Olive's First Trip to the Dentist

About a week ago I took Olive to the dentist for the first time. It is a pediatric dentist and I really liked the office and the staff.  I almost started tearing up when I looked over and saw Olive in the dentist chair. She was so big and grown up. As usual, she just walked right into that big chair and was so ready for whatever was going to happen. This girl lives for new things and experiences. It's one of my favorite things about her.

 

We had talked about what was going to happen before we went. She knew that they were going to look at her teeth and then brush them with a silly, toothbrush that tickled your teeth. She was amazing during the Xrays. The assistant said that she was better than lots of older kids at the Xrays. 

Olive was also charming the pants off of everyone, like always. When the dentist came in he said "Hello Olive, I'm Dr.___. It's nice to meet you" and Olive said "Hello Dr. ___, it's nice to meet you too!" We were all laughing. She likes going around and telling people that she loves them, so I am pretty sure that she told the dentist and the assistant that she loved them.

Olive was seriously so brave, even with the other little girl in the next chair screaming bloody murder, Olive was totally fine. She is actually really excited to go back because she left with a whole bag full of "prizes" like a new toothbrush and toothpaste and stickers. Yeah, she is easy to please. But Olive did remember the secret password so she got the superhero cape to help her fight cavities.

Other than the loot bag she got she really liked that she got to watch Princess and the Frog on a tv in the ceiling. That and showing off her sparkle TOMS to everyone there. She is just growing up way to fast!

Peter and Amanda's Wedding

 A couple of weeks ago my cousin got married in the Salt Lake Temple. It was SO much fun to have all of our family here (even if we (especially Olive) missed their kids). It was a great day!

We tried to stay warm outside while we waited for them to come out.

 Isn't she such a cute girl?

 My girl cousins. I am seriously to lucky to have fun, beautiful, and smart girls to call family. None of us had sisters and growing up I definitely counted them as my closest thing to a sister. They are such great example and friends!

 The girls in my family.

 Here is the bride and groom. Olive was very excited to see them and kept crashing a lot of their pictures because she just wanted to be close and admire them. She kept asking me "Can I have a picture with Amanda?" Amanda's dress was gorgeous and they made a beautiful couple!

 Here are my parents, holding Olive, saying hi and talking to my cousin Peter's grandparents in Brazil on Skype. It was so cool. His grandparents weren't able to be there for the wedding but they got to see everything. I seriously love that we live in such an amazing world.

 After the temple they had a ring ceremony the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. I haven't spent much time there but I fell in love with that building. It is so beautiful. Olive and I kept admiring the paintings on the ceiling and all the details. She especially liked looking at the temple through the windows.

 The couple at the ring ceremony.

 Mr Milo waiting for some food. It was getting a bit stressful keeping the kids good at such a formal event after a long day. We would have loved to stay longer and visit with people more but we had to leave before any major meltdowns happened.

Here is Olive trying her hardest to be very good and polite.  Once she got a cupcake the world was a whole lot better. I am glad that we got to celebrate Peter, he deserves so much happiness. Now we just need to get my brothers married because the are the last ones in the family!

Look What Milo Can Do

We all agree, cutest boy ever right?

Olive's Preschool Program

As I was going through some photos on my camera I found these and realized that I forgot to post Olive's Preschool Christmas Program. It was the cutest thing and Olive loved it, so I thought that even though it is well past Christmas I would post it anyway.  

 

They made these shirt at school. I seriously am so in love with our preschool. It has been amazing. I love, love, love hearing Olive talk the whole walk home about all the things they learned that day. She seriously just soaks it in like a sponge.

 This is Olive being a reindeer while wearing her reindeer shirt.

 This is Olive walking like a reindeer while wearing her reindeer shirt. (There were some reindeer dancers in her ballet performance the week before, so she was copying them.)

Sadly this is the best picture I got from the actual performance. It was crazy packed with people so we are lucky we even got this picture. Olive has a knack for learning songs but I was wondering what she would do in the program. She had told me before all the songs that they were going to sing. She was most excited for Jingle Bells because they got to shake bells, and for Jingle Bell Rock because they got to dance and go crazy. As we were walking in I was reminding Olive to listen to hear teacher during the program. She looked up at me and said "I will not go crazy mommy, only on crazy-rock-out-dance." Then when it came time to dance, everyone kind of froze,  except Olive. She was ready to dance her heart out until she looked around and realized no one else was going crazy. Apparently in class things got pretty wild, but in front of parents it was a different story. She still kinda bopped her head around but, I was prepared for some crazy rock moves. I tried to get her to show me at home but she wasn't interested. And thus was the joy that was Preschool Program.

Family Goals

 I thought I would just round out the week with updating our family goals. Luckily, this post has pictures. And thanks for passing on your family mottos. I find it so interesting!

Okay, so I think I mentioned that we set some family goals last year. They were: for us to go to the temple as a couple quarterly and to have consistent FHEs. We made it to the temple only once, but I am still counting that as a success because we hadn't really gone since Olive was born.

We were horrible about doing FHE for most of the year. Monday would just totally slip by us. But the last few months we have gotten into a pretty good groove. During the holidays was especially easy because there were lots of things we were already doing and we would just count it as FHE. Like we drove around the see Christmas lights and made sure it was a Monday night. Or the kids "bought" Christmas presents for each other, on a Monday night. Okay, okay these are slightly cheating. But I am still counting it as FHE. We have been doing pretty good with FHE this year. For some reason BoM lessons are pretty easy. Most of our lessons are planned in like 5 minutes, when I realize that it is Monday and almost dinner time. They are nothing fancy and usually they not well planned out. We'll get there someday. So, this post is about one more memorable FHE we recently did. Bowling!

 Olive absolutely adored it. It was really fun just doing something together. Olive liked the shoes, and the pizza for dinner. Seriously, it was such a blast!

This year our goals are to do something active as a family every week and to have monthly date nights. Yay for date nights!

My 2012 Goals

These things have been on my mind lately so I thought I would just share a little bit.  Last year I started our "Family Binder". This binder has our family motto, theme, rules, and monthly traditions written down. We will have a family scripture also but I just haven't chosen one yet. Since we are studying the Book of Mormon in Sunday school this year, our family scripture will be something from that. Any great ideas for me? The Book of Mormon will also be the focus of our family home evening lessons. We have a goal to learn all of the versuses from Book of Mormon Stories song.

Did you know we have a family motto? It is: Pattersons are Nice. Simple but to the point. Do you have a family motto? If so I am very curious about what other families do.

Anyway, our Family Binder also has all of our goals written down in it. Since I shared Olive's goals for this year I thought I would share some of mine too. We each make individual goals and then a few family goals.
My 2011 goals were:
-learn to knit cables
-read a novel a month
-submit a photo to the State Fair
-have consistent girls nights
-have a baby

So let's review, in complete honestly I didn't actually achieve one single goal I set last year. Well that's not totally true. I did make one of those goals and I will give you three guesses at which one.

At first I was a bit depressed about this. I mean, none of those goals are that demanding. But, after thinking about it for awhile I came to the conclusion that I was a bit insane when setting such goals. I mean, what was I thinking? I was either very pregnant for the beginning of the year, had a challenging newborn, adjusting to two kids, or it was the holidays. That is all a total cop out but I am still using it. Let's be honest...read a book a month? I have been sleep deprived for the last year. If I sit down to read anything I fall instantly to sleep. Sadly, this was the first year since we have been married that we missed the State Fair. And girls night? Yeah, that didn't happen. In truth I really could have learned to knit cables. I could have. For some reason going the a class just didn't work out for timing.

Okay, so on the positive side I did read lots of birthing books last year. And I did lots of practice relaxation to prepare for labor. I did achieve my goal of an unmedicated labor and delivery. I was also pretty consistent about blogging. And since I did a lot of sitting on my butt watching tv either out of exhaustion or feeding my baby, even though I didn't spend it reading, I did knit over 20 items in the past year. Now that is pretty impressive right? Even though none of those things had cables on them. I'm counting those things as success.

This year I set these goals (basically I'm just copying last year):
- knit cables
-knit new Christmas stockings for the family
-submit a photo to the State Fair
-read a book a month
-read the Sunday school lessons every week
-have girls nights
I think those are pretty doable goals. We shall definitely see. Part of our problem last year was that we set these goals and then were horrible about following up with them. So this year we need to be more consistent on checking in on our goals. I have had a pretty good start at putting some of these goals into action. So, here we go!

Olive's Goals

As of last year we started a tradition that every New Years we will watch a slideshow of our own family's year in review. We do it with extended family but I really wanted to do it for us too. It was really fun and so shocking to see how little Olive was just one year ago. 2 to 3 has been a big growth for Olive. In the future I think we will also play a year in review game, Jeopargy style maybe, and have each person in the family be a category. 

I love new beginnings because they are motivating but also because it is a chance to look back and appreciate what has happened.  That night we also set some goals for the new year and reviewed our goals from the last year to see how we did.  We were so proud of Olive for reaching all of her goals this past year that we got her a little prize. I just thought I would share what those were.

Olive's 2011 goals:
-use a big girl potty
-get dressed and undressed by herself
-learn her ABC's and recognize letters and sounds
-be a good big sister

See? She has done amazing at those goals! I am very proud of her! I sometimes have a hard time coming to terms with what a big girl she is becoming. I mean, she is a Sunbeam now.

So, here are her goals that she set for 2012:
-continue to work on letters and sound out short vowel words
-count to 100
-learn how to ski
-learn how to ride a bike
-pick up toys after done playing
-using a happy voice

I can't wait to see all of the great things that are in store for Olive in 2012. She is going to have a great year!!

USU Aggie Basketball

Last week we had the chance to go up to Logan because someone gave us tickets to the basketball game. We thought it was an afternoon game but it wasn't. It didn't even start until 7pm which for our kids is bedtime, so we almost reconsidered. Plus the drive and everything we thought it might be too crazy. But, we decided to just be prepared for meltdowns and do it anyway. I'm glad we did, but there were definitely multiple meltdowns.

While we were up there we were able to visit Trent and some of his friends at their apartment. When we got there they were water color painting and Olive went right over and sat down like it was no big deal and just started painting. It was hilarious. She talked to them the whole time and told them lots of things and they thought she was so funny. 

  Here we are at our seats. It was so fun to be back in the Spectrum with all the fans. Nobody in Salt Lake really cares about Aggies.

 We had hot dogs and ice cream and popcorn and all kinds of junk. Partly because that is game tradition but mostly because we needed anything to keep the kids happy.

 

Isn't he cute? He was such a trooper. The biggest problem was that whenever we made a basket and everyone cheered in scared Milo and he started crying. We were able to calm him down each time until the last 10 minutes, which were super intense, and so Scott had to walk him up to the top where he wasn't surrounded by screams. Milo fell asleep the instant we put him in his carseat, poor guy.

 Sporting our new Aggie gear. Everyone in our family got some kind of Aggie clothing for Christmas. Olive was ecstatic because hers was a cheerleading outfit. Unfortunately I forgot to take any real pictures of her wearing it at the game. I loved us all matching and showing our school spirit.

Olive was a very enthusiastic cheer leader. She was waving her pom poms like crazy. It was so funny. She loved cheering with dad. I think you can perfectly see the intensity from this picture. We had so much fun and decided that we are going to make this an annual tradition for our family. Go Aggies!

MIlo is 8 months

 Oh my Milo! He is almost eight months old. I am a bit shocked at how much he has changed just in this past month. 

He has two little teeth on the bottom. See them? I keep thinking his top ones are going to come in but no sign of them yet. When they just have the two on the bottom is my favorite tooth stage. Milo loves to eat and will eat almost anything. He refuses to let me feed him anymore and insists on feeding himself. I am impressed with his dexterity. He can actually grab really small bits of food and plop them in his mouth. It might take all his concentration and be very funny to watch but he gets it done. He makes a gigantic mess but what can you do? It's a bigger mess if I try to feed him baby food and he is constantly trying to grab the spoon, spearing food everywhere.

 He has started babbling. It's adorable. His favorite is mamamama. Olive is convinced that he can say mom and Ollie, which I think is so cute. She tries to teach him other things to say. Like his sister he likes to talk and use his voice, especially during church. He also still gets excited and kicks his legs like crazy. He still loves bouncing and will bounce his little legs until your arms hurt.

 He is very inquizitive. It's so different than Olive. He examines everything he discovers. He twists it and turns it in his hands. He tries to see what moves and makes noise. He likes textures. Olive liked to just sit and listen to books but Milo wants to hold them and put them in his mouth. He likes to bang things together to see what they do. I just can't get over how interested he is in things where Olive was interested in what was going on around her. I can get Milo to play for quite awhile with toys and Olive was never that interested. If he is in your arms he will try to grab anything in reach. If he is sitting in his bumbo he will arch and reach and stretch to to try and get something to look at.

 He is almost crawling. He will hold himself up on all for and try to rock back and forth. He will turn himself around on his tummy so he can face the action. He pushes himself backwards on his tummy and often gets himself stuck in corners or under things.

 He has been sitting up for about 3 weeks now. He is pretty stable these days and I don't have to worry so much about him toppling over. He likes his little gym now more than ever since he can sit and play with things.

 Sometimes I just leave his pants off so I can look at his chubby legs. I mean look at those. They are wonderful and I love them.

Milo is so easy these days. He sleeps for 12 hours at night and takes a 2 hour nap. He is easy to put down and likes his crib. He is just so easy these day. I love spending my days with this sweet boy. He is just growing up way too fast. Is it just me or does it go way faster with your second?

Olive LOVES Ballet

The highlight of my Christmas season was Olive's ballet performance. It was the best thing ever! Seriously! I think it was the peak of her life so far. Olive was ecstatic to get to wear a costume and dance ballet. The performance was "A Christmas Dream" and the Kinderdance class were toy teddy bears in Santa's workshop. How adorable is she?

 Olive goes to the Ballet Center that is just a street away from our house. We wold walk there when it was warmer. I love it for it's convenience but also because it's this school that has been there forever, you know? It has all this charm. This is Olive with her teacher Ms Danielle. She loves her teachers (a couple of the TAs are in our ward). I am so impressed with what their class teaches them. Olive can plie, releve, point and flex her toes and they also work on the ballet positions.

 These next few pictures were taken before the performance and you can see her excitement.

 I think Olive loved that she got to hang out backstage with all of these ballerinas in their beautiful costumes. She talked about them for a long time and all the things they did.

 See Olive at the bottom there? Yeah, she was in heaven.

 I had to include this picture because it has a funny story, at least I laugh when I see it. I told Scott to take a picture of the big ballerinas dancing so that Olive could see them, since she was backstage. Being the professional photographer that he is, he has a gigantic flash on his camera. As he took the picture he accidentally blinded all of us sitting around him in the dark. I was seeing spots it was so bright! Everyone that was there with us then got the giggles and had to really work to gain our composure. But at least we got the picture right?

 I was really proud of Olive. I thought there was an 80% chance that she would be the kid to stand and wave at us the whole time they were on stage. At least that is what she does if she sees us during class. I have to kind of hide out from her. But since the audience was dark she didn't necessarily think about us. She was the best dancer out there, honestly. She was so into it and jumping and skipping her little heart out. It was so awesome. I think we were all laughing the whole time at it's adorableness.  Olive felt so special that we got her a rose after her performance.

 It is honestly one of my all time favorite memories. I can't wait until the spring for her next performance!

 I had to include one of Olive and Tanya. Thanks to everyone that came, I'm pretty sure they agree with me, that it was the best ballet they have seen. If you didn't go I highly recommend you see the next one!

Christmas Photo Outtakes

I hope I haven't built these up too much. Here are (lots) of our photos that went so wrong. They aren't edited but I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.