bathrobe beauties

One day I was wearing my soft, green, cozy bathrobe and S was pining about how she wanted to wear my other bathrobe. I told her she could wear it when she gets bigger, but that just wasn't good enough so...I let her wear it. =) I mean....why NOT???

adoption.com profile

Our profile on adoption.com is now live! You can find us here. It still needs some work, but we finally have it complete enough to share. Thanks for taking a look. If you'd like to add an endorsement for us, please let me know!

Happy Birthday Dad

We celebrated my Dad's birthday last week. It's been just over 2 months since we lost him. It's still kind of hard to believe he's not here. Every year for the last few years I've been organizing a get-together for my mom and sisters (and we usually end up having other family along, too). This year we decided to have it on my dad's birthday. I think it was a good way to honor him and it was good to be together.

We started the day with a nice brunch and then went to the Cinderella movie. It's been quite some time since Mom has been to a movie theater! It was fun to go together.

Afterwards we bought some things to put on Dad's grave and then went to the cemetery and decorated his grave. Mom has ordered a headstone, but it hasn't been finished and set yet.

We perused the Holy Cow Boutique in Pleasant Grove, but were all needing a break by then and didn't stay long. However, my niece couldn't resist the overwhelmingly delicious smell of the buns they sell there!

My niece with the buns from the boutique.
Yes, they were delicious
Yes, I ate too much that day!

We ended the day at Mom's house with a dinner Dad would have liked followed by birthday cake. We sang "Happy Birthday" to Dad. Not your average birthday celebration, but what do you do when the guest of honor is gone? I'm glad Mom didn't have to spend the day alone.

move to adoption.com

LDS Family Services finally made the announcement that they will pay for couples approved through them to have their profiles hosted on adoption.com for a year. We knew it was coming, but expected it sooner than it came. I think the delay was because adoption.com just launched major changes to the couples profiles pages (and the improvement is significant! It looks much better and provides much more functionality than it did previously. Plus, it's now located under adoption.com instead of parentprofiles.com.) There was a conference in Salt Lake we attended to learn about adoption.com. Being techies ourselves, there wasn't a lot to learn. However, we were able to get some feedback from a birth mother there about our existing profile on itsaboutlove.org and that was helpful. 

We are still working to get our profile set up (having scanner problems), but will hopefully have it up soon! I'll post a link to it here once it's set up.

S talks every day about her "baby sister." I hope and pray she is blessed to be a big sister. There will be 2 extremely disappointed girls in our house if this doesn't happen! (We'd be happy with a boy or girl, but she obviously has her preference!) Some days it seems like it will be a reality for us and other days it's hard to have hope.

We had a babysitter arranged for longer than the conference took, so we enjoyed some time together in SLC. We looked around at City Creek for a bit and then had a delicious Belgian waffle at Bruges. We had the torpedo, which has chocolate inside the waffle, with vanilla bean ice cream on top--yum!

Happy faces after our torpedo waffle

We liked this pig sculpture near Bruges

what we do for fun these days

We've been having our basement finished. They've been working on it for a couple weeks and they've made a lot of progress. While I don't always love the noise, it's exciting to see it coming together. Choosing flooring and colors always stresses me out, though. I sure hope it all looks good when it's done!

One morning we woke up to this:

we had a very nice view of the crane!

Bed-headed S and Daddy watching the crane

It's far beyond this state now, but here's a look
at it after the framing was done.

it's snow fun

We had a nice snowstorm one day recently. It came down quickly, but we did get 2-3 inches. We decided to go out and play in it before it was gone. The snow was perfect for building a snowman, so I pulled on my snow pants and set to work. S wasn't really interested in building the snowman, she just liked scooping up the snow with her little shovel and dumping it in her bucket. A friend came over to play while we were out. She helped put the nice hat on our snowman :)

S and her friend with our snowman

It was not a structurally sound snowman,
but he still turned out pretty cute =)

Have you ever been to a potty training party?

Me neither! But there's a first time for everything! :) We didn't bribe her with toys while she was potty training (I did use candy a little), but we thought a fun Cinderella cake was well-deserved for our big, potty trained girl! Hurray!! We weren't really planning a party per se, but it sort of worked out that way. I ordered the smallest cake possible and then we invited my mom and sister and our neighbors (whom S loves) to help us eat the cake. And then, how can you possibly have a cake for a 3 year old without candles? I don't think so! We had a fun time together. S squealed with delight when the doorbell rang and she ate up the attention the whole time.

Me and my girl (holding still with nary a silly face, how
did that happen?)

Our neighbors and S, enjoying the attention

S carrying her cake

S watching the balloon she was keeping afloat, with
my mom and sister in the background
(nice photo Daddy :)

I worried about potty training and tried to make it happen several times over a period of many months. I thought it was supposed to be easy with girls, but it sure didn't seem that way. But when S was finally ready it really didn't turn out to be that hard. Huh. I'm a big believer in potty training when your child is ready, not when you're ready (cause now I'm an expert potty trainer - ha!!).