Sledding!

This is my second post of the day... if you want to see an awesome pillow fight and some Christmas pictures, keep scrolling down.

So I just had to compare our sledding trip this year with our 16 month old Katelyn compared to our sledding trip last year when she was 5 months. Here's the pictures.

5 month old Katelyn.














16 month old Katelyn. It looks like the same coat, but nope. It's hard to tell the difference as much as I was hoping... but they're both cute pics so here they are.

What a great Christmas!

What a wonderful time of year and a perfect Christmas. We really enjoyed being with my family and going to so many parties that we can't think straight. It was so fun to be with so much of our extended family and eat a lot of good food. The only drawback to the busy schedule was that our sweet Katelyn didn't get to sleep very early so we're way off schedule. We're hoping that with a couple days of attempting a normal napping schedule that she'll be a happy camper.

You know, as a new mom and dad, Dave and I were surprised with how fun and easy it was to spoil Katelyn for Christmas. Spoil is a relative term, but we loved shopping for little presents and things we thought she'd like. How fun for us. :)

We started out with a pajama-rama sponsored by my brother and his beautiful wife. It was a riot, complete with a pillow fight, the Smurf Christmas movie, the Chipmunk Christmas movie, pizza, and a jello salad with Smurf cut-out jello jigglers (that was Dave and my contribution :) ). What a party. Oh yeah, we also had a fun white elephant/$1 gift game. Look for the picture with Dave and my mom and their great headbands below.

Here's a few pictures of our fun week. We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas celebrating the birth of our Savior like we did.

Katelyn hanging out at the Pajama-rama.












Mom stealing my new Christmas present.













Mom and Mel attacking the kids.












Watch out for Grandma kids!!












Our fancy Smurf salad. Dave cut out the jigglers himself.












My sister Shannon and I after playing our Sleigh Ride duet. We haven't played it for years, but it was a lot of fun. :)













Scott and Mel as our Mary and Joseph.



















Some of our angels.












Katelyn getting ready for her part as a shepherd.












The cast/family.












Christmas morning... what is it Katelyn? A whole bag of ponies!

Woohoo! Snow!!!

Yes, it's been snowing all morning and according to our precise calculations (our little ruler) we have about 8 inches of new snow! It's just beautiful. I wish wish wish I could go skiing, but I don't think that's the safest thing for a pregnant girl. Too bad! I'm still working with Katelyn to make sure she'll love playing in the snow. We're not there yet because she's scared of her snow pants and her boots, but we'll make it! Who knew that they're so scary? She loves watching her cousin Tyes play in the snow, loves standing at the window to watch it snow and even eating some of the new snow off the porch. Oh yeah, her favorite new trick as of today is to get a nice handful of new snow and put it down the back of daddy's shirt. She really loves that one. Wonder where she got the idea? :)

Here's a couple pictures of our beautiful yard.

Merry Christmas!

Here's a new video from the church. It's a beautiful video about Christmas. Merry Christmas everyone! :)

Click here

Dave's birthday, Thanksgiving and Christmas lights!

Here's our visit to Temple Square to see the lights. We love that our little Katelyn was able to tell us that this is a statue of Jesus.












Here are the beautiful lights of Temple Square.












Happy birthday to my sweet Dave. He's so incredible and I love him so much. As you can see, he's an amazing dad and let's Katelyn open his presents.












Here's Katelyn with one of her best friends and uncles, Chrit, and his girlfriend, the beautiful Emily. This was taken on Thanksgiving.












New stereo? Let's just say that after multiple break-ins and losing my radio twice last year, we've been hesitant to install our new one. It's nothing fancy, but Dave, Katelyn and I put it in for FHE the other night. We had a lot of fun. :) Don't tell anyone though... shhh... we want to keep this one.

Half-way there!

Can you believe that our baby is half-way here? My goodness this pregnancy has gone fast. I'm 20 weeks along and feeling even better than I was with Katelyn. It's great! And yes, we were so excited to go to our ultrasound last week! Any guesses? Okay, I'm not going to wait, but we were right...

it's a boy!!

We're so excited for Katelyn to have a little brother and couldn't be more excited to have a little mini Dave running around. So, if you have any good boy advice, feel free to send it our way. I'm assuming I can't put bows on his head... right?

Seen any elfs?

Okay, this is the funniest site! My sister-in-law introduced me to it and I made a little film with my parents, two of my brothers, and you guessed it.... little Katelyn. See if you can pick her out. It will take you to another site. I haven't figured out how to put it on our site yet.

Click here for the video

Halloween and weather patterns

We had so much fun going trick or treating! Our neighborhood was right out of Leave it to Beaver. All the neighbors were walking around with their kids who were of course running from house to house in their costumes with the glow of "Candy! Candy! Candy!" in their eyes. Have you ever heard or read Seinfeld's book about Halloween? I just kept thinking about it all night.

Katelyn was awfully tired, but by the end she was getting the hang of it. She'd slowly reach into the bowl of candy and surprise us by pulling out two candy bars. She got some good ones. :) (FYI, we only took one. We already felt somewhat guilty taking candy for a 1 year old that we weren't going to give it to. Well, most of it. She does like Kit Kats.)

Bell came to visit! Our friend from Thunderbird was in town so we took her up the canyon to enjoy the mountains and the leaves.









Here's the crazy part. One day I was taking pictures of Katelyn playing in the leaves






























and the next day it snowed! What could be better than your first taste of the first snow storm? Mmmm.

Fun with TP

Thanks Jen for the reminder that I need to post something again. :)

I read an article about 14 month old babies the other day that describes Katelyn perfectly. They love to move things from one place to another. Yep. That's her. Whether it's the remote, the pens or sticky notes from our room, or any combination of toys, something is being moved. I think her favorite two things are to take off the arm chair covers (I found one in my room the other day) and to spend time in the pantry, usually carrying out the bag of Fish or the Wheat Thins. Hmmm... is that what she sees us doing... hanging out in the pantry? It gives me a great opportunity to teach her how to put things away. She's doing great.

Okay, on to the pictures. First set... every kid's gotta do it. Here's her first experience with the excitement of the toilet paper roll. Let's just say that she loved it. And what better place to put the toilet paper than in her cousin's truck.

Partay!

October has been so much fun. Not only is the Fall beautiful here (see entry below), but we've been to Halloween parties with family and friends and are having a blast. Here are our costumes from our Hollywood themed party last night. Hopefully I'll have some more from the actual party to share because there were some great costumes. We had so much fun! I decided that wearing white and being four months pregnant don't mix, but oh well. Padme was a fun costume, especially since I found Dave's "cloak" at the DI about an hour before the party. I think Dave loved being Anakin (he had to tell me how to spell it). And a big thanks to Nicole for helping us do some research for the party. At least two of your ideas were at the party Nicole. Beckham and Posh and also Danny and Sandy from Grease. It was a ton of fun.Here's the delicious food from another party, the Price family party. Alicia, Dave's sister, is a pro at planning parties and this one was no exception.
We dressed up in Dave's Chinese outfits. Katelyn was tired, can you tell?
Next party. We got together with two of my old roommates, Valene and Julia last week. It was so much fun to see them and yes I am wearing a costume. I'm a runner. :) Julia is in her real motocross uniform. She's the coolest. Valene and her baby are the psychedelic chicken family. (Hopefully I got that right Valene.)


We couldn't help letting Julia hold the kids. I love this picture. Check out Katelyn's face.And last but not least... my family. The Hoth's. Here are my two brothers, Scott is with his beautiful wife Mel of course, my sisters' five kids and Katelyn. We had so much fun, though Katelyn was really nervous about my brother Shawn's costume. Those teeth on his mask would make anyone nervous.
And here's a closeup of little Katelyn in her little lady bug tutu. I was actually handy enough to make her costume for her (and it was actually fun). If you want to know how to make a cheap and easy tutu, let me know. I'll pass along my wealth of knowledge.

Daniel!

Congratulations to my beautiful sister and her new baby boy. Daniel was born a couple weeks ago and is just perfect. A bouncing 9 lb 2 oz baby boy. Wow.Here she is looking like she just took a stroll in the park rather than gave birth. She's with her oldest beautiful Annie and her youngest of course, Daniel.

Driving in the Fall

I love the Fall! Dave, Katelyn and I took a drive through a beautiful loop by our home and we caught the beginning of Fall. This was a few weeks ago, so there's still a little green.

We stopped to eat dinner here by this river. It was so beautiful!
As much as Katelyn loved being outside, running around the cement pad by the picnic table and looking at the river, once we actually brought her to the water, she was very nervous. Check out her right hand that's gripping Dave's arm or shirt. She's not going anywhere.
Here we are back at the house with her bear and the beautiful flowers.

Dance lessons

We've discovered that we have a dancer in our family by the name of Katelyn. She loves to listen to music, whether it's her daddy whistling, primary songs or I've even seen her doing a little head banging to music she'll hear when we're out and about. Where does she pick this up? I caught a few of her moves on my little camera the other day and put them together in this little clip. The editing is a bit choppy, but you'll get the idea. Just for fun, it starts out with a cute little clip of her when she was about 7 months old. Also, I'll have some of my other Fall pictures soon. We went on a wagon ride to pick pumpkins last weekend and had a blast.

Chocolate fix

Last night I needed a chocolate fix and found this recipe on allrecipes.com. It was awesome and if you love brownies, check it out here. I haven't made brownies from scratch before because who knew that you could make them without a box!? It was worth it and didn't take very long to mix up. Enjoy!

Favorite workout video?

So, I'm looking for ideas. I really enjoy being outside and running, hiking and all that good stuff. Time has changed things though and I'm looking for some good indoor exercise options while Katelyn's napping. I'd really like to stay in shape during this pregnancy, so besides avoiding ice cream, do you have any suggestions of a high impact workout video? :) Thanks for your help!

Birthday, cabin and having fun

Since I haven't posted any pictures of Katelyn's first birthday, I figured it was about time. Here she is getting excited about a new outfit. Who knew she would get excited about clothes. Maybe she'll be the family fashion consultant.Her cousins gave her a cute Carebear and she absolutely loved it. You can see that she's excited, or at least concentrating in getting it out of the bag. It's soft. That says enough. She has a soft blanket that she can't get enough of and screams and snuggles into it every time she sees it.
Here is Katelyn's cute flower birthday cake that Dave's mom helped me with. Isn't it beautiful? I thought she would dive right in, but she was hesitant and wondered what all the pink stuff was that got on her fingers when we "helped" her.
When we ask Katelyn, "Where's your nose?" this is the face that we get. It's usually accompanied with little sniffing noises and we just laugh and love it every time.

We're training her to love roller coaster rides. Look, it's working!
Dave's family has a cabin in the mountains that we love to visit. We were there a couple weeks ago and saw some of the leaves changing colors. It was just beautiful!

I don't remember how this started, but Katelyn loves to pose. If we put our hands together next to our faces and ask her to pose, this is what we get. Isn't she adorable?
Another picture mom?
Here's Katelyn's little stink bug position that she sleeps in every night and of course, she's snuggled up to her blanket.