Take Two of These

For anyone who has had, is having, or will ever have "one of those days."  

Take two of these and call me in the morning.

We all need a dose of Mary Ellen Edmunds every once and a while.

“If Thou Art Merry, Praise the Lord” (D&C 136:28)

or

Godliness with Contentment

Yummy Jam

Sleep is very important to me. I am not a night owl in any way. There are not very many good reasons to stay up past 10:30pm in my book. For the last three days I have had a good reason to stay up late.
I have been using a lot of these.

And lots and lots of these.

I've been doing a lot of this.

To make sure we have plenty of this to last all year.

I love strawberry jam! I really don't know if LOVE is a strong enough word for how I feel about good homemade strawberry jam. Since Anna has been born I have been making my own bread. It would make sense that I should make my own jam to go on the bread. So for the last three nights I have made a batch of jam each night. It is well worth staying up really late. We now have 27 half pints of strawberry jam. Each jar needs to last two weeks in order for our supply to last all year. I hope we can use some control.

7 Months, Almost 8

I decided to surprise Devin by getting Anna's pictures taken for Father's Day. It has been almost a month since I went to Target to get these pictures taken. I have really wanted to get her pictures taken, REALLY taken, not just in our house for a long time. I see cute baby pictures all the time. I hoped that taking the cheap, easy, Target coupon route would still produce some really cute pictures of Anna. I was very pleased with what they could do in 10 minutes. Out of all the pictures taken these are my top 5.

I am happy to report that Devin loved his new pictures. He can't wait to show them off at work tomorrow. I don't blame him. It has taken all the control in the universe to not post these pictures, since I have had them for several weeks now.

I'm Going Down to the Library

Why is reading in the summer more magical than during the school year? Especially for me and the state of life I am currently in (it's like summer vacation all year). Summer reading is still magical though. For the last several months I have been taking Anna to the library for Lap Time (story time for little kids). We love it! I love the library! I made Anna a special "library book" bag. Each week we go and check out all the board books we can cram into the bag. It has been a fun chance for her to interact with other little kids, listen to stories, and to sing fun songs. The teacher in me just eats it up every week.

Last week was special because it was the Teddy Bear Picnic. They had a Wizard of Oz theme (What does that has to do with the Teddy Bear Picnic????? Who knows!). The library was all decked out Yellow Brick Road and all. There were storytellers that told great stories. Anna was happy and sat through the whole thing. So yeah for the library! We are there every Thursday morning at 10:30am. Come one, come all, you'll love it too!

Oh, and if you haven't been to the Orem library lately, they have a new way to check out books that is pretty cool. It is worth going just to check out a book using their new computer system. Today it was funny though, it started checking my books out before I even pulled them out of the bag. So friendly warning the system is a little sensitive.

July 17th at 8:10pm!!!!!

I just bought our tickets to see Harry Potter on Friday, July 17th at 8:10pm in AF.  Anyone want to come?????

I've Got One

I just wanted everyone to know that I am married to one of these "Real Men."

We Did Go to Idaho

It has been several weeks since we went to Idaho to spend time with Devin's family. We had tons of fun. It was one of those times that we were having so much fun that we kind of forgot to stop and take pictures.
The last several times we have been to Idaho we have been so busy with everything that was going on. We decided before we went up this time that we just wanted to spend time with the family with no real plans or schedule to pressure us. We stayed Thursday night with Missy and Briant. Then Friday morning we went and had breakfast with Pam and helped her with her garden. It was fun to get to work with the Idaho gardening expert. http://gardeninglifestyle.blogspot.com/ We then spent the afternoon with Devin's parents so Anna could have some good grandparents time.
We stopped by the cemetery to show Anna where her Olsen grandparents are buried.

Then we headed up to The Barn. Devin's brother Kyle helped change an old fall out barn into a vacation rental. It is pretty amazing. Kyle and Kathy manage the barn so we got to stay there for free. It was so much fun. We played outside with the kids.

We finally got family pictures taken thanks to Missy.

The highlight of the weekend's activities was good 2 hour game of Sardines. (See Missy's blog for the best recap of the fun with this game.) I think everyone had at least three or four hiding spots that they would have liked to try out if there had been more time.
The nice part of the weekend is that we had time just to sit around, chat, and make faces at each other.

It was so nice to be together. We haven't been able to spend this much time together in a long time. The girls had so much fun playing together.

On Sunday we went to church with Kyle's family. The girls wore the cute dresses that Grandma Baldwin made for them. They looked great together.

It was so nice to see everyone. I keep telling them that they should move down. They keep tell us that we should move up. I think someone needs to invent a way to go from Orem to Idaho Falls, Rexburg, or Ashton in less than an hour. I am so grateful to be part of such a wonderful family. Every time we go to Idaho our drive home consists of the "We need to get up here more often" conversation.

32 Seconds

Today we ran, AS A FAMILY, the Firefighters 5k. Thanks to a fantastic family in our ward who gave us their old jogging stroller, we are able to run together and not have to leave Anna behind. It was a little raining and cold, but Anna loved it! I am so grateful to be married to my favorite running buddy. We hope to help Anna to develop a love for running too.
As a happy side note, I was able to shave 32 seconds off my 5k time. I would really like to knock another 3 minutes off. I was delighted with my time though. Even Devin did respectfully well considering that he was pushing Anna the whole time. We will see what the next race brings for our family.

I'm The Winner!

One Christmas I didn't know what I wanted. Santa wanted at least some idea, so I told Santa that I just wanted games. I loving playing board games. That Christmas was great. I got all sorts of board games. One of those games was Monopoly. It has been a long time since I played Monopoly, in fact I realized that I have never actually finished a whole game because people always gang up on each other and we end up getting mad and just quitting the game before too many people end up hating each other.

Devin and I decided it was time for me to finish a full game of Monopoly. Friday night for our Date Night we put Anna to bed and pulled out the board game. 3 hours later, I had completely destroyed my husband. It was really fun!!! It puts a different twist on the game when there are only two people.
We decided that we need to play games like that more often. One of my favorite classic board games is Clue. What are some of your favorite board games?

What Should We DO?

Would it surprise anyone to know that I never really played with dolls growing up? I was a social doll player. I played because my friends wanted to. I liked to set things up, but that was about it. The few dolls I had, I never changed their hair. I would only brush it a bit if I thought it was in need of a little touch up.
So I am realizing I have a big problem. Anna's hair is growing and that means that I'm going to have to start doing something with her hair. I made my first attempt at fixing Anna's hair this last week. We call it the Horn-Do. What do you think?
I think I need serious help. I know with her hair still as short as it is, it is harder to do stuff. Any suggestions? Are their You Tube videos that show how to do little girl's hair really cute? Perhaps a library book? I'm sure there are easy cute things to do, I'm just not very smart in that area at all.

Pre-t Happy

Devin was Pre-t happy today. Why? Today the new Palm Pre came out. Devin is a technology nerd to say the least. Phones are REALLY important to him. He has spent hours and HOURS reading up on cell phones and which ones are the best and all sorts of stuff. Many people come to Devin for advice on phones because he know his stuff.
Over the last few months he has learned more and more about the Palm Pre. He has fallen in love with this phone. I am so proud of him. He has been saving all his pennies so he could use his "fun money" to buy this phone. Today was the day. The Sprint store and Best Buy would be the only places you could get them. The rumor was that they were only going to get 10 or so phones at the Sprint store. The store was going to open early at 8am. Devin woke up and was in line by 6:45am. There were only four guys ahead of him. But they told him that they were all sold out because one guy was buying 3 and another guy was buying 2 and so on. Devin decided to stay and at least get on a list to buy the phone. Later the store manager came out and started asking everyone how many phones they wanted. It turned out that there were enough phones for all the guys ahead of Devin, one for Devin, and one for the guy behind him. Happy Day!!!
By 8:45am he was back home with his new best friend. I must say it is a slick little phone compared to is old clunker Palm.
But here is the best part.....Because Devin bought the Palm Pre today, he got $50 off another phone in the store. About two weeks ago I got my phone upgraded because it was dropping calls just when I was sitting in my house. I got a $50 upgrade for free then. But the phone I got doesn't hold a battery charge at all. We have been meaning to go in and switch the battery out. Devin put two and two together today and realized that I should go in and either get a new battery or get an even better phone.
Long story short. I am now the owner of a Palm Centro...FOR FREE!!!! I don't think I'll ever use all the functions, but it is similar enough to Devin's old phone that I know how to use it more than some of the other phones with full keyboards. Watch out world my text messaging is going to get even faster!!!
Tonight we are both Pre-T Happy. Devin has a new cool phone that controls the universe. And I have a cool new phone that probably could control the universe, if I only knew how to use it.

Only 40 Days Left!

Enjoy! A Most Particular Memory. 

A Big Day

Today was a big day in the Baldwin home. After months and months of people trying to get Anna to roll over, she finally rolled over by herself for the first time today. At 7 months she has finally joined the "rolling over" club. I think she is going to join the "crawling" club really soon. As soon as she rolled over she started to push herself backwards across the room. It is going to be fun to see what the next few weeks bring. I probably should really start baby-proofing my house now.

Today we also went and signed the whole family up for Provo Library's summer reading program. They give the kids the T-shirts before they do all the reading so Anna got her shirt today. We'll see if Devin actually gets his T-shirt this year. He has done the reading for the past two years but somehow has never gotten his free T-shirt. Here's hoping! Anna and I read every day. She loves books that have flaps that open and ones that have parts you can feel. One of the best parts of summer is endless hours of reading.