10 Months

Berkley turned 10 months old on November 21st.

This was the most difficult monkey picture to get so far.  She kept trying to lunge off the couch.  When I would stop her and push her back she would just laugh and it turned into a game.  So this is the best I could do.
New things this month:
-She's getting better at mimicking sounds and copying motions.  If you say "yay!" she claps.  If you say "hi," she waves.  She says 'dada' for both parents and 'mama' for food.  She always says 'wassat?' (what's that?) and it's usually accompanied by pointing at something.  Our new neighborhood has quite a few dogs so shortly after moving in she learned to say "dog woof woof."  She says it any time she hears a dog.
-Speaking of pointing, she just started that this month too.  She started only using her left hand for a few days but now she points all the time with either hand.  Here she is pointing at the snow falling outside.

-She's turned into quite the mover.  She does a little half scoot/half crawl thing that's hilarious.  (I need to get a video of it.)  She's not very fast yet but she can pretty much get to whatever she wants and can make pretty good messes.

 (She started doing that cheesy smile for the camera and I think it's hilarious.)  And yes, I dress her in velour track suits.  Speaking of which, here's another nice one.  

-She has developed a little bit of 'stranger danger.' It's not too bad, mostly when she's tired or something and mostly toward men.  I don't want her to get too clingy but I secretly love when I'm the only person she wants.  I like being her favorite.  

-She had her first Halloween this month.  Unfortunately we were moving that day so we didn't get to show her off at the ward party or take her trick-or-treating.  (Is it even allowed to take a baby around to collect candy when they can't eat it?  Do people look down on you because they know you're just going to eat it all yourself?)  Anyway, she won't remember it so it's ok.  I still snapped a couple pics of her in her costume.  

 My mom just happened to have this purple unicorn costume in her closet so that's what Berkley got to wear!

 Cutest little unicorn ever!  She also enjoyed 'helping' with the move.  

-Her first top tooth came in this month so now she has three total. It's a big one too.  Since getting her bottom teeth, she often pushes her chin forward.  It makes her look like she has this weird grimace but I think it's just more comfortable for her.  Hopefully it will go away once she has a full set of chompers.  

-Her hair has grown a lot and is getting curly in the back.  Zack has curly hair so we'll see what happens.  

-She pooped in the tub for the first time this month.  I was so shocked I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.  It was hilarious but also disgusting and I had to clean it up.  Eww.  I'll spare you the picture of the actual thing, but here she is totally pleased with herself afterward.  (Don't worry, I sanitized the tub and the toys and everything before putting her back in.)

 She does love the bath though and gets super excited as soon as I turn on the water. 

-She loves being outside, she always has.  She'll just sit there and watch the cars, birds, clouds, dogs, trees, etc.  I'm sad it's getting too cold to go out.  

We have loved bundling her up for the cold even if she doesn't love it.  She just looks so darn cute.  

-She's super good at kicking off shoes, pulling off headbands and hats, and even pulling out her ponytail if she realizes it's up there.  She hasn't quite figured out how to get the mittens off yet though and it's kind of funny to watch her try and grab things with them on. 

-We finally broke down and got her a real highchair.  We were just using the bumbo on top of a chair but since she can get out of the bumbo we thought it would be safer to get something that will restrain her.  Plus, we have room for one now!  She loves it and we love just putting food on the tray and letting her shovel it into her mouth.  She loves to eat and definitely prefers table food over baby food these days.  On the first day of real snow Zack brought in a snowball for her.  

-She loves the mirror and usually waves at it.  

Here are a few more pics I have of her 'helping' with the laundry.  (Our laundry is down in the dungeon aka the unfinished basement.)

 There's that cheesy smile for the camera.  That face seriously cracks me up. 

 Her hair is out of control sometimes.

 Just content to hang out with the clean towels... for about 30 seconds. 

She's just a curious little girl and I love watching her learn new things every day!

Grandpa Woody

My Grandpa Woodbury passed away last week.  (My Dad's Dad.)  He has had health issues for as long as I can remember.  My Grandma Woodbury passed away over 12 years ago and I could tell that he really missed her by the way he talked about her when we visited her grave every Memorial Day weekend.  I'm glad that he can be free from his mortal body and with my Grandma again.  I just wanted to write down some memories I have of him.
-He would always take us out to breakfast when we were little.  I loved going to breakfast with him.  Especially because he let me order hot chocolate.  (Whenever my family went anywhere we had to get water.)
-He always had a love of music.  When I was little I thought he was super cool because he would play his keyboard while I sang.  He taught me songs like 'Home on the Range' and 'My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.'  As I got older, my sisters and I would roll our eyes when he would spontaneously break out in song, start singing crazy harmonies with simple songs like 'Happy Birthday,' or ask us to sing for him.  Yeah, maybe he was a little crazy about it but it was something he was passionate about and I admire that.
-He used to take out his false teeth and sing 'All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.'
-Every time he saw me he would tell me how pretty I am, even the very last time I saw him on his death bed.  Usually it was something like, "Callie, you get prettier and prettier every time I see you."  What a sweetheart.
-He would say things like "When I was a little girl..."  He had a lot of corny old man jokes.
-He had a lot of random jobs.  One time somebody said something about monkeys and he said, "I used to sell monkeys back in..."  He had so many crazy stories if you'd take the time to listen.
-He always wore those cab driver hats and always had pins in them.  He had lots of random pins (like tie pins.)
-He loved that I went to Utah State because that's where he graduated from.  Every time he saw me he would say, "There's the college girl!" with such enthusiasm.
-When I got engaged, I called him to tell him the good news.  The next day he went to an AA meeting.  (He was sober for over 45 years and helped hundreds of other people achieve sobriety.)  Anyway, I was told that he got up at this AA meeting and couldn't stop talking about his granddaughter getting married in the temple and how proud he was.  I'm grateful that he was able to be there that day.  (This is us with his wife Janet.)

-The past few years, every time we got together he would ask Misty and me to sing 'Sisters' from the movie White Christmas.  Misty and I sang this duet years ago but we were clearly too old for it now.  So we would just chuckle and make up an excuse not to sing.  We were able to go visit him before he died  so we brought the song book and all three of us sang 'Sisters' to him.  His face lit up like a Christmas tree and he had tears in his eyes.  Afterward, he kept asking everyone, "Did you hear my granddaughters sing? Wasn't it beautiful?"  I'm so glad that we were able to bring that joy to him and I'll treasure that memory forever.

The services were on Wednesday, November 17th.

The navy did a cool ceremonial flag folding thing.  (Zack wishes they would have fired guns instead of playing the trumpet.)

It was really great to see all the family there.  I have a pretty fun, crazy family!

Cutest person there by far.

 My Dad and his five sisters. 

 The siblings with Janet, my Grandpa's wife.  (I'm not sure who decided the Relief Society room was a good place to take the family pictures.  Oh well.)

 siblings and spouses

 All of the grandkids (with a couple spouses and one great grandkid trying to escape.)

All of the family who came. 

The American Dream

Zack started a new job in May as an estimator/designer at Out of the Woods Custom Cabinetry.  His job is in Layton, about a 40 minute drive south of where we lived in Brigham City.  He had to wake up at 5:15am to make it to work on time!  He also goes to school in the evenings at Weber State University in Ogden which was about 30 minutes south of Brigham City.  So we decided to move closer, plain and simple.

Once we started looking, we realized that a mortgage payment on a 3 bedroom house would be significantly less than rent for a decent 2 bedroom apartment.  Seemed like a no-brainer so we took the plunge and bought this little charmer in Clearfield.

It was a foreclosure and vacant for over a year so it needed a little TLC and A LOT of deep cleaning, but we got it for a steal of a deal!  This is actually one of our 'before' pictures of the yard which needs quite a bit of work.  I'm so glad that Zack (and his dad) can fix just about anything!  Otherwise, all of the "small" fixes could have cost a pretty penny.  However, Zack did get to the point where he was at Home Depot every single day and the workers started recognizing him... yeah, he's a little sick of that place.  I've realized that the projects will never be finished and there will always be something else we want to do to the house but for now we've got it to where we're comfortable and that's good enough for now. 

Overall we're totally loving it!  We love having a place for our cars, love having room for all of our stuff, love being able to do whatever we want to it because it's ours, love that I can plant my garden in the Spring, and Berkley loves not sharing a room with the computer desk!

Before we moved in we totally redid the family room.  Here's a before pic.  (I didn't have my camera so it's a crappy phone pic.)

You can't really tell but the carpet is way stained and worn and the blinds are super ugly pink mini-blinds.  So here's what it looks like now.

A little more inviting don't you think?  Don't worry, I know the carpet looks sort of purple in these pictures but it's not, it's brown.  We replaced the carpet, painted the walls, and got new blinds and it's a whole different room!  We wanted a little color to spice things up.  I know orange isn't very conservative but we like it, and I think the paint really makes the white shelf stand out. 

 It's not totally decorated yet.  We have some beautiful shelves to put on the TV wall.  (Made by Zack of course, along with pretty much all of our wood furniture.)  My question is what do I put on the big white shelf?  I don't want a bunch of knickknacks and trinkets to make it look cluttered but I don't want it to just be empty either.  Most of you who read my blog are far more creative than I am so let me know if you have a suggestion. 

I want to say a HUGE thank you to everyone who helped us clean, fix, pack, move, etc.  We couldn't have done it without you!  So far we love being closer to everything and we love being homeowners!

9 Months

On October 21st Berkley turned 9 months old.

-This month I decided to try one of the mesh feeder things.  She liked it.  I've only put a few things in it like banana, peach, and avocado.  It's kind of hard to clean though and I think she'd rather me just cut them into small pieces and feed them to her anyway. 

-On October 1st, she got her first ponytail!  Her hair has probably been long enough for quite a while but I never tried until now.  She pulls her headbands off now so I'm starting to do ponytails more frequently.  (Otherwise strangers think she's a boy even if she's wearing girl clothes.) 

-She's semi-mobile.  She doesn't crawl yet but she leans and gets in the crawling position.  She can slowly scoot on her bum to get to things she wants.  Her signature move is sitting on her bum and using her legs to pivot all the way around.  She'll spin and spin to whatever direction she wants to face.  She'll pivot to watch as I walk by.  It's pretty funny. 

-One day Zack sat Berkley in her crib while he was doing his homework.  He turned around to check on her and found this. 

 She can't pull herself up from laying down, only from sitting up but it still gave him quite a shock.  Looks like the mattress is going down soon!

-Her second bottom tooth came through and her first top one is on its way. 
-Her hair is starting to curl in the back.
-She sleeps about 12 hours a night and still takes three naps a day!  I've been waiting for her to drop the evening nap but she hasn't yet.  It's fine with me though, that's when I make dinner.
-She picks up anything she can find and sticks it right in her mouth.  She has good eyesight too.  We're talking the smallest crumbs.  Some things I have pulled out of her mouth: an entire coupon, a small metal spring (no idea where it came from), a pokey ball from a sticker weed, etc.  She also tries to pick the freckles off of my arms.
-She speaks really good gibberish and it's the cutest sound ever. 

That's all I really know for this month (since I waited an entire month to post it and I can't think back that far.)  Here are some more pictures of my little cutie...

This is the day her dad dressed her.  I just saw her and started laughing!

 My friend Hilary crocheted this stinkin cute hat.  She's super talented and sells them in her etsy shop if you're interested.  If only Berkley would keep it on her head for more than 5 seconds...

 Helping mom with the laundry.  Being able to move a little = starting to get into things and make messes. 

Yep, she's pretty much the cutest.