And suddenly she's 10 months old!

That's right folks. She's done it. She has been outside Mommy as long as she was inside Mommy. Cara has flipped a switch in her brain too. Our little baby is fast becoming a toddler.

Some of Cara's tricks at ten months old:

-She puts cell phones to her ear and says "hi". It's a garbled hi but clearly she understands and copies what I do. (She's always stealing my heart phone.)

-She has rediscovered her thumb and has started sucking on it all the time.

-She's VERY good at crawling and has the balance to walk but chickens out. If she's not paying attention, you can catch her standing on her own.

-She has discovered her voice and is trying to copy our sounds and talks and yells a lot. We like to claim that she can say Momma (which she has done for a while), Ouch, Angie, hi, and Dadda. And Mommy swears she asks "was that?" And points.

-She's very good with her hands and likes to point and touch and grab and clap.

-She loves to play peek a boo.

-Flavor is where it is at for her. To date we have given her hot salsa, tabasco, Arby's Horsey Sauce, pickles, lemons, banana peppers, onions, and more that I can't think of and have yet to have her balk at any of them enough to not ask for seconds.

We are working on signing with her, but she really only does doggie and seems to do it for Gabby which makes us think there is a connection, but Mommy has gotten lazy about reinforcing it. She'll never be able to top me!

Oh and Happy Memorial Day! We had an impromptu family splash party in the back yard with the sprinklers. It was wonderful!

Gabanna Madonna

Meet Gabby. Her previous owner let the five year old name her. Gabanna Madonna is her full name. We call her Gabby and I personally like to call her Gabs. She is a 15 week old Chiweenie or Dahuahua (as Great Grandpa Larsen coined it). Daddy hates the name Chiweenie but regardless she is a cross between a chihuahua and a dachshund. Oh and she's MINE. Mommy knows better but she happened to look on the KSL.com's classifieds and there she was. She needed a new home because the owners before had a baby come down with medical conditions that needed more attention. We got her the day of Aunt Becca's Graduation. (That will be a shout out post later when Mommy gets the pictures.)
She has the biggest floppiest ears but they mostly stand straight up. It's very funny. She should grow to be about 10 lbs but not a lot bigger than she is now. She has been amazing. She's very smart and is practically housebroken. Only one poop accident the first morning we had her and if she's peeing in the house, it's too small for Mommy to notice or she hasn't caught her in the act. It helps that our back screen door has a little doggy door and we've just been leaving it open so she can come and go.

She's super energetic but also loves to curl up close to you and sleep the day away by your side. She doesn't like her kennel but she doesn't whine all night (just the beginning) so it works. She already plays fetch. Sometimes she's not great at dropping the toy but she loves to play it. She's very gentle with Cara (not that Cara is very gentle back) and overly rambunctious with me. I end up saying "No Gabby No" a lot and pointing my finger. She chases me and jumps up on my back. She is a puppy after all. But we love her.

I already owe my parents money?

That's right. Mommy informs me that she will be deducting $236 from my non existent college account although she's willing to negotiate for either just paying for parts or labor.

You see, I've taken to spending time in the car slightly unsupervised. Pretending to drive, playing with all the buttons etc. Well apparently I also started using something for a piggy bank that shouldn't be used for a piggy bank. Do you know what it was? The CD player. Mommy didn't notice this until one day for no reason at all during an errand run, the CD player went kaput. We drove around for almost 3 weeks with no music (a speaker wire happened to slip the VERY next day making it impossible to use the radio even) before Mommy had HAD it. On a whim she stopped in at the stereo store where they could work us in immediately.

Upon checkout, the nice man told on me. He found a few pennies and a couple dimes. He actually says it is quite common especially in minivans. I personally think that I should get a free pass because now Mommy and Daddy have an auxiliary line for an Ipod. Mom says she'll think about it.

Cara's Stats

I am doing this post from Oma and Apa's on our monthly trip to the zoo. (Mommy bought another annual pass so we need to make it count!) However, we are still behind on our posting and I wanted to make sure I said something about Cara's 9 month doctor's appointment.

We switched doctor's to Mommy's new boss. She works for a family practice doc, Dr. Clark and she seems to love him and so Cara and I agreed it would be okay to start seeing him also. (On a side note, as of June 1st Daddy finally has health insurance....YEA!!!!)

Technically, I have left the actual papers with Cara's numbers on them at home by the computer so this might require some editing of exact percentiles once we return.

Cara came in at a whopping 17 lbs and 10 oz....I weighed one ounce more....at my SIX month. (She's such a lightweight!) She's only in like the 25%! She actually was told to stay on the same curve or we're going to have start being careful to beef her up because she is constantly on the move! She is also 26.5" long. (Can't say tall until they measure you standing up!) Yeah that's the 11th%. Whoa slow down girlie! Okay so I was only like 27" or so at 9 months and had slid down in to the 25-50% but come on she's still skin and bones compared to me. (Mommy wants to interject and say that Cara has enough rolls...the little white tan lines in between them prove it!)

Oh but she has a big head...I mean brain. She's in the 94% for her little noggin. Let's hope that means college scholarships later in life!

Another week gone by?!

Time to blog is somehow slipping away from me. Mommy thinks it's because we're annoyed every time we hop on the computer and we pull up the blog and we get a bunch of little blue question marks where most of our pictures should be. Something with our internet connection? Whatever it is, it's ANNOYING.

Anyway...we have been enjoying the week still battling sickness. It's the never ending disease...seriously. I am finally in the clear, but Mommy and Cara are still battling the disgusting throat/chest phlegm that never ends. Mommy just today is able to talk without some sort of pain. (Of course this means that Daddy just came down with it.) So we've just been living the dream. I have had lots of fun playing with my Grandma since Mommy started her new job this week and there were a couple days of just yucky weather, but we still found time to hang out in our swim suits by Grandma's hot tub.

We also got a backyard this week. Part of our sod got laid on Tuesday and the rest was finished on Friday, but this meant that the first half might have to be replaced because it got burnt and a little dried out. We have a two toned back yard. At least that's what Mommy keeps saying. She and Daddy reserved a little place in the back yard for my play house to be on wood chips and Oma and Apa arrived just in time to help us fix up that little corner. We're so excited. Here are some pictures of the yard and us enjoying it. (Excuse my naked bum.)



Mommy is still working on photos of the inside of our house. The problem is that we live in the house and it's just never clean enough to take the "after" pictures. She still needs a bookshelf here or a side table there and it's never ready for a picture in her mind. One of these days she'll buckle down and do it.

Happier postings.

So since I have been sick, we haven't posted about Mommy's many attempts at happiness this week. We visited the fun splash park at Main Street with Aunt Angie and Cara learned how to say her second word. It's also a very telling word. She says "ouch". She does not say this because I hurt her. It's because that's what everyone who holds her says repeatedly. Cara is a grabber. She loves to honk your nose and do strange things with your lips and scratch and pinch Mommy's arms during feedings. It really is appropriate that her second word is "ouch."

Anyway, the splash park on Main Street is delightful. They have one of those fun fountain like things but the best part is the little man made river. It looks like it's straight out of the desert. They have a low rock waterfall that spills in to a shallow area with big boulders for hopping and then it narrows down into slightly deeper swifter moving area. Perfect for little kids. Plus plenty of room for all the people and not much for really big kids to do so they stay away!

We've been sick...and busy

So really. I've been sick. I mean sick sick. Mommy was finally shamed in to taking me in to her office and getting me a breathing treatment after Grandma and Aunt Angie expressed concern for my well being more than once.. So sad. We seem to just love the croup bug. Cara got it when she was only 3 months old and it normally doesn't occur in babies until they are like 6 months old. Anyway, Mommy did realize that it was what I had pretty early and had called Grandpa on Monday night after hearing me breathe and asked him to leave a prescription of Decadron for me at the house. (Of course Grandpa was leaving at 6 am the next morning to climb a big wall in Zion. He slept on a port-a-ledge and everything!) It was so bad the next morning that I sounded like I was breathing through a straw. Now from what I understand about croup, it's only supposed to get worse at night. So finally at 5:30 pm Mommy got me a treatment and I cried the whole way through. I did not like meeting her work friends. It was kind of darling before Tuesday morning. I had this hoarse little voice that really hasn't gone all the way away. I sound pretty funny still. Mommy tried to capture it on video and really all you can tell is that I'm talking higher than normal in this video. I'm also being much quieter. Wednesday when I was feeling slightly better I resorted to mostly pointing and grunting instead of actually talking and on Thursday night I slept a straight 15 hours. It's been a week long process but I'm on the mend just in time to give it to Cara. (Actually in my defense, Cara had fevers first on Thurs and Friday of last week and gave me a fever last Saturday...so shoot Mommy hasn't had well children for quite some time!) Cara had to have her dose of steroids today. It's even sadder when a baby has a hoarse voice.

Ironman

Mommy and Daddy both wish they could say that they were Ironmen. However, we were just supporters. Both of them were very excited for the Ironman race to occur here in St. George. And we went and watched the bike/run transition right on Main Street. We watched the top racer come in to the transition and then run the first half of the marathon and get most of the way through the second half of his marathon and we were only there for just under two hours....insanity. Of course, we have to brag that we heard from more than one person that they saw us in the crowd on a news bit about it. Plus in this photo, you can just make out Mommy and Cara at the very edge of the right side. You can see all of sleepy Cara and like half of Mommy's face. The gentleman, who the photo is actually of, finished somewhere between 9 and 10 hours. He was in the top finishers. It was a very neat experience and it's incredible to be around so many people who are pushing themselves so hard and have such strong will. Especially considering they are not allowed to wear head phones, ear buds, i-pods, cell phones of any kind. Crazy.