It's Finally Winter!

This is what we did on Friday, when it was my day off. It was so nice, we decided to do the outside miniature golf course, that I had told Kylee we could do "this summer." Yesterday it was again nearly 60 degrees outside, and Kylee wore shorts and a t-shirt, and we even went for a walk outside.

Then this morning we woke up to this. After church, we decided to go outside and make a snowman. It continued to snow the whole time, and it was a really wet snow, so it made a good snowman, but we also got soaked! That's Utah weather for you! Not really sure where this storm came from.

 After the snowman, Kylee and Andy decided to have a snowball fight. Andy kept throwing them at me when I was trying to take their pictures, and Kylee just struggled all around. That kid needs some snowball-making lessons.

You can see from this picture how soaked she was. She had also decided she didn't need her mittens anymore, so I thought her hands would be freezing!

Project Day

The other day Kylee debated about whether or not she wanted to stay home with me on my day off, because her school was making volcanos. She finally decided that she DID want to stay home, because she loves having "mom-day" every week. I told her we could make our own volcano. Before we could begin, she told me we have to gather all the "materials". This is NOT all, but I convinced her it was, so we could get started.

Unfortunately, once we started making our dough...we realized we didn't have enough shortening to make a big volcano. Oops. So we improvised, and made the volcano out of paper, and she dyed her dough blue to make bushes at the bottom. Good thing she's a creative kid, and doesn't mind neon pink volcanos!

We then proceeded to make three different lava explosions. First red, then blue, then green. It made a nice rainbow at the bottom of our volcano, and our bushes sort of died. Kylee thought it was "so awesome, mom!" I'm glad she thinks things are cool...even when mom doesn't do them quite right!

After our volcano, we moved on to making Valentine's. Somewhere around Feb. 1, Andy joked during dinner that I should be writing him love notes on the napkins in his lunch each day, because "that's what a good wife would do." I told him good luck with that. However, Kylee latched onto the idea that we needed to make Valentine's out of our red napkins ASAP, because it is ALMOST Valentine's Day, and we might not be ready! I tried explaining that 2 weeks is PLENTY of time...but she was having none of that.

So, having cleaned up our volcano mess, we proceeded to gather all the materials we needed for prime Valentine-making. She's had her eye on all my craft stuff for months...so she took the opportunity to get out everything that looked fun. We had glitter, ribbon, stickers, foam letters, markers, etc.

 My assigned job was to cut out the hearts from the napkins and poster board, and her assigned job was to decorate them for Dad, all the Grandma's, and Aunt Rachel. She also wanted to do grandpas, uncles, cousins, and all the other aunts...but I had to put my foot down somewhere!

I taught her how to make tissue paper flowers with her pencil and glue, and she thought that was pretty neat.

This is the one she made for Daddy. She already gave him his, because she just couldn't wait. The rest are sitting on the kitchen table waiting to be handed out in the coming days, now that the holiday is actually approaching.

Birthday Party

For her birthday this year, Kylee was really excited to have a birthday party. She invited all her cousins and aunts and uncles. Her school friends were having a party at school, and we haven't been in our neighborhood long enough to make neighbor-friends, (okay, maybe we have, but since we are gone all day, every day, we haven't made any yet), so she had a family party. She picked out what kind of cupcakes she wanted to make, and on Saturday morning she helped make them.

She picked that the kids were going to have white cake Strawberry Shortcake cupcakes, and the adults were going to have chocolate cake.

She was very excited to use food coloring to change the white frosting into the colors we needed to put strawberries on top of the cupcakes. She even helped me hold the bag while we squeezed all the strawberries and leaves out.

We also got a poster-board so we could make a "pin the strawberry on Strawberry Shortcake" game. The idea was to see who could put their strawberry closest to the one on her glove. They all missed, but we decided cousin Zack was the closest.

Again, she was SO EXCITED to blow out her candles! We compromised with just one candle again instead of four. I'm just not sure why she is so terrified of them. It's weird.

She did manage to blow it out though.

Grandma Karen got her a Mommy & Me matching nightgown set, so of course she had to put it on right away, as did baby Emily (that she got for Christmas). She got a lot of fun presents from her cousins, too, and she was really excited.

After the Costin/Watkins clan left, my family stayed for awhile, and cousin Tapanga and Grandpa Bruce played playdough with Kylee. Grandma Roxy and Grandpa Bruce had gotten her little molds to make food and things out of playdough, so it was fun.

Kylee Turns FOUR!!

On Wednesday, January 11, 2012, Kylee turned FOUR YEARS OLD. She was very excited about turning four, and is convinced that she is officially a big girl now.

At her school she got to wear the birthday crown.

That night when we all got home, we had our family present-opening time. It was only about 5:15, but as soon as she opened her new silky Rapunzel nightgown, she had to put it on. Then we had cupcakes. You can tell from the picture how much she loves candles. One was all we could force without severe permanent post-traumatic stress disorder occurring.

You can also tell from the picture how much she LOVES lip gloss, and how good she is at applying it to her lips.

Christmas 2011

I didn't take many pictures on Christmas this year, probably because Andy and I rolled out of bed when Kylee woke us up to see what Santa brought...and there was no reason to document how awesome we looked. Here's Kylee getting her Santa presents ready to open. The pajama pants were made by yours truly, and she opened them on Christmas Eve. Andy was so proud of me for breaking out my sewing machine and being "homey". When we were almost done opening presents, Andy saw one more at the back of the tree. Rather than walk around to the back, Kylee climbed UNDER the tree to get it out.