9 Months Old!

Chloe is now 9 months old! How did time go by so fast?! She is growing so fast and accomplishes new exciting things all the time! I think it is just about as difficult keeping up with her as it was with Karson...which took me by surprise. I thought my little girl would be a sweet little angel and never give me any trouble! At least not until she was a teenager LOL. So much for that naive dream...I guess I knew better. She is crawling over things, getting into everything, screaming at us for not paying enough attention to her, and so many other troublesome behaviors... but we are loving [almost] every minute of it! She is still working on getting her little tooth to come all the way through...and maybe that's been playing into her attitude. But who knows... Cris took her for her first bike ride ever yesterday, and she seemed to enjoy it. I also found an adorable little Disney Princess umbrella stroller that she seems to be a big fan of. With the nice weather this week, I took her for a little stroll around the block in her cute new Croc wannabes and she just kicked her little feet the whole way... toooo CUTE!!!

Little rockstar princess :)

Chloe's first bike ride!

Look at that cute new stroller!

... and ADORABLE shoes haha

What a happy girl

Giving Bear dog loves

Karson pushing Chloe in her new stroller...good times!

Ice Cream Date With My Favorite Kindergartener

Karson brought home his report card from school on Friday and it was quite impressive... to me anyways. The kids are given a 1(rarely displays behavior), 2 (occasionally displays) or 3 (consistently displays). Last quarter (or trimester or whatever it is that school goes by) he got mostly 2's... except in respect. Sadly he was not very respectful and only got a 1 in that category. I commended him for doing well in the other areas and we then set a goal to work on being respectful. It was tough at first and then he got it and has way more good days than bad. So this report card was made up of mostly 3's- Yay Karson!- and he brought his respect from a 1 to a 2. I was very proud of him and decided to take him out on an ice cream date. He chose TCBY, and we took advantage of the nice weather and rode our bikes there (after having Cris fix both of our tires lol). This is what Karson chose...

Peanut butter chocolate ice cream parfait with hot caramel, M&Ms, and gummy bears!

He enjoyed every bite of it... minus a few bites that he so kindly shared with his ice cream addicted mom :)

Mmmmmmmmmm!

Our conversation was quite amusing... out of nowhere he told me that he loves girls because they dress so cute, but not everbody thinks so. He also said that he can only tell me that he loves me because if he tells other girls that then they will want to marry him! Haha! There is rarely a dull moment around Karson :)

Lady Bug Lady Bug Fly Away Home...

When I was pregnant I had a lot of time to be crafty. One day I crocheted a cute little owl hat for Chloe. Everyone loved it and once she was big enough to wear it, she looked ADORABLE!

My friend asked me to make her a lady bug one for her little girl...unfortunately for her I was a big time procrastinator about it. I used some ideas off of pinterest to help me create my owl hat, and I hadn't seen (or maybe just hadn't searched for) any tutorials on making a lady bug hat. After seeing the slight disappointment on Jamie's face when the hat that I made for her daughter for Christmas was not a ladybug hat I decided to quit being afraid of failure and called upon my imagination to help me make this hat. I think it turned out pretty darn cute...

I think Jamie likes it...McKinnley didn't really want to wear it, but at least I tried!

Chloe in her cupcake hat... I made this for her on our way to Lava Hot Springs last summer. Karson asked me to make a cupcake for it

My brother, Colton in his owl hat...what a great Christmas present :)

Home Brew, Motorcycles and Teething

We have had quite the exciting week. Cris's friend from college, Jim came to town on Thursday from Nevada. The next afternoon, they had their friend Josh come over and they bottled up 5 gallons of home brewed beer. They seemed to be having a great time, and worked really hard to maintain their sterility by utilizing straws so that they could drink while bottling. Men... lol. It was a pretty cool process to watch, and hopefully all of their hard work pays off in another few weeks.

After they were done, a few more friends showed up and Cris and Jim decided to show them their motorcycles. Cris's motorcycle is having some issues right now, so he is borrowing one from his mom's boyfriend. So naturally, Cris had to take it for a quick ride to see what the bike was capable of. About 5 minutes later, he came inside, breathless and with some gnarly road rash on his right arm and side. He wasn't complaining much about it until he washed it off...then he was hurting pretty good. I'm glad he's okay and all, but I wish he would accept how accident prone he is and protect himself from things like that! Needless to say, I was a little worried about the condition he would come home in after going out riding in the mountains on Saturday! Thankfully, he made it home without any new injuries yesterday afternoon.

Since I worked Friday night, Grandma Penny came over Saturday morning to watch the kids while Cris and Jim went riding. She pretty much made Cris's day, and to top it off she made us breakfast! She found this new recipe for these breakfast pockets where you take pillsbury biscuits and wrap them around sausage, eggs, and hashbrowns, then bake them...mmmm! Karson enjoyed spending the day with his grandma, and Chloe was so good for her! Sometime throughout the day, Chloe sprouted a little tooth on her bottom gum. It has barely poked through, and the one next to it is following close behind....which explains why she has been sooooooo grumpy lately! I forgot how much teething sucks!

Last weekend was officially the end of my baylor schedule. No more working every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night for this girl! It will be nice to not have to work every weekend, but I am going to miss the weekend crew...and my predictable schedule. So far it's okay though.

I started planning a road trip up the Oregon/Washington Coast for the summer... I can't wait to go to the beach! I want to visit Cannon Beach, Seaside, and Astoria...then maybe head up to the Forks area. It's all up in the air right now... but I'm excited!!!

So being the "mother of the year" that I am ;) I signed Karson up for a program called "Legomania" at his school that was hosted by the Y... and then forgot that I had signed him up for it so he unfortunately missed the first two days. Oops! But he was able to go Wednesday and Thursday, and had a blast! We can't wait for the next one!

All and all I would say that our crazy life is pretty good right now. I miss my parents and the rest of my family, and can't wait to see them! But other than that things are good...oh ya minus trying to file taxes through H&R Block. What a truly terrible experience! Long story short, they entered false information, we were charged $230 to file a fairly simple return, got a small amount back from federal and OWED the state money! After leaving the office feeling like I wanted to puke... I plugged in our information to TurboTax and got back twice the amount from the federal government, and a small amount back from the state. We are still in the process of getting them to straighten everything out... and hopefully it will be resolved SOON. We will never go through them again and are going to go talk to our local IRS office on Monday about what they did.

That negativity aside, we are all healthy and doing well... and looking forward to some nicer weather, BBQing outside, and being more active!