Seattle

Rylee talked all week before we went about going in the airplane to see her Daddy in Seattle. When she saw him (for the first time in 4 weeks) she was SO excited! She was sitting in the stroller and saw him by the car and started bouncing up and down and giggling and yelling "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!"

I didn't take as many pictures as normal during this leg of the trip, either. Probably because we spent most of our time looking for houses to rent. (We found one in a cute town called Lake Stevens. It's about 30 minutes from downtown, but feels like it's tucked away on it's own and is beautiful and feels very family friendly. I'm honestly not very excited about leaving our house and friends in Utah, but if we have to move, I think that this will be a good place to go...)

The one touristy thing that we did was go to the aquarium. Both of the girls really liked looking at all the fish. I think Rylee's favorites were the jelly fish, the tank that had fish from "Finding Nemo," and the seals and otters.
Rylee got very good at hotel life. She knew which buttons to push on the "alligator" (elevator) and liked to take "bubble baths" in the spa by the pool. For some reason, she wanted nothing to do with the actual pool beyond the steps, but she did like the spa.
This little frog was Rylee's best friend at the hotel. He was down in the lobby, and she loved to go over and "smell" the flowers in his hand, and hug and kiss him.

We were sad to leave Quinn behind when we came back home on Thursday, but were very glad to be home ourselves. Cailyn even smiled when she saw her bed and went down without a fuss at all! I thought it would take her a few nights to get back to her normal sleep habits, but she slept straight through the night and right on in until 11:30 the next morning! Poor baby, had a lot of sleep to catch up on from all the traveling...

New Mexico

This was definitely the most unconventional wedding I've ever been to.It was unconventional by design; my sister, Emily, has always had her own way of doing things. However, it turned out to be even more unconventional than anyone could have planned. Long story short, the bride and groom's car was stolen in between the wedding and the ring ceremony/reception, along with her dress and his suit and shoes. Funny thing is, I don't think Emily and Greg could have cared any less about the fact that their clothes were stolen - I get the impression that they are glad that it happened the way it did so that they now will be able to top any wedding story ever told! (By the way, their car was eventually found and returned...)

Anyway, since I've been traveling, this is the first blog I've done in almost 3 weeks! So I won't be able to fit everything in here, but I'm going to try to give a good summary of the New Mexico part of the trip. I will start by saying that I don't have very many pictures of the wedding festivities - there were so many pictures being taken that I didn't feel the need to pull out my camera as frequently as I normally do.

My Uncle Doug and Cailyn were good friends over the weekend; he held her every chance he got, and was always able to get some giggles out of her.

My cousin, Sophia, also held Cailyn every chance SHE got.
(There were lots of other arms ready to hold her, as well. Needless to say, Cailyn had plenty of attention!)
We went to White Sands, and Rylee discovered that she could bury people's feet with the sand.

Cailyn discovered that she could stuff her face with the sand.

(Cailyn is making it very clear these days that life is best when there's food, or sand, in her mouth. If there's food or drink in the room, she makes a racket until it's in her mouth.)

Greg's mom has a few horses, so we took the girls over to see them. Rylee loves her new uncle, and loved petting the horse and watching people feed apples to the horses.

My mom took the girls and I to the Farm and Ranch Museum. The highlight of the trip was watching a cow being milked, but Rylee also liked being driven around on a golf cart tour and seeing all the livestock on the grounds.

And she LOVED this see saw with the saddles - she's been aware of see saws for a while now, probably from books and TV, but I think this is the first one that she actually ever saw in real life.

She had a lot of fun "milking" the statue of the cow in the children's area, too.

My best friend growing up, Brooke, brought her 3 kids over to swim. It's really fun because our kids are so close in age.

Cailyn is almost 5 months older than London.

And Rylee is right in between Cooper and Calla.

(This was the next day when we went over to Brooke's house and the kiddos were eating snacks and watching a movie. As we were driving over there, Rylee kept saying "Cooper my friend! Calla my friend, too!"

I totally missed out on getting some of the other pictures that I wanted to get, like ones with Gran, ones with Rylee and Cailyn with their Grandma Karen and Grandpa Dave, etc., because I was planning on taking them on Saturday, the day before we left; unfortunately, I came down with a stomach bug (along with my mom, Brooke, Cooper, Calla, and kind of Charlotte) and spent basically the whole day sleeping. But Gran does deserve credit, because she gave up her bedroom for me and Cailyn to sleep in for a week and a half! Oh, and Rylee slept in the room next to us in a toddler bed that Pops made for my mom when she was little that was all decked out in Elmo sheets - she loved it! (Except for when she woke up several times in the middle of the night and came in to sleep with me...oh well.)

Other than that, Rylee spent a lot of time reading books with her Grandma Karen. And Cailyn spent a lot of time eating any food that she could convince anyone to give her (including straight butter from her Grandpa Dave.)

And then we flew to Seattle...

Rylee-isms

So, my last post was just after I cut up Rylee's binks. She fell asleep in my bed and stayed there until she woke up around 3 and wanted to go back to her bed; I took her and she fell right back asleep. She woke up early (well, early for her anyway - around 7:30) and I heard her crying. I went to check on her and she was talking about how her binks were broken. I said "Oh, did your binks break?" She said "No, AYA broke my binks!" I think she must have thought this because when Ava comes over a lot of times they will go play in that room and both of them play with Rylee's binks. I've felt bad and wondered whether or not I should fess up and tell her that it was actually her mommy who broke them so that she wouldn't hold a grudge against Ava, but ultimately I decided that by the time she sees Ava again (it will be several weeks since Ava is going to California and we are going to New Mexico) she will have forgotten all about it, so I just let it go.

This morning, Rylee and I were talking. I can't remember what about, but she was being her silly self. I said "Rylee, you're a silly little person!" to which she replied "I not a purse, I two half!"

Bye Bye Binks!

Well, I did it. We've been talking for a long time about getting rid of Rylee's bink once and for all, but I've always had some excuse not to do it. It's been several months since we got her down to only using them when she sleeps, but I decided that it's really time to be done. So, tonight I cut the tips off of all of the binks I could find. I was really worried about how Rylee would react. I anticipated that she would throw a fit for hours before finally falling asleep. But I was pleasantly surprised! She walked in to her bed and picked up her purple bink and inspected it for a moment and then looked up at me and said "Purple bink broke, Mommy!" I told her to look for her other binks. So she did, and with each one, she told me that it was broken, too. She kind of tried to suck on them while I read her bedtime stories. When I left her room, she cried for a few minutes. Then Quinn called (he had just finished working) so I took the phone in for her to talk to him. After that, she said she wanted to "sleep in Mommy bed," so I made a deal with her; I told her she could sleep there, but if I heard her cry or get out of bed I would take her back to the "big girl bed." So, she went in my room, laid down, and I didn't hear another peep out of her! Hopefully that will be the end of it, but I'm not really counting on it...

So, onto other things. I've been enjoying really yummy tomatoes from my garden lately. Cailyn has been enjoying any food that she can manage to get in her mouth. We were at Costco the other day and I gave her tastes of whatever samples I could, but when the sample was something she wasn't big enough to eat, she would throw a fit!
She is starting to figure out how to scoot a little bit. She has resisted getting her hips up off the floor and putting weight on her knees...these pictures are from a few weeks ago when I positioned her on her hands and knees:She got pretty angry with me...

...I did it a few times and she never liked it at all.

Then a few days ago, she figured out how to scoot across the couch inch-worm-style.

She seemed very proud of herself! (I have some video footage of her little trek, but I can't get it to load for some reason...)

G is for Glittery Giraffe

This is Rylee's most recent Alphabet Craft. I think it's my favorite we've done so far - it turned out pretty cute! (In case you can't tell, the color she's painting with is glitter glue...)

Rylee has discovered the hose as of late...

She got her 3rd haircut on Monday. It's amazing to me how good her memory is! I'd been telling her for a few weeks that we need to get her hair cut, so she would ask me about it all the time and talk about the airplane chair and balloons and such. On Monday morning when I told her it was time for her hair cut, she got really excited. We went to get her dressed and she told me she needed to wear her orange shirt - which is the same shirt she wore when she got her hair cut in April! I don't know how she remembered that, I only remembered it from pictures. Unfortunately, her orange shirt was dirty, so she chose another outfit. Then she started talking about the airplane chair, but then she said "I mahn it airplane! I sit pink car!" (I don't want the airplane! I sit in the pink car!) Then she told me she wanted a blue balloon and a lollipop, and said she was going to watch Elmo and blow bubbles.

This is the "before" shot of her scraggly hair:

And here's the "after" shot.

I'm SO excited - the hair on top of her head has almost caught up with the rest of it (at least now that we chopped it to just below her ears.) Next haircut, she'll be all evened up! Unfortunately, they were all out of blue balloons, so she chose an orange one.

When I was reading Goodnight Moon with Rylee tonight, she pointed at the red balloon and the bunny in bed and said "She get a haircut!"

Yesterday we went to the Thanksgiving Point gardens with Katie, Ava and their friends Melanie, Wiley, and Naomi. They're having a special in August - every Tuesday you can get in to any of their exhibits for $2! It was a beautiful day, and we all had a good time.

I'm including this picture of Rylee playing in the water part of the gardens because, besides the fact that her little bum is cute in her ruffly swimsuit, you can see the back of her haircut!

Daddy in Seattle

Quinn has been working up in Seattle for a week now. It will be for at least a few more weeks and possibly will turn into our family moving up there. At any rate, I'm not exactly sure when we'll see him next.

Rylee has been really missing her daddy, and it seems like the longer he's gone, the more she misses him. She frequently says "Daddy go work in See-ah-ohl." Whenever we go anywhere or I tell her that we're going to go somewhere, she says "Daddy be there!" or "I see my daddy!" or "Daddy come too!" or something along those lines.

This morning, while we were getting ready for church, we called Quinn. While she was talking to him she said "Daddy Quinn sleep in his car?" Quinn told her that he wasn't sleeping in his car, that he was staying at a hotel and had a bed. She seemed relieved and then said "Daddy have pillow too?" Quinn reassured her that he did, in fact, have a pillow.

When I went to get Rylee from nursery after church today, she ran up to me holding this picture and the first words out of her mouth were "I show Daddy my picture!" I told her that we could take a picture of it and send it to Daddy to see. Then, as we were getting in the car, she said "I see my Daddy now!" I said "OK, should we call Daddy?" She said "No, I SEE my Daddy now!" I chuckled to myself and then called Quinn. While she was talking to him she made sure to double check that he still had a pillow in Seattle.

Hope to see you soon, Daddy Quinn!