Catch Up . . .

Here are a bunch of pics to catch you up on our goings on.

Sleeping baby.  This is one of the most beautiful sights of the day!

Dash always hooks his toes on the tray of his booster seat, so cute!

Trying out crayons for the first time

Where is Riley?

Peek-a-boo!

Brothers having fun in the sandbox

Gary and his friend Chad get ready for a bike ride

Riley and Anya playing tea-time at Gi-Gi and Pop-Pop's house

Eating a snack with Ethan

Playing with Mr. Potato Head

Dash and Cousin Seth

Stopping for lunch in Primm on one of our road trips to Salt Lake

Gi-Gi with her two newest grandsons

Thing 2 COVERED in sand.  He had some help, but he tends to do most of this himself.

Thing 1 also COVERED in sand.  Again, he did most of this himself, but Dash most certainly helped.

Most recent family pic, taken at Circus Vargus

Butterfly baby at the Wild Animal Park

Serious butterfly Riley

Having a great time playing cars and hanging out in a diaper

Superhero diaper boy!  Love it!

Hunting for Easter eggs together

Displaying all of our awesome Easter eggs

Happy 1st Birthday Dash . . .

 

Dash turned 1 on May 2nd.  Yes, it's been almost 2 months now, but here are some pictures from the big event.

On Dash's actual birthday we invited our neighbors the Buchman's over to dinner.  They brought Dash a gift and here  he is trying to figure out what he is supposed to do with this fun blue paper.

Totally checking out the glowing candle.  Gary has to hold his arm, because he really wants to grab it.

Digging in!

I made homemade banana cupcakes with pink whipped cream/cream cheese frosting.  Kaelani (our friends' daughter) asked me to color it pink, so I did.

Riley wanted a picture with frosting on his face too, just like the baby.  However, he has already licked most of the frosting off of his cupcake, so this was all he could muster.

He looks so proud!  He properly disintegrated the cupcake, woohoo!

This is how our family really looks all the time!

Riley (2) and Kaelani (4)

Later in the week we had a party with more friends at a really fun park by our ward house.  We bought an enormous dinosaur cake from Costco.  (No, Dash isn't particularly interested in dinosaurs, it was just really cute)

Digging in

Riley and Grant, Grant's dad Cameron, and the Agles

Peanut Butt-ud and Honey . . .

We make a lot of "Peanut Butt-ud and Honey" sandwiches at our house.  And I found this fun dino sandwich cutter at the grocery store, so I had to pick it up.

  

Riley is my big helper in the kitchen, but he tries to taste EVERYTHING!  Obviously tasting is a big part of learning in the kitchen, but this kid has a really hard time keeping his fingers out of every ingredient.  Since we are making this sandwich for him and his brother I let it slide, but we work on controlling the tasting all the time!

Gotta taste the honey too, mom!

Lining up the dino-cutter on the sandwich

Using our big muscles and pressing it down HARD

Removing the crust 

Removing the cutter

Ta-da!  Two delicious peanut butt-ud and honey dinos, yum!

Pool Time . . .

Our car is broken down so we are stuck at home.  But no worries, it is summertime and we have an awesome pool!  The kids LOVE the water and splash and play until they completely wear themselves out.  They also love to bring all the sand toys into the pool.  By the end the pool is absolutely full of sand and sand toys.  It's good though, because it forces me to empty and spray down the pool more often.  Good thing sand it cheap, because a lot of ours ends up slipping through the cracks of the porch.

Good clean outdoor fun! 

Cheese!!

Check out those blue eyes

Crazy splashing boy
(what a face!)

Sweet boy
(he totally reminds me of Gary in this pic!)

Light Box

I almost never spend time checking out blogs, but my friend told me about Play at Home Mom and I couldn't get enough of it.  I was super excited about the posts where they use their light boxes, so I jumped on Craigslist and found a great one for $30.  It is a pretty decent size, 19" x 15", and we are loving it.  Check out what we've been up to.

We painted with watercolors one day.  The light box really makes the watercolors glow, it's awesome.  The middle picture is where we were talking about mixing two colors together to make a new color.

These are floral beads, you can get them at the craft store.  They come in a little packet and are very, very tiny, until you add some water and give them a few hours.  They soak up all the water and become much bigger and beautifully transparent.  We got two different colors, pink and blue.  They look so cool together.  On this day we put them in a 9x13 glass dish and put a bunch of small glass bowl in the dish as well.  Riley loved scooping and pouring the beads from one bowl to another.

I think he looks so much like his daddy in this picture!

These things are so cool!  They feel cool and they look cool.  In this picture you can kind of see that they reflect each other too.  The more layers you have the more colors you get.  They are awesome!

Now, usually Baby Dash is not invited to play with the floral beads, because he tries to eat them.  But I was taking a chance this day and he was being pretty good.  

Until . . .

Floral beads EVERYWHERE!!  

And those suckers are NOT easy to pick up!  Oh well, at least I got a good action shot!  Unfortunately I don't think we will be trying that again soon in the near future.

Park Skillz

Dash is constantly trying to do everything that his "bruv-der" (brother) does.  It is crazy sometimes the stuff he is able to do!  Here are some videos of his (and Riley's) wicked Park Skillz . . .

This is one of my favorites!  He totally does the slide all by himself.  And it isn't a little slide either.  No, he goes for the biggest slide on the playground.  So fun!  You can see him turn himself around at the top, just like he does before going down the stairs.  Riley loves to go down this slide Superman-style, but I don't have a video yet.

They both love to swing, but Dash is finally really starting to get into it.  I love to hear him say "Weeee!" as he swings.

Here you see Dash playing on the . . . you know, I don't know what you would call these . . . bouncy animal things??  Anyway, he loves it, probably because he is always bouncing and bee-bopping himself.  You can also get a little glimpse into what a dare-devil Riley is, but he also minds pretty well and seems to understand what "safe" means, so we are able to keep him out of most perilous situations.

Of course, no park post would be complete without a little video of Jack going down the slides.  He loves this and it is so fun to watch him!