Rachel's dance recital

Rachel has been loving her dance class the last couple of months, and Friday was the final performance. She was very excited about it all. Here she is with her friend, Lydia, who is in a different class, but the two classes did one dance together.

Rachel is in the middle back row--the only blond with long sleeves. (Sorry if you get motion sickness watching these videos. I won't be winning any cinematography awards anytime soon.)

Most girls are 3 years old, with a few 4-year-olds. Pretty good, considering...

Here's Rachel before her second dance, Beach Baby. She agreed to do a good picture if I let her do a silly picture, too.

I volunteered to help out getting the girls on and off stage and sit with them during the other performances, and that was an adventure in itself. 3-year-olds don't follow directions all that well. :)

Rachel's in the front middle of this one with the green flower on her skirt. I thought the part where they're supposed to be dancing with partners was the funniest. They were so confused, got the wrong partner, realized that they were supposed to find their partner about the time they were supposed to be done with the partner, etc.

And the final pose was so cute. Even the two girls that were kind of lost, just standing there.

I was very impressed with Julie, her teacher, being able to teach two full dances to spacey 3-year-olds in just 6 or 8 weeks (I don't remember how long the session went). And sewing all the costumes for 7 different classes, besides. She amazes me.

It was a great evening and we were so proud of our little ballerina for the great job she did.

Camping

Last weekend we ventured up Mt. Lemmon for a fun camping trip. All week we had been getting great thunderstorms every afternoon, so I was a little hesitant to plan a camping trip and get stuff together, so I put it off until Friday around lunch, and when I saw that it really wasn't going to rain, I threw stuff together in a whirlwind afternoon and we got out the door in time to enjoy dinner in the mountains.

Annie loves the outdoors, and was particularly happy to be outside the entire time.

She was all smiles hiking with Dad:

And walking around in the dirt.

We even found a little stream running nearby. Rachel was happy with feeling the cold water, but Annie just wanted to put her whole body, or at least her feet in the water. She was very mad that we didn't let her.

We did get rained on for about 5 or 10 minute when a fluke cloud let loose, but shortly thereafter it was clear skies again, and a happy evening. Annie went to sleep a lot easier than I had anticipated in the tent. We roasted some marshmallows and enjoyed the fire for a little while before Rachel announced she was ready to go to bed. She, however had a hard time falling asleep with all the excitement of camping. I had to lay in the tent with her for a while before she finally fell asleep. Overall the night was a success. I slept as well as can be expected while camping. At least until about 4 am when Annie woke up. I tried to get her back to sleep, but she was so entranced with her surroundings, wanting to look at the tent and with the pack 'n play making such a cool noise when she rubbed her feet on it, so she couldn't get back to sleep. I took her to the back of the minivan to play and she was up for about an hour before I could get her back to sleep. Bright eyed at 4 am:

Of course at that point I didn't want to open the door and go back to the tent, sure she would wake up on the way, so I just laid down next to her and her mini baby blankets along with my thin blanket and we slept (Annie nice and snug and me freezing) for another hour.

The morning was beautiful, and a little cold. It's nice to be cold every once in a while after our long, hot summer (that still is going strong). Annie and Rachel had lots of fun picking flowers while we got breakfast started.

Annie loved Rachel's camp chair.

We'll have to get her one of her own soon, since Rachel also rather likes her camp chair. And hot chocolate:

We had a lovely hodge podge breakfast of dry cereal, muffins, sausage, and hot chocolate. And maybe a boiled egg or two. We were a bit low on wood for our morning fire, but we managed. Well enough.

It was a great camping trip. We decided we definitely need to do that more often. With a bigger tent. A pack 'n play takes up a lot of room. One of the highlights for Annie was definitely the dirt. Playing in the dirt, and most of all, eating the dirt. Look closely and you'll see her mouth is covered in dirt (I'm pretty sure it was worse than this the night before):

Labor Day Weekend

Oops. This post has been sitting in my edit box for a few weeks completely forgotten. Yes, we did have a great Labor Day Weekend. Several weeks back.

Saturday Jake and I took advantage of my parents being the ultimate babysitters, always willing to get suckered in to watching our kids for a few hours (or most of the day), and we headed up to the LDS temple in Mesa. It was a treat, as always, to go to the temple. 

We came home, made some Rice Krispy Treats (out of Rice Chex, since they're gluten free), and headed over to a friend's house for a fun dinner with 4 couples and 7 kids running around. Here are the little girls all having a ball together waiting for dinner:

Rachel, Maryanne, Evelyn, Grace, and Lydia
It was a lot of fun hanging out and playing games together. It makes me wonder why we don't do stuff like that more often.
On Labor Day itself, we went to Reid Park Zoo and had a picnic by the pond. It turned out to be a beautiful day for a picnic, after months of scorching heat, it was only in the 80s at midday. We met up with a friend of mine that I hadn't seen for quite a while, Char. It was good catching up with her, since we hadn't seen her since before I had Annie, and before she got engaged and married. Lots of changes to catch up on.

Rachel and Annie, of course, enjoyed the ducks (feeding them, and chasing them) most of all. They also got real excited about this little chihuahua who was barking at us like he was a big mean guard dog trapped in a little rat's body. The owners were nice enough to let them pet the dog.

Jake was there, too, just as the cameraman, I guess, since we don't have pictures of him. We enjoyed the rest of our day relaxing and decided that 3 day weekends should be the rule, rather than the exception. In a perfect world. :)

Announcements, announcements, annou-ouncments

Yesterday morning Rachel told me: "When my baby brother grows up I think I'll call him Martha." I informed her that Martha was not a boy's name. She replied, "It can be a boy or a girl name." Like Taylor, or Sam. Or Martha? I don't think so. She came up with an alternate name: Heather. I have a feeling Rachel will not be in on anything except maybe the very LAST steps of choosing a name (like picking between 2 names we approve of) for this little one:

Yes, we will be welcoming a new little one to our family in March. Rachel is really hoping for a boy. All we could see from this first ultrasound, however, was the little peanut. A couple more months and we'll have (hopefully) a more definitive idea of the gender.

The first trimester passed rather uneventfully (thankfully). I had no morning sickness, and generally have not felt pregnant, really. I've been tired, but it's hard to differentiate between pregnancy tiredness and not-having-a-full-night-sleep-since-before-Annie-was-born tiredness. Though this week Annie has actually slept ALL night 4 times. And 3 of those times Rachel didn't wake me up during the night, either, so I finally got 7 consecutive hours of sleep for the first time in probably over a year. Uninterrupted sleep=heaven.

Annie and the new baby will be between 16 and 17 months apart, depending on how close to the due date (March 20th) we get. I keep telling myself "If Justin and Marie can handle two kids 13 months apart, I can do this." It's always nice to know someone who has life harder than you to remind you that it could be worse. :) The transition to 2 kids when Annie was born seemed really easy, but I think that was in large part because Rachel was almost 3 and able to understand when I needed her to play by herself for a while, and when I needed a little help from her. This next one will be an all new adventure.

(As a side note, Rachel does often talk about her brothers and sisters--apparently she has up to 12 depending on the day. They are sneaky so no one can see them but her. So when she said her little comment about Martha it took a moment to see if it was one of her sneaky brothers she was referring to, or the one in belly making me fat. But yes, she was referring to the real-life baby in my tummy.)

Sisters

Annie and Rachel have been having fun together lately. Most of the time. Annie's favorite things are whatever Rachel is doing at the moment, which annoys Rachel sometimes, especially when she's trying to paint or color and Annie just wants to tear her paper, or when she wants to build with blocks and Annie wants to destroy whatever Rachel creates. But other times they have lots of fun playing chase, or dancing to music together. 

The other day we got a package and Rachel thought the box was the perfect size for Annie and started to put her in. I caught her before she dropped her on the floor and helped her in the rest of the way. Rachel proceeded to push Annie around in her "car" for a good while. Annie had a blast.

While Annie mostly likes to follow Rachel around, sometimes she gets creative, and Rachel decides to copy Annie. Here Annie climbed on the bottom shelf of this table thing we have and got stuck.

Rachel, of course, had to copy her, pretending to be a baby, too:

We've been looking back at some pictures of Rachel from when she was about Annie's age and I am so amazed at how similar they look. I can't find specific pictures of Annie that exactly match the ones of Rachel, but at different times Annie has had almost the exact same expression and Rachel did in these pictures and looks so much alike (except Annie has more hair). Here's one of Annie:

And here are some of Rachel back then:






They must be sisters! :)