Valentine's Visitor!!!

We had a great visit from Grandma Parker for Valentine's.  We love to have her come all the way up North to see us!  My girl especially was in need of some grandma time, and took full advantage of having a play mate to do lots of fun things.  The girls got to make great treats for the big day, which also included a special breakfast and dinner by Daddy, a balloon chandelier and streamers (left up from our girl's birthday, also by Daddy), and a skirt made by Mama (the only thing I've been able to sew in the last several months!).  The girls even made hearts, cut them out and put them up around the house.  My girl will latch on to any excuse to party, but really we love to celebrate love!!!

They played dress up and did lots of coloring (my girl used her stickers for heads and then drew bodies for each friend, so cute!):

 And of course there was lots of pretending, singing, and playing games.  She even brought an extra train and more tracks for all the dinosaurs!!!!  

We had a great visit, and would love to be closer so we could visit more often!  Hooray for Grandma!!! 

Grown Up Birthday Girl

 My girl is SO grown up!!!!!  She turned five in January and had a great time planning her wonderful celebration.  She chose to make a great birthday shirt, very cute with rainbow and balloons.  She colored a picture and we ironed it onto a t-shirt.  

Then, she chose some special cereal for breakfast.  She chose LIFE cereal, not because the cereal looked good, but because it had a celebration with balloons on it of course!

She got to go swimming with Daddy, and took a walk at the airport too! 

Then we took her for a special lunch at a restaurant, and had her favorite pizza for dinner. 

She drew a picture of the cake she wanted, with the Blue's Clues house on it:

and her Daddy, the awesome builder that he is, did it exactly according to her specifications:

She loved it!  In order to help with the waiting until the big day, we made a countdown calendar, where she put a candle on the cake everyday, and then on her birthday she hung the banner.

We also put cupcakes up on our thankful tree wall.  We like to write things we love about our birthday person on the cupcakes and tell how much we love her! 

She is so grown up and such a great helper.  We are so blessed to have our special grown up girl in our family!  

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone!  We hope everyone had a wonderful holiday.  We got to enjoy some quiet time at home all together.  Logan was able to take a bit of time off work, which is a rarer thing these days.  (He has been helping his boss build a house after hours for the last several months.)  I was able to try out the embroidery functions on my new sewing machine, and make our girl a Christmas dress, that I totally love and am way excited for all the cute options modern sewing technology offers.  Of course my girl was upset that I had chosen the options for this dress, but once she tried it on, she agreed that it was a good swirling dress and has asked to wear it almost every week.  Hooray!!!

Then it was my birthday.  It is advantageous that in the year my girl turned four, I also had a birthday with a four in the number.  So this next year, since she turned 5, I will also turn an age with a 5.  This is convenient because we can use the same candle for my birthday that we have used for hers earlier in the year.  The fun story from this year is that Logan took my girl to the store and had her help figure out some fun gifts.  My girl picked some interesting pairs of fuzzy socks, which of course she wants to borrow (the funniest are the knee high red and white stripes).  And she decided that I really needed a notebook and pencils for drawing.  She had me unwrap them, and of course wanted to immediately sit down and draw together.  She even offered to let me borrow her notebook and pencils for drawing.  And of course if I was using hers, she would go ahead and borrow mine, so they were both getting used.  Then everyday she asked if I wanted to draw in our notebooks, or if I wanted to let her draw me a picture in my notebook.  What a great friend she is!!!

And I finally got a picture of my girl wearing the cowboy costume my mom made for her.  Back in April of last year, my mom and sister got me a skirt and suit coat for an Easter surprise.  The skirt was black with brownish flowers and the suit coat was a way soft brown.  When I pulled it out of the box and put it on, my girl exclaimed excitedly, "Mama!  You're a cowboy!!!!  You have a cowboy costume!"  I had not foreseen that response to this particular outfit.  So, my mom decided to make my girl her own cowboy outfit, of course in brown.  She has now gotten quite a collection of costumes and accessories in our dress up box, and I don't always remember to get pictures of her as she sometimes changes costumes quite quickly.  Nevertheless, she makes a great cowgirl!

And the holiday was loads of fun!  Merry Christmas to everyone!

Happy Thanksgiving!

  

These were our November activities, which we are belatedly sharing.  We got pumpkins and painted them after the October rush was over.  Our girl always loves painting projects.  

Then I made a jumper for our girl, which she decided was a wonderful twirling outfit and loves to wear.  She is at an interesting stage where she wants to decide all the fabric and trimming choices, but we don't always agree on those choices.  This was fabric Grandma Parker had sent and we found worked perfectly for a great jumper.  Our girl sure is a cutie and so grown up in this! 

And then we had a bit of snow, and our girl was always ready to run outside and play in it, even if Mama is more of an indoor girl.  Se loves to dig in the snow and do some tracking as well.

And at the end of the month, of course, we got to pick our tree!  Our girl is so excited for picking a tree and helping put lights and ornaments on it.  What a great helper!!!  We have so much to be thankful for, and really enjoyed having some quiet time at home just the three of us.  Logan made some great turkey, and then used the left overs to make the most awesome turkey noodle soup ever.  We've ended up making it several times since then because it was so good!  We sure love Logan's cooking!

Happy Halloween

We know it is way past, but we hope your Halloween was full of dress up fun!  We went to the Glacier visitor center for their fun activities, and then for Halloween night we took some pumpkin roll to different friends houses and had our girl 'trick or treat', in the traditional Underwood way (where you take a treat to someone and say, "trick or treat, here's your treat").  She had a great time!!!!

Hacked Email

Hey there everyone!  My email was hacked, and since I have no idea who all is receiving random emails, thought I'd post it on here so you would all know that I know, and that you should just delete the emails, don't open or respond to them, and just get rid of them. I'm working on changing the security info for my account, so hopefully that solves the problem.  Thanks for all the people who let me know so quickly!  And hopefully this gets figured out soon and won't be any further issue!

Where The Fun Starts

Despite it being a couple months later, I am going to try to get updates from our trip up here with pictures, so here goes!

My girl and I started our adventurous trip on August 29.  My girl really loves the airport.  Our airport has so many things to look at and fun things to do like riding escalators, that we sometimes take a trip to walk around the airport, even when we aren't flying anywhere.  However, when the time comes to actually get on a real airplane, my girl is tremendously excited!  Standing in the security line, she kept saying, "This adventure is so exciting!" and "I am so excited!"  She did great getting through security and then wanted to walk all around the inside area, where we don't usually get to go.  The hard part about this was, since we were just the two of us, that meant I had to carry all the carry on luggage by myself.  She had her little backpack, and she did a great job pulling it around, but I don't think she realized how challenging it was to maneuver the rest of the luggage, especially when we needed the special seat and there wasn't another person to leave the stuff with!  So it was an adventure just getting around the airport!  But we made it on to our first flight, where I surprised my girl by pulling out a bag of her favorite dinosaurs.  She loves playing with her dinosaurs.  She had them give a concert on the first flight, where they sang numerous songs, mostly from the Dinosaur Train TV show, but at one point one of them sang the 8th Article of Faith, and did so very loudly.  It was pretty fun!  I was a bit worried, since she tends to get a bit motion sick, but she did great!  It gets easier to fly with a small friend, the older the small friend gets.  We got to our first airport, where we walked around and found some food.....again, I hadn't really forseen the challenge of holding a hand, all the baggage, and trying to carry food as well......Fortunately I had brought the leash, but unfortunately my girl thought it was hilarious to go out to the end of the leash and pull on it, and then spin in to get all wrapped up in it, and have lots of fun with it.....this added to the challenge, but somehow we found a table and got to have our lunch.  My girl thought it was a special tea party for some reason, and was just as happy as a clam and seemed to be filled with excitement the entire time.  She had a bit of a cough and at one point asked me for a coffee cup.  I was very surprised, and told her she doesn't drink coffee so she didn't need a coffee cup.  She informed me that she needed a drink so her throat could feel better for her cough.  So, I held up my drink for her, and she coughed all over the straw.....So it turned out she wanted a cough-ee cup!  I had a pretty good, much needed laugh over that!

After lunch we found a seat closer to our gate and pulled out pillow and blanket for a bit of quiet time.  I had brought ipod with some tv shows on it, and some books to read to her, and she settled in for some quiet (as quiet as it gets in the Seattle airport!).

Then we had our second flight, and we discovered how wonderful it is when there are only two flights to get that close to our destination rather than three.  The day seems to go faster that way.  So it was a small plane, and my girl got to sit by the window, which she loved!  

As we traveled through the day, my girl kept telling me that she missed Daddy, and that next time we travel, we should go with her choice and bring him with us, instead of going without him.  I tried to explain that he had to stay for work, but she knows it would be more fun if he came with us (and I most heartily agree!!!!).  So, again my girl did great on this flight as well, even though she was a bit concerned about walking up and down the stairs on from the outside of the plane, since it was so loud and windy, but we did it, and when we landed we found Grandma Sue and Papa!!!!!  My girl remembered them, and was willing to give hugs and be friendly, and to stay with Grandma Sue while Papa and I tried to make it to air cargo before they closed, which was an adventure of itself.  After driving around trying to locate it, we discovered that it was closed up tight, earlier than their posted closing time, with not a sight of anyone to ask for help.  We went back to the terminal, and there weren't even any Alaska Airlines agents to ask for help either.....so we got our bags, with the realization that we would have to drive the 2 hour drive back at some point to get our cargo item....but we made it safely and all our bags!  And we got to have some Carl's Jr for dinner!  All in all, it was a success, and we made the drive back to Logan's folks' house, and got snuggled into beds safe and sound!

That is the start of our adventure, and I will do my best to get some more fun stories up here with pictures of the fun soon!!!