The girl can WALK!

Olive has been cruising for months now and about 2 weeks ago she took her first steps on her own. She took eight steps and we thought that was it, she was a walker now. We were wrong. As with most things, it is only on Olive time. We would try and make her walk all the time, but she was not interested. Even when she would be standing on her own she would slowly lower herself to her knees and start crawling. She was a very fast crawler so I can't really blame her. We could not entice her to walk at all. Everything we tried she refused. It had to be by her own will or she was completely uninterested.
But last Sunday, everything changed. It seemed normal enough, Olive was in the foyer terrorizing the other babies who were trying to play through sacrament meeting when she decided to stand, walk to one baby, turn and walk to another baby without any hesitation or help. We knew that was the change we had been waiting for. From then on she is constantly walking and it is her favorite activity to do. She loves going outside now and walking around vs. her previous experiences outside, trying to (painfully) crawl on the sidewalk.
So I thought I would document and share her progress.

See, that is a real step!

Playing peek-a-boo in the trees.

"Here I come Mommy!"

Step,

Step,

Stop,

Step,

Sit.

I love how she toddles around and is so proud of herself. As you can probably tell, every step is very laborious and rapid at the same time. It is hard for her to take steps, but then they come in rapid sucession. I am a bit sad that she doesn't do the Franken-baby arms for balance because I think they are so cute, but apparently she is better than that (even though it looks like she is doing Franken-baby arms in the pictures but I think it was because she was holding that piece of bark).

One Year Older and Wiser Too

Our big girl has had a week to reflect on being one and I think she likes it. The doctor said that she is doing great, but we were pretty sure of that. He described her as "intense" which I thought was very accurate. She is 25 pounds and 28 inches long. Again, he never tells us what that means compared to other babies, so this time we looked it up. She is above the "95 percentile" line for her weight for girls. I was surprised for length though, she is only in the 20th percentile.

She really is getting so grown up. Now that she is one she can:
-take steps independently (8 is her farthest distance) even though she much prefers crawling still
- do the baby signs for more, milk, eat, please, out, and daddy
-say her first word which was "dada", and can also say "out" and "up"
-play patty cake, peek-a-boo (which is her just hitting the sides of her head), blow kisses, wave goodbye, and pat her tummy when you say "Who's Olive?" but only on her own will, she never wants to show off when I want her to
-dances and claps her hands whenever she hears music
-sleep like a champ even on vacation and in strange places
-hold the phone and talk to people, mostly daddy
-give big hugs where she pats your back
-attract a lot of attention from strangers and is now not as serious and concerned when they talk to her

She is a very happy and cheerful baby, although at times she is definitely "intense" seeing as she has started screaming when she wants something. She is opinionated and will let you know. She makes us laugh every day. We love how inquisitive and curious she is. Olive explores everything and really treasures the independence her increased mobility is providing. She loves electronics and books and carries them around with her. She has added so much to our little family and we have had the best year with her.


Here are the videos as promised. Please forgive the cheesy music, I had to use the stock music because my own wasn't working. This is definitely Olive picture overload, so don't get overwhelmed.

I had the idea to take a picture of her in the same place every week for one year. Here are all of her pictures put together. Towards the end, you will notice that she didn't like lying in her crib for the pics so she looks pretty upset in some of them.



This next video is a slideshow we put together for her birthday party to remember some of our favorite parts of her first year.



And finally, a slideshow of her one year old photos. We decided to take them while we were in San Diego to try and get some cute beach shots. The first night of our stay we noticed what a beautiful sunset the beach had and thought that would be the perfect setting. Turns out we were right and I think we got some really pretty shots.

Happy Birthday to us!

On Monday Olive turned one year old! We had a little party for her on Saturday to celebrate.
We had planned a pool party because I thought it would be the easiest way to keep lots of kids entertained with the littlest effort on my part. Because of the August heat I couldn't for see any reasons why a pool party wouldn't be ideal. Naturally, it was wicked cold, raining, and there were amazing thunderstorms the morning of the party. Just our luck!

As you can see we did end up at the pool, although we opted for the indoor one. We didn't have much of a back up plan so swimming was our only option. But this pool turned out to be really cool.

It had a mini lazy river section where a current would move you along. That was Olive's favorite part and she spent the whole time in the water. She is definitely a little fish.


To try and pull some kind of theme I decorated her a fish cake. Kinda cute right?


Here she is with her own cake. She was disappointed when we blew out the candle because she kept trying to grab it. We thought that stripping her down and putting her on the floor was the best way to let her "have at it". That was a big mistake. *warning* some of the following pictures are pretty gross.

Since this was the first time she had ever had chocolate she was a little unsure at first. She was also confused about just what we wanted her to do. (Also, since we put her on the floor there are a lot of people's legs in the pictures. I apologize)


"How do I go about this? Do I pick it up"


"That's not to bad actually. I kinda like it."


"It is very squishy in my hands."


"What is it like to crawl through?"


"Am I doing this right?"


"Oh, I love chocolate! I can't get enough in my mouth!"


"I'm a chocolate MONSTER!"


This is the demolished cake. It was crawled through, sat on, squished, had toes dunked in it, and probably some of it was eaten. I think it served its purpose.


After cake we opened presents. Here she got her very own remote control because the girl loves everything electronic.


More books. Yay! I was so excited about this gift because I have all her other books memorized from reading them everyday. She really needed some new books.


A new baby doll that she loves and gives hugs. It is really adorable.


We gave her a "music table" that has interactive parts that play music or teach something. It turned out to be a big hit, but not just with the one year olds.

There is more to come, I have a few slide shows and some really adorable 1 year old pictures to share but I thought I would save them until the doctor's visit so I have stats to share (if anyone cares). Stay tuned!

Surfin' Safari

We took our annual Sanders family vacation to Orange County this week and it was as fun as always. Although Olive has already been to California three times in her young life, this was the first beach trip and she absolutely loved it.

Her favorite part was (obviously) the sand. I think that is what all kids love most. I got this awesome pop up tent for her to play in out of the sun and she liked it, until the realized that digging in the sand was pure joy. After the first day we couldn't keep her away from the sand and her only break was when we would lock her up in her tent. It would have been fine to let her play to her heart's content except our last day at the beach had record strong waves that were 12 feet high. We couldn't swim, let alone let her crawl in the sand. Indeed, we were extremely close to getting all of our things flooded by a giant wave. Fortunately, we had a lot of family to help us wrestle her and keep her entertained.


I love her digging with her shovel. She kinda knew how it worked but wasn't exactly coordinated enough to handle it properly.

And this is her discovering that the sand will stick to you. Her face seems to say "What the devil is happening here?"

Inevitably it goes into her mouth. I chose to take a picture rather than stop her from eating it.

"Shovel, where are you?"


The first day at the beach she was scared of the water. I think it was mostly the noise of the waves that got to her. I did like how tightly she would cling to me when the water would rush over her toes. Her anxiety was compounded by the fact that she was a bit of a zombie baby because we woke her at 5:30 a.m., flew to California, and went straight to the beach. She didn't have any real naps the entire trip, other than in the car, thus she has slept 3 and a half hours this afternoon, which is why I can blog. Considering how out of her routine she was and how little sleep she got compared to normal, she was a delightful travel baby.

Look at how upset the water made her. After recovering from the first day of no sleep, she grew to love the water and would crawl towards it with her head down for increased aerodynamics. It was much better when she was afraid.


She was a definite sand monster and her swimming suit still has sand in it that I can't get out! It was an amazing trip and it went way too fast. Fortunately we get to go back in a week! Yeah for family vacations!

P.S. After reading over this post I think that my reading of Jane Eyre may have influenced some of my writing in this blog. If it sounds very 19th century British formality I apologize. Blame it on Jane.

Fireworks are TOO Scary

We had a really great 4th of July spending time with family. It has been so crazy that I haven't posted much. I will have to update about everything later.

We started our holiday on Friday with an morning trip to Wheeler Farm with Olive's cousin Veronika. These two have a special bond so it was fun that they could spend time together. I absolutely love having the farm so close.


It is so hard to take pictures of the animals when the baby is just in the stroller but it is so much work to get her in and out that I just decided to have weird pictures. Here they are looking at the baby sheep if you can't tell.


The calves were very cute. Olive really liked them. She is finally starting to figure out that animals are cool.


This is Veronika making friends with a rooster. He crowed very loudly at her so we decided to leave him alone.


Feeding the ducks. She looks very fascinated in this picture.


We decided to have a picnic lunch while we were there and enjoy the nice weather.
After nap we took Olive swimming which she loves but those pictures are on another camera. She likes watching the people and splashing. We went swimming because we wanted to go to the drive in that night and it always wears her out. The drive in is the perfect way for us to see movies right now. But, Scott was planning on running the 5K the next morning and it would be an early start so we opted to watch a movie at home instead.

On Saturday morning we got up early to go cheer on Scott as he ran. Here is a picture of Olive blowing kisses while we wait. She has developed lots of "tricks" recently that are so cute.


She also really liked weaving her flag at everyone that ran by.


There he is running with his sister Becca (they are the ones weaving at me). They did a great job.


After the 5K we walked over to the local parade. It is not amazing by any means but it was really fun. This is Olive and her cousins enjoying the parade.



The Murray Park has a big festival all day for the holiday. We went over to check it out. While we were hanging out Olive took her first step. You can see the excitement in Scott's face. She has been cruising for a long time now but is finally figuring out how to balance herself. I just think it was a miracle we had the camera out at the perfect time.

Playing with dad.

They had entertainment, carnival games, bounce houses, booths, and food. One of the games was a dig in sawdust for money. Tanya got 80 cents!


After the carnival it was definitely nap time but we were anxious to head to Provo for a BBQ.

Olive and her cousin Tommy. He was a little upset that we took his binks away for the picture. Olive just looks confused.


Everyone on the deck eating the delicious food.


Ollie found a soccer ball and must have been very proud of herself because this is the funny smile she gave me when I went over to her.


Scott's parents have a beautiful yard and I couldn't pass up the perfect lighting of these flowers. Olive was not that interested in taking pictures so we had to distract her with some yard game supplies.

After the BBQ everyone headed out to Stadium of Fire. We opted out since it began at Olive's bedtime and we thought that wrestling a very tired baby didn't sound like fun. We headed back up to Salt Lake and when we got home there were tons of cars parked on our street for the fireworks. We thought the show must be cool if they were so popular, so we loaded Olive in the stoller and walked over to the park one last time. We got a really great spot nice and close.
This is how we got Olive to stay up so late, caffine.

She doesn't look very excited for the fireworks and it turns out she was right. Since we got such prime seats the fireworks were so loud that they shook your body. Olive started freaking out and she couldn't handle it. After about 5 minutes we decided we had better bail. So we walked home and put her to sleep and watched the rest of the show from our balcany. It was a great Fourth. I can see why it is Scott's second favortie holiday!