Cookie Making

Tonight we decided to make cookies after church. Shane wanted Oatmeal Chocolate Chip and Phia didn't care, she just kept saying cookie when asked if we should make a batch. I found a recipe on allrecipes.com and did 1/2 peanut butter chips and 1/2 chocolate chips. They are delicious! Since Shane was there to help we let Phia participate in the cookie making fun!

First she watched Shane measure brown sugar.....

Then she helped herself to the peanut butter chips....

She got the salt, baking powder and baking soda out of the cupboard.....

Helped Shane dump those 3 ingredients in and got salt all over when she dumped it in the bowl....

Then she helped chop nuts. They went in the oven and she played in her room and then we all enjoyed a cookie! YUM!

Last Sunday we pulled her Aquadoodle out and she had fun drawing on it but eventually she wanted the cap off so she could see what was shaking inside the pen. She ended up getting wet but she had fun! We traced her feet and that made her giggle because of the cool water tracing them. She didn't want to let Shane or I draw at all and just wanted to hold the pen. She kept grabbing the mat and pulling it around the room!

She loves to feed herself and one night we got home and she was hungry so we fixed her some Cheerios. She fed herself pretty much by herself with the spoon and then wanted more in her bowl so she could feed some to Daddy. She rarely offers me bites of her food but always offers Shane tastes! Sometimes it a taste of something she already licked and Shane has to tell her that she needs to eat it!

She is terrified of the vaccum and starts to fuss and point at the sight of it! Last week she kept hiding by Shane as I pushed it towards her and pointing trying to rtell him she didn't like it!

Playing with a towel off the oven....

Her lunch of the champions lately is mini corn dogs with ketchup. She eats all the corndogs and then dips her finger in the ketchup and sucks it off and then dips again. She is a total mess by the time she is finished. She did the same thing tonight qith the spaghetti sauce for pizza quesadillas.

Some days we just get bored at the house and she loves to be active and doing stuff. I decided that I am going to choose a theme each week and learn a little with her about it, read books about it and do art projects. Last week we learned about rainbows. We filled a rainbow in with Stackers which she enjoyed eating plain while we stuck them to the paper and later she tore them off the glue and ate them that way. We also colored a rainbow. Initially we attempted filling it with different colored fingerprints in ink pads but she just wanted to hold the ink pad and it got really messy after doing red and orange. We decided to then just color with crayons. We listened to a Blue's Clues CD and she sang and wiggled while she colored. She kept saying color , color and didn't want to play wih toys. She just wanted to keep coloring.

17 month pictures last Thursday....

"Drinking" her ice cream one night after dinner....

She was playing with her little pigs and their houses tonight and Shane just had her giggling like crazy because she kept kissing the big bad wolf.

We went grocery shopping on Friday and she is getting to be a handful to take! She wants to walk on her own and not ride in the cart or be carried. It's a good thing Shane goes with us to grocery shop! On the way home we were singing If Your Happy and You Know It. We had listened to it earlier in the week a couple times and she would do the actions. Shane would sing clap your hands and pretty soon she was repeating him with her own version of clap hands. You could totally tell taht's what she was saying. Sometimes she says it really fast though and it sounds like cupcake. We stopped singing and all of the sudden she says, "happy la la la" and claps her hands twice! We were cracking up!

Projects

I went to Stampin Up the other night with my mom and we made some really cute projects. The open house is this Saturday and I am hoping to go!

Shane gave me a gift certificate to Pine Needles for Christmas and I decided my table needs something on it after having my table runner on it in November and December. My mom had this pattern and made one for Halloween and Thanksgiving so I decided to a February/Spring one. It is reversible and quilts itself as you go.

The valentine side

The spring side

I just need to sew the binding on tonight!

My project that is next on the list is one I am very excited about! I saw it on Studio 5 the beginning of December and just never got down to Orem to American Quilting. January and February centers were sold out but they did have March. The quilt background stays up the whole year and then you replace the months that are made out of wool as the months change. So, I have 1 1/2 months to get the quilt and the banner finished! I can't wait!

You have a choice of 3 quilts and I am doing the middle one.

This is the March banner!

I have also gotten a little scrapping done. Here's one I finished today!

Finally Caught Up

Phia got to go to Nursery for the first time last week and went for the second time today. One of our 4 nursuries is small at this point and so she got to go in early an not wait until the end of February. She went in without a problem just as I figured since she is so social. I stayed for a few minutes the first week and said bye to her and kissed her and she didn't even turn when I left! When we came at the end she was asleep and had been for about 5 minutes. Today we went to get her and she just looked at us like, "Oh, you are back. Can I play longer?" That was a really easy transition!

She loves it when we say prayers and folds her arms really well. In fact, as soon as we are all at the table she folds her arms telling us it's time for the prayer. If you look at her during the prayer she puts her finger to her mouth (her nose actually) trying to tell us to be reverent! It's really cute. Everytime one of us gets up for something and sits down she thinks we need to say the prayer again so she fold her arms!

zHer she is with her tea set!

She loves her Rolypop that we got her at Christmas time from the Red Balloon. It keeps her very busy and she grabs the balls before they get to the end. The other day she put a tea plate over the hole at the top and then realized the balls couldn't go down so she moved the plate!

My girl!

She also likes the animal pop thing that she got fro her birthday. It craqcks me up because she only can open 2 of them consistenly and one of them is what I think is the hardest one to understand!

Sam and Jolene got her this piano/ball popper at Christmas and she has fun playing it and hitting the balls with the little hammer!

she loves bathtime and loves to unplug the tub! She likes to play with all the toys but hates getting water in her eyes. If it gets in her eyes she is up and standing at the tub ready to get out!

She adores water bottles for some reason so Shane let her drink out of one by herself today and she was soaking wet! She was having fun so I figured just let her play!

This is how she drinks out of it!

Shane was tickling her! She loves when he is home to play. He is more active than I am. I like to read books, do puzzles, color and play with her toys. Shane gets her all hyper and running around and giggling non-stop!

She loves to climb on everything and then dive off onto things. This was the game she came up with last night!

She loves to climg on the construction paper, boxes, basically anything she can climb onto.

She calls her milk in her sippie cup her ba. I have no idea why.

She knows where her head, hair, ears, eyes, nose, tongue, mouth, arms, hands, belly and toes are.

She can tell me that a cow says moo, a duck says quack and a dog says ruff!

She loves to play with her Little Touch Leap Pad and press things to see what sounds they make.

She likes her plastic food she got for Christmas and licks the ice cream cones.

She says amen at the end of a prayer which is so cute!

She gets excited to get out of the car at Grandma and Grandpas.

She loves being outside. Yesterday we were feeling cooped up so I asked her if she wanted to go for a walk. She wanted to and kept saying walk but the stroller was in Orem in the car. She had her heart set on a walk though so we put coats on and walked to the mailbox and back. Pat and Monica were outside and she was thrilled with all the attention she got.

She has a love for whip topping out of the aerosol can. My mom has had some in her fridge constantly since Thanksgiving and she loves it to be sprayed in her mouth. One night she wanted to open their fridge and when she did she kept looking around for it and couldn't find it. It had been thrown away since it was gone. Earlier she had chosen it out of the fridge so I knew she was looking for it.

Her favorite word is up!

She loves mini corn dogs and Grandma discovered that she likes to dip them in ketchup. She never lets corn dogs go to waste.

She loves when she gets ice cream. I wanted a McD's sundae the other night so we stopped and got one and got a kiddie cone for her. She was a mess in her carseat since we ate it on the way home but boy did she enjoy it! She finished hers and wanted our sundaes.

She loves to turn lights on and off and will say off or on if she sees one near her. She doesn't however like the fan in the bathroom or on the microwave. It scares her!

She loves to dance in her carseat to her music and cracks us up when she does! She loves the banana song on the Blue Moo CD and will sing nana to it and dance!

I really need to update more so I can remember more things!

Christmas Day in a Nutshell

I have gotten so far behind in my blogging that I decided to just make a Smilebox of Christmas Day pictures, so here it is.....

At A Later Date

Okay, it's been more than a couple days and I really need to get back on the blogging bandwagon as there is so much day to day that I need to blog about that Phia does so that I don't forget about it.

On Christmas Eve day Phia and I went to my mom's so that we could go to the Alpine Christmas Potluck and then down to BJ's and Haley's that night. I was putting Chicken Dip together that morning in the crockpot and Phia was playing with the popcorn tin and trying to open it. My dad and I decided that she wouldn't be able to get it open so we continued doing various activities. all of the sudden it got a little too quiet and so I went to check on Phia. She had gotten the lid off and was sitting there eating popcorn. When she noticed I had seen her she put the lid back on. She actually can get the lid off and has demonstrated it for us numerous times.

On a side note, the popcorn got eaten and just last Thursday Phia found the tin in my mom's craft room and automatically sat down and wanted popcorn. She opened it up and was awfully suprised to find no popcorn at all in the tin. The look on her face was priceless!

On New Year's Eve we decided to go get her hair cut. This is the before picture and her hair was more that a little shaggy! We decided to take her to Cookie Cutters in Lehi, so we called and made an appointment. When we got there we were really impressed! It was bright and colorful, they had a play area with a slide, the chairs that they got their hair cut in were cars and such. They had individual tv's with DVD players and a wide assortments of videos to choose from and then they got a balloon, sucker and cookie cutter when they were finished. Phia played in the play area and Shane taught her to climb up the slide. When more kids came it took some convincing to get her to go down the slide like the other kids. She went and sat in the chair, watched Word World and got her hair cut. She was pretty impressed that her car horn actually honked. The gal that cut her hair put it in 2 low pigtails and then off we went to get her balloon etc and pay. We ran some errands and then headed to Justin's for a New Years party!

This is after the hair cut. She looked so grown up all of the sudden!

More pictures of her hair a later on in the week.

We had fun at Justin's party even though I couldn't eat much since I had part of a root canal done the day prior as an emergency. He couldn't find the other roots so I had to make an appointment with an endodontist but couldn't get in till the 8th so I was it a lot of pain! On the 8th we went to the dentist and I was telling him it still hurt. He took another x-ray and found that it was the tooth in front that was causing me the pain but that the other one also needed a root canal. He fixed the tooth that was causing me pain and then I had to go back in last Thursday to get the other root canal done. I really don't like dentists too much lately. The first one hurt really bad for about 4-5 days but I haven't had any pain in the second one.

Phia had fun with a blow up punching bag at Justins and kept flipping herself over it and then cracking up until she would do it again!

This just has to be a mothers proudest moment. She has realized that she has nostrils and loves to stick her fingers up there. No matter how often we tell her it's yucky she still does it on occasion. She is the same way with the garbage can lately. She sees me throw things in there and she thinks it's fun to put her hand in and sometimes try and throw things away. I refuse to put the garbage away though because I would rather her learn it's something we don't play with at this age than later on.

Ahhhh, socks! This girl will not keep her socks on if she doesn't have shoes on. The second the shes come off the socks come off and before you can count to 10 she is picking her toe jam from between her toes. Initially she just picked one toe but now she has graduated to seperating all of her toes. She gets really frustrated when she has a dress on with tights and tries really hard to get those tights off.

She is my little walker and just loves to roam around the house checking everything out. She really started walking just before Christmas and pretty much quit the whole crawling thing.

She loves to empty out this basket that usually holds her lotions and carry it all around the house!

She wants to be independent at meal times and for the most part we try to let her do her own thing. She had a pb&j sandwich this day and had tons of fun playing with and eating her sandwich.

She pushed her milk onto the floor, which happens at least twice every meal.

Her and her bear.....

Her and my dad were playing with this phone one night and he had her giggling and giggling. He would run the car into her and she would laugh and fall and then get up again and want him to hit her with the car again.

Grandma Freeman got her this tea set for Christmas and she adores it! It provides her hours of entertainment. The only bad thing about it is that it has lots of pieces so if we take it somewhere we have to make sure we have everything we brought. The other day my mom put some cinnamom chips in the sugar pot and Phia thought that was great! She pretends she is drinking and eating out of it and occasionally offers me some.

While I am cooking dinner she likes to pull out pots and containers and pretend like she is cooking with me. She loves to open and close the dishwasher and knows how to start it. She likes to press buttons on the microwave and knows how to stop it.

The other day Shane cleaned all the phonebooks out of the closet and was going to throw them away. Phia decided she needed to play on them first and had a ball. She didn't even want to come eat lunch!

She loves her Doodle Pro which she calls her mag or her dood. She fell in love with Chloes while we were at their house visiting and so we took back her Dora blow-up ball thing and got her a Doodle. She loves to draw on it and often chooses it to take to Grandma's.

Cute girl!