Gunnar is 11 months old...

Wow how the time just flies by...hard to believe that Gunnar will be a year old next month! He is so fun right now. I guess I say that every month...but really he is just fun! He's turning into such a little flirt. He squints his eyes and turns his face away pretending to be shy, then smiles his cute little smile. I love it! I catch him doing it to everyone that makes eye contact with him when we're out shopping. He still loves to eat anything we throw his way...he even finished off Ashton's leftovers last night! I don't know where he puts it, he's still a little guy for his age. Some of his recent favorites are big kid oatmeal and chicken nuggets. I try to feed him baby food and a lot of them he spits back at me. Can't say I blame him there.

He wants the good stuff!

Oh and if he doesn't have food in his mouth he has a sock or a toy in it! He loves to carry stuff around in his mouth as he's crawling around...

Such a fun kid!

How we celebrated...

Yesterday on our anniversary, Lars let me sleep in and woke me up awhile later with breakfast in bed (french toast and strawberries :) and of course Ashton hopped up and ate some with me. He loves it when we make eachother breakfast in bed because he gets to join in and thinks it's such a treat to eat in bed! Thanks hunnie! Oh and thanks for NOT taking any pictures to capture that moment.

After I dragged myself out of bed he told me I better get showered and ready for the day (sad when your husband has to tell you that hu?) hey it just doesn't happen some days!

So I did and before I was done my Mom showed up!

Lars had called her about a week and a half ago and asked her if she would come down and watch the boys for the day.

So off we went by ourselves for the whole afternoon. Yes this is a big deal...we don't get babysitters very often and if we do it's just for a couple hours. It was refreshing to just be out together and have peaceful conversations and do whatever we wanted...alone.

Not that we did anything exciting just went shopping for a little while, then went to lunch at Iggy's (should've went to Costa Vida like we were going to...I just don't think Iggy's is that good!!) I felt like I ate a plateful of grease...oh well. Then we went to a matinee. We saw Slumdog Millionaire...and it was so good! If you haven't seen it, I would highly suggest it for the next movie you see. I loved it. And so nice to go in the middle of the day on a Thursday. It was us and a few other older couples in the theater.

After that we ran to a couple other stores, then headed home.

Thanks for a fun day hunnie!

And thank you so much Mom for coming and watching the boys and taking my place in the daily fight to get Ashton dressed!

Fun isn't it???

We really appreciate you!

Oh...what are you doing Feb. 26th 2010???
And the 5 days before or after? :)

We've been married 9 years!!!

I can't believe that it was February 26, 2000 (9 years ago today) that Lars and I got married! What a great day it was. It wasn't snowing, but it was a cold day (especially in a sleeveless dress), but I didn't really notice. We got married at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic church in Logan (our old little tiny church up on the Utah State campus). Everything turned out perfect! We had our reception at the Alumni Center and afterward drove to Salt Lake to stay the night, then left the next morning for our honeymoon in Hawaii.

But to take you a little further back in case you've never heard the story of how we met (according to me...Lars has his own distorted version), we were both at a USU basketball game and he saw me with one of my friends and asked his friends if any of them knew who I was. Well lucky for him one of his friends got his hair cut at the salon that I worked at and knew that I worked there. So the next time he went in for his haircut he asked my boss about me and was so excited to tell Lars that not only was I single, but also Catholic! He also told him where else I worked (which was Copper Rivet in the mall), so he came in to the store one day and used his now infamous line. As he grabbed a belt off the rack he came up to me and asked me "Can you help me try on this belt?" To which I replied "No." and walked away.

So he left the store, but came back a little while later (not one to give up so easily) and came up to the register and asked me out.

So I said "I guess so" and wrote down my # for him.

We went out a couple times (then he stalked me for awhile...:) then we just became really good friends for about 2 months before we really started just dating eachother. We got married a little over a year after our first date.

I have to say that I'm so glad he didn't give up on me. I remember telling him one time that whoever ended up with him would be so lucky and I was so right!

We have had a great 9 years together. I just really can't believe it's been that long. Looking back now I'm glad that we had 5 years together before our boys came along...we did a lot of fun stuff. Lars is a great husband and father to our little boys.

One of our engagement pics...Happy Anniversary Hunnie! I love you :)

Looking forward to the big 10 year next year!

(oh and this blog post is your gift...hee hee)

Not quite...but getting so close!

Here's a little video to update you on Gunnar walking. Not quite yet, (sorry to those of you whose guess dates have already passed by)...

but he's getting really close!

(oh and just ignore my annoying voice in the video)

So, Sooooo worth the wait!!!

Celine Dion...2009 I had so much fun last night! My friends Starlee, Tiffany, Randi and I went to Salt Lake

for the Celine Dion concert at the Energy Solutions Arena.

Starlee and I getting ready to head out to pick up the Tiff and Randi...

We had been waiting so long for this concert. Lars actually bought me 4 tickets for it and gave them to me not this past Christmas, but the Christmas before (2007)...when I was pregnant with Gunnar! He told me I could do whatever I wanted with the tickets, so at first I was going to take him and get another couple to go, but then I came to my senses and remembered that it's just way more fun to go to concerts with girls, so I took my friends instead. Sorry hunnie! Believe me he wasn't too heartbroken to miss out on Celine Dion! It had originally been scheduled for Nov. 21, 2008, but about a week before that day we got a message saying that it had been cancelled and rescheduled for Feb. 22, 2009! We had all been looking forward to it for so long that it was kind of disappointing, but we had the option to keep our tickets or turn them in for a refund. We of course still wanted to go, so we just kept the tickets and have been waiting and waiting for last night. And it was so worth the wait!

We had such a fun night...we all got a nice break from our kids and everyday life and got to just hang out and laugh. We went to dinner at P.F. Changs (which I had never been to before) and it was so good! I even valet parked for the first time ever! Ha!

I laughed harder than I have in a long time...it was so refreshing to hang out with my old Copper Rivet friends!

Randi and me at dinner...

Tiff and me...

After the concert-getting ready to head home...Silly girls! After dinner we headed over to park for the concert

(which by the way they are ripping people off!...it was $20 to park where we parked!!)

Oh well we didn't have to walk far and got there during the opening act which was some impersonater guy (never did catch his name), but he was hilarious impersonating and singing like everyone you could imagine.

Then Celine came out and sang for about an hour and a half. She was just as awesome as I thought she would be. No one has a voice like hers and singing live she sounds exacly like she does on the radio or on cd's ...so amazing! And all of her dancers and outfit changes...Wow! She just always seems so down to earth and sincerely grateful for her life and her fans too.

Our seats were about 5 rows from the top! But it didn't even matter.

The only thing I regret was not bringing my camera inside! It said on the tickets no cameras allowed, so being the rule follower that I usually am...I left it in the car! I was so mad...everyone else had cameras! I could have taken a little video to put on here too.

Oh well!

We had so much fun! Thanks girls for going with me (and for buying my dinner and paying parking-I'm getting you back for that!)...let's get our next one planned!

Oh and hunnie this was one of if not THE best Christmas gift you have ever given me! Thank you so so much and for staying home with the boys while I had my much needed girls night out!

Love ya!

Loving my new Scanner!

It's been so fun to scan in lots of pictures...these are the ones from when Gunnar was 3 weeks old. I wanted to get him in to get some pictures taken before he got too big and lost his newborn look, so I took him to JC Penny (before I knew about all of the other great photographers around here...grrrr). So I made an appointment at JC Penney for a Sunday after church. They aren't usually open on Sundays, but will take appointments if they need to. So we showed up right at noon and both boys were happy and fed. It would have gone so well if only someone had shown up! We waited and waited and waited, then finally Lars asked another employee from a different department and they called someone from the photo department who told them they had forgotten to schedule anyone! Lovely...At this point Ashton is starting to bounce off the walls and Gunnar is waking up and getting hungry again. So they called someone in who finally showed up at about 1:00. When she finally started taking the pictures neither one of them wanted anything to do with it!

This is literally the only good picture she got of both of them together and really the only good one of Gunnar at all!

(at least she got this one...I love it!) She got these couple other cute ones of Ashton, but that's not really what I was there for.For all of the inconvenience they gave us a free 8 x 10!

Wow how nice of them!

I had intentions of taking him somewhere else but never did get around to it...life is pretty busy with a newborn and a 3 year old!

Not that I haven't been happy with pictures I've gotten at JC Penney before...I was just really irritated with the situation.

Oh well at least I took a ton of him when he was tiny at home...

This is my all time favorite...he was only a week old

I used it for his announcements...such a little sweetie

Sorry I know this is probably really boring for some people to read, but it's so fun for me!

You know how I love looking back on pictures of my babies :)

Child of the Week!

This week at school Ashton was "Child of the Week", which meant that he and I (okay mostly I) made a poster for him to take to class with pictures of his family and all of his favorite things etc... and on Tuesday I went to school with him for about an hour and a half and he got to stand up and tell everyone about all of the pictures on his poster and show everyone his most prized posession...

his lovey.

The poster...Ashton telling all about it... It was so fun for me to get to go with him and see what he gets to do at preschool and to see how he acts! I'm always wishing that I could be a fly on the wall and see how he really acts while he's there. He was so cute doing all of his projects and listening at storytime and

pouring his water at snack time.

Here he is painting his "Z" like a zebra...fun to see him concentrating so hard to get every line just right and I love how they all go grab their paint shirts and put them on before painting.

(his favorite part of preschool he's told me before is painting :)It was "zoo animal" week...here he is playing with all of the animals in the pretend grassI just kind of followed him around and he told me all about what he gets to do there every day. At one point it just really hit me how grown up he's getting as he was sitting around the little table with all of his friends...just chatting and giggling. I have to admit I almost started crying.

It reminded me of an image that I will always have in my mind of him when he was about 2 and I had taken him to a little park by our house. There were 3 or 4 older boys (like 7 or 8 years old) running around chasing eachother and pretending, and then there was Ashton just peeking around the slides getting so excited to just see me and yelling MOMMY!...I remember thinking then that it was only a matter of time before he would be off running around with his friends not even noticing that I was around. I'll never forget that day. Now here he is already so grown up!

Me and my sweet little boy...

Anyway it was fun for him to have his special week at school and for me to be there for part of it. I loved it! I am so proud of him for how far he has come this year...he's such a great kid :)

A lazy Valentine's Day

On Saturday we didn't even leave the house....It was so nice! When everyone was up I made heart shaped french toast with strawberries for breakfast-YUM!

Then Lars took the boys downstairs to play (and to set up my Valentine's gift...my new printer/scanner/copier!). We've been needing a new printer, but mostly every other day I was saying that it would be nice to have a scanner to scan old pictures or whatever in. I played with it for half the day that day...it is so fun!

The first thing I scanned in...Ashton's Valentine to me that he made at school :) In the meantime I set up Ashton's little treasure hunt upstairs for his and Gunnar's Valentines...

I just made up these little hearts and put them around the house in different places for Ashton to find, each one had a clue to find where the next one was. Gunnar's valentine (poor kid all he gets at this age is another sippy!)Eventually the hearts led him to this... Gunnar and his card :)

"reading" their cards...I think he (they) had fun with it.

Then for once we just hung out around the house the rest of the day...kind of fun to not have anywhere to be. I was telling Ashton that Valentine's day is all about love and he said

"I love you and Daddy and Gunnar...all of you to the moon."