New life in Tucson!

Life has been pretty good here in Tucson. Even though it’s not where I wanted to live, we have been happy. Our apartment is nice and large, and we have made lots of friends in our ward. It is much easier to make friends when you have kids! I was worried about that part, since our last move to Oregon was such a hard transition, even though I was excited about living there. It is wonderful being so close to Adam’s sister Amber and her family and having them in our ward. Lily loves her cousin Amelia, and they are so cute together. Josh likes running around outside, even though there are only sidewalks to play on and no grass. They don’t seem to mind much. And they sure love the swimming pool! I guess the Lord knew this is where we need to be.

Joshua is 18 months and officially in nursery. He is very sweet, but such a daredevil! He jumps off everything, runs away from me squealing and laughing, climbs everything, and laughs even when he gets hurt! I am a bit worried about what trouble he might get into when he gets older, but he is the most adorable thing in the world right now. He has a little friend named Norah whom I watch during the last two hours of church because her parents are busy with callings. He apparently likes her because whenever we go to her house, he grins and says “Nori! Nori!” In fact, when she went out of town, he missed her because every time we drove by her neighborhood, he would get excited and say “Nori!” and would be a little sad when we didn’t visit her.

He talks about spiders and volcanoes all the time, and has a serious sweet tooth. My favorite thing is that when he is in his crib, instead of sucking his thumb for comfort, he sticks his finger in his bellybutton and hums himself to sleep loudly with his pacifier in his mouth. It is just about the cutest thing I have ever seen! The only problem is that when I forget and put him in a onsie, he can't fall asleep for his nap. I can't we won't be doing footie pajamas with this guy!

   

Lily is growing up so much. She will be four soon, and she is learning her letters and numbers. Even though she can’t identify numbers larger than 4, she understands math really well. She can add, subtract, and even multiply small numbers fairly accurately. Reading is not coming so quickly, but she has almost two years until kindergarten, so I think it’s fine.

We are doing a preschool exchange with another family in our ward. Their 3-year-old Violet (Norah’s sister, incidentally), comes over every other Tuesday for 2 hours and we learn preschool things and do fun activities. So far we have learned about Noah’s ark, rainbows, colors, the number four, squares, and are planning to do the letter “G” with some Halloween activities this week. The odd weeks, Lily goes to Violet’s house. They are so cute! I love having a reason to plan a hands-on activity to do at home with Lily, because otherwise, I rarely do that.

Lily wanted to do characters from Frozen for Halloween. So she is Elsa, and we made her a French braided yarn wig to make it more authentic. It’s darling! Joshua is Olaf, and he loves his costume. “Olas! Olas!” he exclaims whenever we put it on him. I am going to dress up as Anna and Adam is going to be a half-baked version of Kristoff. I ran out of motivation for his costume, so it is not as authentic looking. He doesn’t care at all though.

Adam’s mom convinced us to go to Disneyland in January, and Lily is SOOO excited to see all the “real princesses, who live at Disneyland!!” I don’t even think she knows what a roller coaster is, she just knows that Disneyland has castles and princesses. That’s all she cares about.

Something very cool happened here recently: they began construction on the Tucson temple last week. It is a 13 minute drive from our house!  That is a huge improvement over the 1 ½ - 2 hour drive we currently have, which equates to an all-day trip with the kids, or a most-of-the-day trip without them. This is a huge blessing, and I honestly can hardly wait for it to open!

Adam likes his job. He is extremely busy this semester, but things should get better in January. He is teaching couple relationships, advanced family theories, and dynamics of family relationships. He rides the bus every day and is gone 11 hours each day. I thought that would be hard, since it’s more than I am used to. But it’s not so bad. It just means he gets less time with the kids in the evenings.

Adam and I went on an amazing date last week: we got to see the Broadway touring production of Phantom of the Opera. I have wanted to see this show for more than 20 years, since I was a little girl. My mom loved the music and we listened to it all the time. I know most of the words to every major song. Finally, after all that time, we got to go. It was fabulous! Truly, I was giddy with excitement probably the first half of the show. The set, music, costumes, and everything else were breathtaking! It was a really fun (and much needed!) night out. 

Even though there are still a number of pictures to put on our walls, we are feeling mostly settled and at home here. It's not as close as I would have hoped to our family, and the summer heat was really difficult for me to deal with. But I feel that it's the right place. We are very blessed! We do miss everyone in Corvallis, as well as all our friends spread all over the country! Good thing for social media, email and texting! :) Please keep in touch! 

Catch-up: Halloween and Birthdays

I can't believe it has taken so long for me to write about these things! Halloween was well over a month ago. What can I say, things have been busy. We didn't do anything extremely memorable for Halloween, but Lily's costume was just too cute to pass up. Here are a few pictures of us. In case you can't tell, we were trying to be the family from 101 Dalmatians. Our costume probably would have been more obvious if we had, like, nine kids. Unfortunately (or rather, fortunately), that is not the case. So most people struggled to figure out our costumes. But it was fun anyway.

Shortly after Halloween, we had a fire safety activity at our apartment complex. Lily was very excited about the fire truck, as has talked about that day every since.

Lily's 2nd birthday was on November 21st. She got to celebrate twice, since we couldn't have the party until Saturday. Here is Lily opening a few of her presents. The highlights included:

a Minnie Mouse doll from Grandpa and Elizabeth,

several fun books from grandparents,

a baby doll stroller from my good friend Amberly,

and two pairs of firetruck pajamas from my good friend Candice. If you read my first post from November, you will know that Lily greatly coveted Candice's son's firetruck pajamas when they come to visit, so they thoughtfully got her some of her very own!

Lily really wanted an Elmo party, so that's what we did. It was not extravagant in the least, but enough to make her happy. We didn't take many pictures, aside from these Elmo cupcakes I made, which Lily was so very happy about.

This is the community center where we had the party, with a few birthday decorations.

Here is Lily with her friend Jacquelyn, also a BYU fan. :)

Elmo balloon!

Happy birthday Lily!

This was Lily the day after her birthday, trying to wear my shoes to church,

And riding her brand new rocking horse. That was our gift to her, since she loves riding ponies so much.

I also had my birthday in November, although it was nothing super special. I was actually sick the day of my birthday and Adam took Lily to a Christmas parade while I lay on the couch at home. It wasn't a miserable day, but not the most fun birthday of my life.

However, Adam may have made the best birthday cake I have ever had in my life. He made me this peppermint cheesecake. It didn't look exactly like hers, but it was pretty close. Ours just didn't have shaved chocolate on top. I wanted to take a picture of it, but we ate it too fast (and shared with lots of other people). It was absolutely AMAZING! It might be my favorite dessert I have ever, ever had! I have dreams about that cheesecake now, it was so good. Good job Adam. I think I will just have peppermint cheesecake every birthday for the rest of my life.

Otherwise, I spent my birthday reflecting. I am not usually nostalgic on my birthday, but my life will be forever different after this year, without my mom. So I just wanted to think about the past 28 years of my life. I contemplated each one, and thought about what happened and how my life changed. Some of those memories made me cry because I am so grateful for them. These primarily revolved around meeting special people: a few very dear friends, my husband, my daughter. And my conclusion was this: I am so happy. 

True, this has been a hard year. There have been big trials and many little, frustrating struggles. But overall, I feel so very blessed. I have everything that is important. I love my husband and my little girl more than I ever thought possible. Adam truly makes my life amazing, and I am so grateful. He is so patient, unselfish, forgiving, validating, and fun to be with. He is an awesome dad and works so well with the young men in our ward. I know he has a strong testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ and he lives what he believes with full integrity. I have a testimony of this gospel as well, and I am so grateful for my Savior! My life would be nothing like it is without my knowledge of God's love and His plan for me. There are many other blessings, but they are all peripheral to the gospel and my family. We don't have everything, but we have everything that matters, and I am so grateful. I guess that was my birthday gift - the opportunity to contemplate how blessed I am. I hope I can remember that throughout this year, and that 28 can be filled with gratitude and thanksgiving.

Guess what Lily did today . . .

Congratulations Lily! :)

Here are some more recent pictures:

A candy-striped Lily raids the candy jar

Lily snuggles with her stuffed animals after a wet walk in the rain

Mamma and Lily cuddle with Lily's teddy bear at bedtime

Mommy baked her first loaves of bread!! I know this probably sounds like a small accomplishment, but I have had a phobia of anything with yeast, especially anything that requires kneading and rising. I used the fact that I don't have a KitchenAid mixer as an excuse for a long time, but I finally decided to go for it. And it was totally possible! Bread-making will probably not be a weekly task, but it is good to know I am capable of it.

And of course, Lily's first Halloween:

Adam was in Phoenix for a conference on Halloween, so I contemplated just staying home and not doing anything, especially since we don't have any family around to enjoy Lily's costume anyway. But I decided that she would like watching the other kids at the ward trunk-or-treat, so we made the effort to dress up and go.

In case you are wondering, no I was not intending to dress up as a ballerina-eating vampire. With just the two of us, we decided to go very girly, so I also dressed up as a ballerina (black swan-esque, okay), although it's not very obvious without the tights or ballet slippers in the picture.

And in case you were wondering, yes, Adam is back at home. If he dressed up for Halloween, he didn't tell me about it, but I don't think he was a ballerina.