At the park

The pictures of Leah in her hot pink hat were taken from last week's day at the park. It was beautiful weather that day so we went to an Evanston park for playgroup. My friend Rebekeh had her new camera out and took these cute pictures of Leah. The first one almost looks like one you would find in a magazine advertisement, but I'm biased of course.


The other pictures were taken when we visited Braden and Haley at her family's house in Naperville this weekend. We walked down from their house to a little playground.

More pictures from our playground adventure can be found at our photo page.

Spelling Lesson

So as you probably have noticed already, I am obsessed with blogging about Leah. I'm so fascinated at the things she does each day, and I know I will probably have three or four completed photo albums before she even reaches one year old. Nevertheless, I do have family and friends in the blogosphere just waiting to see more pictures of Leah, and I can't let them down.

So here I go. I'm trying to catch up from the last set of pictures I have taken of her. Logan's brother and his wife are in town so I haven't had as much time to blog. I've been trying to teach Leah how to spell her name with the blocks. I figured I should teach her early how to spell her last name since she will have to spell it out to people for the rest of her life. Something about the "neux" gets people confused. She didn't catch on as quickly. She kept trying to grab the blocks and rearrange them. Maybe I should have seen what else she could spell with the letters.

Some more firsts for Leah

Our grown-up sweetie pie is showing off the bow in her hair. I found some ribbon on sale and decided I wanted to use them in Leah's hair. Just a little dab of honey and the ribbon sticks right her to hair. And when I say grown up, I mean that we just started feeding her Cheerios and other finger foods and she loves them. And she really wants to be up and standing when we hold her. I think she will probably start walking before crawling since she hates to be lying on her stomach.

She also went down her first slide today at the park. It has finally been warm enough outside to have playgroup at the park. So I put her in her first swing and she loved it! She was swinging next to a little girl in our ward, and she was smiling and laughing .

This is a really funny looking picture of me but it was such a great one of Leah, I had to post it. Logan was just taking some pictures of us while we were hanging out on our bed. And I was making faces while he was snapping pictures, and Leah thought he was pretty funny standing on the bed above us.

Eva the cleaning lady

Go see the note Eva left us at Dyneuxmite.

WICKEDness, Part II

What she doesn't know is that Leah and I bought two containers of Chocolate Death ice cream and ate it all by ourselves. And we watched three hours of professional wrestling on pay-per-view. And I didn't actually put her to bed until 11:00. Ha! See if she ever leaves Leah in MY care again.

My night of WICKEDness

I finally saw it! It was this past Tuesday night. So I'll have to admit that I really didn't have any intentions of seeing this play because we're not in the financial position to purchase tickets. But thanks to a really, really nice boss of mine (from my days at BYU's Freshman Academy) who was in town and thought of me after someone canceled, I was able to have an amazing night baby-free.

Here's my brochure to the right as proof that I did see it, and I rode the L train downtown by myself. I can't really describe the show other than I thought it was the best performance I've ever seen, and it seemed to fly by. With other concerts and plays, I sometimes check the brochure to see when it would be over. How many more scenes and songs do I have to endure? But not with this one. It's by far my favorite. Some how I will need to find the soundtrack so I can learn all the songs and drive Logan crazy.

Logan put Leah to bed for me and fed her a bottle when she woke up cranky. Thanks, honey!

Our Block Party

We sat down with Leah the other day to show her how to stack blocks into towers. She only liked to grab the blocks as soon as you start stacking them which makes the towers fall over. So we decided we would stack them far enough away from her so she couldn't reach or that she would be tempted to try to crawl over there. But no luck in that department.

Logan's tower is on the left and as you can see, it's significantly higher than mine. That's because he hogged all the blocks and we ran out.

Logan also created this masterpiece to the right with all the colored sides of the blocks facing the same side. Once again, Leah tried to destroy it, but I had to build a blockade against her.

Please visit our photo page to see how pleased Logan was about this tower.

If first she doesn't succeed

Before:

Logan and I read in a book about children nutrition that babies between 7-9 months old should start learning to feed themselves. This has not occurred to me before, so we are always the ones shoveling the food in. I don't really like the thought of getting food all over the place, but I realized that it's the way babies learn. So I thought I would try it one day with some mashed up bananas. I think she loved trying to pick up the bananas and play with them. But I don't think she thought to put it in her mouth. Maybe it takes more than one try. I'll let you all know how it goes next time.

If you click on the After picture and look closely, you can see Leah's little bottom teeth.

After:

Dyneuxmite

Braden and I have started a fantastic new blog. Much less baby stuff and more goofy guy things, except that my post today is about Leah. But it's funny. Hillary's kind of angry because I post here so infrequently and now I'm focusing my efforts on my own blog. But hey, she does such a good job here that I can't really add anything. Anyway, hope you laugh at Dyneuxmite.

Welcome to the Quarter Century Club

Here's a birthday shout-out to my husband so that our loyal readers (those of you who might not know he's turning 25 today on Friday, the 13th) can send some birthday wishes to him. Feel free to comment on this post or on any other post for that matter (hint, hint). I know we generate a large reading pool based on our stat counter, but I haven't felt much love from our readers lately. So I'm soliciting some feedback. We already celebrated together and I want to wish him the happiest of birthdays. Doesn't he look much older and wiser?

Silly Sleeper

This week Leah found this new way of sleeping where she turns to the side with her arm across her chest. Before this new position she would only sleep flat with her hands both out to the side. But for some reason, she has found this to be comfortable though we don't know why. We thought it might mean that she wants roll around and play on her stomach. But she still doesn't like to be on her stomach.

Tasty Banana

While Logan's parents were visiting, his dad took this video of Leah gnawing on my banana. This was actually before we started feeding her baby fruit, but she was so interested in my banana that I decided to give her a bite. Well, she kept coming back for more because she could use her little bottom teeth to bite off tiny chunks. I'm so glad we have another banana lover in the family besides me (Logan rarely eats them).

Fast hands

Leah loves to grab things with her fast hands. You can look away for a minute, and she's lunging forward to grab something she sees. And one of her favorite things to grab is hair. She'll see little strands of my hair even when I've pulled it back and wants to grab it. Logan's hair is nice and thick so it usually doesn't hurt him when she grabs his hair. She also gets excited when we put this red clip in our hair. She immediately wants to pull it out.

Happy Easter

This Easter weekend was pretty low key, but very relaxing for both of us. When Logan came home from school on Friday, I sent him on a Easter egg search throughout our apartment for eggs filled with goodies. He searched different corners like a little boy on his first Easter egg hunt. I told him I would give him three hints if he couldn't find the eggs. Well, I should have hidden them a lot harder because he only needed to use one hint. Leah enjoyed playing with the eggs afterward.

We wanted to eat at Red Robin Friday night but when we made it to the highway, we saw the traffic backed up and turned around and came home. On the way home we stopped at Dominick's, a grocery store chain in Chicago, and bought their $5 pizza special on Fridays. It actually tasted as good as a full-priced pizza, and we had leftovers that Logan can take to school.

On Saturday we watched the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on T.V. I had never seen it before, so Logan told me how good it was. The next morning I couldn't stop singing the songs and looking up the movie to buy it online. On Sunday we got Leah dressed for church in her beautiful Easter dress. It was so fun to pick out the dress and Sunday shoes. I also found a little bow to stick to her head with honey.

We tried to do a photo shoot of Leah in her dress. We couldn't find a good spot to take pictures instead so we tried our luck outside even though it was pretty cold. Here are some pictures we took of Leah by some flowers, one of us together and one after we came back inside.

Play Date with Eden

Last week we visited my friend Laura and her daughter Eden, whose about a month younger than Leah. They used to live in our ward but her husband graduated from Northwestern and found a job thirty minutes away in Buffalo Grove. We have driven to this area on numerous occasions so we could eat at Red Robin. In fact, we'll probably eat at Red Robin for Logan's birthday next Friday.

We enjoy the wide open suburban life near Buffalo Grove where there's plenty of space to park. I was jealous that I parked right next to Laura's building, there's a playground right outside with an open lawn, and they even have carpet in their apartment. All of these things we miss right now living in Evanston. Okay, enough of my grumblings for now.

We thoroughly enjoyed watching the babies "play" together. I use the term "play" loosely because most of the time, they were unaware of each other and not really interacting. They each had their own tricks to show off. Eden enjoyed playing on her stomach where as Leah doesn't like to play on her stomach and would rather sit up.

I think Laura and I had more fun chatting together so much that the babies were getting tired by the end of the visit. Laura popped in a Baby Einstein video, and here they are watching it and zoning out.

Our seven month old Gerber baby

Leah turned seven months old on April 4th, and brightens our days with her big smile and calm personality. A lady waiting next to me at Jiffy Lube said that Leah looked like a Gerber baby, and we would have to agree. The first picture is her more serious face which she uses when she's checking out people that she doesn't know. It takes her a little while to warm up and then she's usually all smiles (unless she's hungry or if she's in the car with the missionaries). She also looks serious sometimes when you're trying to take a picture of her.

She really enjoys having us right next to her to play with and will usually grab at whatever we are holding. And she loves to grab hair. She will spot one little strand of mine and immediately grab it. Logan and I call her "Fast Hands" because you will look away, and she will be lunging and grabbing something she sees.

We keep trying to give her tummy time, but she loudly protests every time. We agree that she might learn to walk before she learns to crawl because she doesn't like to be on her stomach. My theory is its hard for her to hold herself up on her hands because she's so chubby. She's great at sitting up by herself, except for the occasional leaning back when she's trying to see us or throwing a fit. That's why we put the Boppy behind her so she doesn't hit her head on our hardwood floors.

Visit from the Grandparents

This post will catch you up on our exciting spring break activities with Logan's parents (I know it's a little late). Logan's parents flew in from Utah on March 21 for almost a week to spend time with their one and only grandchild and us, of course. Days and weeks prior to their visit, Logan and I made a list of possible activities we could do while they were here. I'm sure Logan's mom would have been fine just sitting and playing with Leah all day, but we also wanted to show them around the city.

First we drove down to the Museum of Science and Industry including the featured Body Worlds II exhibit. It was amazing what they can do with technology and cadavers. You'll have to check out the website to see exactly how they plastinate the body parts. It was fascinating. By the end of the exhibit, however, we were ready for lunch and ready to see the rest of the museum. Here's Logan standing next to a model replica of the Chicago downtown. This was the only good picture I took there. I guess we were so fascinated that we forgot to take more shots.

The next day brought fabulous weather so we took them up to Long Grove. We thought his mom might enjoy the different shops that sold antiques, candy, furniture, nick-nacks, and baked goods. We made one of our final stops at the wonderful Apple Haus bakery and bought some blueberry rhubarb butter and raspberry salsa.

Leah was a champion during our excursions and even managed to nap in the stroller while we were out. Each day she got more familiar with Logan's parents, and we were even able to attend the Chicago temple while they visited. I'm glad she wasn't too fussy for them while we were away.

To see more pictures taken while they visited, go to our photo page.

She's growing up

As you have probably noticed, I haven't blogged in awhile. It's not because I haven't wanted to but because so much time has past, and it would be hard to catch up on everything we've done.

Before I catch you up on all we've been doing, I wanted to show recent pictures of Leah. She's just growing up so much. Every other day we comment how tall, grown up and smart she is getting. She is curious and wants to learn about everything new thing she comes into contact.

One new thing is we started to bathe her in our bathtub. We used to bathe her in our kitchen sink because could stand up and not have to bend over. But she's gotten so big now that we decided that the bathtub would give her more space. When we first sat her in the water she got a little scared. But she now loves to play in the water, especially with the plastic cup we used to pour water on her.

She also loves to take all her toys out of the basket. We used to put her on the floor with a few toys, but she would soon get bored. So we then sat her down with all the toys and she loves taking them out of the basket.




Here's a couple more pictures of her. The right one was the day we matched. I usually don't dress us alike, but I thought it would be fun to try it.

And the last picture is Leah with Logan's wallet. We thought it would be funny to catch her playing with it. What can we say, she's a girl and she knows how to get what she wants. (though we hope this isn't what we have to look forward to).