Memory Book

As promised, my gift to Scott for our 5th anniversary was this memory book that I made for him. I was worried that it might be kinda chessy or lame. It certainly doesn't hold a candle to a song but I didn't see that coming. I kinda thought I was making a killer gift and totally got shcooled. But, when all was said and done, I am actually really glad that I did it.

I started out with a little letter to him about how great and amazing these years have been.

Next was a reminder of where we started and where we are at 5 years.

Then I went year by year with a few pictures that kinda captured the most memorable parts of each year. I included a little written explanation of each year and some of the great(est) memories. I had a title for each year and I thought you might be interested in the highlights. An overview of our years together are as follows:
2005 A New Life
2006 The Year of George
2007 The Year of Challenger
2008 The Year of Olive
2009 The New House
2010 Still In Progress
Some of those are inside jokes and some are very obvious. It was fun to read through it with Scott and talk about some of the great memories from the years.

I ended with a little note about what I look forward to and how excited I am for what our future holds. My intention is to update this little book on our 10, 15, etc anniversaries and highlight the past 5 years. I think it will be really fun to read over and hopefully give a cool perspective to our kids about what was happening in those years. I had so much fun making this book. I hope you liked it too.

I love....

my husband!

I feel like I need to do some catch up on my blog and get back on schedule so this is kinda old news. In May Scott and I celebrated our 5 year wedding anniversary. It is crazy how fast the time has gone and how much our lives have changed. I don't want to be a cliche "Oh I am going to brag forever about how my husband is better than yours" blog. But it felt big to us, so I thought I would quickly share.

Since we were in California we decided it would be fun to go to Disneyland just by ourselves, and it was. Thanks to my awesome mom who made the whole trip possible and was willing to watch Olive so we could celebrate.

It was nice just being able to hold hands instead of holding a toddler while we waited in line. It is crazy how much less stressful and low key Disneyland seems without kids. We were able to go on almost all the rides because you can get anywhere fast without a stroller!


We went to dinner at a nice restaurant in Downtown Disney because we didn't want gross Disneyland food. It was very nice to have a quite dinner. We exchanged gifts and let's just say Scott's made me cry. He wrote me a song! Can you believe that? I have "wanted" a song written about me forever and it is the cutest sweetest song. He played all the instruments and recorded it so I could listen to it there. Our real gift is a cruise, but we got the best price in September so I guess we will be celebrating again!

After dinner we went back and rode a few more rides. We got ice cream and watched the fabulous firework show. It really was a great way to spend our 5th anniversary.

This is what I gave Scott. More to come on what is inside on Friday.

(Pretty good cliff hanger huh? I think I am going to follow TV's example and always end with either a plot twist or a shocking ending. Does that give you enough suspense to came back?)

Olive Loved Disneyland

Olive (and all of us) really had a great time at Disneyland. There is just something so fun about that place. I think so much of the fun for a parent is the anticipation and excitement of the kids. I can't wait for that. Even though Olive doesn't really remember, I know that she had the time of her life being there with family and spending time together.

Olive absolutely adored her Minnie ears. She went into the store and it was impossible to get her to leave because she wanted to try every single hat on. She wore them almost the entire trip and would ask for her "hat". Just recently she has figured out who Mickey and Minnie are and would say their names whenever she saw them. That ended up being about a million times a day since there are stuffed animals and figures and almost anything you can imagine in the shape of Mickey and Minnie at Disneyland. It really was pretty cute though.

This is how most of our family pictures were. We did go with lots of family but it seemed like when we wanted a shot no one was around. This is us waiting to get on the train, which at the end of the day, turned out to be a big mistake because it was so slow and Olive was melting down the entire time (until we got to the dinosaurs). Between alternating having one parent in the pic with Olive (because we also have a ton of those shots from this trip), I kinda like these type of self portraits.

Olive liked the concept of most of the rides and went on quite a few including Pirates and Haunted Mansion. We were pretty impressed.

Her stand out favorite was Small World. She Loved that ride. This is them while on the ride which is why it is so blurry. The first time she went on it she was silent, in awe. The subsequent times she jabbered nonstop pointing and bouncing in out laps out of excitement. It was awesome. She just couldn't get enough.

She loved chillin' in the O.

She loved the teacups and would scream every time we went past them. We started going the long way so she wouldn't see the ride.

Olive really loved Toon Town. We spent hours there while she ran around which was a relief after wrestling her in line.

She loved getting some freedom from being in the stroller all day!

Olive went nuts over all of the animals on the jungle cruise. We were very excited to take her on it because we knew it would be a hit.

Olive LOVED the parade. She loved everything about it, especially the part where she got to go out and dance in the street. I couldn't stop laughing.

She loved riding on daddy's shoulders and it's a good thing because that was the perfect way to keep her contained.
But more than anything she loved (as did everyone else) spending so much time with her cousins. We are so lucky to have so much family that are so close. Olive really loved her cousins and they adore her. It really warms my heart.

Here she is riding some rides with her cousin and just having a good time hanging out with them.



Olive did not love everything. Here are some things she did not love:
On almost every ride we went on Olive would be very very excited and we would get all strapped in and then the ride would start and these are the pictures we would get. Oh the horror on her face. every picture looks like we are torturing her and forcing her on these rides. When the ride was over we would ask her if she liked it and she would say yes and ask to go again. You would never tell from the pics.

Olive loved the carousels and would ask for the "ho-sies" and would then try to climb off. She like just sitting up high on the pretty horse, no need to go around in circles!


A kind of surprising melt down was when the pretend cars from Cars at the little photo opp. spot were not real cars. She was so frustrated and didn't understand why they were broken. She kept saying "Stuck Stuck!" as she pulled on the doors. I had to drag her away kicking and screaming. Who knew?

Of course she did not love the characters up close. She was fine with them at a distance but as you will she, there was no way we were going to get a good picture with them.




Welp, there you have it, if you made it through the plethora of pictures. We had such a wonderful time and are so thankful to have such a great extened family to go on great trips with!

So Sad

This has been a crazy, stressful, exciting, heartbreaking, fun, whirlwind of a month. And this is why:

For those of you who don't know, poor little Olive broke her leg! We were having a lovely time at the park and I thought "I will be the cool mom that takes you down the big slide". She has been down the slide before but usually with daddy. Half way down her little leg slipped off my lap and got caught between the slide and my leg. It was horrible.

She was in a hard splint for a week until we saw an pediatric orthopedic who said it need to be in a cast or boot for 5 (yes 5!!) weeks. He talked me into the boot option. All I will say is that boot was the bane of my existence. It was torture.
She hated walking on it and would crawl most places or sit crying and frustrated. That horrible boot would just randomly fall off and always in the worst places like the grocery store where it was impossible to put it back on.
The doc said it was important that she sleep with it on so if she stood up at night she wouldn't tweak her weak leg. I tried a million different ways to keep her from taking the boot off and not one of them worked. If we did manage keep her boot on at night she could not sleep and woke up a million times until I finally went in and took it off so we could all get some sleep.

We called her peg-leg pirate because of how she had to walk. The boot was too long, and usually I couldn't get it on perfectly so she would have to swing her leg really wide to get it around.

I had to explain a to so many strangers how I broke her leg (which I found out that this is a rather common injury for toddlers, so common in fact that it is called a Toddler's Fracture because they have a weak spot in their shin)

Finally I called and demanded that we get a real cast. I didn't care if I had to sponge bathe her and cancel swim lessons, that boot was going to kill me. So then we got this:

And thankfully our life has gone back to normal.

It is kinda adorable to watch Olive walk on it because she goes around on her tippy-toes (which she already did but a cast somehow makes it cuter).

This cast doesn't stop her one bit, she is actually sleeping and napping, my arm is not breaking from carrying and almost 2 year old everywhere, we can actually enjoy the sunshine and go outside instead of watch Aladdin for the 80th time. I am not quite sure where May went but I am pretty glad it is over and I am so excited for June!

I just loved this picture. It is so Olive. She picked out her headband, which perfectly matched her cast. She is so proud of her necklace. You can just tell she couldn't be happier to be perched up on that chair like a grown up. Yep, it is perfectly Olive.

I started loading my overabundance of pictures from our trip onto my computer when a screen popped up. It said there was no room left on my start up disk and it couldn't download my pictures. When I called Scott he said that if I did something wrong it could erase my entire computer and really mess everything up. Crappers! I am so scared to do anything on my computer now until it gets fixed. I feel like it is a fragile little baby that I must not disturb at all costs. It has our life on here. The thought of possibly losing all of our pictures and movies makes me want to throw up which is serious because I have a rather extreme vomit phobia. ( There are probably tons of mistakes in this post because I am trying to type very fast). So sadly no pictures today, and hopefully I will be able to post later this week but possibly not. Ahhhh!

Location:Bummer

What is with Olive's crazy hair?

Fail. I'm sure everyone came to check my blog yesterday and didn't get a post. You must be so disappointed. (I know that none of that is really true but I like to believe I am very important)
Only one week of a schedule and I already missed a day? What if I have a good reason?

We are actually at Disneyland today! I am posting today, so there, that is dedication. Besides most of the people that read my blog are here anyway.

I really love this place. I only came a few times as a kid. But the true magic is coming with your own kids. It is so fun to see Olive love going on rides and spending time with my little family ( and extended family). Now I know why people love coming here.

This is lame I know and cheesy but true. More to come later, as in next week. I promise..

"Heh-bo?!!!"

That is how Olive answers the phone. "Heh-bo? Ok!"

She is very in love with phones. It was probably her first love. From the time she could grasp something in her hand, she would hold it to her head and use it as a phone. I loved her baby jabbers as she talked into anything she could get her hands on, it didn't matter. From shoes, spoons, remote controls, rattles, and sometimes nothing at all (she would just hold her hand to her ear and talk).

We inherited some toys from an older boy cousin and since we parents didn't realize she would have such a phone obsession we didn't really buy her any girl toys. Not to worry, Olive would improvise and scoot/crawl/walk with toy cars held to her ear. That is when we realized she might like some pretend phones. Her aunt gave her the first one and it talked back when you pushed the buttons. All Olive could say about it was "OOOOOOOOOO!" She was hooked.

Since she loved phones so much she started talking to daddy on the phone at an early age mostly because she would loudly scream at me until she had a turn. It was the only way to get a chance to finish a conversation. Sometimes she would just lay and listen silently or sometimes she would babble nonstop. She loved/s talking to dad so much that whenever the phone rings she yells "DADA!!" Since Scott is in his car a lot of the day Olive gets to talk to dad about 3 times every day and she couldn't be happier. Here is how a typical conversation goes:

Serious concentration at first. (By the way sorry about the clutter of playdough stuff and her beautiful frog bib. I guess I could have cleaned that all up for the pictures.)

Then examining the phone. When Scott calls his picture comes up and Olive is in it as well. Occasionally she will get too distracted by the picture of herself and won't talk but just stare at herself staring at herself. It must be kinda trippy. In this case the was overloaded with play dough toys that she got distracted. At one point she was holding the yellow thing up to her ear to talk instead of the phone.

Then she usually sings (screams) a song or animal sounds or answers whatever questions dad is asking about.

Now Olive is double checking that the phone is still on. Often times that means that she then touches the screen and hangs up on dad. Are you still there dad?

This is what I am guessing she will look like when she is a teenager and is annoyed by her parents listening to her talk on the phone. Ugh Mom!

Now Olive is saying "All done. Bye Bye. All done daddy". If I am not with her when she decides to stop talking to dad she comes running into the room holding the phone up. It always makes me chuckle because I can hear Scott still talking away on the other end without a clue that Olive has stopped listening. We are going to have huge phone bills someday!