Signing

The other day, Jordyn was walking around with her ball.  She but the ball down, looked directly at me, started tapping her fingers together, and said "ball".  She did this over and over.  I could understand she was saying ball and I was kind of excited about it cause I don't feel like she says a lot of words.  But what was she doing with her hands?  Later on, we were watching a baby einstein dvd that we have.  To my shock, she knew all of the words and signs on the dvd, including, you guessed it, ball.  I felt kind of dumb.  My 18 month old knows more sign language than I do.  Signing is not something I have taught her at all.  Like I said, she knows more than I do.  I thought she liked the baby einstein cause of the music.  It is one of those dvds I always just put on when I need her to be out of my way for 20 minutes.  I guess neglect does pay off.

Also, don't mind the silly hat.  My sister made it for her and she is obsessed with it!

Happenings...

Gosh, it seems like we have been busy lately.  The last 3 months I have been working with the youth in our ward in a Road Show.  What is a Road Show you ask?  That is what I asked the bishop when he called me.  It is like a little 12 minute  play put on by the ward youth.  And holy cow was it an undertaking!  So many hours writing the script, songs, teaching, dancing, rehersing, costumes, parties, treats, planning, planning and planning.  Luckily  I was working with some great people and was far from alone in the task.  There are 10 wards in our stake.  Each ward had 3 minutes to set up, 12 minutes to perform, and 3 minutes to take down = total 18 minutes per show.  Do the math...18 minutes for 10 wards is 3 hours of performance time.  The stake organized it so that we did 2 performances on Saturday totaling 6 HOURS of road show fun.  We sat on the gym floor and watched 6 hours of road show!  Something I am not eager to do ever again.  But at the end of the night, our ward won first place!  Wahoo!  A lot of work, but worth it in the end.  Isn't that the way it always seems to go. 

Then we headed on vacation.  Well, vacation for me and work for Chad.  Chad went to Seattle for more training so Jordyn and I flew part way with him to Utah.  We spent 5 days there and it went by so fast.  It always does.  So many people to see in so little time.  I spent a day in Utah County seeing friends from East Meadows, getting my hair done and chilling with family.  I spent a day shopping with mom.  I spent some time with the Barton's as well.  And of course, El Mex.  Twice in one day I might add.  Chad flew in to SLC on Saturday and we had a quick lunch and spent some time playing in the park before we got on our flight back to Denver.  Jordyn was soooo tired.  She had hardly slept all week.  She zonked out when we got on the plane but hit some turbulance just as we got in the air and it scared her to death.  It was a bad flight from there on out.

This is the only picture I got of the trip!  Oops!

Just as we got home at about 7:00 Saturday night, Jordyn slipped on our wood floor.  As Chad went to pick her up, she quit breathing and passed out in his arms.  She came to after a few seconds, which seemed like eternity.  We were terrified.  Some neighbor ward members just happened to drop by as all this was happening so we quickly gave her a blessing and took her to the ER.  They figured she had gotten the wind knocked out of her and passed out because of shortness of breath.  No head trauma.  They wanted her to stay in the ER and observe her til midnight.  We made it til about 10 and called it quits.  Containing a sleep deprived 1 year old in a hospital room was more than we can handle.  She seems to be fine now and is back to her normal silly self.

Hopefully things will slow down for a few weeks now.  I have some super fun craft projects planned and I am so excited to get started.  Curtains, re-upholstering, and lots of fun sewing!  I am gonna go get started now!

Photo Fun Anyone?

I have had my DSL for almost a year now.  I LOVE it!  Honestly, it has been like therapy for me, especially since we moved.  I saw a friend post this and although it was set up for February, I am going to do it in March, and maybe April, and possibly May.  Because let's face it, I cannot commit to taking a picture every day!

I will probably post my photos on my photo blog.  I know I have some photo frenzy friends who want to do it with me!  Any takers?

Dancin' Fool

This girl loves gettin' her groove on!  Anytime any song comes on, she is on her feet shakin' and twirlin'.  She loves Tangled, Care Bears, Sesame Street and Blues Clues (we watch too much TV) right now and every time the characters break out in song, she is breaking out her moves.  I am the primary chorister in our ward, and Jordyn gets to come to primary with me til she is old enough for nursery.  When the kids start singing, Jordyn starts dancing.  She loves music.

I know Jordyn is not the only baby who likes to shake it up.  Every time she busts a move I laugh because, like all baby/toddlers, she looks ridiculous.  But to her credit, she has no reservations.  I have had this question for a few years now and I think it stems from having crazy students doing crazy things and just thinking it is all normal.  At what point do children lose this freedom of expression?  At what point to they start looking at others and comparing themselves, and what causes that shift in their thinking?  As an adult, there are so many times that I do or don't do something because I am worried what others will think of me.  I wish I could be more like Jordyn and just do what I feel without any reservations due to judgement.  There is so much that I learn from Jordyn, and children in general.  They have so much to be admired.

Lesson Learned

With all the changes we went through in 2011, now in 2012 we are starting to see some of the things we did wrong.

#1.  When you move to a new state, you should immediately register your car.  This is something we knew needed to be done, but we did not consider it a priority.  Apparently, you have 90 days to do so, and then you start getting charged a late fee.  No one told us this.  When we tried to explain to the DMV we had no knowledge of the late fee, they simply said that we are now citizens of Colorado and it is our own duty to know of the laws of the state in which we live.  So, now it is costing us about $500 to register both our cars.  And the icing on top of the dumb DMV cake is that it takes a lot of paperwork to register your car.  LOTS.

#2.  When you move, just move to a home and stay there.  Jumping around from apartment to apartment was financially best for us, but sucked big time.  It cause a lot of unforeseen problems, like mistake #3.

#3.  Change your address immediately.  Those 6 weeks in July/August while Chad was training all over the country, I was living in Gunnison with my parents.  With all the moving and new job and new insurance and all that crap we were filling out, we put my parent's address as our home address.  We changed bank accounts and everything to my parent's home.  When we got to Colorado, we got a P.O. Box and set that as our home address for everything.  It was a hassle, but that is not the unforeseen problem.  The problem is that since Chad was technically working for Microsoft in Denver, we were being taxed in Colorado.  But because our address was in Utah, we were also being taxed in Utah.  The result: we are losing about $300 in our tax return.  All because of those stupid 6 weeks in limbo.

#4.  Ward hopping seems ok when you are in limbo.  But it causes unforeseen problems as well.  We were paying tithing to random wards we were living in for about 4 months.  It is now almost impossible (ok, maybe I should use the word annoying instead of impossible) to get the information we need to get the refund on our tax return.  We don't know the bishop's name, the ward name, or anything.  We were just going to church and paying our tithing to the church without a second thought of the consequence.

I cannot believe we have been in Colorado for 6 months.  I feel like we are just finally getting into a routine and things are starting to feel normal.  I like feeling normal.  I think it is safe to say that we are DONE moving for a long while.

Happy Valentine's Day!

I have got some pretty amazing people to love this Valentine's Day!

Let it Snow....again, and again, and again.

When we first moved here, we had figured there would not be a whole lot of weather diffference between Utah county and Castle Rock.  We had read all about the average temperatures and snow falls and the two areas seemed very similar.  WRONG!  I swear we have gotten a snow storm every week since the first week of November.  We have had now had 4 storms each leaving over 12 inches dumped.  Other storms have left 4-6 inches.  And call me crazy, but I do not remember ever having that much snow in Utah. (Ok, that one winter in Cedar City was pretty bad.)  The schools here had a snow day yesterday.  In fact, everything around here closed up early.  Most stores and governmnet offices were closed around noon.  It literally snowed all day.  We are going on 36 hours of nothing but snow.  It is finally starting to slow up now. 

We took a break from house arrest to go out and shovel yesterday.  Jordyn LOVED it!  Her fingers and nose were so cold, but I still had to drag her in the house kicking and screaming.

Yes, those are socks on her hands.  I havn't bought her gloves cause I figured she would not keep them on anyway.

Daddy's little helper!

This was about 18 hours into this 36 hour neverending storm.  I am guessing there is another 6-9 inches out there, just waiting to be shoveled again!  I think a snow blower is in our future.  Weather stations say we will just have flurries for the rest of the day today.  Whew!