Lilly went to her cousin Haylee's birthday party this weekend and she lives on a ranch and has horses! Haylee's Daddy was nice enough to give the city girls a ride on the horse (named Cash) :) Lilly LOVED it and is still talking about it. I took pictures of Lilly ridding off into the sunset and post those later, but wanted to post my favorite pictures while I had a few free minutes.
Aren't these the cutest, blonde cowgirls you have ever seen! (Lilly, Kaelyn & Haylee)

Lilly has mastered the art of drawing smiley faces. We decorated a birthday present for her friend Jaimason's birthday party and it was covered in smiley faces :)

Here's an up close view of one of the first faces Lilly drew on the bag, not too bad. I think being around her artist Daddy helps a little :)

Labels: Foto Friday

So Lilly did something today that she hasn't ever done for me before, she POOPED in her potty! I have been telling (bribing)her that if she poops in the potty she would get an ice cream cone. So of course I had to follow through, Lilly was totally excited about it. She called her Aunt Angie and told her all about it too :) Potty training is coming along, I still don't dare take her out of the house in just underwear, but she is doing really good at home.


We were able to get the yard all seeded on Saturday. Unfortunately we didn't have enough time to look for plants, but we will get to that most likely this upcoming weekend or later in the week. Mike has a few big projects at school earlier this week so that takes priority. While we were working out in the front yard we got to visit with a couple of our neighbors and one is really into fly fishing, so Mike set up a 'date' for them to go fishing on Friday. Mike is excited because this neighbor has been fly fishing for a long time so he is hoping to learn a few tricks of the trade from him.

Now that they weather is getting a little cooler we are able to finish re-landscaping our front yard. I am VERY excited about this, our front yard has been pretty neglected and it is rather embarrassing. You would never know from looking at the front yard that our back yard is such an oasis. Hopefully by the end of this weekend our front yard will be looking good and we wont be the eye sore of the neighborhood anymore. Today we need to rake, flatten out the soil, fertillize, plant grass and set up the sprinklers. Not too bad for a weekend warrior :) If we have time we might pick out a few plants for the sides of the yard and front step. I will try to post pictures when we are finished.

Labels: Foto Friday

Mike is settling into his new major wonderfully and he had a chance the other day to map out his schedule until graduation and it looks like he will be DONE in 2 years! Yay! So Fall of 2010 Mike will be graduating with his BFA and minor in art education. I am so proud that he is going for it and was so blessed to be able to just slide into the program. It confirms to me that this is defiantly the right path for us and we just have to work hard and everything will work out.

Lilly is doing MARVELOUS without her binky. She's only asked for it a few times, and each time she caught herself and reminded herself that she gave it to the cashier. So there's no going back now, although the cashier did sneak them back to me. (they are in my dresser). Last night was an incredibly difficult night (we all have colds) and Lilly was up from 2:00 until 5:00 I was so tempted to just give in, but I didn't and we made it through. Mike was a sweetie this morning and let me sleep in too. Even though he was up every 4 hours taking Benadryl. We had to rush Mike to the ER yesterday. He started a new antibiotic that he had never taken before and had a really bad reaction, his throat started closing off, he was wheezing and hives. Luckily I had him take some Benadryl as soon as he started having symptoms of an allergy and he was ok.

Potty training is starting back up and so far Lilly is doing pretty good with the pee in the potty, but hasn't done the other yet. We are starting the no more diapers rule this week and I am sure it will be full of many accidents, but well worth it. I have figured out that Lilly can't just slowly step by step do something. It's either all or nothing, so we just have to go cold turkey with the diapers just like the binky.

Labels: adoption

We have a pretty awesome garden this year, even though I gave up on weeding it about 2-months ago :) One of my favorite things about our garden is our pumpkin patch, last year we grew pumpkins, but they didn't look this pretty :) I am hoping to find a good recipe to roast the pumpkin seeds and maybe even try and make some homemade pumkin pie filling.
Here is one of our many watermellons! I can hardly wait to eat this one, but it still has some growing to do. Last year our watermellons cross breed with the cantalopes and cucumbers, so they were orange and tasted like cucumbers, pretty gross. We didn't plant anything by the mellon's this year so they should taste normal :)

Labels: Foto Friday

We gathered all of Lilly's binky's this morning and got them ready to take with us to the store. We decided to replace Lilly's binky with a new CD player so she can listen to music while she trys to get to sleep. I am going to miss the binky, it has helped comfort Lilly for over two years now. But Lilly is a big girl now and she 'bought' her very own radio today at the store. The cashier was AWESOME, I ran ahead of Mike and Lilly and explained the situation and she played along beautifully. She even put the binky's in her cash register and made sure Lilly saw her do it. She was like "Oh my gosh she is so cute, I think I am going to cry!" (I felt the same way). So far the only tears shed for the loss of the binky have been by me (and the cashier).

I had a few free moments today to sort through our millions of pictures from July and August. They are finally posted in our photo section of the website. If you drag your mouse over the picture a comment will pop up about the photo.
August has quite a few fun photo's of our Yellowstone trip, we had a blast and look forward to our next vacation this November to Washington.
July had the holiday and lots of fun pictures of our new swimming pool. (we drained the pool today, bye bye summer). I am looking forward to fall, though. I love the holidays and am excited to enjoy them with Lilly and Mike this year.

So Mike has been working really hard to prepare his art portfolio to apply for the Visual Studio Art Program. (application deadline is Feb. '09)Today he met with the Director of the Visual Studio Program (let's call him Jo)and to say the least, the meeting went great! He only viewed 8 of Mike's pieces and then told him he would be right back, well 20 minutes later Jo came back with some paperwork and handed it to Mike and asked him to fill it out. Mike started filling it out and Jo told him that he met with some members of the board and they decided to admit him into the program without an application. Jo also told Mike that his work is not only good, but scholarship worthy! So instead of having to wait until April to find out if he was accepted into the program, he can start working on it NOW! So this wonderful surprise will put Mike's schooling ahead by an entire year!
I love that my creative, talented husband has that artistic spark back. His creativity is one of the reasons I fell in love with him. I am also thrilled to know Mike will be working hard towards a life long dream of ours and it has begun in such an amazing way.

We went fishing this past weekend and on the way home Lilly decided to sing for us. She loves to sing and often makes up songs and sings them for us. It's always hard to get her songs on video, though because she gets shy and will stop as soon as I bust out the camera, so Mike helped her sing so we could capture this video.