Megan's 18 mo Pics

She is totally so adorable to me. She stood like this for the first few minutes- playing shy. She was like that so long that it left a mark on her cheek.

This was the most pleasant looking face we could get. No real smile, but hey it works.

Brother and sister!

Really Mom do I have to keep doing this?

Ready for Christmas

Mary and Joseph

Megan getting ready for her 18 mo pictures- I will post more later. Her hair was awesome and she looked way cute, but no smiles for the camera- not one.

However she will smile for daddy's camera.

Here is our family right after church today. Aren't we festive? Mark is totally ready for Christmas to be here. He asks me every morning, "Is today Christmas?"

Mostly Thanksgiving

November began with an unprecedented long stay at home for our family. We used Mike's day off on Veteran's Day to finish our yard, paint a wall and build some furniture (I'll try to post pics later). We weaned Megan off the binkie. Mark is enjoying preschool more and more- so much so that he asks me everyday if today is the day he gets to go.We did travel to Utah for Thanksgiving. This is what the kids look like when we start the trip. Yes, Megan is wearing curlers in her hair. They are one of her favorite toys to steal out of Grandma P's bathroom. We helped remodel Grandpa and Grandma's bathroom as their Christmas present. We also got to finally celebrate Grandpa and Grandma B's 80th b-days. It was great to see the whole family.
Mark as always has a ton of fun with the uncles. I think its because they pretty much do whatever he wants.
We took a trip to see the lights and temple square. This is Megan experiencing the Front Runner train. She kept saying hi to every stranger we met.

She loved the lights but it sure was cold.
Bryson helped out. Apparently Megan thought the stroller is not that cool anymore so she got carried everywhere while being wrapped up. The kids don't have winter coats because they only need them for a few days out of every year. We just layered. I think Megan has four different layers on in this picture.
Mark enjoyed being carried also.
This is my favorite part of the square. Its hard to tell, but Megan is reaching for the lights. She tried hard all night to touch all of them.
All that fun is hard work. Mark fell asleep on the way home right in the middle singing a song. It was only 5:30 or 6:00 but Grandpa's house wears him out.

October in December

It is glaringly obvious that I am way behind so we will just jump in. Let's start in October.

Megan is getting to be a big girl. This is one of her attempts at yogurt. You have to watch carefully because if she gets board then she just starts playing with her food.

Shoes continue to amuse her greatly. Here she is wearing Mark's on the wrong feet of course. Her favorite thing is to take of her shoes and socks while in the car and then put back on only her shoes on the wrong feet.

Mark is our builder and enjoys Lego's as he would say "a lot and a lot."

We spent a few day in Midway with the Brey family. Most of my pictures were blurry, but this one of the view outside our condo came through. You don't usually see fog in Utah so I took a picture of it. The kids had a blast with their grandparents and the Uncles.

We had a fun Halloween. The kids had been kinda of sick, but they rallied in time to go trick or treating. Mark and Dad had fun with the pumpkin carving as always. Mark refuses to stick his hand in to help clean it out. "Its too scary" he says.

Megan was our little purple princess.

Mark wanted to be a prince with a sword who fights dragons. Mom is usually the dragon. They both really loved the concept of getting candy from all the neighbors. Mark already has a few requests in for what he wants to be next Halloween. I told him that we have to have Thanksgiving and Christmas first.

The Beach

So we decided to go to the beach, let the kids see the Atlantic Ocean and do all the fun stuff you do at the beach. We had a blast and enjoyed our trip to the beach greatly. We were slightly confused by the fact that we could see trees on all sides of what we thought was the ocean. It was all made clear when we learned that we had traveled to a nice lake- not the ocean beach. My sense of direction out there is totally off- I need a mountain range as a point of reference.

Maine/Vermont Part II

Saturday- We got up and headed to Vermont. We arrived around one in the afternoon. The whole reason for the trip was to celebrate Mimi's birthday. It was all a surprise too which made it fun. Mimi didn't know any of us were coming until Saturday morning. This is what most of the drive looked like for those of you who have never been on a New England road.

It was so awesome that the whole family showed up- we had everyone there. Everyone got together at Papa and Mimi's house first. We headed to the restaurant a couple of hours later and had a really great meal. Mark got to help Mimi blow out her candles.

Sunday we got to just visit and relax for most of the morning. The kids played inside mostly because it rained all day. We had to leave at noon to get to the airport in time. We took a 5:00pm flight and got home around midnight. I never get enough pictures of Vermont because I am too busy just enjoying it and having fun. Sorry you'll just have to imagine what it looked like.

Maine/Vermont Part I

This is way late in coming, but every time I sat down to do it I got interrupted. So finally here is a chopped up recap of our trip to Maine and Vermont.

Wednesday was basically all travel. It was Grandma Parrish, me and the kids. We flew, we flew again and we drove arriving in Portland around 8:00 (I think). The kids were pretty great on the plane. Megan actually took a nap, which was a relief to me. Mark watched a rediculous amount of movies.

Thursday- This was our home away from home for three days. Randi and Mike have done a ton of work and their house looks awesome. We went for a lot of walks, Mark loved playing uncle Mike's Wii and we had some good time to just rest and relax. I think this was the day we visited the beach, but to be honest its all kind of run together in my mind. I'll post about the beach later- I got so many cool photos.

Friday- We went on this awesome Duck Boat tour of Portland. We learned a lot about the city and got to go into the bay. We saw some seals and a massively huge oil tanker. That night we packed up so we could head to Vermont early in the morning. The men joined us somewhere around 2 in the morning having taken the red-eye after work on Friday.

Camping Adventure

We decided to go camping two weekends ago. It was a bit of a last minute decision but we figured there would be more than enough places to go because it was after Labor Day. Long story short after visiting six different camp grounds and spending a couple hours in the car we found no where to set up camp. After helping a couple of guys jump their truck at the archery camp site we decided to just stay where we were. We couldn't start a fire so we ate chips, watermelon and grapes for dinner and just left the hot dogs and smores for another day. The adults weren't sure about staying, but we set up the tents anyway. The kids of course had a blast and didn't even realize that there had been any hiccups in the plan. Mark still talks about how fun it was. I think we will try again soon, but first we will make a reservation. This was the only picture I got of our trip becuase by the time we set up it was past 8:30 and too dark to take any other pictures.

Animal Farm

Our mommas group took a little trip to a local aviary. They also had some other fun animals there besides the birds. The kids had a lot of fun. Megan is enjoying the fish.

This chicken has nothing to do with anything, I just got a kick out of its hairdo. The picture doesn't do it justice. This chicken had real attitude.

This is Mark and Lydia playing with the goats. There was the cutest little baby goat there. I didn't know goats were so adorable when they were kids. Mark loved watching them.
This is Megan and her new friend the ostrich. She is thrilled about the relationship as you can see.
All in all it was an awesome little trip. Very entertaining and educational.

Five Years!!

Mike and I celebrated our fifth anniversary at the beginning of September. We took an awesome trip- great thanks to my mom and dad for taking the kids. We stayed at a resort in Park City. Above is the view out our patio. We had fun hiking up the mountain one morning. We surprisingly both had problems with altitude sickness. Below is Mike checking out the view and being his normal charming self.

On Saturday we made the rounds to our favorite Utah stores to stock up on stuff we can't get in Vegas. We stopped at the BYU bookstore and had fudge there for the first time- that is totally something I am going to have to go back for. We visited some of our old dating spots- like the dollar theater and Los Hermanos (still the best Americanized Mexican food I've had).

Sunday we went to church and really enjoyed sitting next to each other and listening. We also went to the Salt Lake Temple where this whole marriage thing started. We did a lot of driving and talking. Mike is really making his point here.

Monday we ate lunch in Heber City- gotta love their train burger and shakes at grandma's drive in. We golfed a little bit in Provo, but a silly migraine interrupted our fun (again the altitude, you think I would be used to even though I have only been away for a couple of years). After some good drugs and a quick nap at a park we were back to the fun. We had an absolute blast playing at Seven Peaks Water Park. We had so much fun going down the slides and going back up to the top as fast as we could. It was like being a kid again- so fun. We finished the night off at Ruby River, another Utah staple we miss. Tuesday morning we went and did sealings at the temple. The perfect ending to our awesome trip. Here we are in our nice duds- a little older than in the wedding pictures, but just as happy to be together.

My Little Helper

Megan helped me clean the floor the other day. She loves copying everything that Mark and I do. Mark was the photographer for the last picture.

Super Hero Rescue!

My Uncles My Uncles!

A couple of weekends a go we had a fun visit from two out of the three "uncles" as they are affectionately called in our home. Mark loves these guys to distraction. He had so much fun playing that he wore himself out. We went to the dairy and to the Bass Pro Shops and Frys and played and wrestled and ate and watched movies and ate some more. I hope the uncles had fun too. They left right after our sacrament meeting while Mark was in nursery so he didn't find out they were gone until we left church. When I told him that they had to go home so that they could go to work Mark just hung is head and said, "Well, I really like my uncles a lot and a lot."