The zoo

We went to the zoo yesterday with my parents and had a good time. Rachel loved the giraffes and all the birds that were hanging around. The weather was decent, but by the end we were pretty hot. Jake and I bought a membership, so we can go back now whenever we want for free (for the next year).
Here are the lazy rhinos.

The giraffe enclosure was in the center, so all the paths wrapped around it and it seemed like we just kept coming back to see the giraffes again and again. Which Rachel loved.

Rachel wanted to jump in this pond to play with the ducks and the HUGE goldfish (they must have been 2 feet long).

And here's Rachel at the very beginning when she was still in her stroller--I think the only reason we take it with us is to carry the diaper bag, since she won't stay in it for long.

9 months old

Rachel turned 9 months last Wednesday, and today she had her 9 month check up at the doctor. Woohoo! The funnest place on earth. :) She's a good healthy baby and everything is going great. She didn't gain much weight since her 6 month check up. She is now 18 1/2 pounds (40th percentile, down from 60th last time), and 29 inches (90th percentile). I guess all that food she's been snarfing down has gone into her height instead of her weight. She had to get a shot today because they've been behind on one of them because of low supply, and that's never fun, but she bounces back pretty fast.

In other news, at church on Sunday they announced a (fake) catastrophe in our ward, and we're not allowed to go grocery shopping for two weeks, to see how it would be to live off of our food storage for a while. So when they announced that, I thought, oh, we'll be fine. We'll run out of milk towards the end of this week and have to use powdered milk, but besides that, we're pretty well stocked with a decent 3 month supply of regular food, and we just got about 6 months supply of long term stuff at the cannery on Saturday--good timing.
Today (just two days into it) I decided we need to plant some fruit trees, or probably just get more canned fruit. And Whoppers or Symphony bars. Unfortunately chocolate doesn't store well for long term storage. I guess that just means I'll have to rotate (ie. eat) the candy more often. :) But overall, so far so good. We do still have a good stock of fruit, but I'm just not looking forward to having nothing but canned peaches and pears to eat for fruit next week. At least we know when this catastrophe will be resolved. I guess it could be worse and this could be the real thing.

Playing chase

Grandma and Grandpa Knight came over on Friday and were playing with Rachel for a little while. She was having a blast, and we were quite entertained.


In other news, one of our Beehives got baptized last night! It was great to see her so happy as she took that step. She's been attending mutual on Wednesdays since before our ward split in April, and started attending on Sundays, the day our ward split, so she's been going for a long while. She is such a sweet girl and we are all so excited for her.

Right before we went over to the baptism we were at my parents' house playing outside with Reese (the dog). Rachel has been getting to where she'll balance if you leave her standing for maybe 10 seconds on her own, so I let her go to practice standing, and surprise! She took two steps. She's done it a few times today, too, especially when she has a toy in her hand. I'll get a video of it one of these times.

Happy Birthday Jacob!

Today is Jake's birthday! Woohoo! One year older and wiser, too. Happy birthday to you! I'm lucky to have such a wise old man as my husband. He's a great hubby and is a great daddy to Rachel. He even got up at 5:45 this morning when Rachel woke up so I could be lazy on his birthday. I don't have time to write about what a great guy he is (Rachel is tired of hanging out by the computer and is making it known), but he is and I love him. Happy B-day!

Termites!

Eeeeewwww! We noticed these about a week and a half ago under our back door:

What are they?, you ask. Mud tunnels built by termites to provide shelter as they travel from their home in the dirt below, up to get some food in OUR home above. Luckily we have neighbors who have had termites (not so lucky for them, I guess), otherwise I wouldn't have even known what the mud tunnels meant. So I'm thinking we caught it pretty early. We had 3 companies come out to do inspections last week and give us estimates, and as far as they could tell, they were only in the one wall.

So today we embark on the adventure of killing them all off. The guy is here right now drilling all around our house to put stuff in the dirt to kill the little buggers. Then he'll come inside and treat the wood. So we have the priviledge of spending 6 hours in our house (I have to be here the whole time) with all of the furniture pushed to the center of the rooms to allow access to the walls:

As you can imagine, all of our baby-proofing has been undone and now no place is really safe to let Rachel play on her own, which may make for a fun day for me. ;) My parents both have started back to work now that the school year has begun, so my days of being spoiled having babysitters any time any day are over. Almost. Luckily they both have semi-flexible schedules, so today my dad is actually going to take Rachel for a few hours so she isn't stuck in this house where she's not allowed to play anywhere except for the bathrooms. So nice. And hopefully in less than 6 hours our house will be termite-free.

Sneaky cucumber

I was working out in the garden on Saturday, and decided the bird of paradise plants we have right next to the garden needed a little pruning since they have gotten way out of control thanks to the monsoon rains. After pruning, I noticed this hanging back in the middle of the plant closest to the garden:

The cucumber plant got a little overzelous and climbed all over the bird of paradise. And hid this cucumber from us. Notice, it's almost as big as Rachel and about twice the diameter of a regular cucumber.

Needless to say, it passed it's ideal picking day long ago and was too bitter to actually eat.

Boo!

So, I'm pretty sure Rachel's first word is boo. It usually comes out sounding like just saying the "b" sound: "buh," or sometimes "boof." She loves playing peekaboo and it's so cute. When she's "helping" me fold the clothes I'll hold up a shirt or something in front of my face, then lower it and say "boo" then she'll get whatever clothing item is near her and sometimes bring it up to cover her face, or sometimes put her face down in it, then come up and say "buh." She also likes playing peekaboo with herself in the mirror when I'm holding her, going back and forth so she can't see herself, then she can.
So last night a friend of mine came over to visit that I haven't seen for a while. It took Rachel a little bit to warm up to her, but by the time she was all bathed and pajamaed she was ready to play. She was doing this for a while, and we just caught the end of it on video, but she seemed to think that she was hiding when she put her head down. It was funny. I don't think you can hear her say boo, though.

Yummy dirt

Rachel loves going outside, even when it's pretty darn hot. So the other day, we were outside enjoying the late afternoon in our backyard and Rachel discovered this pot that used to have a tomato plant in it, but now just has dirt. And she was having a ball.

Rachel has gotten a lot better about trying to eat everything. Now it's only once every few minutes that she'll try to eat something from the ground when we're outside, instead of every single time she finds something on the ground.

Pianist Extraordinaire

There's not much new news to report here. Life is good. Rachel is much better at falling now, so when she pulls up and is cruising around holding on to our furniture I don't have to stay close enough to catch her when she falls and is about to hit her head on the tile floor. She has learned how to balance a bit better, and when she falls, it is almost always on her butt.
We did leave her for the longest we have yet today. We went to the temple up in Mesa, and left her here with my mom for 7 hours. She did great. And it was nice for us to have a temple trip without having to entertain her for the long drive up and back.
And last, but not least, here's a short clip of one of Rachel's new favorite things. I'll go into the kitchen to clean or get something to eat and about half the time I'll come back to find Rachel doing this:

Avacados....mmmmmm.....

I was talking to my mom today and she said she's been checking here to see if we've updated yet and basically said, "put up a new picture of my cutest grandkid, you slacker!" So here you go.
Rachel loves her avacados.