Butterflies

Aunt Kristy sent us a butterfly kit after an unfortunate incident where we brought a caterpillar home from the park and grew a really gross and disappointing moth:(

But this was fascinating!  I think I enjoyed it more than the kids:)

Allergies

I knew something was up the first time I tried to give her yogurt.  Everywhere it touched her face she got a red bumpy rash.  I didn't really think much about it until she got closer to a year and she tried a little ranch dressing, a little frozen yogurt, a little milk.  Each thing had the same reaction.  So we bought some goat milk.  Same thing.  I finally mentioned it to my doctor at her one year appointment and he referred us to an allergist.  A lady from our ward actually works there, so that was nice.  They did what they called an "infant panel" of tests, testing for Dairy, Egg, Nuts, and Soy.  The dairy wasn't really a surprise, but the eggs were.  They actually recommended that we feed her small amounts of milk and egg baked into muffins as sort of an immunization for her allergies.  Apparently baking the proteins change them enough to make them less reactive.  So far on our journey we have discovered that chocolate almond milk is tasty.  Vanilla Coconut milk is AMAZING!  And Vegan ranch dressing is actually pretty nasty, and so is rice based ice cream. (I have some egg free, dairy free mayo that we haven't tried yet).  I've also discovered that it is very difficult for me to cook without butter:(  You really don't realize all the things that contain milk and eggs until you can't have them anymore!  We are very hopeful this will be a short lived childhood allergy that she'll only have to deal with for a year or two. Poor kid, no frosting, no cheese, no milkshakes.

Merit's Birthday

This little cutie turned 1 on March 29th.  We let her open her presents from us and we went and got Donuts and we ate lunch with daddy on her actual birthday. She also sported her very first pony tail:)  And then the Saturday after (Conference Saturday) we had a party for her.  Kristy and her family came, Ron came, and Ryan brought the kids.  It was a fun day and as always, I never take pictures of the decorations or the people, haha.  Her party was rainbow themed.  I made her a smash cake that was a giant cupcake with rainbow batter.  We had french bread sandwiches and a rainbow vegetable tray.  And for dessert I made a 6 layer rainbow cake that was a total disaster and only ended up having 5 layers.  But at least it tasted good!   It was fun having the party in our new and improved house.  Much easier to have people over with the wall gone!  Yay!

Here's what she looked like when it was over!

Merit's Birthday Photoshoot

We had the FABULOUS Hayley Bradshaw do Merit's 1 year pictures in her cute studio and as always, they turned out better than I could have imagined.  

Here's one Hayley did of Chap at his 1st birthday, proving that although my kids look the same now, they do not look the same at the same age.

Anyway, Merit at 1 year.  I don't really know what to say other than she is wonderful, and she is our little princess.  She likes to run and play.  She is a big fit thrower and does this thing that Logan calls "minnowing" where she just goes kind of limp and throws herself backward.  She really commits and if you don't have a good hold on her she falls.  She is also a very cuddly girl.  She likes to fall asleep laying on my belly.  She is very dainty and picks food up so delicately in her fingers and eats it.  It's so funny to me how she has a completely different personality than Chapter did at her age.  I think I could have 15 children and never figure out what the heck I'm doing because they are all so different.  We love you Mer Mer Mooey:)

Easter BBQ

Sunday, after church, we headed up to Kanarraville to freeze our butts off having a family BBQ at Cash and Kali's house.  It was a good time, despite the cold, and Chapter made a few new best friends.  He had SO MUCH FUN with his 2nd cousin Braylee and they spent the whole afternoon "making soup" for Cash's dog Lucy by stirring dirt, rocks and grass into her water trough:) I'm sure Lucy and Cash were very grateful.  

Chapter also made friends with Uncle Heff.  They played all afternoon  driving the 4 wheeler "around the bend" as Chapter says.

Easter

We dyed Easter Eggs

We hunted Easter Eggs 

 We shook Easter Eggs

 We ate candy from Easter Eggs

And we got photographic evidence that I may, in fact, have the grumpiest, most suspicious kids in the whole world.

We went to an alumni Easter Egg hunt at Dixie and it was SO FUN!  They had all kinds of games and food and activities and an egg hunt.  It actually turned out perfectly because Saturday morning it was way too cold to go to the city one, but I bet the people who went got a lot of candy because no one was there, haha!  Good times, Chap got probably a dozen or more eggs and MerMer got 2 all by herself!

A little more excitement than we could handle

We had a few weird days in our neighborhood in March where there was much more excitement than usual, and not the good kind.

On March 16th at about 11:30 at night we had to call dispatch and report that our across the street neighbors were burning weeds and completely smoking us out.  It was so stinky, smokey, and gross and I have no idea why they thought they should go to bed and leave their fire going.  I honestly didn't think anyone would come check it out (I honestly didn't think anyone patrolled Santa Clara at night, haha), but a cop went and knocked on their door and had them put it out, in fact 3 cops showed up and a fire truck.  That gave me warm fuzzies, and I feel pretty safe now.

Then on the morning of March 18th, there was a house fire in the neighborhood.  Merit was in bed with me when Logan left for work and Chap was still sleeping. I swear it was right after Logan left that I heard a siren.  In fact, it was so close to when Logan left that I thought maybe he had been pulled over.  And then I heard more sirens, and I thought (as I lay there in bed not wanting to wake my baby monster) that perhaps there had been a car accident on the main road and I hoped it wasn't Logan.  Then more sirens and more sirens and more sirens.  I started to worry because it was close and this "car accident" must be really serious to warrant that many sirens. Then I heard the deep "honk honk" of a fire truck and I got up to see what the heck was going on.  I looked out my front door, which would give me the best view of where I thought the car accident would be, and I saw what is probably the most heartbreaking thing I have ever seen, our neighbors house was on fire.  I pretty much immediately started crying and I called Logan.  It was a very emotional thing to watch, I think that aside from losing a family member, a house fire is everyone's worst fear.  I know it's just "things", but it's your things and it all the things you have, gone in less than an hour. Pictures, memories, necessities, all gone in the blink of an eye.

Chapter wouldn't go outside, i thought he would like to see the trucks, but he was so so scared.  After things calmed down we went up to see if there was anything we could do, but of course, there isn't really anything anyone can do.  It mostly burned their main living area and kitchen, supposedly the bedrooms were okay, but this last Saturday the restoration company took the whole roof off, and the house is completely gutted down to the studs.  It was a pretty big deal.

Hike

We had no fun at all last year, so I have decided that we are going to do some fun stuff this year NO MATTER WHAT!  The day of the Provo City Center Temple dedication, we couldn't find anyone to take our kids so we could go (which was a bummer), but we had a good time anyway because we thought it was a great day to have a little family time and get out into nature, so we headed up to the Castle Rock subdivision and went on a little family hike at the Gap Trailhead. Chap was a trooper at the beginning, and then he just wanted to pick up every stick he could find and it got a little frustrating.  Oh well, it's still memories:)

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Our kids are a little bit Irish, from both sides of the family, but neither family really gets into the celebrating of St. Patrick's Day.  I remember one year going to school wearing a paper 4 leaf clover my mom had cut out of blue paper.  She spent the whole morning trying to convince me that it was green.  I got pinched.

I don't really go all out either.  We usually make green playdough and green jello for dessert.  Occasionally I'll make green rice krispies, but oh well.  You can't go all out for everything, especially with Easter and Merit's birthday right around the corner.

But here are the cuties playing with their green playdough.  I'll let you guess who ate some:)

Cute Pictures and a Couple of Stories

 I can't really get enough of this picture.  I know everyone thinks their kids are adorable, but MY KIDS ARE ADORABLE:)

And this one is funny. I was trying to take a picture of her crazy bedhead, but she kept smiling so big that her eyes would close.  I took probably 5 or 6 pictures trying to get one with her eyes open, but no luck.

I'll include a couple funny things that Chap has said lately.

Yesterday he found a large manilla envelope in a drawer in the office and he wanted me to open it for him.  When I opened it, he looked inside and said, "Hmmm.  My email is empty." We almost died laughing!

Also yesterday, he was completely convinced it was my birthday.  He wanted to get me "bouncing thing" for my present (we later figured out it was a trampoline), balloons, a cake, and decorations for my party.  He said all my friends would come, and when I asked him who my friends are he couldn't think of any haha.  He told everyone all day that it was my birthday.  So silly.

Sidewalk Chalk

 This is Chapter's "Sheen" (Machine) notice the flag on top.

 Chapter drew a tree.  I was actually pretty impressed with his drawing.  Maybe we start working on drawing people???

 Mer got in on the action too.  I think she ate as much chalk as she colored with:)

Here's Chap tattling on Merit for eating chalk.  Oh help me get through the tattling years ahead haha:)

Sand Box Fun and Unseasonably Warm Weather

 Chap has pretty much lived in the sandbox this week, which is kind of awesome since he spent the majority of his 2 week flu watching tv, and I really don't like that.  It's good for kids to get a little sun, fresh air and sand in their hair:)  This was Merit's first time in the sand box and she thought it was pretty amazing.  She had sand on every inch of her tiny body, haha, and when I changed her diaper there was a fairly sizeable pile of sand on the blanket when I was done:)

Also, check out the pergola Logan built us last summer.  Down below is a graveled area for chairs, our small slide, and our outdoor swamp cooler.  It's a pretty great set up to spend the summer playing in our back yard.

Don't do it!  Eating sand is definitely the downside of letting a baby play in the sand box.  I'd like to say that Chap hasn't sampled it this year, but he did too.  At least I think he learned his lesson:)

11 Months

Since it was Leap Year, Merit actually got an 11 month birthday.  We had some fun; we went to Target and the park.

(This one is taken by Chapter with his little kiddie camera)

Merit is 11 months old and I can't believe it!  This month was a fun one! Merit started taking just a couple steps right around the 10th or 11th of February and by Valentine's day, she had it down pretty well. She still crawls a lot, but she seems to prefer to walk.  She's tons of fun and just the sweetest little girl we could ever ask for.  Yesterday (on her 11 month birthday) she seemed to grow up over night.  She did better drinking from a sippy cup and she acted more interested in real food.  It's so fun to see all these tiny changes that add up so quickly.  

Here's a picture to showcase all of those pretty teeth she worked so hard on last month:)

Valentine's Day

Here's my Valentine's day present.  Logan had the soda truck deliver me a rose, a Dutchman's cookie, and a fancy Dr. Pepper.  I tried the blueberry and half and half and it wasn't very good:(

This is the only picture we got of Valentine's day this year because it was probably the worst Valentine's day ever.
 Logan got sick (kind of a holiday trend at our house).  He was super duper sick and he finally went to the doctor on Tuesday (meaning we also missed Presidents Day weekend and didn't get to use the free Parade of Homes tickets his work gave him) and got diagnosed with Influenza A.  Great.  Later on that day, Chap came down with a fever just like Logan's (102.5) and I took him to the doctor, since the doctor said that if you caught it early you could take Tamiflu.
 I went to get Chap's prescription filled and it was $275, so I decided not to get it since it doesn't cure the flu, it just makes it shorter (supposedly).
Wednesday night while I was at Young Womens, Logan called me and told me that Merit had a fever, though not as high.  She was only sick for maybe 2 days.
Logan is still coughing (9 days later) and Chap is still sick too. I think Chapter caught a cold too though, because his symptoms the last few days have been more cold-like.

My theory of why Merit and I are fine is this: I got a flu shot last year while I was pregnant.  Not sure if this is the case or just general female superiority (haha) but I'm very thankful that I'm well and that Merit didn't get very sick. I've never been a believer in flu shots and the only reason I got one last year is because my doctor made me (he said the flu was hitting pregnant women particularly hard last year), but after the week I've had, I think we'll be flu shot people in the future!

Ice Cream