Jack is loving having his brother here. He is very loving and wants to hold and love Cam. We are working on being soft and not touching the babies eyes, but overall things are going well. Each day gets a little better as we all welcome a new one into our home.
Thank you to everyone for all of your well wishes. Baby and I are doing great and are excited to come home. As you can see from the photo baby cleans up quite nicely. I am sure we will be announcing a name soon, we are very close to finalizing that!:)
Here is a picture of Jack when he was born, and the picture is of me. I think I see some similarities.
These pictures are from the snow storm we had last week. Rob and Jack had a great time and enjoyed sliding down the playhouse. I didn't plan on the playhouse being a winter toy but it was a lot of fun.
My boys playing in the snow.
Rob making sure there is enough snow at the bottom so Jack doesn't hit the ground too hard!
We went down to Temple Square to see the lights for my birthday. It was super cold, but it was beautiful, and not crowded. We had a great time and Rob took some great pictures that I thought I would share.
One of the few pictures we had of the 3 of us. I know it is blurry, but I think I look better blurry now a days.
We love Christmas time in our house and this year we have started off with a bang. We were asked about 6 weeks ago to participate in a Holiday Home Show Tour of homes in the Bountiful area. I wasn't sure because I am pregnant, and this is the first Christmas in our new house, I do not have enough decorations, my Mom lives in Spain now, etc. etc. Well we decided to go ahead with it and said we would be part of the tour. I knew that Shannon, my Mother-In-Law would help me, and so what you see in the next few pictures was created under her guidance with the help of Rob's 2 sisters Emily & Jeni. My sister Nikki & her family did a great job is picking out a tree for us, it is 13.5' tall, and Rob & Nikki were also very involved in making my house presentable to a few hundred people. I was a really good observer of the entire process!:) Thanks to everyone who made this happen for us this year. Rob and I both agree that our house may never look so beautiful at the holidays again.
Coming in the front door, hey Rob!
The family room.
A closer view of the tree. There are lighted balls that go up the middle of the tree. It is minimally decorated, but if you ask me it is perfect!
A closer view of the mantle area. When we were building this house one of the things I pictured was our mantle, fireplace, & hearth at Christmas time. I think this is better than I imagined!
He was recently re-introduced to his Halloween costume from last year. He is Super Why from the PBS show of the same name, and he is coming to the rescue!
So what could be better than combining the two?? If you see me, or I should say my Super Why, basketball jersey wearing son around town just smile and wave, I will understand if you don't want to talk to us!:)
We were blessed, or cursed depending on how you look at it, with our first shovable snow of the season. It isn't so bad when you have two super cute snow shovelers taking care of your driveway.
This past week my brother Zach invited us to Provo to see a BYU basketball game. We knew Jack would just go crazy over seeing the game so even though it was late, we made the trek to Provo. Notice the great front row seats! Jack wasn't so sure about all of it when we first arrived, but he gradually got more and more excited. He would stand in front of us and as the player was shooting a free throw, he would pretend to dribble and then shoot himself, it was pretty cute. We asked him afterwards what his favorite part was and he kept saying "the cougars", I think he meant the players. He also loved the treats at halftime and the bag of treats and drinks that is left under the seat for you. I don't know if we will be enjoying those kind of perks very often, but it sure was fun to enjoy it for a night. Thanks Zach & Lauren!
We had Cosmo sitting right next to us every once and a while. Jack never really warmed up to Cosmo.
During one of the first time outs the referee came over and let Jack hold the game ball. He was excited at first and then a little shy about it.
Here he is in some back locker room. It was a great night and one Jack will remember for a long time.
My sister started doing Wednesday's around the world with her family a while ago. They talk about a different country eat some food, or family friendly version of food from that country. They don't do it every week, but once a month or so. Tonight was Spain, and since we were both just there she invited us to join them tonight. The sign above was made my niece Ellie.
Here they are enjoying some tapas, or appetizers. Meats, cheeses, & olives. We had our kid friendly version of paella, rice a roni, and chicken.
We then pretended to have a bull fight, and here our the 3 matadors and their capes.
Meet our bull. Very fierce.
Here is the bull running at one of the matadors.
The night ended with the bull reading a story about a matador to our matadors! It was a fun night, thanks Ashtons!
For Jack's birthday Rob and I got him a "big boy bike" and he loves it. With the weather being so great right now in Utah we decided to take Jack out to the Legacy Highway Trail, it is about a 5 minute drive from our house, and it was great. The nicest thing about that is that it is very smooth and flat two things that any little biker needs. It was a beautiful day and Rob and Jack rode for a long time. In my current state, I am not much of a biker, but the two of them were gone from me for about 40 minutes, which is pretty good for a 3 year old. I enjoyed the little walk and just being out in the sunshine.
Aren't they cute!:)
If you can't tell Jack is Peter Pan. We dressed him up all warm, I bet he was a little hot, and went trick or treating on our street. He loved it especially when he got a treat he liked. When he got one he didn't want he would have to come and hand it to me, he couldn't even leave it in his bag. Kids are so funny.
Every once and a while he would see something scary and he would whip out his sword and pretend to fight it. He isn't fighting those pumpkins in the background, but some big blow up gargoyle thing. He has watched Peter Pan the movie a lot so he knew how Peter was supposed to act, it was really cute.
Here we are at a door, in fact it is the door to the house right next door to us. Do you recognize it Mom & Dad?
I have been a little slow at posting because I had some problems getting pictures off my camera, but Jack's birthday was on October 15th and we had a fun day. We headed out to the pumpkin patch and Jack played on some of the large pumpkins,
picked some of the green ones,
played forever in the hay maze,
and was just his regular cute smiling self!
These grapes are from my backyard, well my parents backyard, but I have been looking forward to making grape juice and the time has finally arrived. I love the old wooden boxes that we inherited from the old house that used to be where our new house is. I will have to let you know how the juice tastes, but I am pretty sure it will be delicious!
October 13th is Rob's birthday and so we didn't have an elaborate party, but we did have fun with just the 3 of us. We went bowling and you can see how much fun Rob had!:)
Rob and Jack checking out our scores, nothing to get to excited about. Okay yes Jack and I did bowl the same score, but hey he used the bummers.
Take-out from the Mandrain, one of our favorite places to eat, and even better that it is only a few blocks away from our house.
Finally a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, and just a little spider web decorating. Don't you love Halloween!:)
Rob and I just returned home from taking a fabulous 10 day trip to Spain. We have been planning this since March and it has finally arrived. We went with my sister Nikki and her husband Matt, so the 4 of us spent the time working our way through Spain. One benefit of having parents serving as mission presidents is that they get to know some of the other mission presidents in the other cities. We were able to stay in the Madrid, and the Barcelona mission homes as well as with our parents in Bilbao. We only missed out on the Malaga mission home, maybe next time!:) Hermana Watkins who is serving in Madrid with her husband was so generous to come and pick us up at the airport and take us around the first day. She took us to the Madrid Temple, which there is no way we could have found if she didn't. It is a whole square of the temple, and the MTC, and a small distribution center. Thank you Hermana Watkins!!
After the temple we were dropped off right in front of the Prado Museum. This is a very famous art museum in Madrid.
The painting below is a Picasso that is not in the Prado, but is just down the way. This painting is called Guernica which is a town in Northern Spain, in my parents mission, that we actually drove through when we were with them. It is a very sad story of what happened there. You can read about it here if you are interested.
