Pretty Portraits

For a long time now Kyla has not liked having portraits done. Even when Daddy is the one taking the picture she will not sit and pose for a picture. We have not had any type of portrait done for over a year because of this. Last month Jon's work invited Kyla to have her pictures done while they were photographing home school kids and Jon really wanted me to take her and try to have her pictures professionally done by one of his friends at work who Kyla has met a couple of times.

Once I saw the background I immediately thought she should wear her tutu and fairy wings. Kyla absolutely loves dress up and this made her excited to go get pictures taken. She raided her dress up box and packed a backpack full of everything she wanted to wear, some of which I snuck out of the bag before leaving including a crown and wand.

Once we were getting close to the church where the pictures were being taken Kyla decided that she really did not want her pictures taken anymore. It was not a surprise to me since we had just left gymnastics and it was nearing nap time. But then I went to go pull onto the street that the church was on and it was called Madeline Street, I told Kyla the street was called Madeline like her cousin and she thought that was so funny. She was instantly in a good mood and we had a successful photo shoot! I was so happy with how well she did while having her pictures taken and how beautiful they turned out!

Happy Valentines Day!!!

Kyla's first time using the electric mixer

Kyla is such a big helper!

Sprinkles!!!

Decorating cupcakes with lots of pretty sprinkles

Yummy Cupcakes

Making Heart Shaped Pizza

Cheese Pizza

Lots and Lots of Cheese

Kyla's Valentines Dinner

Heart Pizza

Kyla with her Tinkerbelle balloon at Fridays

Pretty Valentines, Kyla, Ella and Ethan



We had a fun Valentines Day Weekend this year. We celebrated from Friday through Monday with different little things each day. Kyla and I made Red Velvet Cupcakes from scratch with really yummy cream cheese frosting and decorated them with conversation hearts and valentines sprinkles. We also made lots of different valentine art projects with paints, fingerpaints, stamps and stickers. Kyla made Jon and I valentines day cards that were very cute and she was very proud.

My mom, Kyla and I went to a valentines day lunch and Kyla got a very cute tinkerbelle balloon from someone who was making balloons for all of the kids at the restaurant. Jon and I celebrated valentines day a day early and went to a movie and out to dinner at a steak house. We saw the movie "Just Go With It", it was a really funny movie. The last time that I went to a movie was over 2 1/2 years ago when I was pregnant.

On Valentines Day we made heart shaped pizzas for dinner and ate lots of chocolates for dessert. Kyla loves holidays and had so much fun doing Valentines Activities all month.

Fun in the Snow!

Ethan playing outside on the slide

Kyla playing on the swing

Kyla and Ella playing with the playhouse

So much fun in the snow

Ethan and Kyla having a great time swinging

Kyla has been so happy the weather is finally warm enough (15 degrees-20 degrees) that we can finally get out and play in the snow. She absolutely loves being outside and it has been so hard to get out with how cold it has been this winter. We have had many days this winter that are below zero or not much above and it is just too miserable to go out in that kind of weather. It is funny how nice 20 degrees can feel after these cold spells. Kyla, Ethan and Ella have been having a fun time playing in Ethan and Ella's backyard on their play structure and in the playhouse. I hope that we are done with the really cold weather so that Kyla can get out and go sledding and skiing since we have barely been able to do either this year. Kyla has some brand new princess skis that she has not even had a chance to try out yet!

A Mouse!!!

Yesterday morning as I was getting dressed I kept seeing something out of the corner of my eye, and then I finally saw it.....A Mouse!!!!! Jon was at work and Kyla was still sleeping so I did my best to not scream. This is the first time we have seen a mouse in our house so we did not have any mouse traps, so there was really nothing I could do. Later I told Kyla we had a mouse and that Daddy would catch it when he got home from work. She was so funny asking such silly silly questions all day about the mouse.

She asked me "Will Daddy catch it like this (putting her hands up in the air like she was catching a ball)?". Later on in the after dinner, I was telling her that Daddy put mouse traps by the stove, under the couch and in the closet. She then asked me "is the mouse eating dinner under the stove?", "is the mouse dancing in her jammy drawer and singing jingle bells" and "is the mouse playing dress up in my dress up trunk". I hope she does not think that this mouse is our pet, she even asked me what the mouse was named.

This morning we still had not caught the mouse and Kyla was aking me more questions about it. I told her that it was still hiding or that maybe it got outside. She replied "it went outside without us??? Maybe daddy shot it!" Jon has never shot anything in his life and does not even have a gun, but her friend Ethan's daddy likes to hunt and a few times she has heard Ethan talk about his daddy shooting something.

It is so funny to see how curious she is and hear the funny things that she is thinking about. She is very amused with the "mouse in our house", as she calls it, but I sure hope we catch it soon and that there is only one!

Our Little Baker

Kyla went grocery shopping for all the ingredients we needed to make bread

Kyla found her dry milk for our bread

Adding pretend ingredients in to our bread

Helping to Frost a red velvet cake

Kyla and Aunt Carol decorating a cake

Kyla with our cake

Kyla has all purses and says she ready to go grocery shopping



Kyla has absolutely loved helping in the kitchen lately. She helps me mix and pour ingredients into anything and everything that we make. She always feel so proud of herself for helping and also seems to eat better when she knows that she helped make it. Last week she helped me bake bread in the bread maker and this week when we baked bread again she remembered certain ingredients and steps to baking bread. She was playing with her new shopping cart and pretending to look for the ingredients and pour them into the bread maker. She was saying "Now I need flour, boiling water, yeast...." I was suprised that she actually remembered many of the ingredients that we poured in. Her favorite part of helping me bake bread is when we put a bellybutton (hole) in the flour to pour the yeast into, she just thinks it is so funny.

On Friday we went over to Aunt Carol's house and Kyla helped her frost and decorate a red velvet cake and she thought it was so much fun to decorate it and she loved wearing an apron in the kitchen too. She had a great day with Aunt Carol and Great Grandma Elsie and loved playing with Carol's old kitchen set. It was just like the one that my sister and I had when we were kids.

Kyla has been having a lot of fun also playing with her play kitchen lately and she just got a cute little princess shopping cart to go with it, which makes playing kitchen even more fun!

Kyla First Art Class

Kyla just began taking an art class yesterday at a new childrens boutique near where we live. She was really excited to go to art class since she absolutely loves doing art projects. There are only three kids in the art class and each week they do a different type of art. I think they have finger painting, water colors, molding clay...

For the first class the teahcer had the kids play with molding clay, but they did not actually fire it so it was more like playing with play doh. Kyla had fun playing with her clay and did well at following directions, but she was extremely shy. She barely talked to the teacher, the other two kids or to me. Hopefully by next week when she goes back she won't be quite so shy.

She has 4 more sessions of the art class and we will see how well they go before we decide whether or not to sign up for the next session. I was not really too impressed with the teacher or with the projects they plan to do, but I thought it would be good to get Kyla involved in something other than just her gymnastics class. We do so many art projects at home most everyday that I don't think she is going to benefit much from this class at her age. Kyla was so funny when we left the childrens store where the art class was she said "Are we going to art class now?", I told her "Kyla, that was your art class" and she said "Oh". I really think she just thought that she was for some reason playing with play doh at this store and really had no idea that it was her art class. I probably would have been better off signing her up for the music class they were offering, oh well maybe next session she will take music instead.

Play day with Aunt Carol and Grandma Elsie

Kyla and Aunt Carol playing dress up

Kyla and Great Grandma Elsie playing dollhouse

Kyla loved this playmobil dollhouse, I know what Kyla will be getting for her next birthday!



Kyla had a very fun play day with Aunt Carol and Great Grandma Elsie yesterday. Last week when we were visitng with them Carol told us she wanted to go through her basement and get it organized and pull out all of the toys that she has saved from when her daughters were kids. She had pretty much saved every toy they had ever had and there were a lot of toys! We only made a small dent in her storage area and are going back next week to play with some more toys that get pulled out.

Kyla had so much fun playing with so many different toys. She loved all of the different dolls and dollhouses, puppets, jewelry, tinker toys and kitchen toys. Carols daughters Miranda and Toni are 5 and 10 years younger than me so a lot of the toys were unfamiliar to me, but there was really cute fun stuff. Kyla was so excited to play with so many new toys and is already so excited to go back and play with more. One of the really fun toys we played with was a playmobil doll house with a ton of furniture, dolls and accessories. I think it was the best dollhouse I have ever seen and am glad that I have not yet bought Kyla a nice dollhouse because this is the dollhouse I want to buy her now. I have been looking at different ones to buy and this one is so much nicer and more fun than all the ones I have seen and I know she will just love it.

We brought home a few toys from Aunt Carols to play with. Kyla loved a fruit basket she had that was full of fruit and vegetables that velcro together and you cut them apart. Also she brought home a little muffin pan with cute little cupcakes, a toy vacuum and some tinker toys. She was so excited about the vacuum and has already vacuumed are floor many times. She loves to vacuum and always is helping me push around the vacuum, so she is thrilled to have her own now.

Kyla helped Aunt Carol make a pizza for lunch and some really cute jello in candy molds for dessert. All day she has been talking about Aunt Carols house and how much fun she had, I think we are going to have to go over there to play a lot more!

2 1/2 years old!!!

Kyla loves finger painting

SO Cute

What a mess!!!

Hard at work!

Kyla playing with her polly pockets
Swaddling her baby

Busy little mommy

Putting all her babies to sleep

Playing Candyland

Playing Princess Chutes and Ladders

Dress up time!!!







Wow! Kyla is two and a half years old! I think she just gets cuter, funnier, smarter and more fun each day.

At two and a half she has just started gymnastics at Aurora Kids and loves it! When she turns three we will also start her in dance there. This is her first time in a structured group setting and she really likes it. I guess I might have to start considering looking into preschool for her. I still have not decided if I want to start her in a preschool program this upcoming fall or wait until the next fall when she is four years old. Maybe for now I will just enjoy all of the time I get to spend with her and just keep enrolling her in fun classes for awhile. She will be starting an art class one day a week soon and we might look into signing her up for a music class too.

Some of Kyla's favorite toys lately are polly pockets and babies. She can sit in one place and dress and undress all of her polly pockets for the longest time. I think it is the most focused and quiet that she has ever been. She just got them for Christmas and absolutely loves them. Kyla also loves playing babies. She will get out all of her babies, all three beds, a hignchair, car seat, moses basket and tons and tons of blankets, bottles, paicifiers, clothes and medical kit and just take care of her babies for hours. It is so cute how she plays with them, sings to them and cares for them. It is really fun to watch and see how much she has picked up from me in learning to care for babies.

Kyla also loves games. We bought her a video game and many board and card games for Christmas and she has been having a wonderful time learning to play them all. We have been playing Princess Chutes and Ladders, CandyLand, Memory, Uno, Hullabaloo, Hi ho Cheery-o and more. It is so fun that she can now participate in these fun interactive games with us and it makes me want to go out and buy a lot more fun games to play with her. I have always loved playing games and now I finally have someone to play them with since Jon has never really wanted to play.

One of Kyla other favorite things to do is to play dress up. She loves dressing up in all of her fun fancy dresses, tutu's, dress up shoes and jewlery. She got a cute dress up trunk full of fun dress up things for Christmas from her Aunt Lisa and Uncle David and we have it filled to the rim with all of her dress up clothes now. She is so funny, she will put one cute outfit on and then instead of taking it off to put the next one on she just starts layering. She will have close to ten seperate outfits all on at once.

Kyla still likes playing with Legos, Little People, Thomas the Train and kitchen, but for now these have all taken a backseat to her new favorite activities.

Kyla is also very much into Music, Nursery Rhymes and Books. I should enroll her in a kindermusik class to keep growing her love for music. She knows so many songs, it really is amazing! She sings whenever we are in the car, the bathtub or just playing. Some of her favotire kids songs are Old MacDonald, Bingo, Skidamarink, ABC's, Miss Mary Mack, This Old Man, Mulberry Bush and the list could go on and on and on. We have a ton of kids CD's and she always wants to listen to them. She also loves "Baby" by Justin Beiber and "Stuck like Glue" by SugarLand. The only Tv she watches is Babysongs DVD's which are also all music. Kyla also knows all the words to an incredible number of Nursery Rhymes. We have four Nursery Rhyme books and she knows almost all of them from each one. Kyla also can not get enough of reading books. She has a huge collection of books and loves all of them. We read books for atleast half an hour every night before going to bed. She has so much fun picking out which books she wants to read and when we are done she is usually begging to read more.

Kyla also really enjoys doing Art, so I am pretty excited for her to start her new art class next week. The art class is being offered by a new children's botique called Sweet Adelines. The classes sound like they will be a lot of fun and they are really small classes so I think she will do really well in it. Kyla's favorite art project to do lately is fingerpainting. She gets really excited to fingerpaint and concentrates so hard on making a pretty picture. She also really likes doing art projects with stamps now. At the end of gymnastics class all the kids gets stamps on their hands, feet and tummy, so this really sparked an interest in stamps for her.

Other things that Kyla really loves is helping me cook, playing with Grandma and playing with her friends Ethan and Ella. She gets so excited to do all three of these things. She gives Grandma the biggest guilt trip when it is time to leave, she looks at her and says" Grandma I want you, hold me" with the saddest face and then as soon as Grandma is not looking she grins so big.

SO far this winter we have had really cold weather, we have had a ton of below zero degree days and the reast have been just barely above zero. We also barely have any snow since it has been to cold to snow and when it has snowed it has ended up getting to warm or windy and melting all the snow. Kyla has not been able to play outside very much, but we are really looking forward to a bit warmer weather and hopefully some more snow so we can get out and go sledding, snowmachining and skiing more. Kyla loves to play outside and make snow angels, snowman and play and it has been hard to be stuck inside as much as we have been this winter.

Of course I think that Kyla is very smart and I think that she talks very well for her age, as every parent does. But she is also just so funny when she talks. She loves to ask questions and it is so funny how she asks them. Instead of just asking you something she either says for example "Do you want this or not?" or she will say something like "Do you want this on or off", "Is it hot or cold?"... pretty much every question ends with either saying or not or by asking whatever the opposite is. I really think that it is pretty smart of her to know the opposite to whatever it is that she is aking, and of course it is just cute too.

At Two and a half years old Kyla is potty trained!!! She has been pretty much completely potty trained for the past month and has had very few accidents. She still wears a pull-up for nap (on the rare occasion when she does nap) and at night, but hates that I put her in it and usually wakes up dry anyway. She has been going potty on the toilet since she was 14 months old, but we didn't really push her to only use the potty until recently. We bought her a Sesame Street book called Abby Cadabby uses the Potty, it is a really cute book with several buttons to push with sound effects for flushing, washing hands... Kyla was able to put a sticker on the book every time that she went potty and it really made her want to only go potty in the toilet. Now she has her stool next to the toilet and just goes in there all by herself without being reminded and goes potty. It is very impressive how easy the potty training process was for her. She has wanted Princess underwear for awhile and I had bought her some but told her she could not have them until she was no longer going potty in her pull ups, so now she proudly wears "fancy princess underwear"!

Kyla is a very sweet girl, loves to be a big helper and is extremely independent and very much a girl. She loves to play dress up, wear nail polish, play with makeup and is very dramatic and emotional. She is probably the most independent person that I have ever met. If you try to do anything for her, she yells "No, I'll do it!". Kyla has to not only pick out her own clothes and pajamas each day and get herself dressed, she also has to pick out Daddy's clothes each day. She has to pick out which cup she drinks from and put the lid on by herself, pick out her dishes and utensils, open any packages of food, get out her toys and pick up her toys (which is fine with me) and everything else during the day BY HERSELF!!! It is probably are biggest struggle with her because there really are times that we need to help her with certain things for either safety or time and she does not understand that and just demands to do everything by herself.

We really feel so lucky to have such a wonderful daughter! She is adorable and so sweet to everyone. She plays great with others and is very caring. She is everything that we could have ever wanted in a daughter and more!

April and Travis's Wedding

Beautiful Bride!

Walking down the aisle with Steve and Paul

April and Grandpa

April and Travis!

Beautiful Ceremony

The Happy Bride and Groom!

Cake Cutting

Maid of Honor and Best Man giving a toast

Our Family

Bridal Party

April and Travis

Ashley, Michelle, Lynn and April

April with Grandpa and Uncles

Kyla giving the pretty bride a kiss!



We had a great time at my cousin April's Wedding to Travis on 1-11-11. April made a very beautiful bride, her maid-of-honor and the flower girls looked beautiful too. The ceremony was very nice and I think everybody had tears as she walked down the aisle first with my stepdad Steve and Uncle Paul and then was handed off to Grandpa. Of course we all wished that her dad was still here to be the one walking her down the aisle to give her away.

Kyla did very well during the ceremony and stayed pretty quiet. She really liked looking at April in her pretty wedding dress. On the way to the wedding Kyla kept asking me if April would be wearing a big wedding dress or a little one. During the reception Kyla had a great time dancing with the two flower girls and eating the really good wedding cake that Aunt Carol made. Jon was busy taking all of the pictures during the wedding, so we didn't get to hang out with him, but the pictures turned out great!

We are so happy for April and Travis and wish them all the best!