Puppy Tales

Ever since Anabelle was old enough to reach the top of her head with her hands she has refused to let Maria put any kind of hair accessories on her. However, since Anabelle got half her stubbornness from her mom, it is not surprising that Maria has not given up easily on making her hair look "pretty." Maria's latest strategy has been to appeal to Anabelle's one great love right now: puppies! Since Maria told Anabelle that the two pony tales atop her head are like puppy tales, Anabelle has excitedly embraced the idea of hair accessories. Well, at least for the first half of the day. They never quite make it to the evening.

Maria's Birthday part TWO!

Not only did Nathan make Saturday one of the best days I've ever had, but on Sunday Bennett & Jenn continued the celebration by making a special dinner. Bennett was not kidding when he said that Jenn made the best chicken pot pie, it was delicious!

18 months = No More Anabanana!! (Well maybe for 2 hours each Sunday)

On Sept 15th Maria had her birthday! Maria had a blast on her birthday since I took her out to a really nice restaurant for breakfast. I then let her take a nap for a few hours (she still needed some sleep after Anabelle's surprise wakeup-screaming duo the previous night). After that I took her to the beach and surprised her by whipping out two inflatable ocean kayaks. After an hour of pumping up kayaks (and patching up a hole) we went out for ~45 minutes. It was really cool and we saw leopard sharks swimming under us. After that I had a semi-surprise dinner planned for Maria and we invited over a few neighbors who live right by us. Despite all of these plans I made, Anabelle gave Maria her favorite gift. Her favorite gift was that Anabelle turned 18 months the same day. That meant that today Anabelle finally got to go to nursery during 2 hours of church. We walked her up to the nursery and played with her for a few minutes and then dove out of the room when she had her back turned. In stead of going straight to Sunday school, we basked in our new found freedom. We sat outside and ate Anabelle's snacks. I do have to admit I miss having her run around the teacher in Sunday school and playing with her little monster truck in elder's quorum. Against Maria's wishes I peeked in nursury between classes to see how the Banana was doing.

bebadaba doobadooba babaduba.... amen!

This evening we invited Anabelle to FHE (usually she goes to bed before we start). Maria started with a prayer and so Anabelle bowed her head, folded her arms and closed her eyes. Suddenly about 10 seconds into the prayer we heard a bebadaba doobadooba babaduba bamamadubba mubbabeba.... amen! Then Anabelle hopped up and walked over to get a pretzel... until Maria finished praying... I couldn't help but laugh at Anabelle's first prayer. We love that girl!

Lasik

Well, Maria got lasik! She keeps reminding me that she can now see better with no help then I can with my contacts in... but now she can't use the excuse that she can't read whenever we're doing our evening scripture study. Since Anabelle always wants to be like Maria, she's now dropped her glasses fettish, but now is always trying to get ahold of Maria's eyedrops to put them in her eyes!

Hanging Out with Grandma

While at the grandparent's house we decided to brave the extreme southern Utah temperature and so we hiked up to the Red Cliffs Area, which when we hiked it one winter it had a beautiful stream and some really cool waterfalls. We found out, though, in August there's only one brown-green pool at the base of where a waterfall normally is... the stream was all dried up. It was still a nice hike, though, and afterwards we got some frozen custard from the place I worked at back in 1996. Anabelle loved that part!

Vacation time leads to idle hands for Daddy

What do you get when you vacation in a city where it is over 100 degrees outside? Well, you do get either crazy parents or an entertained little girl... or as in our case, both!

I did get to take pictures of everal pretty sunrises from my parent's house, though, thanks to Anabelle... I've to sit her down and talk to her about how vacations and weekends are synonymous with "sleep-in-days" but she still insists on forcing us to adhere to her "early to bed, early to rise" philosophy.

Pippo!!

After spending a couple days at Fish Lake, we went to my parent's place in St. George for ~5 more days. There I showed Anabelle a small book about hippos and she fell in love with them, but started calling them "Pippo... Wawa!" which is translated "Hippo! It lives in the water!" Then I found a stuffed hippo and taught her that hippos also love to slide up and down the banister... she, however, taught herself that they also like to be thrown down the stairs.

* 3 cheers for blogspot!!! I was always bugged by the links to dirty videos that Youtube kept putting on the end of Anabelle's videos, so I'm happy that blogspot now has their own video thing... but they won't center the videos for you... I had to manually type in the html to do it my self... so I guess it's only two cheers for blogspot...

Fish Lake, Where Daddy Taught Anabelle to Throw Rocks into the Lake and Florentina Taught her to Eat Them

We went to Fish Lake (just NW of Capital Reef National Park) this past August with my family. We had a lot a fun there... Anabelle and I threw lots of rocks into the water. Anabelle also had a ton of fun with her cousins Pioter and Florentina (she keeps saying Pioter's name over and over again... she really liked him). The only bad part of the trip stems from the fact that Anabanana can't sleep in the same room with us, so we set up a play crib in our bathroom. A minute or two after she went to sleep there, we realized that we had a problem... her crib took up the whole bathroom, which means that we had a very uncomfortable night and very full bladders.

The next day we went on a short hike with Randall (my little brother) and Clara who had come all the way out from Boston. It was great catching up with them.