New Addition!

Jay and I are now officially patrons of the arts. That is right, people, we can now be admitted into shmancy crowds because we commissioned a work of art for our home! It finally came a few weeks ago and we LOVE it! One of our friends from church back East studied art at Wellesley and is now selling custom collage pieces. Her website is still up-and-coming, but I'll for sure let you all know when it's up. In the meantime, if you are interested in contacting her, let me know and I'll put you in touch! She is awesome. And without further ado, the masterpiece!


It's hard to see how awesome the details are, so here are a couple of close-ups:

I LOVE the water. Here's some off the coast of Asia, to give you an idea.

I can't imagine having to cut out all those pieces so precisely! She did such an amazing job!!

And we of course had to let The Frog have fun with the packing supplies. Nothing like witnessing a person's first interaction with bubble wrap :)
By this time, he understood the most effective way to get the job done. He's a pro already!

Big Brother

That's right! The Frog is going to be a big brother!! (and he looooves this book, by the way.)

I can't believe how much BIGGER I am this time!! Compare 13 weeks last time to 13 weeks this time:


It's no wonder why I was convinced we're having twins!! We signed up for a free ultrasound to train new sonographers last Friday, and it turns out I was wrong:


We're super excited for the new addition this August!

Happy Valentine's Day

Having Valentine's Day on a Sunday can be a bit of a downer for us LDS since that keeps us from going out to dinner on the Sabbath. So we celebrated Love-Day on Friday instead. Jay brought me a traditional bouquet of roses in a non-traditional color :) and "made" a candle-lit Indian food feast for the fam. (We looove Bombay House) It was sooo good and such a welcomed change. We rarely "eat out" because it's so inconvenient with our adventurous little Frog (and we like having him around) so it was fun to get our favorite take-out.


I also decided to try making sugar cookies for the first time (can you believe it's taken me this long?) and I was sadly not impressed by them. BUT they sure look cute eh?


I must admit, as much as I love desserts and baked goods, I loathe making cut-out cookies. It's such a time-consuming process...

make dough.
refrigerate the dough.
roll it out.
stress about getting maximal cookies and an even number of each shape out of rolled dough.
deal with shapes that are stuck to the bottom or won't come out of the cookie cutter.
stress out about moving the now cut shapes to the cookie sheet without ruining their shape.
stress out about perfect placement so as to maximize the number of shapes on the sheet while minimizing melding.
waiting for the sheet to cool before putting new cookies on it.
waiting for the cookies to cool so you can frost them without the frosting melting (shouldn't all cookies be able to be eaten warm?)

plus you have to make the frosting... in at LEAST two different colors. And if you think you can convince me to BUY frosting, you are horribly wrong.

EW.

I think in order to prevent me from becoming a burnt-out mom too quickly, I'm going to hold off on the cut-outs until my kids are old enough to want to help out. Next year? I'm going to tackle the Red Velvet cake instead :)

My Husband the Poet

How romantic :)

Sunny February!

Though the most famous groundhog, Punxsutawny Phil (in PA) did see his shadow this year, a lot of the local ones did not. I honestly don't know if we have one in Utah, but I would guess that Spring might be coming early this year (finally!) After a dreary-gray January, February has been just delightful! The Frog learned how to say "day" because I've been opening his window every morning and, seeing the sunny skies can't help but proclaim, "it's a beautiful day!" I'm not sure if he really understands, but he often points outside now and says "day!".

The Frog is definitely getting cabin fever and now that he can open the door to the garage, I'm finding I need to give him an alternative out-door option. We've been going outside for a little bit these past few days and it's been just grand.

Though there is still snow in our yard, there is a lot of dead grass showing and I can't wait to see it turn green. I'm excited for sandboxes, picnics and playgrounds.


Here's to an early spring!

Happy Birthday Mel!

Though Melissa's birthday is actually tomorrow, we had a super-fun birthday celebration at Cucina Toscana in Salt Lake. The food was really good, and the atmosphere extremely shmancy. :)

I was having too much fun to remember to take photos of all the food, but I did snap some shots of the yummy complimentary bruchetta they brought while deciding what to order.

I also barely remembered to get a shot of our chocolate mousse cake we shared (not quick enough to avoid bites being taken out though.)

It was so great to have a fun evening out with just the adults- a rare thing for me lately. Hope the birthday girl had as much fun as I did!

Happy Birthday Mel!

Bean Museum

A friend of mine from church has a little boy a few months older than The Frog and we decided we needed to do more things together, now that our boys are old enough to actually explore and play. This week we went to the BYU Bean Life Sciences Museum. I had never been and it's FREE :)

I was surprised at how The Frog actually never tried to cross the roped off areas.

The "li" is definitely The Frog's favorite specimen. He loved looking at it from the balcony above and on the ground up close.

It's hard for little bodies to only look, so I was glad they had a couple of touching exhibits too :)
Admiring the "buppo"
They had quite a few bears too.
Though O and The Frog don't actually play together much (more in parallel), they seem to get along okay, so far.
This was a favorite look-out spot.
I think the boys had a fun time, and I was amazed at how many animals they had that I had never heard of before. For being basically a bunch of taxidermy exhibits and dioramas, it was surprisingly uncreepy.

Though it would be nice to have a "live zoo" nearby, I think this "dead zoo" will be a nice, free, close, alternative. :)