I’m sorry if you get tired of hearing about Fay. She is my whole life, and she is REALLY cute!  If you don’t want anymore Fay, check out a different blog. 🙂

Anyway, Fay is growing up so fast, we hardly know what to do!  She is super smart and loves to share anything she observes with us!  For example, she is excellent at remembering the names of her friends and shouting them out every time she sees them (it makes Sacrament Meeting really exciting!) or whenever she thinks about them. This little boy is a friend from upstairs named Isaac. Fay LOVES Isaac and had a blast when he came to play for a few minutes the other morning. Periodically throughout the day Fay will declare “Isaac!!!” (in her own little Fay way) and then “Lena!” for Elena who is Isaac’s big sister.  She similarly declares the name of her best bud Auden, and one of her favorite babies Leila.  It’s more than slightly adorable! She’s also getting really good at feeding herself with a fork or spoon.  This is a picture of her eating yogurt in the kitchen on the day we had a tornado warning last week. (That is relevant info because we went into the kitchen to be more protected if a tornado did show up.) She ate a whole bowl all by herself without spilling! Fay is also taking her appearance more into her own hands. Anything she can get around her wrist is declared a “bracelet” and she LOVES them!  She found a bunch of baby links yesterday and insisted on fitting as many as possible onto one arm. If you try to put them on a different wrist than she wants, she will make sure you know that you’ve done wrong, and correct your mistake. 🙂 Today, Fay found the nail polish again (she does every couple of weeks) and wanted to get her toes painted.  The old polish had about worn off, so I was happy to help her. Up until today she has always just patiently watched me paint her toenails; but today half way through the first foot, she decided it was her turn!  Please notice the amount of polish on the toes of her left foot!

Another thing Fay has been doing recently is repeating anything we say that she finds interesting.  A couple days ago she dropped something at dinner and Josh said “uh-oh spaghettio.” She really liked that and has has “uh-oh bellio” or something like it each time something has dropped since then!

She really is so much fun, and we love her more than anything in the world…at least for a few more weeks!

Josh’s and my first Valentine’s Day as a married couple was on a weekday in the middle of midterm season. We gave each other sweet cards, and I heart attacked the door for him, but we didn’t really do much else. We declared that we would postpone it until a time when it was more convenient.  Well, it turned out that there never was a convenient time, so it got skipped altogether.

This year, Mother Nature blessed us with the “snowmageddon” only two days before Valentine’s Day, and as such, Josh had the entire weekend–from Thursday til Sunday–free to spend with Fay and me at home!  As such, we did quite a few fun things!

On Thursday evening, we made cookies to take to our neighbors and to Josh’s home-teaching families!

This is me looking goofy while displaying them!

On Valentine’s Day itself, we all dressed up in as much pink and red as we could find! Our next door neighbor was good enough to document it for us. 🙂

Fay also got a cake pop from the neighbors! It was the best looking cake-pop I’ve ever seen that somebody actually made, so I got all sorts of tips from Robin on how to do it. 🙂 Anyway, Fay really liked it! I don’t think she realized that it was cake inside, and she mostly just ate the sprinkles off of it. But it was adorable!

And, of course, we had to have a delicious dessert after our Valentine’s dinner! Fay gobbled up her strawberry short cake!

 

The day after Valentine’s Day we had our friends, the Burtons, over for dinner! We really like the Burtons and we have been wanting to have them over for quite some time. But the reason we wanted them over this weekend was because we had a hankering to make a fantastic Valentine’s Day cake, and we needed somebody to be impressed by it. 🙂  The Burtons were perfect cake subjects!

Told you they were perfect!

Anyway, we had a great Valentine’s Day weekend! Thanks to the snow for making it a party all the way through!

 

 

 

Josh and I have recently re-picked up some hobbies. Josh got (from me) some oil paints for Christmas 2012. He tinkered with them quite a bit last spring, but since we moved to North Carolina and school started again, he hasn’t had much of an opportunity to paint. But, now that we have 9:00 church and Fay takes a Sunday nap, he uses that time (I’m usually napping as well) to work on his painting! This is a recently finished work of his! It is beautiful and meaningful for this part of our life!

For those of you who don’t know, that is the well that is the icon of UNC.

 

As for me… My Aunt Martha taught me to crochet when I was about 12 (when Mother and Daddy went to pick Jordan up from his mission to Venezuela), but since high school I really haven’t done much until NOW! 

I’ve been a little baby happy (we are only 11 weeks away from baby Kid’s due date!) and the baby boy vest is the first article of clothing I’ve ever really made! AND it is the first pattern I have ever followed from written instructions!  The white project is the beginnings of a hat for Little Brother Monson. It was supposed to be newborn size, but I can’t really tell if it actually will be. Especially since my perception of baby is all skewed right now. We’ll see when he gets here!

The past week–since last Wednesday–has been mostly characterized by a rather cranky Fay. Some kind of bug has been going around our apartment building and Fay got it. 🙁  Over the weekend, it was mostly just a runny nose, a cough, and all around “icky-ness,” but on Monday–just about two hours before we were supposed to have the missionaries over for dinner–Fay threw up. Fortunately, she had been able to take a really long nap before, and another really long nap, actually during the missionaries’ visit.

Because of her extra nap–an hour before bedtime–she was feeling a little better by the time that we were trying to go to bed. She is lucky to have a daddy who loves her enough to play with her late into the night.

She has been feeling progressively better, I think, and she is definitely acting more like her cheerful self. She still has her moments, however.

For example: Yesterday at lunch she happily ate about half of her PB&J sandwich, and then wanted some milk and the cheese crackers that Mommy was having. I got her the milk and asked her to eat one more piece of sandwich before she could have crackers. It was the end of her life.

I don’t know if you can really see, but the piece I asked her to eat is in the bottom middle of this picture. She would put it in her mouth (once she realized I was serious) and then gag and spit it out. It was SO FUNNY! When I told her she really had to chew and swallow it, she buried her face in her hands, as though her puppy had just died.

Sorry, that isn’t the best picture.

But today, she is really feeling much better. She has been far less picky with the activities she does and how long she does them, and she has been giving me lots of smiles and laughs!  I’m happy that she is feeling better, for her sake and for mine and Josh’s. 🙂