Happy Birthday!!

It's Reagan's 3rd birthday. I have a 3 year old. Weird. We had a little party last night and here are a few pictures.

Teapot. Her signature pose.

Rea and mommy

Auntie Lael and Rea

Cousin Livia

Katie

The Belle cake

We were all really worried about the candles. Belle is quite flammable, you know.

A picture from today with her favorite present. A camera. A REAL camera. I'm sure I'll be posting a few of her genius shots soon as she's already taken a photo of everything she owns.

And what's a birthday post without a few baby pics.

Happy Birthday, my sweet girl!!

Amen

Ahh, prayer time. The part of our nightly routine where Reagan jumps and wiggles like she has squirrels in her pants. Super hard to keep the spirit when you want to murder your kid. So, I thought of this help that has worked wonderfully. We call it our prayer board.

First, we thought of things we're thankful for and things we are asking for. The red writing is thankful and the green writing is need/bless. Then, I let her color them all in.

Next, I made a poster board with our opening and closing sentences and 5 spaces for each color. I attached velcro to the cards and spaces and made pockets to hold the extras. Did I mention that I had the cards laminated? Well, I did.

Voila! She loves picking out her cards for the day and it's really helped settle her down and say good prayers all by herself.

It's in the air...

I love fall. I love it because it means cute holiday decorations, yummy baking and tons of time with the family. We got a good start today with our holiday crafts and Reagan and I managed to get some cute stuff done this morning while E slept. We made....

Cute ghosts made from the girls tootsies. The smaller ones were made later from E's cute little fat feet which made way better ghosts than Reagan's freaky high arched feet. And I don't think you can tell from the picture but our ghosts have white sparkles on them because if your doing crafts with Reagan, something MUST be sparkly.

A family of pumpkins. I wish I knew how to rotate pics on here. Grr....

Some spiders made from Reagan's fingers. She drew the faces. Next year if we do these I'll let her cut. If I let her cut this year, these poor little spiders would have no legs.

I even got out my Halloween wreath

my fall garland

and my little pumpkins and yummy smelling candles

I love the fall.

Trips

The end of August brought our first road trip as a family of four. It went very well. Reagan's always been good in the car and this trip was especially good thanks to her new Nintendo DS games and backpack full of movies. Elisabeth decided to go through a growth spurt and slept all day and then slept all night. Nice. September 1st was my dad's moms (Nanny) 80th birthday party in Vegas. It was held at a cousins house and was a blast! It was casino themed and there were so many people there, it couldn't have been more fun. Unfortunately with all the fun having, no one took pictures. It was great to see so many family members especially Robert, Nanny's husband who had a stroke and passed away a few weeks after the party.

After Vegas, we drove to southern Utah to visit my grandma and Jared's grandpa who live about 45 min apart. Seeing my grandma was great. She's had some health problems these last few years and previous visits had been a realization that she's getting older and we might not have her too much longer. This visit was a definite turn around. She's more active than I've seen her in years and she seemed to be much happier. Jared's grandpa (Melco) is insane! At 90+, he still is going strong. Runs his ranch, works at the temple 5 days a week and lives on his own. I want to be him when I'm that old. He loved seeing Reagan and meeting Elisabeth for the first time. Family is super important to him so it was nice to have him meet some of his posterity. Elisabeth's middle name is Paige after Melco's middle name Page. We did get a few pics although they're mostly the last 20 minutes we were there but they're very cute.

She played this horse game so many times!

Tuckered out. Love those rolls!!

Grandpa Melco and Elisabeth

Aunt Lyne and Reagan

Reagan and Grandpa Melco

Jared, E and Grandpa

The Leavitts

Cute pic of the girlies

Good times with the family

What a fun trip!!

Oh and I got to see a college buddy of mine, Becca when we were driving back home. I think she gave birth to her baby a day or two after we saw her. Crazy!

We did see some of Jared's mission buddies and their families but if I haven't proved this already, we suck at remembering to take pictures. So thank you to the Larsons, Lewis's and Ellis's for letting us visit and crash at your houses!!