Happy 2nd Birthday!

And today Cara is officially a TWO YEAR OLD! And boy is she feisty.

She started here:


Got to here last year:


And now look at her! She actually has HAIR!


Of course that's not all that makes her so neat to have as a little sister according to me:

Favorite Movie: Susan (Monsters vs. Aliens)
Favorite Food: Grapes
For fun Cara likes to : Play Games
What color is her hair: White
What game do I like play with her: Chips (meaning chess)
She likes to jump in the pool and use her floaties (Mommy has never seen her do this however so maybe I'm talking about me)

That's a pretty good list but Mommy says she'll help me talk about more stuff now.
-Cara is our eater. If she likes it, she will eat it and lots of it. She tries anything we put in front of her. Recently she has quit eating hot dogs though and doesn't always care for bananas which used to be her favorite food. Mommy thinks Cara's favorite food might be chicken nuggets or "Chick Nugs" because she frequently requests them (and gets them) for breakfast. Oh and she loves lettuce! Go figure.
-She likes to talk and tell you stories. You can understand maybe 3/4 of what she says. She also frequently sings songs. Any song that comes to her head. She knows two verses to "I Am A Child of God"
-She's still signing and likes to do it.
-She knows her colors and gets them mixed up only once in a while
-Still loves her diapers
-Has an okay handle on her letters. She does pretty good but still sometimes sounds like she's guessing.
-She LOVES to be outside and will wander out into the backyard and just stay out there, doing who knows what and singing and talking to herself.
-She is also an animal lover. She will play shy to an animal for about two minutes after first meeting but will then proceed to love and pet and snuggle and try and feed said animal. I never really warmed up to animals like Cara did.
-She re-warmed up to Grandpa. She took a little break from preferring him and now is starting to go right to him again.
-More of a tantrum thrower than I ever was. She can yell and scream and kick her legs...and the strangest things seem to set her off. (However she doesn't whine quite as much as me! :P )
-She has the funniest habit of needing to touch your skin with her feet. She will just push and nudge and press those little bare feet in to any bare skin you have. (Even if the only skin she can find is your face!)

There are a hundred more things that we love about Cara but it is really hard to put it all in to words. So instead we'll end here and just yell:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CARA! WE LOVE YOU!

As an update to this post, Cara had her 2 year well check with Dr. Clark on Monday August 15. She is now a whopping 24 lbs and 31.5 inches! (Yeah..just plugged that in to the growth chart: we are 12% for weight which is awesome for her and a very tall 3% for height. She's such a shrimp!)

24th Goings on...

Well yesterday was Utah's big state holiday but since it was a Sunday there sure was a lot of celebrating going on today instead. However, yesterday we celebrated Cara's birthday a week early! Mommy even made a cake.


Editor's Note by Mommy: This is the first birthday cake I have ever made for my girls...and it's for Cara's 2nd! We always had other things going on that warranted a huge Costco cake. I tried making a birthday cake for one of my Young Women and it was what I would call a disaster. Yummy but disastrous. I modified the recipe slightly and got this wonderful cake. I don't do homemaking. Seriously. So please keep in mind that even though it looks like a CareBear cake (not my intention) this is a HUGE achievement for me and took me more time than I normally spend on anything!

Grandpa has all the pictures of Cara opening her presents but Mommy was busy doing other stuff on the computer and didn't have the patience to upload them while we were there YESTERDAY. Anyway, she fell asleep on the ride over to Grandma's house and so Sleeping Beauty took forever to awake and when she did she was a little groggy and didn't really get in to the present opening. It took her until her LAST present to kind of understand. And let's not talk about trying to get her to blow out her candle. Maybe we'll try again on her ACTUAL birthday. (Sure hope I get to celebrate MY birthday twice.)



This is a portrait I did of Cara at preschool...I think I gave her too much hair.


I think the favorite present (and I voted on this too) has to be the book Pete the Cat, I Love My White Shoes. I have it memorized and Cara almost does. The best part is that you can LISTEN to it on the internet and hear the song. We have read it 50 times since we got it!

Anyway...today we had a lot of fun too! We got to be in our first ever BIKE PARADE! Our neighborhood organized it and Mommy didn't have any streamers but I still rode my little tricycle with all the kids anyway. Cara wanted to join in too but wasn't happy to just walk so Daddy ended up being in the parade as well! Then we enjoyed yummy watermelon and popsicles.







(Can you tell it was a little HOT?!)


This is my "boyfriend" Matt. Mommy used to keep hearing about how I would kiss him during primary. We just kept riding in circles and shamelessly flirting in front of our parents.


I finally let Cara try to ride. Her legs are still just a little too short.

Um busy anyone?

We failed to mention that last Sunday's post was our 350th post! Wow. That's a big milestone to just ignore. However it feels like we don't have enough time to blog lately and we can feel summer slowly slipping through our fingertips! So many last minute trips to cram in.

Last Friday Mommy and Daddy ran in The Chelsi Petersen Fun Run/Walk 5k. We did it last year too if you want to look up that post. Last year was Mommy's first ever race. This year was her second ever race and she beat her time by 3 minutes! She ran it in 28:28! And let me tell you, that's impressive because for the first two minutes all Cara did was scream and try and bail out of our stroller head first. So Mommy and Daddy spent that time taking Cara out and getting frustrated by having to hold a 22lb child and then she'd scream harder because she actually wanted to run in the race and have all of us stay together. So they'd put her back in the stroller or pass her to the other person, none of which was making Cara happy. This probably went on for like 3 minutes actually and finally Mommy told Cara "If you want to run, you have to get in the stroller!" To which Cara, sniffed and said in her quiet little voice, "okay" and stuck her thumb in her mouth and sat down contentedly. Daddy, pushing our stroller and with our start delay, still kicked Aunt Becca's hiney with a 25:40. She still kicked everyone else's butt though by a full two minutes or more. :)





(The run STARTS at 10 pm. WAY past our bedtime.)


And today we spent a delightful day up in Veyo with Grandma and Grandpa. I LOVE TO SWIM NOW! I had so much fun using my goggles to swim underwater (I still need to work on actually getting forward momentum and self propulsion!) I also had fun with my floaties in the DEEP end. Cara was pretty brave too jumping off the side into Mommy's arms. We couldn't say no to yummy food and watching Daddy climb either. We even went and played down by the creek, aptly named Crawdad Creek because of it's favorite inhabitant. It was a perfect day up there. And Cara was the only one who through a tantrum and it was because Mommy and Daddy wouldn't let her keep going over the rickety log bridge over the creek and up the metal ladder up the side of the rock. Parents. If they just would have let her, we might have had NO screaming at all this trip!

As an editor's note, there will be pictures posted tomorrow...they are all just on Grandpa's computer!

Sun Sun Sun

Our little monsoon season seems to be over. We had what felt like two weeks of constant thunder clouds accompanied by the very fun actual thunderstorms. It was nice because everything seemed to stay a lot cooler but I'm glad the crystal clear blue skies are back. We've been playing in Grandma and Grandpa's spa. I even figured out floaties which has opened up a whole new world of swimming for me. I jump off their waterfall now by myself and even go under water!



We also did a rare thing with Grandpa and that was go to the lake on a Saturday! Actually, Mommy drove Cara and I to the day use beaches at the lake, Daddy rode his bike and met us there, and Grandpa and Grandma rode up on their boat. They forgot the little kid lifejackets so only Daddy actually got on the boat and took his turn wake boarding but we had A LOT of fun in the sand. Thanks for playing with us Uncle Eric!



P.S. Mommy just wants to say that she LOVES that her camera is small and can be dropped or taken underwater but lately she has been very frustrated by the quality of photos. Of course maybe the fact that I've been stealing it and taking pictures with it and smudging the lens with my fingers has something to do with it.

Ariel on Stage

Last night I got to see Ariel on stage. Grandma took us on a girls night out and Aunt Angie and Aunt Becca came and we ate dinner with Grandma Great and it was so much fun.

We went to the Tuachan theater. What makes it so neat was that it was outdoors (which led to Mommy's second ever bee sting...) and they did amazing things with creating a wall of water on stage to make it look like they were swimming under the ocean. They sang and they danced and I sat and watched the whole thing, so did Cara! They tried to stop Grandma when she brought Cara in because she is so small. They didn't believe she was two! (Hey it's July and she will be 2 before August okay...) We had a WONDERFUL time. I think "Under the Sea" was everyone's favorite number because they did part of it under black lights. They also used heelies on all their shoes to make it look like they were swimming. Very clever.

Here we are getting ready for the show to start.








And this is a picture with the cute kid who played Flounder. I'm sorry but Mommy's camera is TERRIBLE at night shots. Just terrible. I don't know why we bothered. I think I'll post it here so Mommy can think about how she might want a different camera next time. :)



And you know what, the show didn't start until 8:45 pm but Cara only slept for 20 minutes in the second half and I didn't get sleepy until they sat me in my car seat. Yeah...we got home at 12:15 am. We also woke up at a normal time today despite Daddy's assurances as Mommy left for work that we could sleep in. That would explain why Mommy is finishing this post at 7:30 pm and I am really asleep in my bed already and so is Cara. Have been since 6:45 pm.

I Did It!

Today I gave my very first scripture in Primary and I ROCKED it. Mommy helped me. I got up and said loud and clear in to the microphone:

"God appeared to Moses in the tabernacle and He spoke to Moses like a friend, face to face. Exodus Chapter 33 verses 7 through 11."

Mommy was so proud of me and was really surprised that I did it because I would get all shy when I practiced at home.

And now for something totally different:

Mommy was browsing through Grandpa's photos yesterday and found all these great pictures from last October that were never posted on the blog. There actually was a great picture of us in our spider costumes...which now that Mommy thinks about it is kind of silly to post it here because it won't actually be in the same blog book. Oh well here they are for posterity purposes anyway. Look at how much hair Cara didn't have and how much we've grown since then!

More 4th of July

So here are pictures of what we did for the rest of the day...actually now that I think about it, Grandma and Grandpa have more on their computer and their actually of Mommy and Daddy doing fun stuff on the boat...we'll have to get those.







And this photo I took all by myself! You can only see a little bit of my finger.


Of course Mommy also wants to post pictures of us doing fireworks. This is Cara stepping on a pop it. We went through probably ten bags of those. We love them.





And this is me watching the fireworks from the back of Mozzy. I preferred the door closed.


This is what would happen if you opened any door on the car while a firework was lit.


Now see video for further proof. It's not my fault the fireworks are LOUD.