We Heart Sugar Cookies

We have a ward Family Valentine's Dance to go to tonight, and I volunteered to bring some heart-shaped sugar cookies.  When I started on them yesterday, it quickly became a group effort.  Apparently I've never learned how to roll out cookie dough, so Marty had to teach me.  And Damian can smell sugar from a mile away, so he was eager to "help", aka, help eat the cookies at every stage of the process.


Rolling out the dough



Cookie cutter



Sampling the dough

NO clue where he got that idea.  :-)

So, tangent, whenever my mom made cookies, she always gave each of us kids a little ball of dough to eat, which we LOVED.  But if we tried to sneak any more, we got in trouble.  In fact, I got in trouble this past Christmas for taking extra dough when we made sugar cookies at my mom's house!  But I think she was just kidding for old times' sake...  :-)  So now that I'm a grown-up, that's the main reason why I bake.  So I can eat all the dough I want.  And so far, it looks like I'm passing this psychological problem on to Damian.  As we were rolling out the dough, I was like, "Look, you can eat this!"  After that first taste, he kept taking more, even out of the dough that had already been cut into cookie shapes.  But I just laughed.  So basically, if we ever have more kids, I'll have to make a quadruple batch of dough if I want to end up with any baked cookies.

Frosting a cookie (after he'd already eaten half of it)

And survey says...

Looks like he hates it, huh?  But this is the face I got when I asked him to smile.  He's so photogenic!  He actually loved the cookie, which became very obvious when he finished the cookie, asked for more, and sprawled out on the floor sobbing after I told him no.  I should have taken a picture of that!  But overall, he loved all of it.  We've got a baker on our hands!  Or maybe just a sugarholic.  We can blame that one on me too.



Big Shoes To Fill

Lately, Damian absolutely loves shoes.  In fact, he was sitting on my lap when I started typing this, but he just walked away saying, "Shoe?  Shoe?"  He likes his own shoes just fine, but he's been having fun trying on other people's shoes lately.  In fact, I just heard Marty say, "No, those are Mommy and Daddy's shoes.  Let's go find your shoes."  This whole thing started out okay, trying on Daddy's shoes.  That's normal, wanting to be a big man like Daddy, right?

Then, he moved on to Mommy's shoes.  But they look like they could be guy shoes, so we didn't worry about it.

But then he moved on to Mommy's more feminine shoes.  And I must say, I think he walks in them better than I do.

Up until this point, we chalked it up to curiosity, or wanting to be like Mommy and Daddy.  However, a little later in the day...

I know it's kind of hard to see in this picture, but these shoes belong to his little friend Abby.  They are pink with high heels.  And this is one of several poses that he did for me, and this is probably the least girly of them all (but somehow those ones didn't make it onto my camera).  And then, when it was time to go home, he put these shoes on again and totally intended to walk out the door with them.  Under no circumstances would he trade for his own boy shoes.  Now, I have to wonder, was it a mistake to get him a doll for his birthday last year?  This year, we'll get him a nice manly football.  :-)

Take a Hike. Or Two.

I was looking through my photos from our trip to Utah and realized that I never posted these pictures from the hiking we did with Marty's family.  There were two separate hikes we did, both on the same day.  That's how it goes with Marty's family!  I'm always exhausted by the end of the day!

So the first hike was in Snow Canyon.  There's this cool little slot that I'm sure people pass over all the time because it looks like nothing, but it has petroglyphs from ancient inhabitants of the area.  It's pretty narrow, as you can see from the picture.  We're practically touching both walls of the slot.

On the way back to the car, Damian got his first try at hiking.  In the past we've always just carried him, but he was restless, so Grandpa Dave helped him along.



Here's all of us hikers.  Isn't it beautiful?  And this is in December!

After this first hike, we jumped in the car and drove to our next hike, to see some more petroglyphs just outside of Ivins.  This was a longer hike, and Damian decided to snooze through most of it.  But this looks super comfy, right?

So if you've been wondering what petroglyphs look like, your curiosity is about to be satisfied.  I forgot to take a picture of my favorite one, which looked unmistakeably like an alien. I think aliens used to visit the Indians back in the day, which would explain the spaceship in this picture.



Later in the day, we went to Olive Garden for dinner, where Damian threw the tantrum of a lifetime, and then fell asleep in my arms.  I guess we wore him out!  Only Marty's family could fit enough fun into one day to make my toddler zonk out in the middle of a restaurant at 7:30 in the evening!  But we definitely loved it!

The Potty Chair

Damian has recently become fascinated by the toilet.  When he started asking us to let him sit on the toilent, pulling his pants and diaper off as he insisted, we decided to get him a potty chair.  He still has no idea what he's supposed to do when he sits on the potty chair, but he sure loves sitting there.  Every hour on the hour (or at least it seems that frequent), he asks, "Poo-poo?"  So here is a picture of where we've been spending the majority of our time lately. 

Hopefully it won't be long before he figures out what the potty chair is really for, because I'm getting tired of spending my days in the bathroom for no good reason.  But it sure is cute!  :-)

Three Christmases - One Short of Filmdom

This year we were able to spend two weeks in Utah during the holidays.  We spent one week in St. George with Marty's family, and one week with my family.  We had real Christmas with Marty's family, then we had a second Christmas with my family.  Since we didn't want to pack up the stuff we got for Damian, we left it all here at home and had a third Christmas just yesterday.  Here are some of the highlights from the festivities.

On Christmas Eve at the McFaddens, we did a live nativity, and Damian was assigned to be a shepherd boy.  That lasted for all of five seconds, and those five seconds weren't even during the nativity.  But he was adorable!

I think his favorite part was riding the sheep.  Ride 'em cowboy!  Or sheepboy, I guess.

For Christmas with the Reynolds, I wanted to pretend like it was really Christmas, and I got upset when everyone just started coming downstairs like it was any other day.  I made all the kids go back upstairs at least for the photo op.  As for our strange pose, watch the SNL video called "Surprise Party."  We were "just so freakin' excited!"

I especially like Marty's face.  Don't you? 

And as is cliche, Damian's favorite toy that morning was a box.  I think he wants to be an astronaut when he grows up.  :-)

Our third and final Christmas was here at home, and we actually didn't take very many pictures because somebody (me) didn't take the pictures from the trip off the camera, so we kinda ran out of space on the memory card.  Oh well.  It was actually really nice to have a quiet Christmas all to ourselves.  Here's a little video, right before the camera died. 



I will relieve you of your suspense.  It was a saw to go with his new workbench.  And by new I mean old because we got all his gifts from DI and we only spent maybe $20 total.  We were very proud of ourselves because we like to give gifts and it's hard to keep it cheap.  And it was $20 well spent because he LOVES his tools and workbench.

Even with three Christmases, it seems like the season was too short.  We had so much fun with our Christmases, and it was such a blessing to spend this special time with family for the first time in three years.  There is no better place to be when we celebrate the birth of Christ, the one who made it possible for us to be with our families forever.

New Favorite Movie

"I didn't want to do this but you leave me no choice. Here comes the smolder..."

The Last Catch-Up: The Speed Racer / Dancing Fiend

This video is pretty long, but very cute.  The speed racer portion might drag on a little, but skip to the next part if you get bored because it gets better.  PS - Try to ignore my giggles.  Apparently I'm a giggly person.

More Catch-Up: Garden d'Lights

One last December catch-up. Last Monday we went to the Bellevue Botanical Garden with some of our favorite friends to see the Garden d’Lights. They use Christmas lights to create all sorts of beautiful things, like a pond, a waterfall, an aquarium, corn fields, grapes in a vineyard, and even a monkey! This picture just doesn’t do the place justice.

However, even with all the cool things to look at, I think Damian’s favorite part was splashing in a puddle while some on-looking ladies laughed at him.

Catch-Up Number 2 - KidsQuest Children's Museum

There's this cool place in Factoria called KidsQuest Children's Museum.  It's basically a hands-on museum full of fun things to learn and explore.  I've been meaning to take Damian for a long time, but the price of admission kind of scared me off.  A few months ago, I found out that the first Friday of every month is FREE admission in the evening.  After a couple first Fridays had passed, I finally put it on the calendar as if it was a real appointment - the only way I'd, A) remember, and B) not be tempted to postpone it in favor of playing with friends.  So we went, but our camera did not.  We forgot to bring it.  Luckily, Marty's phone takes pretty decent pictures.  Just don't look too closely if blurry pictures offend you.

There was a room in the Garage area with a bunch of kid-style hammers, nails, etc., and Damian loved playing carpenter with the tools.  Don't tell him, but he's getting a workbench for Christmas this year.  His fascination with the tools just made us that much more excited for his Christmas present.

I know this next picture doesn't look super exciting.  (And, I guess, neither does Damian.)  It's a chalkboard.  But in the background, there's a gigantic Light-Bright!!!  Damian liked playing with it, but I decided we're going to make one like that someday because I freakin' loved it!!!

Last, but certainly not least, we went to the Waterways area.  Damian totally loves water, and he had a blast.  You can't tell in this lame picture, but by the time we were ready to leave, he was thoroughly soaked.  Just the way it should be.  It was so fun to watch him explore, and we can't wait to go back!

Decking the Halls... 2 Weeks Ago

I was doing so great blogging regularly back in November.  Then, for a while, I was waiting for something interesting to happen so I had something to post.  But then the holidays hit.  So I have a few things that I meant to blog earlier, but today is when I'm getting to it.  So here is the first of my catch-ups: decorating for Christmas!

We decided to buy an artificial tree this year.  Fresh tree every year = $40 per year.  Artificial tree = $80 one time.  So, as long as we use it twice, we haven't lost any money.  And I think we'll get our money's worth.  It was a lot of work to fluff the stupid thing (ask Marty about his ornery wife during the whole ordeal), but I love saving money.  Here's Damian helping to trim the half-put-together tree.

As we were pulling out decorations, we found a wreath and Marty thought it would be funny to put it around Damian's neck like a necklace.  Or a race horse.  But the kid totally freaked out.  Here he is tip-toeing around the horrifying wreath after the traumatizing experience.

The poor thing is gritting his teeth and everything.  :-)  Anyway, it took a full week to finish getting the tree put together and decorated, but it's always worth it.  About a week after that, we finally put up our little 4-foot tree, aka, Damian's tree.  Here he is carefully hanging his ornaments. 

He's loved rearranging the ornaments and, um, plugging in the lights every morning.  It kind of scares me that he understands electricity like that, but at least he's putting a plug in the outlet instead of a fork.