Happy Birthday!

Rachel is now officially 1 year old!

We had a "birthday party" for her on Sunday, which involved having my parents and brother and sis-in-law over for dinner and having cake for dessert. Yes, it was an awesome par-tay. :)

Rachel enjoyed her cake, but actually remained relatively clean, compared to some of her regular meals--no food in the hair at all.

We are so happy to have her in our family. She is such a good little girl and it is so fun to see her grow and learn. We are blessed to be her parents. And if you didn't notice the post before this one, check it out and enjoy all those pictures of Rachel's first year.

The past year

Rachel was born one year ago today. Here is a quick review of our year in pictures in (mostly) chronological order.

pics

Here's a few pictures to tide you over so you don't go through cute baby withdrawl (some of you, I know have cute babies of your own, but not all do, so this is a public service for those who don't). :)

Rachel loves her swing.

At Grandma and Grandpa Knight's house the first thing she does when we get there is the sign for dog, and heads straight for the back door.

She loves getting the ball for Reese and throwing it to him so he'll grab it and run around the yard and bring it back to play some more.

Books

Lately I see a lot of this:

Rachel loves to read and is continually bringing us another book to read to her.

I guess there are worse things she could be into than books.

Geocaching

Jake and I took the Beehives geocaching yesterday. Some couldn't make it, but those who came had a lot of fun. I think we'll have to do this again, maybe with all the young women next time.

Here they are finding the first cache.

And exploring the contents of the cache.

The girls and Jacob after a failed attempt at finding this cache near the park.

Of course I accidentally left the camera in the car when we found the best cache, so I don't have pictures of that cache, nor of our fights with the cholla cactus that attacked two of the girls' shoes on our way back from that cache. Luckily we all walked away with only minor scratches.

Caught

The other day I was on the phone in my room and Rachel wandered in to our bathroom. After a little while I heard what I thought was the garbage being moved, and thought I'd better stop her from digging through the garbage, so I went to get her out of the garbage. This is what I found instead:

I'm just amazed that it's taken this long before she's finally made it through an entire roll of toilet paper. In our other bathroom we took the roll off long ago and keep it out of her reach, but we haven't bothered in our bathroom because she's usually only in there when we are (except when I'm distracted by the phone, I guess). At least she had some fun.

Rachel has learned how to cross her fingers. But her pinkie and ring fingers, not the normal ones you cross. When her hands are slimy she must like the feel of it and does it a lot.

Here she is talking to us with her fingers crossed--it almost looks like her finger is broken, sticking up at an unnatural angle, if you enlarge the picture.

Election day

Election day is in a day and a half! With all the stuff I read I sometimes start getting a little worried about how everything will turn out, but I keep remembering general conference last month and so many speakers who basically said, you do what you know is right and no matter what is going on around you, you and your family will be fine. Let's hope so.
I was just reading some articles about the marriage amendments that are up in Arizona and California (and Florida) and again realized how important it is that these pass.

I'm passing out fliers tomorrow, and hoping for the best. It's been a really organized effort coordinated within ward boundaries throughout the state here, and I'm pretty sure the vote no side hasn't had the same level of organization and I know their funding was way less, so I'm hoping that's indicative of the way the people feel. I really liked a video I saw of Elder Bednar in a Q&A session and how he responded to the tolerance question, basically saying that tolerance is not a one way road: we will tolerate others' decisions about how they want to live, but they must also tolerate our beliefs and allowing a small minority to redefine an age-old definition of marriage will affect how we are able to live our beliefs. (If you haven't seen this NPR article, it's worth reading.)