Lydia's 1st Halloween (2012)

I love Halloween. I think that it may be my inner child who loves to dress up and play pretend. Or maybe it is just the part of my personality that likes to do something out of the ordinary. Or maybe I just like all of the candy. Who really knows? But one thing I do know for sure - I really enjoy pretty much all of the aspects of Halloween and I always have. 

When thinking back to my growing up years, I remember being a beautiful pink princess, complete with a tall cone-shaped princess hat topped with ribbons. I was once a red crayola crayon. And another favorite costume was when I was Rainbow Bright. Remember her? Yeah. I even have a picture to prove it: 

This year Halloween was extra special and fun because it was Lydia's first Halloween. One of our favorite nicknames for our little darling is "Lyddiebug" - and so I knew from the get go that I wanted Lydia to be a Ladybug. I'd seen tutorials for cute tulle tutus, and thought "I could do that."  I made the tutu and sewed black felt dots here and there to give it the resemblance of a lady bug. I was given some cute purple fairy wings as a baby shower gift from my cousin Sarah, but never had the chance to use them - but this was the perfect opportunity. I molded the metal outline to make them look more rounded, painted them red with some red acrylic paint and a foam brush, then sewed black felt dots to them. I had to switch out the purple elastic for black elastic to make them stay on her - but I think that they turned out so cute! I even used the little antenne from the wings and made it into a headband for my Lyddiebug. Here are some pictures: 

In a previous post, I wrote about how we went to our ward party the weekend before Halloween. It was really fun. However, on the actual Holiday (a Wednesday) David's work had a Halloween party at his work. All of the little kids got to come in their costumes and trick or treat through all of the cubicles.  It was really fun. Lydia didn't do much candy gathering, although we still walked around to show her off to David's co-workers. They even had a little station set up for picture taking. 

I dressed up as a spider and David dressed up as a spider web. (We were playing off of the Ladybug/insect theme. 

L really loved her daddy's costume. She couldn't get enough of it! 

Here's another good family shot. You can see my spider legs really well in this picture. It was a fun costume. I'm so grateful for a husband who jumps into the "family themed" costumes so wholeheartedly. 

Another one of the bug and her mom. She likes to chew on her fingers. She will often be found with her middle two fingers in her mouth. Or her thumb with all of her other fingers splayed out. 

As we were leaving the party, I stopped to take some pictures by the fountain outside of Davids work building (The KSL building in downtown Salt Lake). Less than six months old and she is already completely able to stand with minimal assistance. In fact, she would rather stand than sit most of the time. (But no - she still can't roll over from her front to her back.) I love these pictures of her because you can really see how big she is getting! This Halloween was fun, but I am secretly excited for next Halloween because she will know what is going on a little bit more. 

For our Halloween celebration, we also stopped by the Peaden grandparents house in West Jordan so they could see Lydia. Then we drove to Morgan and spent the rest of the evening playing with the new dog, Dante, and answering the door to trick or treaters. The Walker grandparents are so happy to be able to play with Lydia and have had a great time loving on her.

All in all, we have had a great Halloween! And don't even worry, I'm already coming up with ideas for what we are going to be next year! 

Pumpkin Carving

This year we had our annual pumpkin carving party. It was a little bittersweet and a lot empty. You see, the Olivers (who have been a HUGE part of our pumpkin carving extravaganzas for as long as I have been born) moved away to Michigan. It was so sad. I'll admit that our family is growing quite a bit on it's own - but without the extra 10 or so people there carving pumpkins with us the house seemed so empty and quiet. Olivers... we missed you dearly! Thank goodness for our dear Ben Oliver who represented for his entire family and still came over to celebrate with us. 

Here are some pictures of the night - and Lydia's first ever Pumpkin Carving! 

Even though it was Lydia's bedtime, we kept her up for just a minute so she could be part of the party. I just adore her little bald head and sleeper.  Below are some fun pictures of the creativity at work:

Our sweet little family.  

And then it was Lydia's bedtime - and we got to work on our pumpkins. 

Thank you to Pinterest for teaching us how to cut our pumpkin lids - it makes it easier to gut the pumpkin and light the candle .

 

David's pumpkin in on the left. Mine is on the right. (If you can't tell, mine says Lydia with a little bat underneath of it.)

This was my dad's pumpkin - in honor of Matthew who is on his mission in New Jersey. 

 We had to set our camera on a bench and used a timer. Thats why our legs look so big. But it's a great shot of everyone that was there. Except Lydia of course. We had a great time. I love carving pumpkins with my family. I can't wait for our family to grow bigger and bigger and for my kids to grow up loving to carve pumpkins with their grandparents. Happy Halloween!

Five things.. on Saturday.

I missed the boat on our Five Things on Friday post. But for the sake of being a better blogger, I will persevere and still post about five things that have been going on this week. 

#1- It snowed! We just got a little dusting of snow (whereas my family in Morgan had a snow day due to the 7 inches they received) - but it was so fun. We took Lydia out into it and she just kept looking around amazed. It was fun to have her first snow be at an age where she is so interested in the world around her. She loved it! We tried to get a picture of her face but the camera died. 

#2- We printed off some of our awesome new family pictures and hung them around our house. It's so fun to have some new pictures hung up. I'm constantly amazed at how well Lydia's personality was captured by the photos. 

#3- I went to my second ever book club and had a really good time. We read "The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie." I didn't particularly LOVE it, but it was fun to read something out of my element and to be able to get together with friends to chat about it. Oh, if you want a really good book to read, try out "The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet." I just finished it and it was SO good!

#4- David and I went to the last play of our Season tickets at the Hale Center Theater. It was South Pacific, and although it wasn't our favorite play - we had a really good time. Special thanks to Amy who came down and watched Lydia for us while we were gone. We have LOVED having these season tickets. I'm so lucky to have a guy who would surprise me with the totally unexpected Christmas present of season tickets to the Hale.

#5- Lydia went to her very first Halloween party. Isn't she darling? We will take some better pictures of her when we go to David's work Halloween party - but I couldn't resist posting these. She makes the cutest Lyddiebug we ever did see. Don't you agree?

(I love this sweet picture of Lydia and her friend Elsie. Such a cute pair.) 

Mexican Train

Shantel and I love to play games. Board games, card games, dice games, all games. When we got married we got a set of dominoes as a present. It was perfect because there are some really good 2 person games you can play with dominoes. Our favorite was Mexican train. The goal is to play all of your domino pieces before the other player. If you get stuck, you have to put a train on your line until you can play again. While you have a train on your line, anyone else can play on your tiles. We played all the time in Logan, but for some reason did not play as much when we moved to Lehi. At least until the rivalry was renewed the other night. If you ask Shantel, she will say that I always win. And that is just not true. Shantel wins all the time. In fact, when we played the other night she rocked me. Well of course I had to challenge her to a rematch. She got out to a huge lead, only to have more storm back to victory. Here are some photos from the night.

My awesome game winning hand. 

Me celebrating...you always have to celebrate victory, however, I was smart enough to realize it was probably not a good time for a "winning team, losing team" chant at the moment. 

Shantel being very sad. Shantel will tell you that she is not competitive because she does not care about winning. However, this is simply not true. She does not care about winning, but she hates to lose. Needless to say, her hate of losing makes her very competitive. 

I love being married to Shantel because she is so fun to play games with. She makes me laugh and makes every game better, even if she does beat me all the time.

Too cute

These pictures were taken last week and you have to admit. 

This girl is just too cute!

(I just love her little boots!)

Five Things

Sometimes, you have so many things to blog about, it's hard to know what to start with. I have six posts in Draft stage - waiting for the final touches in order for them to be blogged about. My plan was to write a blog post each day this week in order to catch up - but you can see how that plan worked out. However, this week was full of lots of fun things.

#1 - Lydia slept her first night in her crib. She has still been in her pack and play but we were lucky enough to inherit a crib from Wendy and Sam, so we set it up and gave it a go. She did pretty well, we think. We are thinking about painting it white, or maybe a fun color. What do you think?

#2 -I got to hang out with my awesome friend Natalie! She just got back from her mission and it was so fun to be able to spend the day with her. I sure miss this girl.

#3- I was able to get together with a bunch of friends from Elementary/Middle school. Three of us are married and two of us have babies. It was good to catch up with them. From left to right, there is Tony (Shandell's husband), Shandell and her baby, Kellie (Nick couldn't make it), Lauren, Andrea, and then Lydia and I (David couldn't make it either.)

Lydia was such a sweet girl. It was only toward the end that she got sad. It was a little noisy and close to her bedtime but she was such a trooper. I am so grateful for such a good baby. 

And here are some embarrassing pictures of those friends and I as little girls: (I couldn't resist!)

#4- My little sister Melissa introduced me to the funniest think. The SnapChat App. It is so funny. It may have made me want an iPhone pretty badly. Until I realized that we have an iPad. Whoo hoo! SnapChat enables you to take funny pictures, write funny captions, and send them back and forth. It's like a text message on steroids (where they can't download the picture and post it on facebook (*cough* Melissa *cough*). 

#5-We have been able to spend a huge amount of time with my family. It started out with Family pictures last Saturday: 

Then David had to go to Wendover for work all week. Because he was gone, that meant that Lydia and I stayed in Morgan and spend the week with my family. We were SO excited for David to come home, but we really enjoyed spending so much time with family!

First Piggy-back ever!

We had a wonderful week and we are so excited to have David back home with us.