Strollers ?? Opinions please

With this new one on the way, i'm looking for a new stroller. I love my full size one, but it's just that - full size. I need a good umbrella stroller for the space, traveling, etc. I hate the cheap ones, they're no where near tall enough for me and I end up with an aching back or just carrying the child. My preferences (in order):
1. tall handles
2. shade
3. basket underneath
4. sit & ride seat for Ains
Has anyone ever seen an umbrella stroller with the seat on the back for older kids?

I want your opinions, experiences, etc. Thanks!!

Tulip Festival 2009

While dad & Sandy were here we went to the tulip festival. We went Saturday morning as it has been really busy the past few Sat afternoons. I don't know that it got quite so busy this time, Saturday was a bit cold and rainy. We didn't stay long, which was probably better we had more shelving to do. The fields were gorgeous, but the wind blew right over them, so it was pretty cold walking around them. Ainsleigh had a lot of fun. She held a bird (though it mostly stood on my hand as I steadied her arm), we both got our faces painted - she had hers picked off within a few hours and then started working on mine, and then asked where they went :). She also liked the ducky races, the bouncy houses, and most of all her pony rides - that is always her favorite.

big helper

Ainsleigh is really into helping lately, I try to allow and encourage it as much as possible, although sometimes that does take additional time and patience - I want her to enjoy helping. This past weekend my dad and stepmom came to visit and help us put up some shelving. Some of it needed to be painted before it went up - so Sandy and Ainsleigh painted it together - Ains really did a good job, she's getting so big it amazes me sometimes the things she can do. I guess when I paint her dresser i'll have to have her help me.

Easter egg hunt

finding an egg - yeah!!


posing for the camera - if only I could get her to look at it, too.


I didn't get pictures of Ains in her Easter dress, maybe i'll dress her up the next nice day and take some. We decided to do an egg hunt at the house Sunday afternoon. It was cute to watch, she got so excited with EVERY egg she found. The hair is post nap, so that's part of why it's a little crazy - it's growing, but I think it will still be a loooong time before we have a bob again. She and I both miss pigtails so hopefully it grows fast.

Updates

Wow, time is flying by. I am now 7 months along, I can't believe that means less than 2 months to go!! Auuggghhhh!! I feel like I still have so much to do. I am getting excited, just want to have all my ducks in a row. I am still working on doing stuff to decorate the house, then will get to work on stuff for the girls room. I actually have to do stuff for Ainsleigh and the baby is getting Ainsleigh's crib bedding and her current dresser when I finish painting one for A. In a few days I can say I'm due next month, which kind of makes me laugh because it's bit of a skew since i'm due at the very end of the month, but that's okay. At my appt last week I made all of my appts through the end, that felt kinda wierd. I am having another ultrasound in a few weeks to make sure the baby is growing okay since I am constantly measuring small. I did the whole time with Ains too, so no one is real concerned, just bettter safe. I probably just have another pip squeak. We'll have to wait and see, and no, we haven't settled on a name yet - still accepting suggestions.

free digital scrapbooking

So, things have a changed a lot in the free digital scrapbooking world since I posted about this last. There are still a lot of freebies out there, but in my opinion you do have to look a little harder. The biggest change is that a lot of the sites that do a freebie each week or so now "retires" these kits at the end of each week. That means you only have that week to get them, then most of them go to dollar bins in their respective stores. For most of them, the collab kits are still free indefinetily. Big thanks to my sister-in-law Erin for letting me in on a bunch of these sites. I am working on revamping my link list on the side, I was working on editing it and accidentally deleted it completely. There's a list of places to check for the weekly freebie each week and there will be some other links as well. If you find any I should add, or discover some that aren't there anymore, etc - just let me know and I will try to update it accordingly. Happy scrapping.

Music on my blog??

Okay, I ALWAYS look at blogs, and do generally everything with the computer muted, today I unmuted it and couldn't figure out where the music was coming from - apparently I have music attached to my blog??!! How long has it been there? Now I get to try to get it off in the next few days, and i'm not even sure how it got there! Have a good day everyone.

scrapbooking...

Sorry, no updates on free downloading sites. The little bit of time i've spent on scrapbooking stuff has mostly been reloading all of already downloaded free stuff into my program. I got a virus in the fall, and still haven't caught up completely since then. I didn't lose anything, I was able to save it all and reload it, but I have to reload each free download kit seperately. Anyways, as we're getting pretty settled into the house I should have more time soon to update that sort of thing. Anyways, this past weekend scrappingsimply.com, as far as we know the cheapest place to print 12 x 12's, had a sale on printing. So I did my last touch ups to the few pages i've had a chance to do and get them printed. I thought I would show you the finished product. It will be very interesting to see the way things change as I do this more and more.

Celebration time!!

Ainsleigh's birthday was a little spread out this year with the move. Her birthday was on a Tuesday and we moved the following Saturday. My family wanted to come for a party, but they're far enough away it has to be on a Saturday. So, we put her party off and had it after we were moved in and somewhat settled. I worked on her actual birthday, I think i'll ask for it off next year, so we took special treats for snack time at "school" - she picked them out, brownies and Capri Sun. She really liked that. While we were walking through the grocery store I kept telling her it was her birthday and she was 3. She would get excited over it being her birthday, singing to herself and repeating, "oh yeah, it's my birthday." But, she was not yet convinced that she was 3. She kept telling me, "no mommy, I be 3 in March." It took a few days to convince her, but now she agrees she is 3. With turning another year older she got to move up in classes at daycare/school. I was concerned this would be a really hard adjustment for her - one of her 1 year classroom teachers moved up to the 2's not long before she did, but this time it was all new and a much higher student to teacher ratio. But she has done awesome. It helps that she already knows many of the kids from the past two classes, and that her best friend McKenzie has her birthday just before Ains. I'm grateful it has been an easy transition for her and that she is almost always happy when I drop her off. Nothing makes you feel worse than when they cry every day as you drop them off.

Present from Papa & Nana Pack - Her first gift was from Papa & Nana Pack, it was a set of Hello Kitty scrubs that she demanded to put on immediately and wear to bed, but i'm not sure why I didn't get a picture of them - they're super cute. We let her open it the night before so we could both be there without her having to wait 2 days after. Now she thinks any package that comes to the house can potentially be a gift for her and she can't wait to open them.



The card she got from them was super cool and had this crown in it. She couldn't wait for me to cut it out for her - she loves anything at all princess like right now!


Party at our house. We had a family party Saturday the 21st with all of my immediate family and Rachel and Brady and boys. They had lots of fun, Ains loved having all of the other kids to play with. She is a little timid about tearing paper on gifts, so she asked the other kids to help her. It was such a mass of kids standing around it was hard to get good pictures of her opening gifts, but that's okay.

The cake was kind of funny. My original plan was to make an ice cream cake, lately she only eats the icing off of cake. Then a week or so before her birthday she asked if we could make cupcakes and they decorate them themselves. Great, no time necessary for me to decorate anything :). The morning of her party she decided she had to have a cake, that it wouldn't be a birthday without it. So I made a cake and very quickly decorated - it was very fitting of a 3 year old, it basically looked like she had iced & decorated it. But it still tasted good. She also said we needed to decorate the house for her birthday. I wish I had had balloons and streamers because I think she would have totally gotten into it. I included the top picture of me lighting the candles because this was in the middle of the song. As soon as I lit them the first time, even before we started singing she blew them out, so I lit them again and she got to blow them out twice!


Her birthday outfit was pretty cute - she wanted to wear her pink dress that desperately needed ironing, but was not allowed, and her princess pajama pants. They played dress up at some point during the day, and she kept this dress on through the rest of the party.

fun times with baby Lillian

Lillian came to play recently while Meredith helped me pack some things up. Ainsleigh always feels like Lillian needs whatever she does, and makes sure to put it on for her. Usually it's some of her dress up dresses, this day it was winter hats. Hopefully she'll take such good care of her new sister as well.

playgroup valentine's party

We had a Valentine's party for playgroup. We made and decorated cookies and made valentine's. We had a great time, the kids really enjoyed it, we're even talking about doing one in March for St Patrick's day. I didn't get any great pictures, but here's a few of some of the kids decorating and eating their cookies. Oh, and if anyone needs a good sugar cookie recipe - this one is amazing. It has sour cream in it so the cookies are so soft - yum!!

names???

We don't have a name picked out yet, have a list of possibilities. but i'm open to suggestions. We think Ainsleigh is a very cool name, and therefore our next one deserves a cool name as well. Who knows, maybe one of you lucky readers can come up with one we just fall in love with. Have a great day!!

New house

The first weekend of February we bought a new house. We have been looking casually since December, seriously since the first of the year. We looked at quite a few houses, and found the one for us. We initially tried to stay in our ward boundaries, but that didn't work out, so we will be moving into the ward directly to the west of ours. We meet in the same ward and our playgroups meet together most of the time, so Ainsleigh and I are happy to not still have an easy connection to all of our friends in the Keizer ward - we have made some awesome friends there. And we'll still have our various parties together. Brody's sister Rachel and her family also just bought a house in Keizer - in the same ward!! They are in a different elementary school district, but it will be fun in the same ward, the kids will love seeing each other on a more regular basis. The house is new, we're buying it fromt the builders. We're excited about that. We like everything, the only thing we're planning to do is putting a closet organizer in the girls room, and maybe the understairs coat closet downstairs. So, here are some photos the builders took a little while ago to send to someone else. The refrigerator wasn't there yet, and there are only photos of the master bedroom, but we'll take more once we are moved in - empty rooms are kind of boring to look at anyways. It is a 3 bedroom 2 1/2 bath with lots of storage and an enormous master bedroom -so the office stuff will go in there. We are supposed to close somtime in March, latest rumor is the first week, but we'll see. We should be moving in very soon after closing. So right i'm busy trying to clean, clean out and start packing soon. My mom and stepdad, Ric, are coming this weekend so maybe they can help me get some things done. We are also doing the walk through and shopping for window coverings and some furniture. We saved up a little extra so we could get some new furniture for the new house as well - we're really excited.

living room from kitchen/dining area

kitchen & dining area - but there's a fridge now

linen closet in the laundry room - which is upstairs with all of the bedrooms!!

master bedroom

master closet

master bath - we LOVE this

driveway - at first I didn't like this, thinking I would've preferred more grass, but the more I think about it the more I like it - a place to ride bikes, play basketball and do all sorts of other things without having to be in the street. The house in in a cul de sac that will be fairly quiet, but is just off a busy for inside a neighborhood road where you wouldn't want kids playing.

backyard - yeah, enough space for a swingset!! And Ainsleigh's birthday is coming up - yippee!!

We're having a ....

January in a nutshell

January came and went really fast. We closed on the sale of our house in Florida on New Year's Eve (yeah!!), so a lot of time in January was spent looking at homes to buy here in Keizer. We came within hours of making an offer on one, but finally decided it was too expensive, made an offer on another but got outbid. Then things came around in February.

Play-doh has lately been one of Ainsleigh's favorite past times. She plays it nearly every day.

Ainsleigh loves the princess dresses she got for Christmas, and when baby Lillian came to visit us for a while one day Ainsleigh requested that she be dressed as a princess as well - they had fun, although i'm not sure Lillian was quite certain what to think of all the clothes.

Ainsleigh loves to have one of us with her when she watches shows, and daddy is still her favorite! I wish I could've gotten a good picture of both of them at the same time, but none the less - I still think these are adorable.

For our anniversary this year we went to Portland and watched the Jazz play the Blazers. We had a great time, and were very pleased with this picture, I think it's the best one of the two of us probably since our engagement pictures.