September 2011

Yes, I'm still convinced that I can catch up on blogging. Even though it's January and I'm blogging September, I know I can do it! So here's what happened in September, mostly in photos.

Parks and an Ouch

I took Bailey to a park every day. We had a lot more time on our hands with it just being Bailey and I again, so we took advantage of the warm weather and sunshine while we could. By the way, Moscow is great in the parks department, there's like 15 parks in this tiny town!

Bailey had her first "ouch" from a sliver from a park outing. It was the biggest sliver I had ever seen. We had to pin her down and dig it out. Poor girl. Whenever we asked her where her "ouch" was she always pointed to her head...

Play Dates 

We had a few play dates in September, one was with Clark and Abby. These funny kids were so cute playing together!

Then Nayomee, Clark, Bailey and I took a little trip to Kendrick. We took the kids to a park for lunch first, then we went shopping at all the fun antique stores! My favorite store had all their antiques displayed by color. Now that's my kind of store! If you know me, you know that I am a little OCD about organization and colors. I have to arrange and eat my candy in color order, and I have to arrange shapes of things in like groups. I know, I'm weird. It was fun to see all the fun old stuff and of course, take some fun photos. (Bailey thought that little dog was a cat)

While in Kendrick, I talked to a lady who owned one of the stores and found out she also owned the Antique Mall in Moscow. I had been meaning to go in there and talk to the owner about putting my jewelry in the store, perfect! I talked to her and it was go! So now Tom Design Jewelry is in the Antique Mall in Moscow. Yay!

My friends and I also had a little girl's night of our own. It was one of Ashley's last nights with us in Moscow so we went to dinner, went shopping, and saw the movie, "The Help". Love these girls.

Spring Valley

The Ritchies and Muirs invited us to Spring Valley Resevoir for some tin foil dinners. I love things like that. Mark and I are actually big on camping but can't really do those things with a baby. Tin foil dinners will have to do until we can. I loved taking photos of Bailey and Abby playing. We sure do miss her!

Ducks

Our stake had an opening social at a park in Pullman. The best part was that there was a huge duck pond! Bailey loves ducks, and this park proved no exception, she was in love. She waved to them, tried to hold them, and shared her dinner with them.

Farmer's Market

Moscow has a great Saturday Farmer's Market, it's one of their selling points to get people to come to town. This was only our second time going, but I knew I wanted to do a little photography experiment: photograph the color wheel! I used to do this with my junior high photography students and then I  saw my photographer friend do it at the market so I tried it there too. I love all the colors, especially when they're lined up like this.

Here's what the photos are.

This girl had fun too.

County Fair

Lucky for us the Latah County Fair is in Mosow! We went last year with the Muirs when the kids were babies, I think Bailey slept through most of it. This year we went with the Muirs again and the Robertsons, and best part was that the kids were toddlers and they actually had fun! It took Bailey a while to warm up, but she eventually did and loved seeing all the animals, flashing lights of the rides, the concert, and of course those ginormous Elephant Ear scones, yummmm.

SO many lights, colors, and sounds! 

August 2011 Part 2: CLC, Walking, Play Time, a Farewell

Craft Lake City

The day after Rick and Janice's wedding reception in Utah, I had a craft fair "Craft Lake City". I spent quite a bit of time getting ready and even made a nice vinyl banner for my canopy. It was an incredibly hot day - we even put that huge garbage can right there to shade where I was sitting, but it turned out to be a pretty good show.

1/2 of my booth

Walking

Bailey got the courage to start walking more this month. I would take her outside and have her practice with me, I loved holding her hand and walking with her, so sweet!  She had a few scraped knees and scuffed up her shoes pretty bad but she got the hang of it!

Lots of stopping to investigate new things!

Farewell BBQ
The last week the three of us were in Utah we decided to throw a little Farewell BBQ for ourselves. We wanted to have fun with everyone one last time. The best part of the BBQ were the hamburgers! I got the patties from Costco and they were 1/2 pounders! HUGE! Mark did all the grilling, I took photos, Bailey practiced walking, and everyone just chatted and talked and enjoyed the evening.

Play Time
Of course I have to post some fun, play time photos of Bailey each month. She keeps us laughing and on our toes! She loves getting into everything and exploring new things. She even loves going down the slide head first!

 

August 2011 Part 1: A Wedding

Mark's brother, Rick, got married in August so we all joined him and Janice in California to see them get married in the Oakland Temple. We made the decision to fly and rent a car - so glad we did. And that way we were able to make it a mini vacation instead of spending days driving.

San Francisco

We spent the first day around downtown San Francisco. First, we sat in traffic for about an hour and a half. There was a baseball game just getting out right when we got there, perfect! After that we ate dinner at In-N-Out, walked around the Piers, saw some cool submarines, went in an antique arcade, then made our way down to Fisherman's Wharf. It's a good thing we packed winter coats for everyone we needed them! I remembered as a kid it was always freezing in SF and we always had to buy sweatshirts, but we were warm in that freezing ocean wind.

The Zoo

The next day we went to the San Francisco Zoo. This was way fun, and little warmer too! The SF Zoo has way more animals than the Hogle zoo and lots of space for them to roam. Of course Bailey made all the animal noises she knew and we even got to hear the lions roar! They had a special Tarantula exhibit while we were there, YUCK! I still get goosebumps thinking about those, some were HUGE!

Wedding Part 1

That night we headed over to the church to help set up for the reception. We got the ceiling put up and since that was the part Rick and Janice worried about the most I thought the worst was over. Nope. We spent the next two days setting up for the reception/ring ceremony/dinner, it was a ton of work, we did everything you see in the photos. But it was Janice's dream come true - she had been designing and planning this since she was 12 so it was all worth it. It's a good thing we love her! Jake and his family also baptised Isaac and blessed Sadie during this time.

Before

After

Wedding Day

The wedding day was beautiful, we spent the morning in the pool, later in the morning finishing the church, then the ceremony. There were a few bumps along the way including Jake's car breaking down. We had to stall the temple for 30 minutes, but everyone made it safe and it was a beautiful ceremony. Then we headed to the church and had a ring ceremony for all of Janice's friends and family, a delicious dinner, a program, and DANCING! Dancing made me forget how tired I was from setting up and how bad my feet hurt. I even danced while cleaning up! Clean up took until about 1:00am, but we lucked out and only stayed till 11:00pm to take Bailey home to sleep. Bailey was such a trooper through all the craziness. She was able to fall asleep in her car seat wherever - even through the dancing!

The next day we woke up late, really late, threw everything in our suitcases and sped off to the airport to catch our plane. We've never been out of a hotel faster than that and we got to the airport 10 minutes before our plane LEFT. We got through security super fast since we had a baby, they even passed me with 2 water bottles! Then we RAN about 1/4 mile to the gate I was pushing Bailey in the stroller and was ahead of Mark and Marcie. People were yelling "You're going to make it!" Ha ha! Then I heard a hostess yelling "Thompson?!?" down the hall of gates and I said, "THAT'S ME!" They let me on without a boarding pass... and then let Mark and Marcie on. Whew, we made it. We got to the SLC airport, but since we were so late our checked bags did not - and that's where the keys to our car were. They came on a later flight! Ha!

A week later we did it all again for a reception in Utah. All the girls made 125 cupcakes, we frosted, made sandwiches, decorated, and I made my very first wedding cake! I think it turned out beautiful! I learned that you can cover all your mistakes with ribbon and flowers :)

All in all it was a busy, tiring, but super fun trip! We loved spending the time with Mark's family!