The kids are growing up so fast, I feel like they've especially grown in the past couple of weeks. Coen started sitting up better and loves it.
We got Ava a princess castle at Kohls on a great sale and she was so excited! We save it only for Quiet Time every day. The first morning she was begging for Quiet Time, making us laugh. She puts her princesses on and they each sing their song and say some things. I sometimes overhear her while playing saying "Thank you so much!" as she is making the princesses perform.
We were outside and Ava was looking all cute in her Elsa outfit, and the sun was casting perfect light. We took a few pictures and I decided to hurry and fix Ava's hair and get Coen dressed to take some pictures for our moms for Mother's Day.
We finally got a few cute ones after I bribed Ava with her Minnie camera.
Beautiful babies.
A few outtakes:
Ava with her Minnie camera afterwards.
I got a large unexpected cash bonus from my work and so I decided that some of it is going to go to paying babysitters for dates! I got a MiaMaid in our ward to watch the kids and we went on a date to downtown Denton. It was fun to curl my hair and get ready for a hot date!
First we walked around the Square.
Then we went to a BBQ place that we heard good things about. The brisket was really yummy, and Brent loved his ribs!
Coen started jumping in this and he absolutely loves it! The first day he just kind of sat there, not sure what to do. Once he figured out how to jump, he's been jumping for like an hour at a time!
On Sunday we had Brent's institute graduation at the stake center. Chris and Rita came to support him :) Right before Brent went up to get his "diploma" from the stake president and institute president, Ava who was sitting on the front row with me, said "I need to go potty!" We all kind of giggled and luckily she waited a second to see Daddy graduate ;)
His cheeks look especially kissable in this picture.
We did a little play date exchange and had Ava's friend over to play one day. Ava had a really hard time sharing and I had to play with them and make sure that Ava was nice.
Ava is such a good bike rider! She just goes and goes.
I took Coen to Young Women's with me one night and he got a lot of attention in the room full of girls.
While I was at Young Women's Brent took Ava on a little date to McDonalds.
Big boy Coen got to try rice cereal the week before he turned 6 months old. He loved it.
I got Ava an appointment with the state to have her speech evaluated to see if she needs speech therapy. We were in a room with two ladies who listened to her talk while she played with toys and asked me about 100 questions about her development. Ava also went through a flip chart of pictures of all sorts of objects with one of the ladies and she looks notes on how Ava pronounces things and how her vocabulary and sentence structure is. In the beginning Ava was scared to talk, but they had prizes to bribe her with. Then Ava was saying the words really quietly. The lady told her, you need to say it louder to get your prize! Finally Ava spoke up to get her princess stickers :)
After we got home we had a little picnic and Ava showed off her prizes she earned.
I got to go with Brent to his last institute while Kaylie's mom watched Ava (play date exchange worked out nicely!) It was all sorts of musical numbers which was cool because UNT is famous for their music program so there are lots of talented musicians in the area. Coen loved the tuba number:
We went to a reception for a girl in our ward. They had a cool cupcake display for their cake!
Ava went as Elsa to the wedding to see the "real princess."
On Saturday Brent studied at the library for a good chunk of the day. It was a stressful time for him, writing his final papers, for the end of the school year.
Did you ever see a happier baby?
Coen always has to have a blanket touching his face when he sleeps.
Mother's Day was wonderful! Brent sure knows how to spoil me. He let me sleep in (like he always does on the weekend) but this time I slept in a lot and got about 11 hours of sleep. This Mother's Day will go down as the first day since I had Coen that I wasn't tired.
When I got out of bed Brent had a card, breakfast, and my present waiting for me. Our friend Chris had given me this corsage to wear to church.
When we got home from church we tried to make a few pictures of me with the kids. Right at that moment it started raining. It was Coen's first time to be in the rain and he was gasping and making all sorts of funny noises.
Look at his face! Haha, I started to laugh and Ava was posing all cute so the pictures turned out different than I expected, but probably better than planned. Just how motherhood is :)
This girl has attitude! And loves posing for pictures.
A video of Ava and Coen:
I took the kids on a walk for Family Night while Brent worked away at his essays.
Ava's babysitter sent me this cute picture of Ava and Lilian.
I am so glad both of the kids got their daddy's blue eyes. Aren't they gorgeous?
Coen's are turning bluer and bluer every day.
Ava took a chocolate cookie and I told her she had to wait until after lunch to eat it. She clasped her hand around the cookie and was trying to trick me that she didn't have the cookie anymore. She was just looking down at her hand to see how clasping it tight (around the cookie) made a "circle." Then she went and hid under our kitchen table and hurried and shoved the cookie in her mouth. Sorry Ava, that cookie was chocolate and I can see it all around your mouth! It made me laugh that she thought she could trick me.
We had the most gorgeous sunset one night. I tried to get some pictures, but I obviously couldn't quite capture how beautiful it was. I just stood outside and watched the sky change colors from bright yellow to orange to pink.
Ava loves playing in the sand at the park.
We went to Target, just for fun I believe. We're hard up for entertainment ;) Coen looked adorable in this hat.
Brent installed two cameras in our house last summer so that he could check on it while we were out of town. They are pretty cool and he can scan around the room and also hear the house. Recently he's started "checking in" on us while he's at school. It's sort of a joke- he'll check to see what we're doing, how dirty the house is, etc. Well it FREAKS Ava OUT! She gets so creeped out that Daddy is in the camera or something.
The other day I was sitting on the couch talking out loud to him and he could hear me through the camera and he was responding by texting my phone. For about 10 minutes we had a conversation this way and Ava was huddled next to me saying "I'm scared!" Brent would hear her say that and then text my phone "Tell Ava not to be scared." I would say Ava, daddy says not to be scared. Then she would slowly turn around and look at the camera all suspiciously. Brent took this picture so we could see what he was seeing. The things you have to deal with when you have a technological-savvy dad.
For play group this Friday our friend chose a park pretty far away, about 20 mins. While we were there, a girl and her 1.5 year old boy came. The girl was asking my friends and I questions such as, do you all know each other? Are you from a church group? We said yes, we go to a different park every Friday morning. She said she was new to the area and was hoping to make friends. So I started talking to her some more. Our conversation got to where we were from and I told her I'm from Utah. Then she said, "oh, I went to BYU!" I was like, ohhhh, you're LDS? Hahaha. So then we got talking about our degrees and she said she got her graduate degree at the U of U. I said, "hey me too! What did you get yours in?" She said accounting. I said, "hey me too!!" She got her masters one year before me. What a small world! She even worked for the Company that my firm is a member of.
Coen got tired playing.
We got Chinese take out and went to a park. We tried out a park across the lake from us. It was really pretty! The Chinese place forgot to give us forks, so luckily Brent had one in his car, which we shared.
Ava has been posing so much lately, look at these shots with the lake in the background!
This park had the funnest toys!
On Saturday morning Ava and I went to a ward service project. The primary was planting flowers. Here's Ava and her cute friend Kaylie.
At noon after the service project our ward had a BBQ. They had so much left over food from a funeral the day before that no one had to bring their assigned food.
That evening I had a girl's night at my house with nine women from the ward. We chatted, had treats, and watched Young Victoria. It was so much fun!
Brent took Ava on a date downtown to a candy shop and also met up with Chris at an old fashioned diner.
Around 9:30 pm after our movie was over and while Brent was out, we both all of a sudden started to get a really bad stomach ache. I didn't think too much of it since I always have stomach aches. I got up a couple times in the night, sick, and I noticed Brent did several times too. That morning the RS president (who was at my party) text me and asked how we were doing because lots of people had food poisoning from the ward BBQ. Ohhhhh, it all made sense! Brent asked me if people were sick at my party. And I said, now that I think about it, every single person used the bathroom at the end of the movie....
We started laughing a lot. Then I said to Brent, oh my gosh, you know what the RS president told me they did with the extra food after the BBQ? They took it to the families in the ward who had new babies, and also to inactive families! Brent started laughing so hard he was crying. I snapped a picture of him lying on the bed laughing SO hard, and also in pain.
So many people were missing from church. It seemed not too many people were spared. We laughed and laughed about it all day. It was a weekend to remember!
