We went on a cruise...

It's official.  Leila loves the sand and surf as much as her parents.  Our cruise to Mexico was quite the adventure, we held pythons, went repelling, and chipped some teeth in the process. (More on that later...)

 Here are a few pictures from our stop in Cabo San Lucas.

No football

One of Leila's first words was "football." I'll give you three guesses as to why. As a baby, she had no say in the matter, but she wasn't going down without a fight when it came to this football season.  For a while Leila loved to cheer when there was a touchdown (yes, she knows what that is) but then things started to get ugly when she wanted to watch Tangled. Chad and Leila battled it out every weekend and I ended up playing the part of neutral referee.

Case in point, we would come home from church and Leila would dart past us, into the house, and grab the remote control.  As fast as her little feet could, she'd run down the hall in a mad dash to hide the remote, thus stopping football.  One of her first sentences was "Daddy! No more football!" 
Well last night we were talking and Chad was teasing her that he was going to watch football.  Then I told her that football was over for a long time. That night we said our prayers and she added this little line, "Tank you all done football.  Bess daddy no sad." (Thank you for no more football.  Bless daddy to not be sad.)

Is Leila still obsessed with her boots?  Yep. 

Speaking of her hiding things.  The kid hid my book.  My book that I was in the middle of. That I'm DYING to finish.  I have torn the house apart. Twice.  I can't find it anywhere.  She usually hides things in her baby bed, or under her dresses, or even in the pots in the kitchen. But we can't find my book.  And I know she has it.  I don't bribe my child, but I finally pulled up a picture of the cover on Amazon, showed it to her, and said, "Find mommy's book and I'll get you an ice cream cone!"  She smiled at me and said, "It's in a room." 

How specific of her.

 I've gone crazy and in an effort to stop my incessant whining help me, Chad has now joined in on the search.  He said this should be a lesson to me, although I'm not sure what the lesson is.  I know I should just go buy another copy, but I'm borderline obsessed with finding it. 

You should read it and tell me how it ends.  The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.  It's an great read AND a true story.

So go buy it.

And then let me borrow it.

She asked me to do her hair, "Like a horsey" with apparently means braiding.   

Year End

The holidays were a lot of fun. In no particular order...

We went to the zoo with Emily and Jaylee:

We wait anxiously for Daddy to come home:

We played outside, because it's been a weird winter in Utah with zero snow:

We went to Park City because Chad had extra time off work.  He thought it would be fun to let Leila stay up really late with us in the hotel that night.  Turns out "fun" just means "hyper toddler who won't go to sleep." The picture below was after dinner when they both got chocolate covered pretzels. 

Christmas morning pictures

We went to the Greek Market for my family's annual Christmas party.  Leila loves her aunt "Dewey" (Julie.)

Is it just me or does Sean look like he's questioning the family he married into?

I kid you not, my Ya Ya did a quick visual sweep before she started giving my one-year-old cousin some sips of Coke.  Lots of sips.

Did I mention she loves her Dewey?

Leila is obsessed with dresses right now.  Every morning, she greets me with "Mommy?  Jammies off and pretty dress. Please? Pretty dress?"  We go through all her dresses so fast that sometimes they are all in the wash.  So, the other day I saw her improvise with one of my tank tops.

My cute aunts and even cuter baby Jessie.

For New Years we went to my Grandpa's cabin (thanks Grandpa!) with our friends Jared and Meghan.  I forget how much fun it is to sit in a warm place, playing games, watching football, eating yummy food, and laughing into the early hours of morning.  It's also fun to watch your husband and his friend play "chicken" on the frozen lake.  Actually, it may have given me a panic attack, but hey.

Lastly, we enrolled Leila in gymnastics. She's been known to do flips off the couch (also panic attack-inducing) and we thought it would be something she would like.  Well she loves it. She wants to practice at home and she can't wait to show off to daddy.

If they listen in class, they get a stamp on their hand.  Leila and her friend Grace always manage to get two stamps. :)

And this picture, well, I just love it.

Hello 2012

My last post was for Halloween, so I guess Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years are next?  It's all a blur of family, food, traveling, and food poisoning.   I'm still ticked about the food poisoning part, not because it was misery on a level I've never known, but because it ended my streak.

The last time I threw up, I was seven.  It was a pretty nasty experience, and I remember my little 7-year-old brain vowing that I would never throw up again. 

So I didn't.

It became a competition of sorts, between Chad and I, partly because I don't think he believed I had really gone 20 years without throwing up.  When I got pregnant, Chad would tease me that I would have morning sickness and my streak would be over.  I did have morning sickness, but I didn't lose it.  Same thing during labor.  Same thing when I got the flu.  I really believed I had conquered it.

Until a few weeks ago.  Hours after dinner I felt something was off.  Really off. I kept asking Chad if he was feeling sick, but he said he was fine.  That night I tossed and turned and was in so much pain I started to wonder if I needed to go to the hospital.

  I'll spare you the details, but as I got up to try and walk it off, my streak came to a very abrupt end.  17 times.  Within an hour, Chad was joining me.  We had food poisoning, and it really is like having your entire body poisoned.  The worst of it lasted for 48 hours, and we are stupid lucky that Leila was an unusually picky eater that night. She was just pushing her food around with her fork, and I was too lazy to make her eat her dinner.  So I had her eat some applesauce and called it good.  (Sometimes, laziness pays off.)

It's actually funny to look back on it now, the way we camped out on opposite ends of the house in an effort to contain our busy toddler. The fear in our eyes as we each took turns taking tiny bites of a cracker.  How I changed diapers lying on my back, because I honestly couldn't sit up.  Leila, to her everlasting credit, was so well-behaved.  She spent the day rushing back and forth between us, asking, "Daddy okay?"  "Mommy okay?"  (She even wanted her own bowl to "throw up" into.  She would be playing and then, run to her bowl and force a cough into it and say, "Oh dat better.") 

It was the sickest Chad and I can ever remember being.  It took a full 72 hours before we could walk upright.  My aunt, bless her soul, brought us lots of liquids and every stomach medicine she could find. Along with a toy for Leila, which was a lifesaver. 

The sweetest thing about the entire experience?  Chad, who, when retching himself, still managed to hold my hair back. That's love folks.

I currently working on another 20 years. Ha.

Now for some pictures to wipe out the metal images I've just given you:

 How in the world did my "holiday post" morph into a puke post? I'll redeem myself later with lots of holiday cheer.

P.S I've been working on a little something lately. Check it out here and here.

Peacocks and Pirates

There's a lot of things I'm not. "Crafty" is one of them. I generally don't like crafts, they bore me to tears, and I'm not fully convinced they save money. 

Last year I had my annual crafty thought (yes, singular) and decided I'd make Leila's Halloween costume.  It lasted all but a week, when I strolled into a store with 1/2 off costumes.  Forget it, I just bought one.  Done and done.

A few weeks ago I was going through my craft drawer (and by "craft drawer" I mean plastic Target bag stuffed in the corner of my guest room closet) when I found the items I had originally bought for her costume last year.  I mustered all the gumption I could, whipped out my needle and thread glue gun, and went to work.  

Let's just say that the end result was a lot prettier in my head.  But she loved the feathers and I burned myself stupid with hot glue. 

I had cute little feather slippers for her to wear, but this kid is going on month SEVEN of being obsessed with boots.  She calls them "Boo Shoos"  which is Leila-speak for "Boot Shoes."  She wears them everywhere and Halloween was no exception.  (We actually left the house without them once and in the car she started screaming, "Mommy my boo shoos, my boo shoos home!")

Our neighborhood is chuck full of kids (and adults) who take every holiday very seriously.  It was fun to go trick-or-treating with all her little friends and when it got dark, she loved handing out candy to the older kids.  After she crashed, Chad and I did what every good parent does...raid her candy.