January 9th, 2015

Ian  at  9  months

Ian Loves:

Ø Soft blankies.  He loves to burry his face in every soft blanket he can get his hands on.

Ø His brother.  He follows Nik as much as he possibly can and watches everything he does. 

Ø His Daddy.  As soon as Ian hears Ryan’s voice as he comes home from work each night, Ian immediately recognizes his voice and starts to get excited.  And as soon as he sees his daddy, he starts to shake and lean towards him.

Ø His binky.  He loves his binky, but doesn’t beg for it or depend on it.  It’s quite funny to watch, he will snatch it super fast from where ever he sees it as soon as he spots it.

Ø Stuffed Animals.  When he sees a stuffed animal he grins and occasionally grunts at it, and then tries to either eat it or burry his face in it, depending on the size.

Ø Exploring.  Ian can now army crawl and semi crawl.  He is in heaven. He can’t hold still, and goes everywhere he can.  He also loves to rock on his hands and knees and thinks he’s pretty funny.

Ø Food.  Ian has been in heaven lately as I have been feeding him more solid foods.  He loves oranges, and has also recently found a love for Ritz crackers, baby puffs and Gold Fish crackers.  He really loves food, and when he sees someone else eating he immediately makes it known that he should be having some too.  And don’t you dare try to take his food from him.

Ø Jumping.  Ian loves to jump.  It usually lasts only as long as someone’s arm muscles can manage it, as Ian feels so heavy.

Ø Sleeping on his left side.   I am not sure why, but he loves his lefts side.  As soon as I lay him down in his crib, he immediately turns to his left side and cuddles up.

Ø Ian loves to growl.  He growls for everything these days.  Give me food = a growl.  I’m excited to see you = a growl.  Give me that toy = a growl. Etc.

We love you little guy.

December 2014

December  in  a  nutshell

Ø Nik had a Christmas Sing-a-long program at his preschool.  It was fun to watch him in class and I videoed it so that Ryan could watch it later.

Ø For Christmas this year Grandma and Grandpa Dance bought us plane tickets to fly out to Idaho for Christmas.  We were all so so very excited.  We decided that Santa needed to come early to our house so that we wouldn’t have to bring all of the presents with us as we traveled.  Nik thought this was a great idea.  We made Santa some yummy German cookies and a big glass of milk.  When Nik woke up in the morning he was so excited.  He saw that Santa had brought him an awesome Marble Mania toy and had filled his stocking, plus all the other wrapped presents under the tree.  Nik couldn’t wait to open gifts, and immediately started playing with them all.  Ian was just happy to play with whatever he could get his hands on.

Ø Just before leaving for our trip out West, Ryan stepped in a strategically placed dog poop and walked all through the house depositing it everywhere.  I was so very pleased, not!  I was ticked!  So we spent the night scrubbing dog poop out of the carpet and then cleaning the carpets.  You would think that after all this, the experience would not repeat itself.  Wrong.  Just moments before leaving, as we were taking the luggage out to the truck of our Home Teacher, both Ryan and our home teacher stepped in a pile of dog poop and walked through the house with it.  Awesome!!!!!

Ø Flying always stresses me out when doing it with kids.  I want it to go smoothly and inevitably it rarely does.  After spending all day traveling, on the day before Christmas Eve, we finally arrived in Salt Lake.  It was late and we were all pretty spent, but were excited to be back in the West and about to see our families.  We went to go to our rental car, and there was the most rank fart musk radiating from every fiber of that car.  We have dubbed it the ‘Fart Car”.  It was pungent, and rank and I can only imagine the guy who prepared the car for us thinking it would be so funny to let one off in the car right before closing the door and letting it marinate for the poor sucker who would inevitably enter the car.  Boys.  Ugg.

Ø I was so excited to see my family, whom I had not seen for 6 months or more.  It was so great seeing everyone and being together.  We had big family dinners, ginger bread house competitions, cousins cousins and more cousins, sledding with the four wheelers, bowling, movies, shopping, plenty of wrestling and chasing, big toy car racing, family pictures, plenty of games and last but not least the influenza.  We all had a blast, but unfortunately I caught the flu half way through our holiday.  It was a major set back, but in the end it was still nice to just be there with my family.

Sadly, it came time for us to leave.  I was still ill, but was trying to be optimistic about the whole travel thing.  We drove to Grandma and Grandpa Whitesides and were going to party with the whole family for the new years.  Unfortunately, I fell asleep through the whole event, but it sounded like everyone had a great time.  Boyd and Gayle are always so wonderful and it was so good to spend some time with them.  We wish it could have been longer, but hopefully we can see them soon and can spend more time with them.

The next day was the big travel day.  We went to the airport and learned that the rest of the nation was also traveling on that same day.  Yay for us!  We already knew that it would be a long day of travel with a 3 hour lay over in Denver, but we ended up having a 2-hour layover in Salt Lake and then a 5-hour lay over in Denver.  After finally arriving in Chicago, we retrieved most of our luggage, and went to go retrieve our car seat s from the odd sized luggage belt.  I was so excited, I looked over and Ian’s car seat was the first out.  It was sitting in a big tub and without thinking, we grabbed it and started putting it together and left the big black tub on the belt.  Little did we realize that we were supposed to take it off the belt.  The entire conveyer belt halted to a stop and shut down with a resounding clank as the conveyer belt door slammed shut.  Yup, you guessed it, my family and I had single handedly shut down the conveyer belt at the airport, leaving us and about 15 other people stuck without their items.  You can only imagine all the glaring and hushed comments aimed at us.  Oh the joys of traveling.

Ian and Paxton sitting on Grandma and Grandpa's lap.

November 27th, 2014

Thanksgiving

This year was the first year we did thanksgiving ourselves.  We couldn’t fly out west for Thanksgiving, and so we decided to do it all ourselves.  Initially we thought it would be fun to invite some people.  Ryan invited some of the people he has been working with lately in the ward, but in the end it was just Ryan, the boys and me.  And thank heaven for that!  It was a semi disaster.

I had planned and planned for this dinner, wanting it to turn out great.  I found all new recipes (not a wise choice) that were dairy and gluten free, and set it all in motion.  After spending all day before, and the day of in the kitchen, tirelessly working, things were looking pretty good (I seriously have a new found respect for all the ladies out there who year after year put on Thanksgiving dinners.  They are secret warriors!.).  Most everything was done, and looking good.  I decided to brake away from the kitchen to go take a shower, thinking that since the bird was in the oven and timers were set, that everything would be smooth sailing and flawless.  So imagine my surprise and absolute dread, when, not five minutes after leaving the kitchen and taking my shower, than I hear Ryan saying to me that “the oven started beeping strangely because there was too much smoke and the turkey was catching fire.  But don’t worry”, he says, “I turned it off and everything is fine.”  What!  Everything is not fine.  I jump out of the shower and throw something quickly on and rush to the kitchen.  I pull the turkey out and look at my poor, sad scorched blackened turkey.  It was really really sad to look at.  Thank goodness for strange alerts built into ovens or I would have burned the house down!

As for thanksgiving dinner, we rectified the situation as best as possible and had a very late thanksgiving dinner.  I know for myself, that this years Thanksgiving will forever be remembered.  Ugg.

December 9th, 2014

Ian  at  8  Months

Ø Ian has discovered the headshake. It’s pretty cute and Ian thinks he’s pretty funny when he does it.

Ø Ian is definitely on the verge of crawling, he tried to scoot around a bit on his tummy, and can go a little ways.  I know I’m going to turn my head one day and discover he has crawled somewhere.

Ø Ian is at that stage where he wants everything.  So don’t you dare take anything away from him or a total melt down will occur.   Red face, screaming and all.

Ø Ian seems to have grown exponentially.  It’s almost as if I put him down to sleep and when he wakes up he is bigger.  I know this seems strange, but I swear its true.  His size and girth are much changed.

Ø Ian’s been loving all the new different foods he’s been getting.  Since he has done so well on everything I decided to try him on some baby yogurt.  He seemed to like it, so I kept giving it to him all week.  At the same time, I noticed that he was waking up at night crying and screaming.  It wasn’t till a week of this that I stopped to think about the possible correlation.  Could Ian be lactose and tolerant?  I took him off the dairy, and no more crying at night.  Needless to say Ian is off of dairy for now.

Ø Ian has discovered a new way of communication, the demonic growl.  Yup, my child has a scary and odd growl.  It occurs all day and all night.  Ryan thinks he learned it from hearing Nik trying to sound like all his scary monsters and vampires.  I am not too sure about that, but we all think its pretty funny and enjoy the oddity.