You hear that?

This is Rylee's current favorite thing to ask - whether she hears a helicopter, the microwave beeping, a bird outside, some paper crumple, whatever, she asks "you hear that?"
Right now I am sitting upstairs doing some work and Quinn and Rylee are playing downstairs. The ice maker in our freezer just dropped some ice into the container and, of course,
Rylee said "You hear that?"
Quinn answered "Yeah, what was it?"
Rylee replied "Tinkerbell's Fart!"

That girl sure does make me laugh.

Playing Catch Up

OK, I'm finally sitting down to catch up and post a bunch of pictures from the last several weeks...

We've had quite a few visitors lately. Grandma Joanne and Grandpa Bob (I decided it was easier to tell Rylee to call them that than it would be to confuse her with another Grandma and Grandpa Mac) came out about 3 weeks ago for a high school reunion and stayed with us for one night. Rylee had lots of fun playing with them.They got in Wednesday and stayed until Thursday around noon. Then Grandma and Grandpa Mac flew in Thursday night, and then Quinn flew in from Seattle Friday morning. Rylee was very excited about seeing everyone, but especially her daddy! She hadn't seen him since we were in Seattle a month before. Here are the girls with Quinn at Mi Ranchito where we all ate lunch after picking Quinn up from the airport (Ava was also very excited to see Quinn - she hadn't seen him in 2 months!)
We had a nice weekend mostly just enjoying each other's company around the house. The girls had fun playing with their silly daddy.

This is our family picture on Monday morning, right before we drove Quinn back up to the airport. At this point we thought it would be quite a while before we would see each other again.

Rylee was very sad when we left Quinn at the airport. She cried and kept saying "I HAVE to go to the airport with daddy!"
However, within a few days, circumstances changed and we decided that moving wasn't our best option after all, so Quinn left Thursday evening and drove all night and was home again by Friday morning. Yay! (That's when I posted the video of Rylee singing "I'm so glad when daddy comes home"...)
Anyway, Tuesday after Quinn flew to Seattle, Brett and Allison left with the Bundersons to go to their cabin for the week. Then on Friday (the same day Quinn got back from Seattle with his car) our family and the Bergs drove up to meet them at the cabin where we stayed until Saturday. Then we came back home and Brett and Allison were with us until Tuesday morning. Here are come cute pictures from that week:

At the park:

(I love this one...)

Cousins at the cabin in matching jammies:

This is a face carved into a stump that we saw on our hike by the cabin on Saturday. We also saw a moose, but we weren't close enough to get a good picture of it. At least, not with my little camera.

On Sunday we had a family gathering for all who could attend at the cemetary where Grandpa Clawson is burried. Because of various circumstances, it took a year and a half but we finally got his headstone in place.One of the setbacks ws finding out after the headstone was made that it was too small to meet the cemetary guidelines. So Steve Despain made this beautiful border. I actually am glad that he had to do this, because it turned out beautiful and looks very much like Grandpa.

Rylee thought it was beautiful, too.

On Monday, while Quinn and Josh were working, the rest of us went up Provo Canyon. First to a park...

(notice Cailyn is wearing 2 shoes here)

Then to Sundance, where we rode the chairlift.

I was nervous about Rylee squirming, but she was very excited about the ride so we decided that the best set up would be to have her alone with Grandma and Grandpa, while Katie and I took the other girls on another chair.On the ride up, Cailyn kicked off one of her sandals. Luckily, this was the second to last warm day of the year, so I guess it was good timing.(Crap, I had a picture of Katie and Ava that I thought I uploaded, but instead I uploaded this one of me and Cailyn twice. I can delete pictures, but when I upload them they automatically go to the beginning of the post and I can't move them around, so I'm just going to forget about it.)

On the way back down, Rylee wanted to ride with me, so it was the two of us, Cailyn and Grandpa.

Rylee kept saying "Don't throw me off, k? It make me sad." Funny kid. She had a great time, but the last 5 or 10 minutes, she did get pretty squirmy and was definitely happy to get off. Her little personality is not one that likes to sit still for extended periods of time.

We finished off the afternoon with treats; the girls chose lollipops.

And here's the whole gang. (Notice, Cailyn has only one shoe.)

So that's the story of our family visiting.

In other news, Cailyn has finally figured out how to do a pretty good army crawl, and is much happier because of it. A week or so ago, I set her down in the family room, and next thing I knew she was sitting in the pantry, getting into a box of peaches!

Luckily, it's not too much of an adjustment since we've already done all the childproof locks, etc. for Rylee. Oh, and her first toot finally broke through, right around the same time she started scooting. I guess I'll have to take a picture sometime.

Rylee's latest art project is...

I is for Ice Cream

She says and does funny things every day. Yesterday, she walked into my room holding her little monkey. She informed me that Cookie Monster was sitting in time out because he had bonked the monkey's head. She was comforting the monkey. Then, she went over to the stairs, where Cookie Monster was sitting and talked with him. She said "Cookie Monster, you be nice. You stay there a while."

Today she went to her friend, Zara's birthday party. It was a dress up party, so she wore her Tinkerbell dress. When I got there to pick her up, they were doing a pinata. Afterwards, they had all the kids sit together to take a picture. The rest of the kids smiled and posed for the picture, but Rylee was too busy opening and eating her candy to care. She was most excited about the bubble gum - probably because I never let her have any since she has swallowed it every time I've let her try to chew gum. I decided to just let her enjoy her treasures, so she swallowed probably between 5 and 10 pieces of gum this afternoon. Oh well!

Thanks, Grandmas!

Our girls are lucky to frequently get fun and cute things from their grandmas. Here's what they got this week:

Grandma Karen sent some money for Rylee to go get some boots. (Since it's been cold lately, Rylee also would like to get some slippers with the money, but we haven't found any yet. Considering that she takes her clothes, socks and jammies off several times a day and then whines "It's so cold!" I'm thinking it's probably not that urgent anyway!) Anyway, here she is modeling her boots.

Grandma Mac got this cute little giraffe hoodie for Cailyn. (Luckily, she doesn't know how to undress herself yet, so I think it will keep her nice and snuggly.)

Thank you Grandmas!

Speaking of grandmas, that reminds me of a cute little thing Rylee said today. She loves her grandparents and talks about them frequently. Today, we walked down the street with our neighbors to wait for Abby to get off the bus from kindergarten. While we were standing there, our other neighbors opened their garage and pulled out. Sally (our neighbor, Abby's mom) told the kids "Stay on the sidewalk, Grant and Carolyn are coming." Rylee got excited and said "That's Grandma Karen coming?!"

I'm so glad when Daddy comes home!

So, we're not moving to Seattle afterall. Yay!

Quinn was so excited to come home that he pulled an all-nighter and got home around 8 this morning. He wanted to surprise Rylee, so I hadn't told her that he was coming. Rylee came into my room about 8:30 this morning and woke me up (I was up until a little after 2 making room in the garage for Quinn's car...this included an unplanned vacuuming of the garage...so I was still pretty sleepy at 8:30!) and said in a giggly voice, "Mommy, guess what? Daddy here!" She was SOOO excited! As we all snuggled in the bed, she chattered on and on about Daddy being home. My favorite part of the conversation went as follows:

"My Daddy come home! I so happy! He make me all better. I not sad anymore!"

Isn't that just the sweetest thing you ever heard?

Cailyn woke up not too much after this, and SHE was so excited to see Quinn, too! She was grinning from ear to ear and giggling and babbling.

So good to be all back together again.

I have pictures and other things from the last week or two that I will write about later, but for now I just wanted to write about our happy morning.

Here's a little video of Rylee singing - she sang this to him earlier, but he's sleeping now, so I just took a video of the Rylster.

The Wheels on the Bus...

Ever since Rylee has become aware of buses, she has wanted to ride on one. She loves singing "The Wheels on the Bus," which contributed to her bus infatuation. So, after several weeks of her telling me every time she saw a bus that she wanted to ride on one, I finally planned a little field trip for a bus ride.

In my head, I was thinking that buses went in little loops and we could just get on a bus and stay there until we got back to our starting point. Once I realized that wasn't very practical, I thought it would be fun to take a bus to a park, play for a while, and then ride back. The only problem with that was that I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to figure out where the bus stops were in relation to parks. So Katie came up with a great plan: we would ride the bus from the University Mall to the Provo Town Center and get ice cream, and then ride back (finding the bus at two malls had to be easy, right?) Well it should have been easy. Except that I saw the 850 bus and jumped right on without a thought as to which way it was heading; as it turns out, we were on the northbound bus, when we should have been on the southbound bus. Oops! But we decided it didn't really matter that much.

Here we all are on the bus. Rylee and Ava were very excited to be on the bus. I wish I had pictures or a video of them as they were actually getting on the bus. Rylee marched right up, pushed her way to the back of the bus, found a seat and sat down with a huge grin on her face; Ava on the other hand stayed close to Katie and me. Those girls sure love playing together, but they definitely have their own ways of doing everything! I had to take Rylee off her seat and bring her farther down a few rows to the back of the bus where there was room for our whole gang.

I think that it was right about the time this picture was taking that the girls started pushing and fussing at each other, so I gave Rylee a little talk about how we were on the bus to have fun and if she was going to fuss and fight we were going to get off. Then I started snapping pictures and Katie pulled out her video camera. I didn't think much of it until a few stops later when a lady who was sitting at the VERY back of the bus got off...with a little boy who was probably about 4 or 5. We were sitting on the benches that are sideways, so I had seen her before, but I hadn't noticed her little boy. I felt a little bit guilty as I realized that they were not on the bus for a field trip, but that this was their regular mode of transportation.
Anyway, as we rode the bus, the girls loved looking out the window.
We decided to get off at 800 North in Orem and get some ice cream at Macey's instead of at the mall as we had originally planned.

Cailyn, of course, loved the ice cream cone.

Ava and Rylee found the bouncy ball display and played with the balls for a bit.

Then it was time to catch the bus again. As it turns out, there wasn't a southbound bus stop at 800 North, so we had to walk almost all the way down to 400 North to catch the bus. We got there about 10 minutes before the bus was supposed to get there, so we thought it wouldn't be too bad of a wait. We told Rylee and Ava to hold on to the pole so the bus would know to come get us.

That lasted for all of about 30 seconds for Rylee, but Ava held on for a while.

Eventually, Rylee returned and discovered that she could see through the holes in the pole.

Well, 4:03 came and went, but the 4:03 bus never showed. The girls got rather restless and started playing in the rocks. Rylee and Cailyn tried to eat the rocks.

When Rylee started putting cigarette butts in her mouth, I decided it was time to get her off the ground!

Of course, then everyone else wanted to sit on the wall, too (:

We waited, and waited, and waited...and finally, a little after 4:30 the bus came (I don't know what happened to the 4:03 bus; the next bus was scheduled to come at 4:33.)

After 45 minutes of waiting for the bus, I was so happy to be back on it again! (Cailyn was happy to be holding on to the pole again - she held on to it almost the entire time both ways.)

I think our adventure was successful in two ways:

1. The girls had a blast!

2. I have a newfound appreciation for my car and the fact that I don't have to rely on public transportation!

Oh my gosh!

"Oh my gosh!" is Rylee's newest phrase that cracks me up every time she says it.

This came from our garden...and no, it is not a bell pepper, it is a yellow tomato that came out looking like some kind of tumor! So this gets the "Oh my gosh!" award for the blog posting.

I'm just going to say up front that it will not be the best written post I've ever done...my brain is just not working well enough to make anything flow together right now!

So here's a summary of the last few weeks. Allison came into town about a week ago to celebrate her mom's birthday along with her sisters. When they weren't celebrating, she got to come down and spend time with us!

While she was here, we went a couple times to this great little spash pad thing that just opened up this summer a few miles from our house. It's just in front of the Highland library and it's free and so fun! I think they should build these all over the place. I'm puting in a couple pictures because it's kind of hard to explain.

There's this little stream with (fake) rocks that spray water...
then at the end of the stream there's this big splash pad that has water that shoots out of the ground in a big circle.

The girls just love it!

We weren't successful at getting all three girls to pose together for a picture at the splash pad, but we did manage to get a few of them wearing their pink leopard jammies that their Grandma Mac got for them.

Cailyn just turned 9 months and is as cute as ever. She is cutting her first two teeth (the bottom front ones) and has had all the classic teething symptoms (notice the runny nose...) Popsicles have been her friend.

But just because a girl feels yucky doesn't mean she can't look cute! Ava and Rylee dressed her up in this crown...

...and I dressed her up in these adorable shoes from her Grandma Mac.

Rylee likes to play with the kids on our street. Here she is with our next door neighbors - she and Emma are attempting to trace Abby with chalk, although, Rylee doesn't quite understand how to "trace" things yet...she just goes around and colors.

And we did our first alphabet project in probably a month this week...

H is for Heart

Oh, and Rylee told me about a dream she had for the first time this week! It was a nightmare. She woke up screaming "Don't eat me!" I calmed her down and asked what was trying to eat her. "Tinkerbell!" was her traumatized response! I calmed her down, got her back to sleep, and have been laughing about it ever since!