My sister in law got married back in September and Im just now posting some of the very many pictures. Aren't they cute?!

"On" switch

Liam turned 2 on the 26th and it was a big day for him. Climbing out of his crib, getting staples in his head, getting a big boy bed.... Geez, I should have just potty trained as well? :)

Where to begin?
The morning of his birthday I woke up to my bedroom door swinging open and liam running in saying "mommy, mommy!"  I glanced over and saw Chase still asleep and looked at liam and asked if he climbed out of his crib. He sweetly replied "yes", and I was secretly hoping that it was an accident that he wouldnt repeat for at least another 6 months... boy was I wrong. The rest of the morning was great... and then it was nap time.

I put Liam in his crib for his nap around 1 and before I could reach the door he was trying to climb out. I didnt want to risk him getting hurt, since he is prone to falling while standing still :),  so I pulled his mattress off his bed and onto his floor thinking that he would sleep there, no problem. Liam has always been such a great sleeper so I was really wishing this would be no big deal to him.  ha... he was jumping on his bed, getting up playing with toys and anything else you can image- he did it. I was getting so frustrated with him because I was exhausted and we had a party to go to at 3 and I really wanted him to have at least a cat nap.

3 came around and Liam had still not settled down enough to even blink. We went to Chase's families for the party and then headed over to my parents house for another birthday party. After ice cream Liam was playing and came running into the kitchen and collided with my nephew causing liam to fall and crack his head open on a bookcase. He was bleeding like crazy so we rushed to the ER.  I was wishing that the cut wasnt that bad and that they could glue it back together. The nurse came and looked at it and said "looks like someone is going to be getting staples." STAPLES!... seriously, ouch. I was not excited about that in the least. But then again, who is? Anyways, Liam did great with the shot to numb the area but started screaming while we were pinning him down. Chase pinned his legs down while I rubbed his cheek to try and be a good mom and console my child while the dr was stapling his poor little head back together. Luckily he only needed 3, so it went fairly quickly.

We finally got home around 9 and I was beat. Chase and I talked about getting a crib tent so we wouldnt have to deal with the whole "big boy" bed situation and still keep our sanity, but I didnt want to spend $50+ on something I would only use for a few months. So I braved the thought of having Liam in a big boy bed... and he is doing AWESOME! yay!! Every night he has only gotten out of bed once. Nap time is a little harder since he's not totally worn out he wont stay in bed. But I couldnt be more proud of my little boy. 

By the time I went to bed I was certain that Liam had turned the "on" switch on for the terrible twos. Chase said that "he could have wanted to get every thing out in one day." Ha! I wish that were the case.

I know that the millions of people that read my blog dont really want to see the picture of the staples, so I'll spare you.... at least for a little while until I get them downloaded to my computer :)

Here's to the Terrible Twos.... any advice?

My baby brother is all grown up!

Earlier this month my brother Michael and Amanda were sealed in the Portland, OR temple. Dont they make a cute couple? :)  Heres just a few from their day!

wedded bliss

I love being apart of a couples wedding day. This bride and groom were no exception, they were so laid back and you could tell that they were so happy to be getting married. 

cereal box mirrors

Theres was an empty wall by our kitchen table that I really wanted to hang mirrors on. I had a specific look in mind and the mirrors that I found were each $75 (no, thanks for cheap momma over here), so I decided to do a little diy project.

 Well, its done! I finished the frames last year but I had to wait a few months for it to get warm again so I could spray paint them. I love the way they turned out. And the best part, it cost me less then $15 for all three, much better for the purse strings. If you wanted to know how to make them go here.

They were super easy to make, just a little time consuming! Thank goodness the Bachelor was on then :)

Sneak Peek

Sneak Peek of my friends wedding! Mandy was such a beautiful bride and so relaxed. I had so much fun shooting their special day! More pictures to come soon.

Yay!

I have LOTS to be excited about.

First off- Summer is actually here! We went swimming for the first time this year- no pictures, but its ok cause liam wasnt having it at all. He's been sick the past couple of days and I dont think he was feeling up to swimming, poor guy.

Second- I finally have my new computer! I now dont have to wait for Chase to load pictures onto his and then transfer them to my computer! Now I just have to wait for him to teach me how to load them onto mine, so sorry no pics yet. But I have lots of pictures just waiting to be loaded!

Third- In January, my friend started building me a built in bookcase in our basement and that is now finished!

and Fourth- We finally started redoing our backyard!! Pulling out stumps, cutting down trees and next is laying new sprinklers! I cant wait til we have a lawn rather then goat heads and stickers to play on. It'll take a while to get the finished product, but we started and thats all that matters :) We are going to be fencing in our property (which is an acre) and I can not believe how expensive fencing is. We dont have time to build a fence for that big of an area so we need to buy the pre-built sections which is a pretty penny. So we'll have a fence finished in, oh i dont know, 7 years :)

playing catch up... again!

Im going to bust out my disney world trip into one post... so warning, this could get long :)

Islands of Adventure was so fun! It was pretty warm out that day so we decided to do Pop Eyes water ride, and boy did we get wet. Majority of my family all wanted ponchos but I didn't. I enjoy getting soaked when you're on a WATER ride. whimps :)  Josh had the right idea and just took his shirt off. lol. I guess its easier for guys then girls. moving on... 

Harry Potter land was INSANE! One of my families favorite ride was in there (used to be called dueling dragons) and we thought it would be packed. I was surprised that there was hardly any wait at all. Everyone was waiting in the 2 hour wait for the Harry Potter ride. Which I actually did not enjoy. They had rather large spiders falling and grabbing at you. No, thank you!

That night as we were walking out of the park we decided to eat at Bubba Gumps. Mike is a huge Forrest Gump fan and won the questionnaire that our waitress gave us. Can you tell he likes it? :)

My all time favorite park is Animal Kingdom. I was looking forward to it since we booked our flights! As soon as we parked, Crystal was ready to go and was basically speed walking to the gate. Once we got into the park we ran (while people stared at us) to the safari ride. We were only supposed to get the "fast passes" for our family and meet them somewhere else, but there wasnt a wait so we decided to take a little detour through the safari on our way to meet them :) I could spend all day on that safari ride looking at the animals. They had a baby giraffe and elephant there. Can you see them? They were so cute!  (little side note- when my mom was younger they lived on a farm in California and actually took care of a baby elephant for awhile. So jealous) Speaking of babies, dont you just love the picture of liam passed out on mike? Every morning mike would get him out of the car and as we were walking into the parks he would fall asleep on his shoulder. 

Ok, now for a funny story. See my shirt that Im wearing at Animal Kingdom? Well I got it at Old Navy for like $4 and thought it would be a nice light shirt for Florida. I wasnt sure if I really liked it or not, but I didnt think it looked bad on me so I bought it. Well, my sister and I were resting while our babies slept and we got to talking about how americans are overweight. Not more then a few minutes went by and I saw a very overweight lady with the same shirt that I had on and it was not flattering at all. Now that shirt sits in my goodwill pile. 

Okay, so it wasnt that funny but we had a good laugh. 

(did that just make me sound like a terrible person? I promise Im not)

MGM- I dont know if you could tell, but look at my brother in laws facial expression, (hes in the bright orange shirt) haha. I just had to put that up. You're welcome Mace! I love all of Liams expressions. Hes a stud, no? 

We went to "Honey I shrunk ourselves" play ground and Liam and the kids LOVED it! I didnt take a ton of pictures since they had water squirting everywhere, but I did catch a mean "slide guard" stopping Crystal from taking Liam down a slide. Did I mention that it was a small slide and there were no signs. I love Crystals expression, it's as if she's saying "Your actually being serious? That is the stupidest thing ever." Oh wait, that is what she said :) ha!

(Half way, are you still with me?) 

Love sea world! We got to touch sting rays, watch the dolphin and whale shows and later on we found a dolphin cove that had the sick/ younger dolphins swimming around. That was fun. I was mesmerized. My child has many expressions :) They crack me up! 

The dolphin show was a lot of fun, but I was really disappointed with the whale show. Last time we went the trainers swam a lot with the whales but they didnt this time. Which is understandable since a trainer was killed not to long ago by one of their whales. But they did have a baby whale there (can you see him :)) and he was so cute. 

Im not sure if you can read what I wrote of the picture of the whale, so I'll write it here too. Before the show started they were letting the big whales swim around and there was this whale that was just staring at us through the glass. It was pretty hilarious watching him just look at us. We kept laughing that he was probably looking at the idiots in the "wet zone," and it was us. Luckily we were in the middle and didnt get wet.

As we were walking through the park we saw this hammer game (i cant think of the name of them, but you get what Im talking about) and we wanted josh to play. He claimed he didnt have any cash on him and started to walk away, but my family dug through our wallets for dollar bills so we could force him to play. He won and Brian now has a giant spider man. My nephew Jace screams bloody murder if he even sees the spider man. I think its kind of funny :) 

This is my all time favorite picture. Liam loves his uncle Mikey! He fell asleep on him a lot during that trip!

Guess what?.... Im done with Florida updates! 5 months later and I can check that off my to-do list. Ha!

I have been horrible about updating our blog. I still have not finished posting about our trip to Florida back in, oh just November. Oops! I guess life has just been busy, but really I don't know why it's been 5 months and I'm still thinking about needing to do it. I have pictures that I need to put up, but I have yet to transfer them to my computer. And I like to think there are fellow bloggers that enjoying reading my pathetic little posts if there's atleast pictures of our cute Liam :) so if there is anyone that reads this, I will get better about updating our lives! Pinky promise!!

3 posts in 1.

A Minute to Win it New Years Eve!

My good friend Jessie and I love minute to win it! I would do anything to be on that show! We had some other couples over to play games with us and we had so much fun, probably Jess and I more so then others :) We played a lot of other games but these are the only pictures I had.

Face the Cookie! This was one of my favorites, but it was hilarious watching everyone move the cookie to their mouth. 

 

I'm not sure why, but the kids loved Chases boots and thought it was so funny to just stand in them. I should have put Liam in but didn't think about that til now :)

 Chase is going to kill me for putting these up, but he doesn't read this so he wont find out. Hopefully. When he gets into games, he become aggressively competitive... kinda scary :) He was bouncing ALL over the place and swinging his body as hard as he could. (side note: we played a game once where a person stands in the middle of a circle with a newspaper and everyone in the circle takes turns at saying a name of someone else in the circle, and if your name is called you want to say another name fast before the person in the middle trys to hit you before they say a name. If that made sense at all :) well chase was in the middle holding the newspaper and when he tried to hit someone I serious thought he was going to break something in the room he would fly across it so fast). 

Casey put bigger ping pong balls in my box to make me work even harder at getting them out. I was wondering why it was taking so long for some to bounce out :)

A great way to start the New Years off right....

New Years day Liam cut his eye brow/ lid open on a metal bed frame and we had to take a trip to the ER to get it glued shut. Not a great sign for how my year will go with this boy! I see several er trips in my future!

Fangs...

As of today Liam now has 6 teeth but when his top teeth were coming through they came in a weird way. Most babies get their front teeth first. Well not mine, he got his fangs first. Well they looked like his fangs but they are the ones next to the fronts. I tried to capture them on camera, but he wasn't cooperating too well so this is the best I got. My mom said that Heavenly Father knew that if he gave Liam his fronts first that he would probably knock them out with all the falling he was doing. Which is so true.

the happiest place on earth

Day 2: Magic Kingdom

We spent all day at magic kingdom. It was insanely busy but we still had a blast. 

Liam and Emily loved walking next to each other. They kept reaching for each others hands and leaning in to give loves. 

 Crystal and matt... she sure looks excited, not sure about matt :)

The kids loved driving the cars. 

Its scary that jamen is going to be able to actually drive in a year...

 Cec was in charge of steering and josh was helping with the gas and brakes. Chase and I were lucky enough to be in front of them and experience bumper cars :) this is josh looking oh so innocent! 

 Toon Town! Mike had perfect timing to look at the camera! 

 haha. i just have to laugh at this. 

Sleeping arrangements through out the day...

 

poor brian. we were waiting for the parade to start but he could not stay awake for more then a few seconds. 

  It down poured on us through out the day. It was hilarious to see everyone huddle inside stores to stay out of the rain. We braved it and kept riding rides! It was a blast, but sure didn't help the hair situation!

i LOVE this picture of crystal and liam. We woke him up for the parade and he was in awe of everything. The princesses that came through would blow kisses at him. I would too since hes so darn cute :)

Tinkerbell.... but i missed her. oops! i love the lighting on the castle!

 before we left we wanted to go back to see 

Mickey and Minnie!

terrible picture of me but its the only one with them in it!