitting up and ten minutes later she'll still be sitting up, gnawing on one toy or another. She's figured out how to get out of her swaddle wrap at night, so she had 2 nights of crying it out and now she can stay asleep without having to be swaddled. It also helps that she knows how to grab her pacifier and put it back in her mouth, so that helps. 

We love you, Mya girl!

Bryn and Mya at 7 months

Birthday Dinner

 My friends are so sweet and planned a fun birthday dinner last night for me and Candace who also had a January birthday. It was such a great night! These ladies are the best.

One of the very best things about our time at Dartmouth has been our amazing friends here. One of the things that drew us to Dartmouth was the small class size and tight student community, and it's been even better than we thought! It's so fun to have such an awesome group of ladies who are all in the exact same stage of life, all dealing with the fun and the stress of grad school, all living on tight student budgets, all going to the same school events and community activities, all worrying together about internships and job offers and where we'll end up next. We're all away from family and we're out in the middle of nowhere, so we have no choice but to be close friends :) 

In some ways I can't wait to be done with grad school (and get a paycheck again!), but I mostly just want this final year and a half to go slowly so I can enjoy this stage of life and have even more fun with our awesome friends!

26

I turned 26 on Sunday! Does that mean I can say I'm now in my "late twenties"??

My birthday seemed to be spread out to the whole weekend, which was great :)

PRE-BIRTHDAY

On Saturday my friend watched the girls while Josh and I went to dinner in Hanover and it was a great time! We also popped into the Dartmouth Bookstore while we waited for dinner and their Christmas books were on clearance, so we scored a few of our favorite books for cheap cheap cheap. That was a birthday gift in and of itself because I get giddy about new children's books, especially holiday books. So the pre-birthday date was definitely a success. 

BIRTHDAY

Josh made a delicious smoothie for my birthday breakfast and then we headed off to church. After church we had dinner with friends and enjoyed Josh's famous peanut-butter brownies with ice cream. My phone was broken on my birthday (still is), but Josh was even nice enough to share his phone with me, so I could chat with my siblings and parents on my birthday. Great day!

POST-BIRTHDAY

Just when I thought it couldn't get any better, Josh agreed to a birthday Target trip down to Concord. Our nearest Target and shopping mall are 70 miles away, so it's a real treat to make the trek down there. Bryn and I dashed through Target, scoured the toddler clearance racks, stocked up on Archer Farms snacks, and even found a birthday shirt. Meanwhile, Josh studied in the car while Mya napped. Husband of the year, for sure.

Yay for birthdays!

Bryn's Birthday Date

We have a fun tradition that every year for her birthday Bryn gets to go on a date with Josh. They go to the bookstore and she gets to pick out a new book, and then of course they get a treat :) We were two weeks late this year, but they finally went on their date last week and Bryn had such a good time!

 It was so funny to see her pick out a "date outfit", complete with a fake pearl necklace from her dress-up bin. 

We don't have a Barnes and Noble in our small, little college town, so this year they went to the Dartmouth Bookstore instead. (This is a googled image, so just picture this scene but with the sidewalk and tree all covered in snow!)

Bryn picked out "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore". I had never heard of it before, but it's actually a really cute, creative story with great illustrations. Nice choice, Bryn!

 These two are such good buds and I love their cute relationship!

Oakland Temple Watercolor

Speaking of the Oakland Temple (see the below post on Jae's wedding),

my most recent watercolor painting is actually the Oakland Temple. I painted it last month, but I don't think I mentioned it on the blog. It was a Christmas gift for my parents since they were married there. I've been doing a lot of watercolors lately and it's been so fun to get back into it after a year long stint of not painting. I don't know why I ever take a break from painting because it really is so good for my soul!

Jae and Amy's Wedding

After our 4 weeks in Utah we flew to San Francisco because....

MY OLDER BROTHER JAE GOT MARRIED!!!

It was such a happy, happy day and I'm so glad we could be there for it.

Beautiful couple, right!?

Here are my siblings at the wedding dinner the night before...minus my sister Marie! Her baby was just a month old, so she couldn't make it and it wasn't the same without her!

They got married in the beautiful LDS temple in Oakland, CA and my Grandpa Clarke performed the wedding ceremony in the temple.

The Oakland temple is a special place because this is where my parents were married 30 years ago!

I took a million pictures of the wedding, but I think this is the only picture of our whole family.

Love my pops!

The reception that night was in Amy's hometown of Santa Rosa. The reception was really beautiful and so much fun.

My little brother Jordan actually just moved to San Francisco about a week before Jae's wedding, so it was fun to see him in his new hometown :) It worked out perfectly because he took over Jae's apartment contract and moved in right as Jae was moving into his new apartment with Amy.

 Along with the dinner at the reception, they also had this cute display of Bob's donuts (famous in San Francisco). Logan was in charge of restocking the display throughout the night and did a fine job.

 Bryn loved playing with Amy's two cute nieces.

Mya got all wild and crazy that night and decided it was time for her first ever sip of water. Party animal!

 Love my mama!

 Their first dance

 The best part of the night, by far, was watching my 87-year-old Grandpa Tueller cut a rug on the dance floor with all the other dancers crowding around him. Priceless!!! I am so sad I don't have any pictures of it!

My picture doesn't take good action shots...(that's probably apparent)...but it was so much fun having a good reason to dance with my fam.

 The mothers of the bride and groom with their youngest granddaughters.

 Bryn was begging to dance with Mya, so we finally gave in and let them dance for a minute. I think Bryn enjoyed it much more than Mya!

 Best dad of the year! I love these three!

Let's end with this great picture of Jordan busting a move.

Congrats Jae and Amy! I couldn't be happier for you two!