Family Pictures

We took family pictures on Labor Day. Kyle's sister Melissa is a photographer and she took our pictures. We are happy with how they turned out. Thanks, Melissa.

What a life I have! I am surrounded by cute boys. I think it is funny that Noah is already seven months old and we still have yet to get a picture of Jason and Noah together where they are both smiling and looking at a camera.

Seven Month Old Noah

I am totally loving Noah at this age. He is social and happy, but not yet mobile. This guy is pretty content to sit or lie down and play with a toy. That is until mommy walks by-- then he begs to be held. Yes, I am his favorite person in the whole world. He leaves no doubt about that. Sometimes I have to leave the room so that he will be happy being held by others.

Noah loves watching Jason, although Noah does get upset with too much pestering. I can tell these two guys will have fun playing cars and trains together because Noah already prefers those toys over his baby toys.

Noah can roll over both ways, but he prefers his back or side, so crawling probably won't come along too soon. He is still taking three naps a day, and he usually sleeps on his side.

We are having fun trying out different baby foods. So far he loves carrots, sweet potatoes, peas, apples, peaches and corn, but he hates green beans and squash. He actually had a food intolerance to oatmeal, but we are crossing our fingers that he will grow out of that. I am worried about my milk supply, so we tried giving him a bottle of formula (shown in the picture), but he just thought the bottle was a great toy and couldn't figure out how to really suck the formula out (or didn't want to). So we keep trying our best to keep the milk supply up and roll out more solids.

First Day of Preschool

 Jason is in preschool now. This is him on his first day. He was so excited. He didn't even cry.  Neither did I. My heart did feel full (I can't believe he is so grown up!), but I had already had my cry thinking about it a few weeks earlier. Preschool has been so good for both of us. I enjoy the break, and Jason enjoys the friends and learning. For this school year he will go two hours twice a week. He chose to bring his car "Miguel Camino" as his first show-and-tell item; "Daryl Cartrip" came along for the second show-and-tell. I think we might see a pattern emerging.

A few days later Jason did an awesome job helping Kyle stain the playhouse. I came out to check on them and Jason proudly declared, "We're painters!"

August Snipits

Here are a few snipits of things that happened in August:

Jason saw his first hot air balloon festival. That was pretty cool. He also saw his first city fireworks up close (Kyle took him to see Highland City's). That was even cooler! Jason kept asking to see more fireworks for weeks after.

We enjoyed the Alpine Days parade with Grandma Diane and Brooke's family. Grandpa Jesse and Karren were running a half-marathon in Provo during the parade. Way to go!

Noah turned 6 months! At six months he weighed 15 lbs 9.5 oz (13th percentile) and measured 26.5 inches long (48th percentile). He got his second bottom tooth (first came in at 5 1/2 months). Noah started sitting up by himself at six months, but he is wobbly enough that we still have to have someone or something close by to catch him for whenever he decides to topple over. His hair keeps growing and growing. I can't even get it to stay up in a mohawk anymore. I keep saying I am going to cut it, but so far I am all talk.

Jason and I made mint brownies. My favorite!

Kyle took me on a hot date to see "Wicked". It was our first time seeing it. We both liked the play, although we still can't figure out why they made a set with this awesome dragon, which had nothing to do with the play.

Jason's First Campout

This past weekend we had a campout scheduled for the boy scouts (I'm assistant scoutmaster). I was planning on taking Jason with me and Kate got him extra prepared for it by telling him how fun it was going to be. When we showed up at the church on Friday to go the only other person who showed up was another leader. The other leader had already reserved our campsite and asked if I wanted to take Jason anyway. I thought about just doing a campout in the back yard, but I wanted to give Jason an actual camping experience. So I decided to take him. We went to one of the campsites at the base of Mount Timpanogos on the Alpine Loop.

Here is Jason helping set up the tent:

While setting up the tent, Jason pinched the palm of his hand on a tent pole. It ripped his skin and was pretty painful. He was out of commission for about 10 minutes while I finished putting the tent up.

In order to help settle him down, I decided to get the fire going. He was very excited to build a fire and roast marshmallows:

My favorite part of the night was while I was working on the fire. I was crouched down blowing on the flames and Jason walked up behind me, put his arms around my neck and said "I love you Dad". Even though he hurt his hand, he was still having a great time.

In the morning we took a quick hike. The original plan was to hike Stewart Falls, but without the Scouts I decided to take a walk around Bridal Veil Falls.

At the bottom of the falls they have a little pond where you can feed fish. I didn't have any change to buy food, but a nice guy gave Jason a handful of food to throw in.

Even though I had a hard time sleeping, Jason slept  pretty good. He woke up once saying he was cold (he had slowly made his way out of his sleeping bag), so I pushed him back in and he quickly fell back asleep. Overall, we had a great time!

Work Party

Each summer my work puts on a Summer Party. This year didn't originally sound as exciting as previous years, but it turned out to be a hit for Jason. He loved it. I think it ended up being a great party for the whole family. They reserved a pavilion at Sugarhouse Park and then paid a company to cater dinner and provide a bunch of games and activities. They had a bounce house, blow up slides, a blow up obstacle course, rock climbing, and other activities. 

Interestingly, the bounce house was pretty empty most of the night. Jason tried it out at the beginning of the party and I was going to go in with him, but when I asked the teenager monitoring the bounce house if an adult could go in he paused for a little while and then responded "sometimes." We took that to mean that he didn't know and so I played it safe and just let Jason go in. 

They also had snow cones!

Kyle's New Baby

Kyle has a new baby. Actually it is his long-awaited Father's Day present. He got a Mac desktop. Kyle's laptop that he got for high school graduation finally died out on us nine years later, so we needed a new computer. Happy Father's Day, love! You deserve it.