It's been a while... again...

Life has been a little crazy!

Since my last post....

1. Emma started "playschool" with two little friends from church. We meet once a week, and the moms take turns being in charge. We have a letter of the day and typically do a craft, read a book, let the kids just play together, and then eat lunch. It is hilarious to watch these three kiddos; they are adorable together. Seeing her friends interested in learning letters has encouraged Emma to want to learn her letters more. Now she can recognize uppercase A-H (that's as far as we've gotten) and gets excited when she sees those letters. Next step I guess will be lowercase?

2. Our Primary Presidency changed, but I stayed in as secretary. It's been a crazy time since the changes happened just a few weeks before the Primary Program (which was AWESOME) and half the presidency is pretty new to the ward (moved in July/Aug, called end of Sept). Now we're trying to figure out teachers/class assignments for next year and it's a little hectic! Our building doesn't have enough classrooms for all the kids we have so we have to be careful about what classes get split and which classes just have 15 kids (yikes!).

3. Chris changed his position at work (maybe this happened before my last post, but I doubt I wrote about it on here). He now does something on the mobile side at USAA. All I really understand is that he's had to work a ton of extra time because some system has major issues, he does something with USAAs internal apps, and because he needs test devices to make sure all the apps he manages work his work now pays for his phones (yes, he needs more than one for his job) and his ipad! It meant he got upgrades earlier than we had planned on, so hooray for work! He seems to really enjoy what he's doing, although I'm sure he'll enjoy it more once they figure out the root cause of the issues they've been having the last several weeks.

4. I had a birthday! I got a new Kindle for my birthday and I think we went out to dinner (I'm sure we did, but I really don't remember... haha). What I really wanted for my birthday was a massage, so the week after my birthday Chris took a day off work and we went and got massages. He found a groupon that made a 90 minute couples massage the same price as me getting a 60 minute massage, so we went for it. Oh man, it was heaven!

5. My bff moved to Texas! She lives a couple hours away, and I still haven't seen her since she moved here... but we're in the same time zone now and that is exciting!

6. The week after my birthday we headed down to Galveston so we could go on our DISNEY CRUISE! Oh my goodness, this was the most magical vacation ever, and I really need to do a whole series of posts about it. We have hundreds of photos that I'm still sorting through. But in a nutshell, we met lots of princesses, characters from Frozen, Mickey and Pluto! We got to see all three AMAZING broadway style shows they had onboard (which meant Emma stayed up til 10:00 every night). We watched fireworks during our Pirates IN the Caribbean party. We swam, ordered room service, and ate multiple entrees at dinner most nights. My favorite dessert I ate the entire time came the last night, when we ate at Tiana's Place. Beignets are amazing. Our tablemates were from Louisiana and they said the beignets were very good and authentic. Oh, and we went to Cozumel. Haha. We only got off the ship for about 1.5 hours; next cruise we'll go to ports we are more interested in.

7. We came home right in time for Thanksgiving! We had a great Thanksgiving at home, just the 3 of us. It was perfect.

Birthday Girl

Emma was SO excited for it to be her birthday (back in May...). For weeks leading up to her birthday she said just wanted a cupcake and a "happy spiderman balloon". Eventually I got her to explain that a happy spiderman balloon is a balloon that has spiderman on it and says Happy Birthday. We were relieved that we were able to find one! Chris's parents were in town for her birthday, and she was so excited to have them here! Emma is currently obsessed with Care Bears, so she was very excited to get some big Care Bear figurines for her birthday, along with a blue wooden mailbox which has been great for her imaginative play. 

For her birthday she got Candyland. It just took one round for her to totally get it. She's great at taking turns, can figure out where she needs to go, and LOVES the pink cards with characters on it. If someone else gets one of the special cards (Princess Frostine, the Gingerbread Man, Grandma Nutt, Jolly, Lolli, and Mr. Mint) she lets them go to that space, but then wants to put the pink card in front of her and count them all the time. She's pretty funny.

Uncle Jeremiah and Aunt Kara sent Emma this adorable wooden stable with horses in it. Emma was excited to name her horses and she tries to ride them around the house. She sure loves her horsies! 

We also had a little birthday playdate with friends, but I was too busy enjoying the playdate to take pictures. She has the sweetest little friends and they had a blast playing up in our playroom for an hour or so before eating cupcakes!

Swimming!

I wish I had more photos of this, but this summer Emma really has LOVED swimming! At my family reunion she got some time in the pool with Aunt Kristi, who has taught swimming lessons for years! Aunt Kristi helped Emma overcome her fear of getting her face wet in the pool and she taught Emma how to jump into the water. This first picture is from right after Emma jumped into my arms in the pool, she was so excited!

Since coming home from our family reunion, Emma has asked to go swimming several times. Thankfully we live in a neighborhood with a swimming pool, and some of our good friends also have pools in their neighborhoods, so we've been able to swim lots! 

Emma is getting better at being patient while we put on sunscreen, and she's got the sweetest tan lines on her bum from her swimsuit. She loves to jump into the pool, either into my arms or just straight into the water. She's a pro at kicking her feet and is working on how to move her arms. One of her friends is a 5 year old who likes to play with diving rings at the pool. Emma likes to help throw the rings, and then swim around the pool and show Savannah where the rings are.

We will be so sad in October when our pool closes again for a few months. 

We are alive!

A brand new movie theater opened up not too far from our house a few months ago. They were one of the theaters that did a free kids movie each week during the summer. For Emma's first movie theater experience we saw Minions (which she already loved) and she did great! She was excited to have a big comfy seat all to herself, and since the ticket was free we got popcorn! She was so excited. Since this time we've been back to the theaters twice - once for another free movie, and once to see Finding Dory. She really likes going to the theater!

This is the first time Emma went bowling. She was so excited to push the bowling ball down the little slide (kids ramp) that they have. We've since gone to another bowling alley (actually one at the movie theater mentioned above) and she LOVES it. 

For the 4th of July we got sparklers! Well, I shouldn't say that we got them. We had Janyse & Dennis and their kids at our house for the 4th, and they picked up some awesome fireworks and sparklers. We bought pop-its, which Emma loves. Emma got to stay up really late (around 10) to watch the fireworks and do the sparklers. She LOVED all the colors and the loud noises and did so good staying up!

Silly Emma Pictures

Emma is just a happy kid for the most part (although she throws killer tantrums too). She was excited to show off that she had just finished brushing her teeth!

One day I came into her room after naptime to discover that at some point after I put her down for her nap she had run out into the playroom and grabbed her doctor kit and colander with some play food. When I came into her room she was wearing the colander on her head like a hat and asked if I wanted pasghetti. Goofy girl! 

Chris does a lot of stretches for his legs because he has some sore muscles, and Emma likes to stretch on the stairs with daddy. This was right before church one day. 

After church one week we were changing out of our church clothes and Emma ran into our room with these Mr. Potato Head glasses on her face. She thought it was the funniest thing in the world, we agreed. She's pretty silly

After doing some yard work I realized I had a splinter. Because Emma is obsessed with Doc McStuffins she was convinced she could get my splinter out. She ran to my bathroom and helped me find "the tool" and sat there for about 10 minutes squeezing my finger with the tweezers. She wasn't able to get it out, but she sure gave it a valiant effort.

Chris birthday

I'm starting to play catchup a little here on the blog. First: Chris's birthday was at the end of March. We decided to go to a new(to us) restaurant for dinner to celebrate! We hit up Pappasitos Cantina and oh. my. goodness. It was DELICIOUS! Huge thanks to the sis who sent us a gift card there for Christmas, it was... AMAZING!

We normally skip appetizers, but this queso. I could drink it by the gallon and still want more. It was AMAZING.

We decided to get 2 entrees and split them. I ordered these chile rellanos, which I had heard of before but never tried. We both LOVED them. Oh man. And their rice and beans were amazing too.

Pappasitos is well-known for their fajitas, so we decided to order the chicken/beef fajita plate. Oh. Yum. I can see why they are famous for their fajitas. We loved all our food and were too stuffed to eat dessert there, so on our way home we hit up the grocery store and bought some ice cream.

I guess, before the grocery store we went to Barnes & Noble and looked at travel guides because we're going on a legit family vacation later this year and wanted to see what awesome books there were. We left with the Disney Cruise Line travel guide and have learned a TON of info that will help our vacation be AWESOME! Then we went home and ate a little ice cream!

One of our birthday traditions is getting a balloon bouquet. I let Emma pick Chris's balloons this year and wasn't surprised at all when she picked the Doc McStuffins balloon. Chris and I laughed so hard later when he came home and saw his balloon. Emma played with it for several days until it bit the dust. She's already talking about what balloon she wants for her birthday next month!

I think it was on his actual birthday, but Chris's parents sent us a gift card for Cheesecake Factory (because they know we are OBSESSED!) and it made the perfect dessert on his big day! We got two slices- this one is the Lemoncello Cream Torte, which is probably one of our new favorites. It was DIVINE. The other slice we got was Adam's Peanut Butter Cup Fudge Ripple Cheesecake (our all-time fav) and it was heavenly. 

Life

Wow. I have started about 12 blog posts since the last time I posted on here... but none of them have gotten finished. Maybe this one will, and maybe I'll go ahead and post some of the started/not finished ones. I have been writing in my personal journal though, so it's not like I've got no clue what has been going on...

Recently I was looking over my calendar and realized how over-committed I was. I realized I had turned into a "yes-man" where anytime someone would ask me to do something (watch their kids, take a meal, help with some project, etc) I would say yes. It got to the point where within a two week period I had 5 days where I had other peoples kids at my house. During those 2 weeks I only went to the gym twice, and I was just feeling super overwhelmed. I realized something had to change. This week I've had two people ask me to watch their kids and both times I said no. It was so hard to say no, but I needed to do other things for my family this week (and I had to go to Presidency Meeting and didn't want to add an extra kid to that). I'm getting more things done now that needed to be done, and it feels great! And I've had more time to do things for myself. It's kinda nice.

Our yard (especially the backyard) has turned into a jungle because I would get so overwhelmed looking at it and I would never go out and pull weeds. Or I would, but because of how bad it was you could never tell a difference. Well, last weekend our home teacher brought his wife and 5 kids and after one hour of us all out there weeding (not Chris, because his Meniere's disease doesn't allow him to do yard work) you could FINALLY tell a difference. It motivated me to get out there more and now our jungle is finally starting to get tamed. I'm hoping that this weekend I can make a ton more progress on it!

Other random things you've missed out on....

1. End of Jan/early Feb I potty trained Emma! It only took a few days and she was a pro! She hasn't had an accident in forever and isn't afraid of automatic-flushing toilets anymore.

2. Before I could potty train her I decided I needed to get Emma out of her crib. The weekend before I potty trained her we took the front of her crib so she now is sleeping in her big girl bed. Now she can get out when she wakes up and needs to go potty. It's great. And now I don't have to go up the stairs as often!

3. Chris and I both got new callings. Chris was released from teaching Gospel Doctrine and called as Asst. Ward Clerk and is over finances. He is loving this calling so far! It does mean we take 2 cars to church now and that he has to stay after church each week, but Emma and I have some good time together after church. I got released as a Relief Society Instructor and called as the Primary Secretary. It's been a little hectic of a change for me, since our Primary was short many teachers, cub scout leaders, etc. It's been a challenge keeping up with all of the changes we've made over the past few weeks and making sure all our lists are up to date, but things are starting to calm down more and I'm figuring everything out!

4. This past Sunday I was in charge of Singing Time in Primary. Our music leader was released a few weeks ago because she got a stake calling, but our new music leader had not been called yet, so the PP asked me to sub. I had a great time teaching the kids a new song, but my favorite moment came in Senior Primary. It didn't take the kids long to learn the March song so we had some extra time to kill. I asked a sweet 8 year old what her favorite primary song was and she chose A Child's Prayer. As we sang, the spirit was SO strong. Afterwards we paused and talked about what we were all able to feel. The whole mood in the room changed and it was amazing. These kids are fantastic and I have been loving getting to know them a little better.

5. Emma has broadened her horizons when it comes to movies/tv shows she'll watch. We're not as stuck on Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood (although he is still one of her favs) but it's been nice to watch some Doc McStuffins, Care Bears, Inside Out, Monsters Inc, Monsters University and Elf (even though it isn't Christmas anymore!).

6. We decided it's about time for us to go on a real family vacation. After a lot of thinking and researching and discussing the matter, we decided to try out a cruise. A Disney Cruise! We only live a few hours away from Galveston and there are plenty of cruises out of Galveston, but we decided Disney would be a perfect option for our family. We are so excited, even though our cruise is still MONTHS away! It's really fun to watch videos and read all about Disney Cruises.

7. Back in November Chris's little sister moved out. Did I ever even mention she lived with us? Oh well. It took us a while to get into a new "normal" routine, but we've figured things out. Emma gets really excited when she sees Steph on FaceTime, and is super protective of "Stephy's Seat" at our dinner table, freaking out if anyone tries to sit there.

8. I've read 9 books so far this year! Some of them were children's books (Mary Poppins, A Little Princess) and some were classics (Persuasion) while others were just hilarious (Mindy Kaling's new book-Mom, you wouldn't like it... you don't know who she is) and some were for Book Club (All the Light we Cannot See) and others were just my choice. It's been great to finally work through my "to-read" list on Goodreads.

9. Emma loves to paint. I'll print coloring pages off the internet and let her paint them. It's hilarious to watch her go to town on a piece of paper with just one color paint. At first it was teal she has obsessed with, now she's stuck on blue, but that's almost empty so she'll have to pick a different color to paint with next.

10. I don't feel like I can end this list with only 9 things, but I really can't think of a 10th thing for now, and Emma just woke up so I should finish this now and get it posted before it gets forgotten again!