This Week

It's been a great week...

  We walked to the beach and made sand castles with friends

We packed lunches and headed down to the pier to watch the surfers

We went to the beach again

We played at the park daily

 Okay, just one last beach day

 And we went to Disneyland and rode the Bugs Life rides again and again until we were sick.

.....

Wait a minute. That was last February! Oops!

This chilly New Hampshire winter is really making me long for our sunny winter days in Huntington Beach! We had it good! There's supposedly another big "Nor'Easter" blizzard headed our way tomorrow and I'm hoping it's not too wild because Josh is gone interviewing until Saturday afternoon (if his flight isn't delayed). The internship options in California are sounding better and better right now :)

P.S. New Hampshire, I really do love you, but not in February.

Tueller Family Pictures

While we were in Utah we had our pictures taken with my whole Tueller family. We were hoping to do them outside on the steps of the Maeser building at BYU, but it was a huge blizzard that day, so we had to move the pictures indoors. We hadn't taken Tueller family pictures in years, but most of the out-of-state family members all happened to be in Utah for Christmas so we jumped at the chance to take some pictures. 

This is everyone! 

My cousin Brittany was the only one who wasn't in Utah for Christmas, but her family made it into the picture with a little help from photo shop :)

My cute grandparents

 My mom's immediate family

 All my Tueller cousins

The Tueller great-grandchildren (minus Brit's two daughters)

My fam

Bryn had obviously had it with the pictures at this point!

Our little fam

 Devin, Marie, and 2-week-old Braden

(How amazing does Rie look 2 weeks after labor!!?)

 Jae and Amy

Jordan and Logan

There's nothing that brings two brothers together like a good photo session! :)

 Mom and Dad

Thanks to Jylare Smith for the fun pictures! 

Girl Time

Josh has been out of town the last two days, so we've had some fun girl time!

Josh will have an out-of-state internship somewhere this summer and chances are the girls and I will stay here in New Hampshire while he's away. So this week was a tiny little trial run of how it will be this summer. We've had a lot of fun! And we've also had lots of not-so-fun! Come home Josh! 

The fun turned not-fun when I made the mistake of feeding Mya baby food prunes. And that's a mistake I'll only make once.... I'm not sure why I thought that would be a good idea. Josh wasn't here to stop me.

I don't need to elaborate, but nothing puts me in a better mood than scrubbing out soiled outfit after outfit and changing soiled diaper after diaper. 

Tip #1 from this trial run of surviving without Josh: no prunes.

Okay enough about prunes. Let's talk about duplos. I could play duplos with Bryn all day every day. Our favorite thing is to build houses for her Toy Story characters. And today we went all out and even made very fancy felt beds for everyone. This was probably one of the highlights of Bryn's life thus far. Now I'm scouring ebay for a good deal on duplo sets because Bryn and I have great plans for what we could do with this Toy Story house if we only had the duplo blocks for it. In the meantime we'll just keep daydreaming about all the towers, and stairs, and balconies, and three car garages we'll be able to build someday.

 While Josh has been gone we've made lots of "girl meals" and twice-daily spinach and kale smoothies (HERE is our favorite recipe. Yum!) And the rule about eating (drinking) kale is that it cancels out any Valentine's candy you eat that day. Right?

 This girl loves to bake! And eat! She is her mother's child.

We usually have a rule of no reading at the dinner table, but it was a girls night so we let Mya off the hook this time. 

I'm not crazy about dressing my girls exactly matching, but Bryn happens to have the exact opposite view on this issue. She lives for it. It is a real battle to get her into an outfit that doesn't coordinate with what Mya is wearing. 

Basically, I love these two girls and I miss Josh.

Trial run #2 will be next week when Josh takes off for more interviews in New Jersey. I guess we are in the thick of "recruiting season". Kind of exciting, kind of really, really scary and nerve-racking. We'll see how things pan out. Yikes!

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!