4th of July Weekend

We've had such a fun weekend! Brett, Allison and Colin surprised us and came up Wednesday night to stay for the holiday weekend. It was so nice to be able to spend time with them and our other family and friends while they were here!

If you know me at all, you know that I am addicted to taking pictures, and holidays are just excuses for me to whip out the camera and take even more pictures than normal, so here they come! (By the way, Cailyn wound up being the subject of most of my pictures since she is basically immobile; her sister and cousin are very independent these days and are not nearly as cooperative when it comes to being photographed!) On Friday night, we went to the Provo Freedom Festival. It was really crowded and the kids rides were ridiculously expensive, so we wound up not doing much there, but we did have a yummy dinner at La Dolce Vida and Allison bought the cute red-white-and-blue flowers that Rylee and Cailyn wore in thier hair the next day, plus we got to visit, so it was a good evening anyway. I took this picture of Cailyn at the festival while she was being pushed around in the back seat of the double stroller. I think it is my favorite picture from the whole weekend! If not my very favorite, it is certainly in the top 3 (:

Saturday morning started at 6:30 with a canon going off in our neighborhood! Rylee (who was sleeping at the foot of our bed since Grandma and Grandpa were sleeping in her "big girl bed") jolted, but stayed asleep, but it woke Cailyn up...I just brought her in bed with us and she went back to sleep. Quinn and I weren't sure that it really was a canon until we talked to our neighbors later on - apparently it's a Lehi tradition. I guess I can appreciate it's patriotic value, but would it really be so hard to do it at say 8 or 9 instead of 6:30? Oh well.
Everyone but our little family of 4 went down to the parade in Provo that morning - we had originally planned on going, but Rylee hadn't gotten to bed until midnight for two nights in a row, and I knew it would be hard on Cailyn, so we decided to stay home. As it turns out, it was a wise decision; the reports were that the parade was overly crowded, poorly organized (big gaps in between floats) and, most importantly, they did NOT throw candy! Rylee would have been very disappointed in that.
So the photo shoot began that morning with Cailyn...

Good a sport as she was, she did lose it at the end...

Early afternoon, we headed up to the Draper pool to meet with our good family friends the Bundersons. We picnicked at the park outside the pool and then swam.

Cailyn has discovered what food is and likes to try to taste whatever she can these days. She loves watermelon, although I don't think that she was as successful as she hoped at this attempt to get it in her mouth:

I spent a little while chasing the older two girls around to try to get their pictures, but they were fast, so this is the best I was able to get. I think it would have been cute if it weren't fuzzy...

Here's Rylee trying to hide from the camera in Quinn's arms and waving me away.

Eventually, I gave up and we went swimming, which of course, was fun! Afterwards, Cailyn passed out wrapped in her blankie on the grass.

Rylee at some chips (she hadn't eaten much of anything before swimming, so this was her meal.)

And then, Rylee and Ava discovered water balloons! They watched the adults have a water balloon toss and managed to get their hands on plenty of balloons themselves.

I love this picture of Ava in action - the tongue is the best!

Then we went over to the Bunderson's house to hang out and wait for fireworks. I managed to get a photo shoot in on the back porch while we were there. I love this one of the 3 girls!

This is my favorite of Rylee

but I like this one too. (She really needs a haircut. I'm hoping that at some point in the not too distant future, the hair on top of her head will finally catch up with the rest of it, but I'm not holding my breath...)

And the sisters...

and Ava and her lollipop.

So, even if it did take some work, I wound up with some cute pictures of each girl.

Fireworks were fun and, of course, loud. Ava covered her ears a lot at first. Rylee just kept saying "fireworks screaming!"

They both loved the sparklers!

It always makes me laugh how different Rylee and Ava are. They had these glow sticks, and as you can see, Ava got all dolled up with them. She had them around her hair and all chained together around her whole body like some kind of tribal headdress.

Rylee, on the other hand, ran around pulling them all apart and throwing them. But they're best friends anyway, and I love it!


Today, everyone came to our ward for church. It was a really nice testimony meeting, and both Brett and Allison gave wonderful testimonies.

Here are the girlies before church in their matching dresses.

This evening we went to Annette's house for dinner, so we got to visit with more wonderful family. I managed to round up Colin and his three nieces for a quick picture while we were there.

We had lots of fun sitting outside and playing on the lawn and talking.

Brett, Allison and Colin will go home tomorrow, so the weekend is over and things will go back to normal. Oh, and Cailyn will be 7 months tomorrow! Wow.

Sometimes I feel silly being attached at the hip to my camera. But what can I say...I love taking pictures! I have my Heiner genes to blame for it. My dad always got teased by our family for taking so many pictures. Emily especially hated it for several years. But I think she appreciates having the pictures now. And hopefully Rylee will be glad to have them someday, too.

Swimming!

This week we got a membership to the pool, and it's been so fun! Rylee LOVES it and asks about going swimming every morning shortly after she wakes up. The Lehi pool is great for families; there are 3 playground areas for kiddos, a lazy river, and a big water slide - you know, the kind the big twisty tube kind that they have at water parks. Since it's in Utah, it's mostly indoors so that it can be used year round, but it has a retractable roof so that two of the play areas and half of the lazy river wind up being outdoors in the summer.These bungee swing things are meant for babies, but Rylee likes them too (:
Cailyn loves bouncing and spinning in them!
Rylee loves playing all over the place! She goes up and down the slides, through the tunnels, and anyplace else she can. She also loves jumping into the water and being caught.

There has only been one bad experience for Rylee at the pool. One of the playground things has a huge bucket on top that fills up with water and dumps when it gets full. (I don't have a picture of this piece of playground equipment - I figure the less time I spend with my camera in the water, the better.) Anyway, Rylee was climbing the stairs to get on the slide and was almost to the top when the bucket dumped! I was sitting at the bottom of the slide waiting for her, but she didn't know where I was. She clung onto a pole for dear life and started crying and screaming "Mommy! Mommy!" until I was able to get to her (which probably took me at least 30 seconds - it's a pretty big play structure.) But, she has since recovered and still loves swimming!

Lehi Roundup

This week was the "Lehi Roundup" - the City's summer festival. They had different activities going on all week, and we had fun participating in a few of them. Thursday night we went to the Horse Parade; there were all kinds of horses, some plain, some fancy (we even saw one that was all painted pink!), some with just one rider, others pulling a whole wagon. Being there made me realize how much of a farming community we live in - even if our little neigh-borhood (sorry, I couldn't resist) is more the suburb type.

Here's one little patriotic pony with his family that we saw:And here's a bigger version:
We all had fun watching the parade,
especially Rylee! Her favorite part was the candy they threw. She's still talking about "Parade throwing candy! Hit my arm!"

(Check out her cowgirl boots for the occasion!)


Then on Saturday morning we went to the Grand Parade, which was more the traditional type with floats and marching bands and such.

They threw candy at this one too. And although Rylee's favorite part of both parades was the candy, she wasn't very good at actually getting any of it on her own. Even when it did land at her feet (or hit her arm), the bigger kids were much faster and she almost always came up empty handed. This picture is of her returning empty handed from a candy run.

Lucky for her, I wound up being the mom who jumped out onto the street to grab some candy for her every now and then!

Cailyn liked the candy too...Rylee gave her her lollipop stick after she finished it and there was just a little bit of sugary goodness left.

Cailyn got pretty tired and wound up falling asleep in the stroller with a bottle of juice - which, by the way, is a new thing for her as of this week. She really seems to like the Gerber juice and does pretty well holding the bottles herself.

After the parade, we stayed for the other festivities, including a petting zoo...

...and a pony ride...

...and more petting zoo...

At some point, Katie and Ava came to join us. I tried to put a video of the girls dancing as they watched the performers on stage here, but for some reason it wound up at the bottom of the post and I can't move it...so watch it at the end!

They had lots of fun on different rides, including the blow up jumpy things and these swings - they went around in a circle.

In other news this week, I have moved Rylee into the guest bedroom for the time being. The plan is to get Rylee used to sleeping with the freedom of not being in a crib and Cailyn used to sleeping through the night in a crib before I get Rylee her own big girl bed and put them in the same room. So far, it's going pretty well...although the first night, Rylee managed to totally destroy the blinds in that room! But she's very excited about sleeping in her "big girl bed" and likes to shut the door "Rylee self" after I tuck her in for the night.

I'd planned on doing the letter of the week every Monday, but on Friday Rylee said she wanted to make a Bumble Bee B again, so I decided to go ahead with the next letter...

C is for Caterpillar

And here are some cute summer pictures of a little girl eating a popsicle outside in her swimming suit after running in the sprinklers.

Cailyn Videos

Here are a couple videos of Cailyn from the last couple days. I will probably be posting other videos soon, but I was having problems getting more to load, so it's just these two for now. (Just a reminder to those of you who are looking at this in your email, in order to view the videos you need to actually go to our blog - you can't watch it in your email!)

Did you have fun?

Today was Quinn's day off from work, and both he and I had dentist appointments. Quinn went first, and then came home and took Rylee to the park while Cailyn and I headed off to the dentist.
When I got home, Rylee ran to the garage and yelled "Mommmmyyyy!!!!!" (like she normally does when one of us gets home.) Then she said (and it took me a minute to figure out what she was saying) "Did you have fun at the teeth doctor?"

The Latest on our Cute Girls

It feels like it's been a while since I've updated my blog...so here we go.

I suppose nothing really too eventful has been going on, other than the girls just being cute. Here's on of the few pictures that I have of them both smiling... I took this picture with Gran in mind - the girls are wearing their official Whiting shirts that were made up last year for everyone when we burried Pops. Cailyn was still in the making at that point, but now she's finally grown into her onesie. Rylee was very excited about wearing jammies that matched Cailyn's!
Cailyn is really starting to get a sense of what's going on around her, and it's fun to watch.
She loves to arch backwards to grab things...

...and she has discovered food. I think the last time that I wrote about her on her, I had just started giving her rice cereal. Shortly after that, I was eating a popsicle after dinner at Grandma Clawson's house. Cailyn grabbed it and got it in her mouth and wouldn't let go!

I'm thinking that letting her eat sugar as her second food is probably not the best thing, but oh well...

since then she has made it obvious that she knows when we're eating, and she likes to try to get tastes of anything we will let her - apples, bananas, watermelon, etc.
I just love her pretty smile!

Rylee is as busy as ever and I finally feel like I am making some headway in my efforts to come up with activities for her to stay busy. I've decided that for me, the transition from baby to toddler is harder than from no kids to baby; with a baby you just take care of them, but with a toddler you need to plan things to do with them. Anyway, one thing that I've started doing is making letters of the week. I got this idea from my cousin, Megan, and it's been great! Rylee loves letters and numbers - she's constantly telling me about all of the ones she sees - so it's fun for her, and pretty simple. So here are pictures from the first two weeks:

A is for Alligator

Rylee really likes glue...she says "squeeze" over and over while she's using it.

Showing me where her eye is after gluing on the Alligator's googly eyes.

B is for Bumble BeeThis was Rylee's first time using real water colors (my mom got her some kind of pre-water color thing that was more like markers that up dipped in little jars back around Christmas time). She really liked the process of "water, color, paper..."

And here she is in her red bath...I think she dumped about half the bottle of her Elmo bubble bath/paint into this one (like the glue, she loved to "squeeze" it.)

She really likes going on walks in our neighborhood and finding all the horses.

She is also getting to that stage where she wants to do everything herself. Here are some examples:

We picked Charlotte up from BYU music camp on Saturday and Rylee wanted to push Cailyn in the stroller (even though it's a double stroller and my intention was for ME to push BOTH girls...)

She also wanted to carry Charlotte's suitcase by herself, even though it was about as tall as she is and I'm sure heavier. She fell over a few times, but kept trying. I also had to laugh when we got in the car and told me "Mommy, stop it!" when I tried to sing along with the music, but then said "Charlotte sing!" (By the way, we were listening to Fergie at Rylee's request...she likes "Big girls don't cry" and "The letter song" - a.k.a. "Glamorous")

And here she is today walking into the post office to mail Anne a package. It cracked me up because she totally looked like a little adult with her glasses and my keys (as we got out of the car she grabbed them and said "push beep!" so I let her lock the door...)

She wanted to open the door by herself (she pretty much always does these days)

And here she is reading all the numbers she saw on the PO Boxes.

So that's that. And here are a couple videos...I tried to put them up at different places in this post, but for some reason don't seem to be able to drag pictures or videos on this computer. The first one is Cailyn cracking up while Rylee hits her in the face with a balloon (she did the funniest laughing before I got the camera). The second one is Rylee telling me her name - "I Rylee Skye McNamara" - and her sister's name - "She Cailyn Del."