Singing

Rachel loves to sing these days. Some of her specialties include Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, 5 Little Monkeys, The Itsy Bitsy Spider, The Wheels on the Bus, Popcorn Popping, and Once There Was a Snowman.
Here's a video of a couple of her songs.

Happy Birthday, Jake!!

Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday, dear Jacob! Happy birthday to you!

Jake said he didn't want a cake, just ice cream, so I decided to make him panCAKEs for breakfast. Rachel enjoyed "helping" make the pancakes and requested a duck when she saw I was making special shapes. Or maybe she was saying that one of these looked like a duck. Who knows.

Anyway, I'm thankful to have such a great husband and a great father for Rachel. You're my favorite hubby-poo, Jake! I love you. Happy birthday!
(These pics were taken before Jake woke up while he was having a well deserved birthday sleep-in, so that's why he's missing from his own party in the pictures.)

Potty talk and new book

Rachel is really into her potty training lately.

Last weekend she went the entire weekend without an accident. But that was with me reminding her every hour or so "it's potty time." So on Monday I decided I should let her start deciding when she needed to go on her own so I don't have to be calling her every few hours in college still telling her "It's potty time." She's had a few more accidents this week, but actually she's doing pretty well.

In other news, we got our Campbell blog book in the mail yesterday.

I've been meaning to do this for a loooong time, and finally got around to it. I used Blurb to convert all the stuff from our blog in 2007 and 2008 to a book (minus the videos, of course). It was a good deal compared to the one other place I looked--a 80ish page softcover book for $19.95, I think. I figured if I printed off all those pictures individually it'd probably come out close, but then I'd have to put them in an album myself. Since I am so not into scrapbooking, this is as close as I'll ever get, and it's a lot easier. We plan on getting a new one printed every year, having these books as our kind of family record/journal.

Artsy Fartsy

We had some fun with some of our art supplies yesterday. Here are some pipe cleaners fashioned into stylish head- and eye-wear.

And with some left over spahetti noodles, a little Elmer's glue, and food coloring, Rachel went to town making her own lovely masterpieces.

She kept picking up handfuls of noodles, and as she dropped them on the paper she'd say "PLOP!"

Notice her first masterpiece on the left. That's before the noodles started mixing and making that new purple-ish color.

And, as a side note/potty training note, I haven't had to clean pee off the floor in at least 40 hours. She was accident-free yesterday and so far today. (Except yesterday when we went to a meeting at someone else's house I had her wear pull-ups, and she peed in them. But today while we were waiting for an oil change she went on the toilet at the store!) Here's hoping she keeps it up!

potty training, water balloons and a haircut

WARNING: Lots of potty talk-sorry, but it's what occupies my days and my thoughts, so I guess it pours over to my blog, too.

Last week we started trial #2 of our potty training adventure. In trial #1 Rachel did great for almost a week, then had 3 days of way more accidents than successes, and since I was getting ready to go to girls camp the next week and didn't really have time to pay attention as much as she needed me to for potty training, I gave it up for a while. So last week, since we are done with vacations for a while, I decided to give it another try. Wednesday morning Rachel woke up to some streamers and balloons and a wrapped present for our "potty party." The present was a doll that goes pee.
She named her Hannah, I think because one of her potty books has Hannah as the main character, and we had just gotten back from Idaho where she had been playing with her cousin, also named Hannah (I had named her something at the beginning of the day, but that only lasted about 2 hours until Rachel renamed her Hannah).

Rachel had fun "teaching" Hannah how to use the potty and telling her "pee-pee goes in the potty" when Hannah would have an accident. Of course she lost interest in Hannah after a while, but she's made great progress in the potty department. She holds it for a while and when I tell her it's time to go potty she'll usually sit on the potty and go right away, or she'll tell me no, which usually (but not always) means she doesn't really have to go yet. Yesterday I went to work out for an hour, then to get groceries, and when we got back home after being gone for over 2 hours she was still dry! Later in the day I wanted to go run errands and she refused to put on a diaper, so I decided to give it a whirl and she held it for over 3 hours! Woohoo! She still has accidents a few times a day when she's too involved in what she's doing, but overall, I'm pretty encouraged. Hopefully this time she keeps it up.

Because we were doing potty training, we only left the house for maybe 15 minutes all of Wednesday and Thursday, so on Friday I invited over a few friends to have their kids come play in the backyard with water balloons and our kiddie pool for a little fun. Rachel and Lydia were "cool dudes" with their sunglasses on.

Here are all the kids having fun in the pool. The water balloons had all been popped at this point. It was HOT outside, but the water helped a bit.

Rachel was going diaper free, and I was a little worried that she'd pee in the pool (not that a swim diaper would be any different-they let the pee right through anyway), but Rachel got out of the pool, climbed into my camp chair, and went pee there. How nice. At least she realized she was supposed to go sit *somewhere* to do her business, and if her potty wasn't in sight, she'd choose something else.

Yesterday I decided I was done dealing with Rachel's uneven hair in front that ALWAYS falls out of her pigtails or braids, or however I do her hair, so I went ahead and gave her bangs. I also cut the back just a little bit to even things out.

(Excuse the MESSY mirror-this is Rachel's mirror where she puts her stickers and grubby fingers)

Of course, later in the day I noticed that I hadn't cut them quite even, so today I did what you're never supposed to do and tried to even them up. Which resulted in much shorter, but still uneven bangs. Oh well.

Mutual

For our mutual activity tonight I had the Beehives over to my house to learn how to make homemade ice cream and granola. It was a lot of fun and we actually had all of the beehives show up, which was great.

The ice cream in a bag turned out a little more like a milkshake, but was still pretty tasty.

While we were waiting for the granola to cook we played Mad Gab, but before we got to the game, Ashlyn found a library book Rachel loves to read and just HAD to share it with us. It's called "Where's My Potty." They all got a kick out of it.

The granola turned out pretty tasty and we had plenty for everyone to take some home, too.

It was a fun (and loud) evening.

Family Reunion-Saturday

Saturday morning around 1am I was woke up by Rachel. She started throwing up and kept it up all night like clockwork every 2 hours. Except after the first two times there was nothing left in her stomach, so it was just dry heaves. Poor girl. She would whine and say, "tummy hurts" or "feel yucky," then throw up, then go right back to sleep for another couple of hours. Finally around 7 she had her last episode and slept until 11 or so. After that she did pretty well for the rest of they day, though she was obviously tired and didn't have much of an appetite. So the poor kid missed out on some fun things, like the slip 'n slide (they had a small one for the little kids) and water balloons. We took turns with Jake and I and my parents hanging out listening for Rachel to wake up, so we each got to do some fun stuff on Saturday.

First up on Saturday was the slip 'n slide. They set up a huge one that looked like a lot of fun, but I was too tired from no sleep to join in any more than watching. They started a big chain slip 'n slide that was really funny. Later they counted how many in a row they could get, with everyone getting up after they reached the bottom, running back up to the top and going again. I think their record was something like 85ish.


After the slip 'n slide we ate lunch, then played some games. This fun one involved holding your pvc "stick" straight up, then following the directions of the "caller," everyone would go either left or right, leaving your stick behind, trying to catch the one next to you before it hit the ground. If it hit before you caught it, you were out. It was so fun, and there were some really graceful (and some not-so-graceful) dives.

Next came bottle rockets. They had soda bottles partially filled with water that they stuck on this contraption they had made a few years back, then used a bike pump to pump air into the bottle until the pressure got high enough to launch the bottle into the air. It kept us entertained for quite a while.
After a while the guys who were pumping the bike pump got tired, and brought out an air compressor to keep the fun going.
For more water fun we did a water balloon toss, which later turned into the kids just throwing them around and a mini water balloon fight.
We then had a bubble blowing contest with bubble gum. There were some pretty good bubbles.

Barbara said, "take as many as you want." Mason and Hayden took as many as would fit in their hands. :)
Here's Mary'sI love how Gabby's gum matches her swimsuit.
Becky had several bubbles that covered her face.Bryce:
Megan had lots of good ones going:We wrapped up the games with balloon animals. I left to go take over watching Rachel, but I hear the adults had as much (or maybe more) fun figuring out how to make the animals as the kids had playing with them.
We finished off the evening with more food, and they showed another movie with the projector on the lawn, but I was too pooped for that. The next morning we went to church, then left for our drive back down to Utah to catch our plane the next day. It was a fun reunion and I'm glad we got to go. We look forward to the next one.

Unfortunately Monday morning I woke up sick. I thought it was just from not getting enough sleep and eating junk on Sunday, but then I heard that my brother, Justin, and my cousin, Mary both were sick on Monday, too, so I'm guessing that Rachel did a little bit of sharing and passed her bug on to us. I'm feeling better now, though.

One thing we have learned (again) from this trip: Plan vacations to have more vacation days than travel days. 4 days of travel and 2 days of vacation just doesn't cut it.

Family Reunion-Friday

Friday morning we mostly hung out and played around, not really doing any organized activity.

Then in the afternoon a lot of the adults and the older kids went to float the Salmon River on inner tubes. It was a lot of fun. There were a few rapids that were big enough to flip some of the kids, and it was a fun time. Of course, I didn't get any pictures of us because water and cameras don't usually mix well and there was a lot of water in that river.

While we were floating the river, the smaller kids went down to my Aunt Reah's house and played in the pool down there. I guess they had a fun time, too.

After our separate activities, we met back up at the park and ate dinner and talked, and the kids got to play on the playground equipment.

Mason and Rachel and some other kid joined together making "cupcakes" out of the wood chips on the playground. Mmmmm.

After we were done pigging out on the food we ignored the 30 minute rule and went swimming right after eating. It was a lot of fun and the pool was A LOT warmer than the river was. Again, with the water activity I didn't get any pictures.
Back at the ranch we watched a movie--they had a projector going over at Grandpa's house out on the lawn, which we heard was pretty cool, but we never did make it over there. But we watched Forever Strong over at the Stokes house, which was a pretty good movie. Then it was off to bed to get what little sleep we could....

Family reunion-Thursday

We took about 400 pictures in 3 days while we were up in Salmon at the family reunion, and probably about 20 videos, so I decided to break it up into each day here on the blog.

We flew up to Utah Wednesday night, stayed with Jake's family (see previous post), then on Thursday around noon we headed up to Salt Lake to pick up Justin and Marie from the airport, then to continue on up to Salmon. We're really glad Justin and Marie got to come. We hadn't seen them since last July when we went out to Georgia, and Justin hadn't been to the farm since 2000, and Marie had never been there. So when we finally got to Salmon we went on a little tour of the farm, and went to see the cows that Rachel was SOOOO excited to see.

Here's Rachel with Grandma Knight and Nate (my cousin) hangin' out with a calf.

Emma had a good time playing with Rachel, and being a good, helpful cousin. And Rachel loved the attention. She also loved the climbing opportunities she found.

We celebrated Pat's birthday a day late with some yummy cake and ice cream.

Rachel got acquainted with Hannah, who is just a few months younger than Rachel. They had a good time following each other around and playing some over the weekend.

The Jolley kids played soccer, of course.

Well, that's it for day 1. We got there late, so didn't really do much. But there's more to come....

Utah stop-overs

This last weekend we had a Jolley Family reunion up in Salmon, Idaho. We flew in to Salt Lake, then drove the rest of the way, which allowed us one night each way to spent with Jake's family in Provo. It was definitely a speed vacation and we plan on making sure we have more time up there next time. But in the little time that we spent in Provo, we had some good times. Rachel got to meet her Aunt Cari, who she hasn't seen since she was a month old because Cari left on a mission to Alaska and just got back a couple of weeks ago. Rachel and Cari had LOTS of fun playing with each other while we were there.

They played ball together and climbed on the stairs (one of Rachel's favorite things).

Rachel LOVES tents, so she had a blast with this tent Cari got at a white elephant gift exchange, or something like that.

Sunday night, on our way back south we got to celebrate Sharon's birthday. Happy Birthday Sharon!!

Cari and Sharon's roommate Cassie made the evening into a beach party. Pretty cool.

And Rachel had a good time with the party hat and the balloons.
We're glad you we got to see you guys. Come visit anytime. And email me a copy of the family picture we took--we didn't have our camera out at that point. :)