Christmas

We had a wonderful Christmas this year. We have felt so blessed to be surrounded by family on this special holiday season. We got to spend time with my family this year and on our way up to Washington, we drove to Boise where we stopped by to see my grandparents. It was wonderful to spend some time with them as well. We then flew out from Boise to Seattle where we met my parents and spent a week with them. Steve's (my step-dad) daughter Jamena and family came to visit for a day and it was great to see them too. Jamena's son, Grady who is only 5 months older than Kyla was also there and they had fun playing together.
We got so many wonderful gifts from people. I got a sewing machine and a kitchen aid mixer (the kitchen aid is also part of my birthday present too :)), movies and Jordin Sparks' CD!! Hyrum got a Wii game, a microphone stand to record his music, a webcam and lots of other fun things. Not that Christmas is about receiving gifts, but we really are grateful for family and friends we have thought about us and have blessed our lives. It truly has been wonderful to think of the Ultimate gift of Christmas which is Jesus Christ our Savior, his birth, atonement, his sacrifice, resurrection and his love. I know that Jesus Christ loves me and I am grateful that he has provided a way for all of us to return home to live with him and our Father in Heaven again.

Kyla and Grady playing a beautiful duet!

Here is one of the toys Grammy and Grampa gave to Kyla! She sure enjoyed opening presents. We tried to get the toy out of the box so she could play with it and she got really mad because we were taking too long! It was pretty funny.

Here's our family Christmas day picture!

I met my grandma on my step-dad's side for the first time. We went to visit her at the nursing home on Christmas Day. She was pretty happy!
Kyla playing with Great Grandma Brown!

My parents have a cat named Shiloh and Kyla LOVED playing with her. She would get really excited every time the cat came up to her. It was great!

One really cool thing that Kyla's Grandma Denney does to all her grandkids is give them the 12 days of Christmas. So everyday for 12 days, she got to open one present! Kyla loved it and it gave her a ton of practice for opening the presents on Christmas day! :)

Because we went to be with my family for Christmas this year, we had our own little Christmas before we left.
This was one of Kyla's presents she got from Hyrum and I. She LOVES Barney so we got her a DVD. She definitely has enjoyed it.

This is my mom and step-dad on Christmas day before opening presents! They're so cute!

Kyla got a new princess chair for Christmas from Grammy and Grampa! She loves to sit in it. Notice the dress she's wearing: that's the very first thing I've ever sewn (not including a quilt I made for Kyla)...the first Christmas dress I've ever made! It's kind of a hard picture to see everything but the top is black velvet with a bow around the waist and then red silk with black lacey sequince stuff sticking out the bottom of the red silk. It's very pretty and I'm very happy with how it turned out.

Next up: Kyla's Birthday Party!!

Snowball Fight and Christmas Tree Decorating!

This is GREAT! Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Snowball fit with Mitt Romney and George Washington!!
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Decorating a Christmas Tree
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Scary Santa!

We took Kyla to see Santa a couple weeks ago at Wal-Mart. As you can tell, she wasn't sure what to think of the guy. :) I wouldn't blame her though. After being around clean shaven, non-fictional characters her whole life, suddenly being handed to a strange thing with a white hairy face and glasses over the eyes can be more than intimidating! I would cry too!
I was actually kind of surprised she cried because she's really quite fond of characters, beards, and new people but apparently with Santa it was a whole different story! Plus it probably didn't help too much that she was ready for a nap. I don't think she's scared of him anymore now though because she can say "Santa" now (or "danda" in her exact words) and point him out of a crowd. Maybe I'll take her again before Christmas ends and see what she really thinks. :) Merry Christmas everyone!!

Confessions

Alright so I have an addiction and obsession. I am a true American Idol fan and it starts in less than 4 weeks!! I am so excited. So if you ask to do anything with me on Tues or Wed nights, forget it because I'll be at home watching American Idol! :) I was so excited that Jordin Sparks won last year and her CD just came out. I haven't been able to get it yet (lack of money of course) but if anyone has it, I'd love to borrow it from you to hear what she's accomplished this last year. Thanks! :)

I'm also proud to announce that Kyla took 10 steps all by herself yesterday! Yay for her! She'll be walking consistently by Christmas for sure.

27 Days Til Christmas!

Here is our beautiful Christmas Tree! It's decorated in blue and silver ornaments, silver bows and white lights. It's only 3 ft tall but it's sitting on a platform to make it seem even taller. :) We had to barricade it in a corner so Kyla wouldn't go for the kill and knock it over 30 times a day. She hasn't even gotten to it yet!

A close up


Here is part of our Christmas decorations. The shelf is new. I got it with some of my b-day money! I love it. I made the little arrangement with extras left over from the wreath.

One other thing I have forgotten to mention: I had a great b-day on the 16th. Hyrum got me a KitchenAid stand Mixer! I was the happiest person in the world that day! Also Kyla got me a b-day gift too. The day before my b-day, she took 2 steps for the first time all by herself!! I was so proud and happy. She hasn't really done anymore than that, but she's getting better still! We're hoping she'll be walking by Christmas.
Here is the one and only Christmas Wreath arranged by Amiee! I can't believe I actually made that!

Thanksgiving

The Day after Thanksgiving we did a little shopping. We needed to get some boots for Kyla to keep her feet warm and to prevent her from taking her socks off while in the cold car. So we found these for a great deal and she looks so cute in them! Hyrum took this picture. You can see she's ready for winter! :)

This is what Kyla looks like after a yummie dinner of chili! She is ALWAYS such a messy eater, espeically when it comes to one of her favorite foods: beans!



These 2 pictures are of what Kyla's hair sometimes looks like in the back--CURLY!!!! I absolutely love it! The top of her hair is completely straight though so who knows what it'll look like in a couple years. hehe.


During Thanksgiving Break we spent a lot of time with Hyrum's family here in Rexburg. They have a hot tub so we took Kyla in the hot tub with us for the first time! She thought it was REALLY hot at first but as soon as she got used to it, she loved it!

On Thanksgiving Day we had lots of fun. We ate all day long and stuffed ourselves until we got sick, we watched the movie "The Ultimate Gift" which I highly reccommend. It is soooo good!! All the girls cried. :) Then the girls scrapbooked for part of the evening, played games and relaxed. It was such a great day!

Getting Ready for the Holidays

Hello Everyone! Sorry it's been so long since I updated our blog. You all know how it goes though: You start to get really busy and then one thing after another comes up that's more important and then you just never have time to do anything!
By the way, these pictures are some of the cute ones we took for our family Christmas cards we're sending out. We're only putting the one of her and one of the 3 of us on there. The one with her hands up in the air has a story behind it. Let me share. With Hyrum's wonderful and funny sense of humor he taught Kyla to raise her hands high above her head whenever he said "Wasssup!" So now when we say that, she'll raise her hands up and tilt her head. It's so cute!



Can you believe there is only 28 days until Christmas?! I am so excited this year because
1) It's Kyla's first Christmas and everyone is spoiling her...including us!
2) I get to see my family (which we weren't sure until this weekend if we were even going to be able to. Once we actually decided we were going we wanted to surprise my mom because we were going to drive but then plans ended up changing again by my mom surprising us saying she was going to fly us down there!! Thanks again soooo much Mom. I love you and am so happy I'll get to see you soon!)
3) We have a beautiful decorated tree. It's simple, and it's small, but I think it's beautiful! Not to mention I made another wreath today which again, I'm pretty proud of. It turned out really pretty!
4) I've gotten into the Christmas spirit early this year. Hyrum and I started listening to Christmas music in the beginning of November so we've been really excited.
5) Since this is Kyla's first Christmas, we get to play Santa this year!!!! This is something that I have been looking forward to since High School.
6) We get to take Kyla to see Santa and get her picture with him....whether she's screaming or not!

There are more pictures and stories on the way! Have a great week!

10 months old?!

I've been taking a picture of Kyla every month on her "birthday" day (every 1st day of the month). This is what her 10 month old picture looked like. She smiled so big and cute! (If you look carefully you will notice how you can see her top tooth:) I'll be adding more pictures of her teeth soon.) A fun fact about Kyla: She can almost say Jesus when we show her a picture of him! We say, "Whos that? Is that Jesus?" and most of the time her response is, "Jeesss". Another fun fact is that she knows where my eyes, nose and mouth is. I can ask her, "Where's mommy's nose?" And she'll point to my nose. Then I ask her the same with my eyes and mouth and she knows where they are. It's great! Now we just have to work on having her point to her own nose, mouth and eyes.

The many faces of Kyla--She always scrunches up her nose and face and makes a noise as if she's sniffing or something. I have no idea where she picked that up but it's so stinking cute that I finally took a great picture of the moment. She's so silly.

Hyrum's birthday was on the 3rd of this month. Kyla and I couldn't wait any longer to have Hyrum open his gifts from us so we did it right after we all woke up (as you can tell, they're still in their pjs!) One of the gifts that Kyla gave him was a Nintendo Wii game. It's called Surfs Up and you obviously can tell he was pretty excited! It's a really fun game though.

Kyla was playing in the tub yesterday and since she loves bubbles so much, I decided to give her a bubble bath. She had a blast! She was so excited that she was eating the bubbles and came up out of the water with a bubble beard! Another fun fact about Kyla: On Hyrum's computer there is a screensaver called bubbles and when Kyla is fussy, we tell her that we're going to show her the bubbles. She gets really excited and then we show her the computer with bubbles going everywhere on the screen. She stops fussing and gets so excited, smiles really big and tries to say bubbles and points at them. It's the cutest thing.

This is my most recent project that I've done. I've been obsessed with wreaths lately but I didn't want to go to the store to actually buy a pre-made wreath since they're usually about $20.00. So I decided to see if I could make one myself. It turned out better then I thought it would! I just bought the grapevine wreath by itself and then bought the fall flowers and stuck them in the wreath. I made my own arrangement for less then $10.00! The great thing about doing this myself is once fall is over, I can take out the leaves in the wreath, and arrange it to look Christmas like with poinsettas and other christmas type things. I'm pretty excited!

Halloween

We dressed Kyla up as a ladybug for her first Halloween! I got her wings at DI (like a goodwill type of store) for $1.00 and then collected a bunch of other stuff for her outfit at numerous stores and made some of it too. Her whole costume probably only cost about $5.00! GREAT DEAL! We took her trick or treating to a couple doors in Hyrum's parents neighborhood and to a couple friends' houses. She liked eating the wrappers of the candy and she had a lot of fun! We took some photo shoots of Kyla and her cousins, Courtney and Kyler all dressed up. It was a fun night! Today, I went to Wal-Mart to decide what costume Kyla would wear next year. I found a cute little lion outfit for 1/2 off! It was only $5.00. I was so excited. I'll probably put a little bow in it or something in case people mistake her for a boy which happens way too often then not.
FYI: Kyla slept through the night once a couple days ago! It was heaven! However, she has decided that she doesn't want to do it again...:( Bummer! We're still working on it though.

The Long Stand

A couple days ago, there was a cartoon on TV that Kyla was extremely interested in so Hyrum placed her in front of it standing and let his hand go from off her back and she stood on her 2 feet all by herself for 30 sec! It was the longest she's ever just stood there like that. It was pretty exciting. We can hold her by one hand now as she walks...very wobbly. It's very cute. She'll be walking any day now! :)





Kyla was playing at Grandma's house for a little while and they played in the leaves with her cousin Kyler! They had fun! Kyla likes leaves.

Kyla Speaks

So as I was reading one of my friends' blogs about their little one saying his first word I realized that I haven't even mentioned anything on here about Kyla talking! It was about a month or so ago when she said dada and actually knew who "dada" was. She said it a few times before and she called everything that. She still calls a lot of things dada, but now she can actually call dad "dada"! A couple weeks ago she started saying "mama" but she only says that when she wants food or is tired, of course :) Then a couple days after that she started saying ball. Her favorite word now is ball and gets really excited everytime she sees a ball. She points at it and says "Ball, ball ball ball" Sometimes it sounds like "ba" other times it sounds like "baw" (trying to get the L sound or something.) As of yesterday, she's been trying to say buh bye and I think she actually did a couple times. It's amazing how smart she is.
Another thing recently is that her top right tooth broke through the gum finally!! It has seemed like a 2-3 month battle to get that one tooth through. I can still see 3 more top teeth trying to come in also so hopefully it won't take another 2 months to get those in! It's been a rough couple months teething wise for her. But she's such a trooper and is so good about it.
She's also getting so close to walking! She walks along all the furniture but it just too scared to let go. Whenever I walk with her holding her hands, as soon as I let go, she sits down in a very graceful way. Sometimes I try to trick her and she actually stands for a sec or two, but once she realizes she's doing it her self, she'll sit back down again. I know she can do it, I just don't think she has any desire to right now.
Anyway, that's the recent update on Kyla! She's such a cute little one though. :) We love her soooo very much.

The Twins--Only with different moms

So I had the funnest week. A couple weeks ago one of my best friends from HS, who is now living in Utah, came up to visit Kyla and I. Her husband was busy with school and work, and so was mine so she came up to keep me company and to keep herself from getting too bored. Her baby Makella is only 6 weeks younger than Kyla so they were both crawling everywhere and having so much fun playing together. It was great to have them here! One day we bought them matching outfits and went to take their pictures. They looked so cute! They look like twins from the back, but once they turn around, the look completely different. I consider them twins however, just one came from me and the other came from Bonnie! We definitely had fun though!

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

SNOW?!

It snowed here in Rexburg on October 6th, the weekend of General Conference. It was exciting because we could take Kyla in the snow! She loved looking at the snow come down. They were coming down in huge flakes. Here a few pictures to capture the moment.

NYC

This is a few of our Pics of NYC! The first picture is of our little family with the city behind us. We were on a ferry headed toward the statue of liberty and Staten Island. The next is at the oreo finale event. There was an oreo mascot guy and Kyla loved him! He was lots of fun. Then it's the guys singing on the stage. They did so great! Then of course, the host of the finale event was Carson Daley, and the guys took a picture with him. Kyla and I got a pic with him too. I must say, he has pretty eyes, but WAY too much makeup. :) The guys unfortunately didn't win but we all had so much fun in the Big Apple! Of course New York is famous for our country's freedom symbol, the Satute of Liberty. It was an amazing site to see. It was neat being able to see it in person instead of so many times on TV. I definitely left New York feeling patriotic after seeing Lady Liberty. Hyrum was so nice and watched Kyla for a few hours in the hotel while I went with a couple other couples to see the Broadway show Les Miserables. It was the most incredible thing I've ever seen in my life. The actors/actresses were phenomenal. The actress that played Fontaine (the mother of Cosette) was the singing voice of Mulan and Ariel from the Little Mermaid. It was great! Well that's just a little about our trip. Thanks to everyone again for their support and especially for the votes to get the Kreamy Krunchies through to NY! It was an experience of a lifetime!