Birthday party (yep, the 2nd one!)

BEWARE: THIS IS ANOTHER OUTRAGEOUSLY LONG POST. BUT I COULDN'T HELP IT!

This was Jax's 2nd birthday party! Yeah, the kid is truly spoiled. And a little rotten. No he's our sweet man! We had his party at the park, and we actually had more people show up than I expected! Thanks everyone!! We had pizza and cupcakes. (scroll down and you'll see our sad looking sesame street wanna be cupcakes that took me and Andrew forever to make! But at least we had fun!) Jaxon pretty much again just loved all the attention! He loved all the kids at his side helping him open presents! He got a ton TON ton of cool things! Thanks everyone! Even though it was FREEZING (yeah like the coldest day so far, even today was warmer! ugh!) I think we had a fun time! Again, thanks to everyone who reads this and came!

Jax the party animal!

After the park, the pool was the plan, but everyone bailed on us except Dustin & Felicia (thanks guys!) But that's ok, we're glad that many showed up at the park! This is the Washington city rec center. And wow it's cool! It's even cooler in the summer (or even late October, when it's still hot, but we missed that by a week!) because they open it up so half of it is outside! There's like a splash pad and a lazy river outside. But that's ok too, the inside was great fun and Jax had a ball! He loves the water.

isn't this place awesome?

Pay no mind to my cheesy creepy face.

After swimming, since Andrew & I are sticklers for tradition, and thanks to my friend Kim who gave me this fabulous idea, we made Jax his very own cake, stripped him down, and let him have at it....We made the mistake of lighting the candle (we're new parents, gosh!) Well, the pictures do a pretty good job explaining what happened with that. It was sad but funny too. After calming down about that, he wasn't sure what to do with a big cake sitting in front of him and Mom and Dad staring at him! I had to pick up his hand and shove it in the cake, then bring it to his mouth! And that did it!

Can you guess what happened here?

this is what a 1 year old on sugar high looks like! Luckily, he went to bed okay.

And heres what looks like Christmas! And this isn't even half of it!! Jax really banked this year! Thanks everyone! He loves all of it!

Guess where?

Ok...I refuse to be embarrassed about this. For one of my sporadic, random photoshoots, I took the boys down to...the uh.....ahem....Junk yard. Don't make fun! I drove past a few times and there were some really cool old "things" (not junk) sitting there. Instantly embedded in my mind was the picture potential that place had! Andrew thinks I'm nuts, but what else is new? Check em out...they're not so bad. But maybe I am...for taking my child there...

(these aren't at the junkyard, they are at this place is Virgin)

I had so much fun editing...can you tell?

Andrew is so supportive of my obsessions

it's crazy what a little editing can do to a sunset....

"fire in the sky"

ya gotta love southern utah...

some of these others are me just havin fun with my lovely new camera!

i love old rusty colorful stuff. isn't that just beautiful?

one man's junk is another man (or woman's) treasure!

Wow! Jaxon is 1 year old today! That's so crazy! It's true, it does go by fast.


Well, we love our little man so much! We are so glad we have him around. He lights up our life and keeps us busy all day. He's such a sweetheart with such a lovable personality! HAPPY BIRTHDAY JAX! WE LOVE YOU!

Here are all the things our stinky little one year old can do:

He can show you where his "nose" is.

• When you say "patty cake" he will clap his hands!
• He drinks out of a straw!
• He can crawl up the stairs!
• He can pull himself up on ANYTHING and walk alongside it.
• He can walk with you holding only one of his hands!
• He can find his "ducky" in the bathtub when you ask him!
• He mimicks us coughing or shaking our head!
• He eats EVERYTHING we eat! (almost)
• He is NOT afraid of any animal. He loves loves loves cats and dogs!
• He's so social. He loves people and attention!
• He's so alert, busy, and smart! He always wants to go go go and not stop!
• He has such beautiful eyes and gets comments on them all the time!
• He sleeps 12 hours at night! Wahoo for me!
• He knows what face to pull when I get the camera out! He's such a cheeseball!

We love this stinky man so much and are so thankful God chose us to have him! We look forward to the daily surprises Jax has in store for us each and every day!

Faces of Jaxon

I have been wanting to do this for so long with a nice camera. I love close-ups of faces. Specially cute faces like this one.

Halloween Night

Since Andrew works all day, I pretty much have time to blog all the time. So, I know I realize I am a kind of loser, but it's better than watching tv all day right? AND yesterday I found a horrible little surprise on my computer...about 98% of all our pictures had been mysteriously erased! (Later we found out it was because of our stupid zune) So, LUCKILY...I have this blog where I post just about every little thing that ever happens, and a TON of our pics are saved on it. AND before I even started blogging at all, we saved all our pics on CDs. So really, we didn't lose a lot. We did lose a few, and I don't like to think about it. ANYWAY...moral of the story...SAVE your pics on some back-up thing. Or blog!

Well...after that horrifying event, because it was Halloween, I tried to not let it affect me, so it wouldn't interfere with Halloween! (It was hard, but it had to be done!) It was Jaxon's first Halloween! He pretty much had no idea what was going on the whole time, yet Andrew & I insisted on making him endure the WHOLE Halloween experience. Yes, We DID go trick or treating! We were so excited to finally have a good excuse to go again! We both love it dressing up and going trick or treating and think that it's too sad that it's not acceptable for adults to do it. We got a lot of "How old is your baby?" from people who were obviously thinking that candy is not for your baby, it's for you! And yep, that's true! Well we did give Jaxon a sucker! He loved it.

But really, he was just a long for the ride. He loved it. We started pretty early (at like 5:30 ish), and no one was home! They were all at the STUPID STUPID trunk or treat! (Andrew and I have a very strong opinion about the trunk or treat...) But as it got later, more people were home and we saw more kids on the streets trick or treating. We went in a really nice neighborhood thats pretty close to our house. I think we trick or treated on the best street in Utah. I'm serious! There was this house that went all out. They had seriously everything out in their front yard. You had to even walk through this little scary place to get to the candy. It was great. On that same street, there was a really cool witch on a bike driving up and down the road giving out candy. AND on that street was a spook alley! It was free too. We didn't go in because of Jax. It was awesome! We are glad that we went! We all had a great time, and Jax got a lot of candy that we will be definitely helping him out with! When we got home at like 7:30, we waited and waited for trick or treaters, but NOTHIN! We had a bunch of candy ready for them too! sad!

I made home-made chili!

gettin ready to go trick or treating!

Jax loved this sucker!

this is that cool scary house

check out that witch!

Jaxon kept looking up at us to make sure we were still there. I think he was pretty confused about this whole thing.

Look at all that candy!