At Home and Abroad

In the last 2 weeks Audrey and I traveled close to 5000 miles! Whew! Thank goodness for airplanes, strollers, awesome rented minivans and comfy shoes! For now we are back and taking it easy at home before our next big adventure to the west coast in 2 weeks!

We got to go to California for almost 2 weeks to visit my side of the family (and Mitchell's wonderful grandmother). It was a great time!! Audrey was such a trooper to patiently and happily endure all of the busyness and travel. Her curiosity was an asset with all of the new places and people we visited too! The first few days of our California vacation were absolutely PACKED with visiting. We visited my dad at work so I could get an eye exam and new sunglasses and we got to go to lunch with my grandparents and sister Lynn and niece Summer. We spent an evening with my high school BFF Jahmese (why didn't we take a picture?!!?) and of course played games with Mom and Eileen. On Friday Audrey and I drove to Palo Alto for a quick visit with Grandma Peterson. It was so nice to get to visit, AND it was her first time meeting Audrey in person! Audrey loved her Great Grandma! Thanks, Grandma, for such a nice visit, sorry we couldn't stay longer!

Grandma Peterson and Audrey

We were even able to squeeze in a baby shower for Lynn since little Ricky will be here before we know it! We also got to see so many friends as we attended an open house in honor of a wonderful woman and a wedding reception for a great girl.

Then on Monday of last week Mom, Eileen, Lynn, Summer, Audrey and I piled in our rented mini van and headed to San Francisco for our 'Girls Week.' It was a blast! Here's the run down:

Monday. Pros: Drove to SF in our sweet van. The floor of the van actually lifts up for massive storage! Sweet! We checked out our awesome suite for the week and had a dinner at a little Italian place. Cons: The restaurant owner (with ash tray breath) kissed Audrey on the mouth. I wanted to deck him.

Tuesday. Pros: Drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, enjoyed a beautiful warm sunny day, met up with my friend Kim and her cutie Sam, played at the Bay Area Discovery Museum. The museum was AWESOME! The kids loved it. Especially the water station. They were soaked and so happy! Cons: Audrey's unprepared mother did not bring her a change of clothes so she had to spend the rest of the afternoon in a onesie after soaking herself from head to toe playing in the water station.

This was us checking out the little stream before the babies (and innocent bystanders) got wet

So FUN!

Do you see Audrey looking over to copy whatever Summer is doing? That was the standard procedure all week! So cute!

The Girls

Wednesday. Pros: We had a picnic on the beach!! It was another gorgeous warm sunny day (with a little wind) so we took advantage and sunned ourselves on the beach! I will put the large flock of seagulls under the 'pros' category because Audrey and Summer had a great time chasing them around! Also, they were respectful and refrained from dropping any bombs on us while we were eating our lunch. Cons: Audrey was fascinated by the warm sand and decided to give it a little taste, and by 'little taste' I mean a WHOLE HANDFUL! Gross.

Happy beach girls

Thursday. Pros: We spent the day in San Francisco! We rode Bart (commuter train) from the airport to Powell Street then took a cable car through the city to Fisherman's Warf. We got a free sample of Ghirardelli chocolate and had delicious clam chowder in a bread bowl while overlooking the warf. Serious PRO: we found the best deal on clam chowder bread bowls in the whole city at a cute little 50s style diner. Yum! Cons: Audrey hated the cable car ride, she cried the whole time. It's tough to be a tourist!

While we enjoyed our clam chowder, Audrey enjoyed a new food. A dill pickle!

Mom was in Grandma heaven!

Friday. Pros: Free breakfast at the hotel, well that was a pro for the whole week. Audrey tried to copy everything Summer did all week so she actually ate food! Pancakes and yogurt for breakfast! I'm pretty sure her grandma was clandestinely passing her fruit loops too! We got all packed up again and headed to the East Bay to visit the Oakland Temple! How wonderful to be in the temple! Eileen got to do baptisms while Lynn and I got the little girls situated. Then Eileen, the BEST baby sister out there, watched both girls while Mom, Lynn and I did a session. It was divine. THANK YOU SISSY!! After the temple we headed back home to Sacramento. As per tradition we stopped at Nations for a delicious burger. Cons: Everyone was so full from the burgers that no one wanted pie. :)

It was such a fun girls week! BIG thanks to Mitchell for letting his girls run off for nearly 2 weeks without him. I don't think he'll be letting us out of his sight for a while now that we are finally back.

While in CA I also got to finish the quilt I have been working on for quite a while! My grandma has a fancy long arm quilting machine that she showed me how to drive and she let me at it! It was awesome! I am really happy with how it turned out!

It looks like I am giving a thumbs up but really it was such a powerful machine that I had to grip it pretty tight to control it! It rattled my whole body! Sure beats quilting by hand though.

Mitchell took the day off work yesterday so we could have a family day! That was such a fun surprise! We ended up sleeping in, having a yummy breakfast and taking Audrey to the Madison Children's Museum. It was such a fun day! Oh and by now you have probably all heard about the rallies going on at the Wisconsin state capitol. It's pretty crazy. Today was day 16 of protests and absent legislators. No one is really sure how this is all going to resolve, we'll all find out eventually I guess. Since the Children's Museum was just around the corner from the capitol we decided to make a detour and check out the excitement! Imagine the deafening sound of whistles, drums, screaming, yelling and chanting and marching all around the capitol. Craziness.

Audrey was so happy to get to play with her daddy! We had so much fun!

Maybe I could teach her to pull weeds this summer! Yeah slave labor!

One more thing to add to this mega long post! She's well on her way...

Messy

This explains why all of our binder paper, printer paper, index cards etc are always wrinkled. So fun!

Coolest Relief Society Activity!

I built this from scratch!

Snowpocalypse

We finally dug ourselves out of all the snow that we got in the blizzard last night! Whew! It was a fantastic storm! There were gale force winds, white out conditions and a TON of snow! The snow in our backyard looked like a sand dune this morning from having been whipped around in all the wind. When I tried to open our front door there was at least 3 feet of snow heaped up on it! I spent a couple of hours this morning digging 2 deep trenches; one from the door to the street and the other from the front door to the driveway. It's crazy! The trenches are about 2-3 feet deep! What an impressive sight! Here are the pictures to prove it!

My awesome trench!

Trench to the front door.

Looks cold? ...We've seen worse!

What you are looking at here is the 10 foot drift that is literally burying our neighbors completely! The small deck in the upper right corner is actually on the second story!

Here it is again, you can barely see the neighbor's sliding glass door peeking up over the snow drift under the deck.

These are our front windows. The debris you see in front of the windows is actually a large shrub! This stuff is deep!

On Saturday we took advantage of the 'best sledding hill in the Madison area' at the park across the street from our apartment. It was really fun! We only did 3 runs down the big hill though. We would have stayed longer but my legs couldn't hike up the hill anymore! (I did run 5 miles earlier that day so I deserve a break!) It was really fun! Audrey even got to try out sledding too!

A very kind lady let us borrow her awesome toboggan for a couple of runs!

All bundled up having a great time!

Cookie Face

I don't know why I think this is so cute but I do. Mitchell gave Audrey a cookie last night and she looked so cute with it that I had to have a photo shoot. Don't worry health nuts, she only ate maybe 1/16th of the cookie, if even that!

"Daddy gave me this new thing then took a bite out of his"

"Yummy treat!"

I love how she held on to her cookie with both hands for the longest time.

"Yum! Cookie!"

Surprise!!

Last week Audrey and I migrated south to warmer temperatures. Oh, that and we surprised my best friend, Lindsey, for her birthday!! It was so fun! She didn't know we were coming and we just showed up! It was such a fun adventure! Audrey was an angel (except for a couple of nights that she decided not to sleep, and therefore, I joined in her rebellion) and she charmed everyone wherever we went. Lindsey has 2 little girls and all 3 of the girls were so cute together! Audrey immediately took to Lacey (the almost 3 year old) and the 2 of them played so well together. Michayla is 4 months and is the happiest, smileyest baby ever! We visited the children's museum, shopped, ate sweet pork salad, gave and received scalp massages, chatted, laughed, slept a little (see we have changed a little since our college roommate glory days!) and just overall had a wonderful time! It was such a fun week! Also, while I was in Dallas soaking up the warm sun, wearing short sleeves and leaving the coat packed up, Madison was beyond FREEZING! One day the high temp was 7 degrees! Brrr! So glad I missed that! Here are some photos.

Lacey was singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat"

Partners in 'climb'

Audrey loved this activity board with spinning tiles. This was such a fun little kids play place.

Beautiful Babies!

Lacey wanted to have a 'sleep over' with Audrey. You can see they adore each other.

And I adore this girl! Happy Birthday!

Audrey and a Unicycle

I'm inspired by my friend Kim (Hi Kim!) who recently posted several updates to her blog so here's my catch up post. I haven't neglected this blog because of lack of things happening around here, we've been busy! Happy new year to all! 2011 is off to a great start for the Harris family. Mitchell just hit his 6 month mark at work. It's hard to believe that we've been here 6 months already! Melanie is staying busy with Audrey, a quilt, babysitting once a week and I am making a better effort to read consistently too! Audrey is just as obsessed with climbing as she has been for at least the last month. She gets impatient when we have to do other things that take time away from her climbing practice. She stands up in bed now which, fortunately, has only interrupted her sleep routine a couple of times. Nowadays when I go in her room in the morning she is standing up in bed talking, I love being greeted with a big smile when I enter the room! Speaking of her smile, she has a couple of new additions to it! 2 teeth! The lower teeth broke through a couple of days after Christmas.

Audrey won't let me look in her mouth at the teeth so this is the best picture I could find of them. Just 2 little points poking through!

Here are some of Audrey's other 'likes':

*CLIMBING (it's her passion so it's worth mentioning again)

*Experimenting with lots of sounds including: mah, gah, bah, guh, dah, neh, buh. Sometimes she will string different sounds together too!

*Clapping. It's fun to see what gets her excited! The other day she went from crawling position to sitting on her own and clapped at her accomplishment!

*Smiling. Audrey is very generous with her smiles. She makes lots of friends this way. :)

*Crawling. She has mastered the hands and knees crawl and rarely army crawls anymore.

*Being social. She would rather be in the same room with me or Mitchell than be left alone playing with her toys. I often notice her following me around the house if I am doing other things.

*Reading books. Audrey got a lot of books for Christmas and she loves being read to! She has even learned how to open the flaps on her flap books and goes right for the flaps when we turn the page.

*Everything goes to her mouth these days.

*She is getting better at her fine motor skills and is able to pick up small things with her pincer grasp.

*Playing with cords, wires and heaters, all are off limits.

*Playing fetch with herself. She often throws certain toys (especially balls and rings) ahead of her and then crawl after them and repeat the process across the room.

*Sucking on a wet paper towel when I wash her hands and face.

Audrey's 'Dislikes':

*Anything that gets in the way of climbing.

*Water on her face in the bath.

*Being strapped in her car seat.

*Getting in her snow suit.

*Scratchy kisses from her dad who grew a beard.

*Being removed from the vicinity of cords, wires and heaters, they are off limits.

*Dad's Easy Button. She pushed it one afternoon and it scared her and made her cry, now she wont go near it.

Saturday morning we went to a regional juggling expo with our friends Andy and Lynn. It was amazing to see so many people juggling, doing tricks and riding unicycles. Lynn and I decided to give it a try. I have to say, it's a lot harder than it looks!

This guy had 5 pins going at once!

This guy was juggling 7 balls at the same time! His hands were moving SO fast!

I had a lot of confidence that I could learn how to ride a unicycle...until I actually got on it.

Audrey was tired and ready to go home.