reading time, more stinky faces

More stinky faces - "How strong is Cora?"
Are you tired of these yet? Well we sure aren't.
I don't know why we've had so many pictures of Cora at mealtimes lately, she just gets so cute and interactive when she's in her little chair!

Little reading girl - ignore the lovely non-matching red socks.

olives and belly buttons

Another favorite food of Cora's is olives. Especially when they're sliced and fit right on her finger!

This was Cora this morning. She usually wears a onesie for warmth, but it got dirty from her berries at breakfast so I took it off. Because of that she made a new discovery - her belly button! She's been learning all her body part lately and this is one more cute one to add to the list. She is also very good at building tall towers and knocking them down.

morning cutie

Here are some pics of Cora being cute this morning.

Eating blackberries and strawberries and cereal.

Reading to her dolly

Pushing buttonsPeek a boo!

snow baby

What have we been up to lately? Getting back into school and babysitting - starting next week I'll be babysitting 4 kids! (They all have different schedules though; I'm pretty sure I'll never have all of them at once.)

Here are our two old friends Breanna and Acacia sharing some snacks with Cora. Cora's favorite things lately:
Hugging and patting her dollies and stuffed animals on the back
Sitting in her own little chair - her favorite is actually the new white one from Ikea, from Grandma and Grandpa.
Drawing on her magna-doodle
Giving hugs
trying to get into the cupboards in the kitchen
eating blueberries and a kiwi everyday
oatmeal squares cereal for breakfast and goldfish and go-gurt for snack
pushing around her doll stroller
building and knocking down block towers
clinging to mommy and daddy at bedtime
dragging around her favorite silky blankie
feeding her dollies a bottle and giving them her binky

Wait, binky? Well we went to the doctor for Cora's 15 month well baby check and immunizations. She's doing pretty well, even though she doesn't say many words yet she understands a lot. She's still in the bottom of the charts in weight, right in the middle for height, and right on the top for head size. But our doctor did say that he thought he could notice a little bit of shaping in her mouth already from her thumb-sucking. Usually he tells parents not to worry about it, but he suggested maybe trying to get her on a binky, which doesn't create as powerful of suction, and then after a year or so taking that away. So we bought a couple of pacifiers, but so far all she does is play with them, and still get her thumb at night. We've never worried about it very much before, since there's not much we could do and for now, she's still a pretty cute little thumb-sucker. Now it's a bit stressful when we think about her teeth in the future, but he said if the pacifier trick doesn't work, to not push it or worry too much. Hopefully she will stop on her own before too long.

These next pics are from earlier tonight. It snowed pretty good here today. Ryan took advantage of a student discount night at Pebble Creek ($6 lift passes) and went skiing with a couple of friends. Cora and I went to a dinner activity at the Institute with Shawna and Breanna (we were each other's dates since Kevin and Ryan were skiing together.) As we got home it was still snowing and I snapped a couple of pictures of Cora just before we came in the house.

And yes Mom I know she's not wearing mittens, but we were just outside for a minute going from the car to the house. Also, please overlook the lovely silver Christmas garland I still have not taken down from our front gate. What? It's almost February? I guess I should take it down now. I took down our other decorations but overlooked that one.
Cute pants are courtesy of Auntie Katie! And the cute coat is from Grandma Wei and the cute hat is from Grandma Nielson!

dancing cousins

This video was from the day we left Elise's house, January 4th. We had a little dance party before getting in the car for a long ride.

***edited***
Hope the video works for you, this one was actually taken with Ryan's new phone, the Droid. It seems that about every other time I check it, it doesn't work. Not sure what the bug is. We'll have to take another one with our camera. Cora has now started dancing by running around in a circle.

a few videos

This is Cora answering our question "How strong is Cora?" It's not a great video, but it's the best one we've gotten so far of her doing it.

This is Cora playing with her new baby and doll bed, which was a present from Grandma and Grandpa. Such a good little momma.

Cora's baby book

We all got pretty spoiled for Christmas. Cora got a bunch of fun new toys and things, which she's been having fun playing with since we got home and finally let her play with them. But the main present that Ryan and I got for her was a baby book we published with an online company called Blurb. We worked on putting it together for many hours, and it turned out really nice. I thought I would show it off a little bit here, and maybe also motivate some of my readers to look into doing some digital scrapbooking as well. It's so much easier, and I think cheaper, than traditional scrapbooking, and although I spent a while putting it together, it was fairly easy and fun to do. This is what it looked like when it was done.

The table of contents page, and the copyright page - I put the lyrics to I hope you dance, by Leeann Womack on it.

I typed up journal entries from Ryan and I when we wrote about Cora's birth, and my mom also wrote about what happened, since she was there.

This is the last page of her book

Catch-up III: Christmas and New Years

We don't have all of our pictures from Christmas yet, as we again, let others do some of the picture taking for us. We will post more as we get them.

Elise yet again was our gracious host for this year's Christmas and New Year's. We had a great time with Grandma and Grandpa, Eric and his family, and Elise and her family. We ate a lot of good food, watched movies, and played lots of board games (our favorites were Harry Potter Clue, Cranium Cadoo, and Blockus.) Cora and I got a little sick for part of the time, and Cora broke a bunch of new teeth (molars, no less,) but she was a trooper and pretty good throughout, all things considered. She loves all of her cousins and it was so fun to watch her playing with all of them. She especially loved baby Noelani; every time she saw her she would laugh.

Stinky faces in the kitchen.

Christmas sweater dress from Grandma MadelynAll dressed up for church in her Christmas dress from Grandma Madelyn. Cora just loves Alex. I think she's doing her "How strong is Cora" response here.All the kids in their BYU sweatshirts from Grandma and GrandpaThe whole gang, on January 3rd. Noelani was blessed that day in church and so she's wearing the beautiful blessing dress Grandma Madelyn painstakingly handmade for her.

Catch-up II: Anniversary

December 22 was our 5th wedding anniversary. We drove to Boise that day to join the rest of the family for Christmas, but Elise was kind enough to babysit for us later that week so we could go out to eat and celebrate. We have certainly been blessed in so many ways this first five years of our marriage. We have moved many times, made good friends and been able to spend great times with our families. We were blessed with the arrival of a beautiful baby girl who makes us laugh and smile every day.

Here we are, 5 years ago.

I love you forever Ryan!

Holiday catch-up Part 1

It's been quite a while since I've posted, but I see from looking at my friends blogs that I am not the only one who got behind during this past month. We have been away from home for a long time, it feels like, but we are finally back and enjoying being home again, with a little bit of free time left til Ryan starts classes again next Monday.

Picking up where we left off, we made another quick weekend trip down to Utah on the 20th of December. Our old friends, Brandon and Tonya Barker, drove up from Arizona to visit family for Christmas. Brandon's sister Brooke was kind enough to let us crash at her place for one night and we got to have a fun, but short visit with everyone. We met baby Haylee and played with JT, who is now so big and smart. We definitely miss the days when we took it for granted that we would hang out with our best friends every weekend. We lived a 30 second walk away from each other, and stayed up til the early morning playing board games (Boys against girls, of course.)

Here we all are at Cabella's in Lehi.