Memorial Day Weekend

We had an enjoyable holiday weekend, though we mostly did a lot of yard work. We took advantage of the extra long weekend to finally work on fixing our leaky basement. Kyle is building a dry well to divert rain water from our basement. In the past when we get too much rain, the pipe coming off of our down spouts gets backed up and fills our stairwell with water and seeps in through the door (It has happened 3 or 4 times in the two years we've been here). We considered several options to fix the problem and feel confident that this will work best. Kyle may have gone a little overboard with the size of the gravel pit for the water to go, but he didn't want to take any chances of it being too small. He dug a whole in our yard with his shovel measuring approx. 4 ft x 4 ft x 6 ft deep. Then filled it with coarse gravel. Unfortunately the weight of the truck with the gravel made some awful ridges in our front lawn (the same spot that we put sod in last year).
Here is the trench he dug from the down spout out to the pit. Unfortunately, we weren't able to finish everything like we hoped due to the rain on Sunday making it too muddy to work yesterday. Though it was probably nice for Kyle to get a rest. His hands got pretty blistered from it.We did get to have a little fun this weekend. Our ward had a fun picnic on Saturday, and Scott and Heather blessed their baby Allie on Sunday. We had a great time seeing so much family and letting the kids play with their cousins and relatives. We took our camera, but unfortunately left the memory card at home, so we any pictures to share of that. Hopefully, though, you will enjoy the following pictures as much as we did.

Having great success with peas, we gave Brooklyn green beans for the first time this weekend. The following pictures speak for themselves. (Ethan would agree with Brooklyn on this one)

Peas Please

Tonight Brooklyn graduated from baby cereal to her first Big Girl food...peas! As you can see from this picture, her first reaction was one of confusion......but she quickly decided she loved them and kept asking for more.
She ate until she couldn't eat any more.
After she was finished, she had to lick the spoon clean.

Ethan's been pretty funny lately too. He has been learning all kinds of new words and makes up a few as well. Here are some of the funny words he's been saying and things he's been doing lately:

• When he wants to cuddle/snuggle with Mom or Dad, he says "tuggle with Mamma/Dadda."
• Even though he loves Lightning McQueen, he still can't say his name. Instead he says "Fween." When we try to get him to say it right, he sometimes say "MaFween."
  
• Today he started calling DVDs "DDEs."
• Instead of "ABCs", he says "BECs"
  
• He loves to count. The problem is, he knows the numbers but not the order. We often hear him muttering to himself "one, two, three, two, seven, two, six, nine..." and on and on.
• He likes to share his food with his cars
• Every night before bed he has to kiss his Cars book characters and say "bye" to each one.
• He loves Thomas and Friends so much that the other day he wanted to change Brooklyn's name to Baby James (after one of the trains).
• Today in nursery Ethan learned about sharing. The teachers gave each kid a toy car, and they were supposed to let the other kids play too. Ethan refused to give his up. The concept must have sunk in because later during Sacrament meeting he had fun sharing his animal crackers with the little girl sitting next to us. She said "Thank you" and Ethan proudly responded, "Thank me, Thank me!"
  

6 Months Old Today!!

Our baby is 6 months old today!! Where did the time go? We love our little Brooklyn so much and feel so blessed to have this sweet little girl in our family. She has such a bright smile that always brightens our day (figures we can't always capture it when taking her picture). Here are some pictures of her I took this morning. Ethan was very distracting so I had trouble getting her to look at the camera.



It has been amazing to see her look more and more like me as she has grown. Here is a picture of when I was about the same age.She was so good yesterday letting us get some yard work done, though she did get tired after a while. Here are a few pictures.


Happy half-birthday, baby girl!

Breaking New Ground

This weekend was exhausting! We rented this massive 16 horsepower hydraulic tiller to break ground for flower beds and more garden space. A very kind neighbor of ours is giving us some raspberry starts. It has been a dream of Kyle's for the longest time to have raspberries. Although they probably won't produce until next year, we are really looking forward to picking our own raspberries. It will take some time to get our flower beds fixed up, but we will post some pictures when we are finished. It took several hours for Kyle to do all of the tilling. Ethan and Brooklyn enjoyed watching daddy out working.
Ethan wanted to go out and help so badly, but settled for helping me make cookies instead (you can kind of see the evidence on his face).
Kyle had Brooklyn on his shoulders the other day while on the computer. I couldn't resist taking a picture.
And this one of Ethan was just too cute, not to share.
Sunday afternoon, we finally got to go see Ethan and Brooklyn's new cousin Allie. Brooklyn and Allie are about 5 months apart. While we were amazed by Allie's dark hair . . .
. . . Brooklyn thought Allie's fingers were particularly delicious.
Thanks so much for letting us come and visit. When we got out to the car after our visit Ethan said, "Brian and Jackson house fun!" After this busy weekend, we were all so exhausted when we got home last night.

Update: We are so grateful for the wisdom of our sister-in-law, Heather. We implemented some of her advice following the frustration we posted about last week and it has been working so well! Ethan now loves to pick one or two of our fingers to hold while walking through parking lots and bedtime has been a bit easier since we put our foot down and created more boundaries (and now only bathe him every other day--he is such a dirty kid, hopefully we'll be able to keep this one up). We originally created our bedtime routine because he would cry himself to sleep almost every night when he was little and it seemed to help. Now that he is two, and now an excellent sleeper, he figured out how to use the routine against us to drag things out. It feels good to be the one in charge again :).