2 year old Pictures!

Well, Emma has definitely gotten a lot of personality since the last time we did pictures :). I took her to the mall to do some 2 year shots and they turned out great! Of course it took 3 workers and I dancing around with Winnie the Pooh and bribing her with a sucker (that was the real trick). But after a whole lot of effort...they turned out great! I love my crazy, full-of-energy little toddler. She has grown so much over the last year and is in such a fun stage of life right now.

I took her to the doctor this last week and her stats are:

Weight: 4th percentile
Height: 93rd percentile

Still skinny, but getting so tall! Here are the darling pics from the photo shoot:

Taft LeRoy Young

Yay! We have a new cousin in the family! Tara and Johnny had their second baby boy on October 28, 2011. Tara was due 3 days before me (Thanksgiving day), but Taft decided he didn't want to wait on the turkey. He came at 36 weeks and we are SO happy that he is healthy and didnt' have to spend any time in the NICU! Such great blessings!

Tara finished school on Tuesday and Johnny had been deployed for a couple months and got home the DAY BEFORE the baby was born! They were thinking they had a few weeks together to get things ready, but these darn babies decide to come when they want :). It was amazing timing though. Johnny got home Thursday and that night Tara started having hard contractions. So Friday morning Tara thought they better go to the hospital and check things out and sure enough they said "you're going to deliver right now!" We were so happy Johnny got to be there for the birth of Taft!

Congrats you guys!!!

2011 Goals!

Well, I made lots of goals for this year and I'm happy to say I have finished most of those goals. Most years I am one of those people that makes New Years resolutions and breaks them within the first month :). I made sure to make reasonable goals this year and stick with them (most of them, that is :)). The goals I made were:

1) Read 4 books this year. The first one I read was The Help. I LOVED this book and the movie was amazing too! The other books are If I Should Die, Parenting with Love and Logic, and Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Baby (still reading this one).

2) Exercise at least 3 times a week. I have done surprisingly well with this goal :). Minus the last 2 weeks in my pregnancy, but for the most part I have really enjoyed taking Emma to the daycare at the gym and I read while exercising. Emma loves playing there as well.

3) Practice voice and piano 5 times a week. I didnt' do as well with this goal as I would have liked. I kind of went in spurts where I did really well for a while and then slacked off for a while. This will be an on-going goal :).

4) Learning how to garden. I planted roma tomatoes, grape tomatoes, green, red, and banana peppers. The peppers did really well and the grape tomatoes were absolutely giant! I couldn't contain them. Even with the wire holder, it was so huge that it took over the garden. Unfortunately the roma tomatoes did not do very well. They grew and grew, but once then turned red, they were mushy and gross :(. But the grape tomatoes were amazing so it made up for the others :).

Garden when I planted:


Garden at the end of the season:



I had someone tell me some pruning tips for tomatoes (after it was too late). I'll try those next year :). I had tons of fun learning how to start a garden and I loved enjoying the grape tomatoes every day.

5) Sewing and crafts. I wanted to do at least one project a month. I have loved finishing projects. I am usually the type to start many things, but not finish much :). But I have finished some projects that I am very happy about.

I sewed Emma a dress but it's still too big for her to wear. It turned out okay considering I made up the pattern in my head and just went for it. Patterns were so expensive and I didn't want to pay that much so I made it up :). She'll be able to wear it next spring probably.




This snowman quilt is something that has been on-going since April or May. I joined a quilting class at church and every month we learned a new step such as applique, connecting corners and borders. It has been a huge project, but it's fun to see the finished product.



I made Kristen a carseat cover too. Boose helped me pick out fabric and it turned out really cute!



One more project that has taken months and months to complete I will have to blog about it later at the end of the year. Pics and post to come!

I'm happy to say that it feels good to make goals, accomplish them and look forward to more goals to come. Now that Reese is coming, there will be more pressing things to spend my time on for a while (like trying to be a mother of 2!). But I am looking forward to it!

Random Emma photos

Emma LOVES to brush her teeth. She has found a way to climb onto the counter so she can brush her teeth herself. The first time I found her doing this, she thought it was hilarious! I laughed too cause she was so cute sitting there and she was so proud of herself :).



She got her first haircut last month. I couldn't stand the mullet anymore :). So I sat her down with the ipod and some fruit snacks and she actually sat there the whole time. She looked so cute after! Here is an awesome "before" picture:









I like this picture because she's holding up her finger to say she's "1"! Well, now it's taking work to convince her to say "2" when people ask "how old are you?"



Visiting Daddy at work. We go about a couple times a week. She LOVES it every time we go say hi.

Nemo Party!

As you know now (from previous posts), Emma absolutely LOVES Nemo and so we decided to make her 2nd birthday a Nemo theme. She loved seeing so many Nemo's on the balloons, the birthday cake, the coloring pages and more. We had my family over for some games, presents and food. It was a lot of fun. There were even Nemo's hidden in the room that Emma and William had to go "find". Emma just loves having family around so no matter what we did, she would have loved it :).

The cake turned out how I was hoping! Many things went wrong in the process...the middle fell through, then the whole thing fell apart as I was getting it out of the pan. But with a little frosting...it got patched up and you couldn't really tell :).



We also played a game I called "Mother Knows Best" where everyone had to match up the word Emma SAYS with the word she is MEANING. It was great! Here are the answers and you can see why it was a hard game. Aside from Cade, Nathan scored the highest- 13 out of 19! It was fun to see what people put :).




Other pics from the evening...





Here's our little princess in her tutu I made for her :)



And Grandma and Grandpa Bleak gave her the horse from Tangled! Emma couldn't have been more excited! She LOVES Tangled (especially the horse!).







Happy 2nd Birthday Sweet Pea!

Our Birthday Adventures...

You know those days you can look back at and just laugh at them?? Well, I can't quite laugh about this one yet :). I'm sure this post will make other people laugh, however.

Emma turned 2 years old yesterday! She has grown so much over the past year. She is starting to use sentences and definitely understands now that she has a choice in many things and voices that opinion. She is learning and soaking in so much around her and it's fun to be able to actually communicate with her. I love her so much!!!

Certain parts of her birthday, however, I didn't love so much :).

We woke up in the morning and took a video of her coming down the stairs to discover her new slide! I wanted to get something that we could put in the basement for the winter for her to play on and then take outside next summer. She LOVED it! Here is a video:



After she played on her slide, we opened lots of presents from mom and dad (books and a fake make-up kit- she's already such a girl!). And some presents from Grandma and Grandpa Close- a train set and a princess purse that had many items but her absolute favorite- a pink phone! She was a happy girl!







Then the real fun began...
Emma had been sick the couple days before and of course on her birthday (just like last year. I hope it's not an annual thing!). I had put off shopping the day before because she was sick, but I couldn't put it off any more. And after all Emma just had a cough and runny nose...what's the worse that could happen? So we shopped and after about 20 minutes she started coughing...and she wouldn't stop. I had water for her, but that didn't help. She coughed and coughed and I knew it wasn't going to be good. So I grabbed the little zip-lock baggie of cereal I had in my purse just in time to catch all the throw-up. She coughed so hard she threw up over and over everything she had eaten that morning. The best part is the way everyone looks at you while passing by. And then I didn't have anywhere to throw it away at the moment so I took it with me to checkout :). Shopping time was DEFINITELY finished!

The rest of the day went pretty good. Emma had lots of fun playing with her new slide and toys. And then when I was exhausted from the day (which I am most all the time nowadays) we watched a movie together on the couch. At night, we had pizza and then Cade had to leave. Before he left he asked if I would call back a good friend from Arizona who left birthday wishes for Emma. So I was talking to him in the front room while Emma was playing by herself. Unfortunately the call ended when I walked into the kitchen to discover Emma drawing ALL OVER our white fridge with PERMANENT marker!!! I was SOOO upset! But Mommy and Daddy write on a white board with black marker, so why was this any different? Needless to say, the birthday did not end very good.



Well, the ironic thing (Cade pointed out) is that this happened THE DAY of her 2nd birthday...does this mean the terrible 2's have officially begun?? I sure hope that's not the case :). Emma is a sweet, very happy little girl. I'm sure there will be moments in the future that I will want to pull my hair out and fall asleep crying, but for the most part, life with Emma is SO wonderful and happy and I don't know what I would do without her in my life! And here we are going again...baby girl #2 will be here any day or week now and we're excited to add more children to the Close family!

Happy Birthday Emma! Your dad and I love you very much!