Who looks most like Josh? Incidentally, Josh and Carter are wearing the exact same onesie in their pictures (courtesy of Jenny Monson). You can see that 26 years has had an effect on it.Also, I don’t have a picture of Josh at age 2 on hand; but I wanted to show a comparison with me too!

I look at these pictures and think that our kids mostly just look like themselves. But I’m very interested to see what you all think. Do they look like Josh or me? Or maybe a little bit of both?

Carter’s first attempt at solids was kind of lack luster (It was rice cereal; who can blame the kid for not eating much?!) so I didn’t post the video. But when I gave him a taste of Fay’s bedtime snack apple sauce, he kind of got addicted!  He clearly likes the taste; but I think he also didn’t mind that it wasn’t coming from a spoon. Spoons still throw him off just a little.

Also, Fay’s singing in the background gives it such an authentic touch! Don’t you agree?

 

Lastly: this is a picture of Fay and Josh wearing “earrings” this afternoon. It is too precious not to share!

If you have been to our house in the past 4 or so months, then you have undoubtedly already heard Fay sing this song.  If you haven’t seen Fay recently, you really can’t quite get a grasp on what she’s about without hearing this song. 🙂

So, school has been going for two weeks now for Josh, but I feel like we have been hanging onto summer a lot. We did the zoo the day after Josh started school, then Lacey came, then we had this long weekend, and I am thinking that summer might really end this week. We’ll see. We’re good at hanging onto the fun stuff! (And really bad at getting back into normal bedtimes…)

Anyway, I just wanted to share something about me. Because I feel like it…  Every year, as long as I can remember, as summer draws to a close I have felt the promise of a new beginning as a new school year approached.  I remember laying on the back bed of the motor-home with my sister Christina as we drove across country for family vacation daydreaming about how awesome the coming school year was going be. We were finally going to really practice the piano, and we were totes going to be the best dressed, most desirable girls in our respective grades, and we were going to get all As and live happily ever after!  And even though I have been graduated from BYU for nearly two years, and even though I love being a full time mom, there is always that longing that comes at the end of the summer for a new beginning and becoming something better.

I have been thinking for the past few weeks about how I could possibly recreate the feeling of new and important changes in my life without sacrificing the things that are the most important to me (ie: being a wife and a mother).  So, I have come up with an idea for this autumn that has so far satisfied my longings without sacrificing my higher priorities!  I am going to be giving myself classes at home!  I made a giant list of things that I always wished that I had been able to study more in college and I have selected a few of them to have as “classes”!  The plan is to dedicate at least 30 minutes each evening after the kids go to bed (assuming they actually DO go to bed) to work on one of my selected subjects each night. I plan on getting my learning materials from the library and from MIT Open Course Ware, and from any other connections I might have. For example, I have enlisted the help of Josh to be my private tutor for my “beginning programming” class. (Thursday night date night on the computer!!!!)

I am really looking forward to learning new things this “semester” and I hope to continue doing this sort of thing forever. Maybe not as structured as I’m planning right now, but I love the idea that I can just keep on learning the things I want to even if I don’t have a professor to spoon feed it to me anymore!