Summer Part III

I almost finished up my summer posts before summer ended. But, I got distracted by a major blessing in our lives (coming in a future blog). Last 4th of July I made Rory a festive tutu - I was in my tutu stage. This year I decided to try my hand at korkers and a pillowcase top. I also spent a little time jazzing up $3 flip flops from Old Navy. The shoes were her favorite (she take after me). I had a lot of fun with all these projects and they were so easy and stress free. Even the top!





In Benson, we celebrated Independence day on Saturday the 3rd. I'm not sure why people seemed so surprised or upset; it's not like it doesn't happen every time the 4th falls on a Sunday. Landon and I even ran into each other at a 3rd of July party 6 years ago.

We started the morning at our traditional parade watching spot, my nana and tata's house. They live towards the end of the parade route so candy can sometimes be scarce at that point. But, they're yard is pretty perfect for watching and who needs a ton of candy anyways?

I thought Rory looked extra cute! After the Parade we went to our annual Sherwart hotdog lunch. It was a good time, as usual, until Rory got into a bowl of salt. She went to grab the bowl and took in a face full of salt. :( It was in her mouth, up her nose, and in her eyes. She even threw up, but she learned a pretty valuable lesson about grabbing at things on the counter.

After a much needed nap and a quick set of laundry (had to wash Rory's top) we headed to the park for fireworks. My family always watches them from the side of the Ramada. It's not really that packed and close enough that ash doesn't fall on you. This was Rory's first time. I felt she was old enough that she wasn't go to get scared. She didn't. She got bossy. She really liked to fireworks at first, but after a while got bored. As boredom kicked in she decided to continually tell the fireworks to, "STOP!" It was a pretty funny end to our day. :)

The rest of our summer was spent swimming. Rory still loves water and thinks she's an expert swimmer. She even jumps in off the side! I don't know how I ended up with such a fearless kid (I'm a worry wart), but I'm pretty sure she's going to give me a couple ulcers. ;)

Rory and Grammie.

Well, this rounds up our summer. Rory's birthday and my 'distraction' are still to come!

Summer Part II

Ha! I'm already back and determined to finish this series! June brought many BIG moments!

My great grandma (Rory's great great grandma) turned 90 in June. We through her a surprise party at the park. She had recently broke her leg, so it was nice for her to get outside some. Rory really enjoyed playing on the playground and running around with her cousins. We discovered her LOVE for slides that day. lol.

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We were also able to go camping and fishing with my parents. It was a beautiful weekend and probably Rory's favorite part of summer. She loved that we never had to go 'inside.'

She also really enjoyed fishing. My dad brought my old snoopy pole that I learned to fish on back in the day. He put a mickey bobber on the line and would cast it out for her then let her reel it in. It was cute.

Landon actually caught a fish. He usually doesn't catch anything, so he was pretty excited. :)

Summer Part I

Okay, so I'm sure we're all aware I am a terrible blogger and should never go into blogging for a living. I have this problem with NEEDING to catch up. I feel like I can't move on without getting some of the past. So this is the first in (hopefully) a quick series about summer.



We left off with Easter...

I made my first dress. It was supposed to be done by Easter, but didn't get finished till the next weekend. I had seen the fabric numerous times at Joann's, but finally found a reason to buy it. I think it came out pretty darn cute. My very talented MIL helped out a lot with the zipper and hem. So, really I didn't do much of the hard stuff.

While I was pregnant with Rory, Landon spent A LOT of time helping my cousin restore this boat. He painted it, worked on the electical, and what not. Being pregnant and afraid of boats I would get sooooo frustrated with him spending so much time on it. But now that we get to use it pretty much whenever we want, I'm so thankful he put in the time. It's a ton of fun!

We FINALLY took the boat out for the first time. We went to Lake Roosevelt. It was a beautiful, cool, overcast day. It took me a while to get over my boating fear, but we ended up spending a full 7 hrs. exploring the lake together. It was one of my favorite days of summer.

We had so much fun, we decided to make it our Sherwart Memorial Day Vacation 2010. The theme was 'Get it up!' because we spent so much time trying to get up on boards that weekend. It was a great time filled with Landon trying to drown me and a pregnant Nicole on a tube, me almost killing the boys on a tube, attempting to wake board, the boys learning to knee board, Landon almost drowning after strapping himself onto the knee board (lol), Jeremy taking a board to the eye, sandwiches on the boat, swimming, super loud mexican music late at night, sunburns, ants, and weird camp neighbors. :)

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Rory and I also spent some time at the zoo with her cousin Paige and Paige's mommy Amanda. We had a lot of fun and Rory really enjoyed seeing some of the animals. We even got to feed the Giraffe! Sooo worth $2. I really like the Tucson Zoo. It's kinda small, but the prefect size for small kids. Hopefully it will cool off soon so we can go back.

Easter

The Easter festivities started on Friday for us. We spent the day dying eggs, decorating cookies, and kicking butt at an egg hunt. Some of Rory's cousins came down to participate in all the fun that Janice worked so hard on.

For some reason it never occurred to me that egg dying was going to be super messy. I mean I have a hard time keeping clean. I don't know why I didn't realize Rory was going to make a monster of a mess. She REALLY liked the blue dye and decided that the entire counter should be blue. lol. I didn't take any pics because I was too busy trying to help clean, but it was everywhere. She also really like cracking the eggs. She laughs when I crack eggs, so this was her chance to try it out.

After dying eggs we decorated cookies. Rory's Nana lent her this super cute apron that she didn't want to take off. Too cute. As usual she only wanted to eat the icing.

After cookies we did an egg hunt. I wasn't sure if Rory would get what to do, but she picked it up right away. We only had to point out a couple of eggs an she went on from there. She would get sooooo excited every time she saw an egg. She would rush over and then throw it in her bucket. I was amazed at how good she was. She had a ton of fun!

After conference on Sunday, went to my parents house after conference. Rory had fun running around outside and doing another egg hunt. I think Easter might be her favorite holiday.


I didn't get a picture of her basket, but she got a farm animal wooden puzzle, ABC by Dr. Suess, a bunny, m&m's, and some chocolate gold fish. She loved everything especially the book. I now have the entire book memorized. I get to read it about three times a day, so I'm thinking it's time for a new book already.

Why does Landon do this to me?

I should know by now that whenever Landon wants to go on a simple picnic to somewhere I've never been, it's not going to be so simple. I love him very much, but I just don't understand why insists on terrorizing me. Landon had wanted to picnic out at Cochise Stronghold. Apparently there's a pretty shady area and river or something like that. I don't know because that's not where we ended up.

We packed our lunches, put some Robin Hood on for Rory to fall asleep to, and headed out in the general direction. After driving around some and not being able to find the trail that would take us to Landon's desired picnic area, we stopped to asked directions from a guy reading a book under a tree. Mistake. As he was walking over to our truck in his short shorts, I thought to myself it would be funny if he was foreign. Lol. He totally was and he was super creepy. Plus I'm pretty sure he was crushing on Landon which made it even funnier. He wanted to know where we were on our Arizona map. I thought to myself: Weird. Why doesn't he know where he's at? When Landon pointed out that we were in a certain square of the map, the guy corrected him and told him to turn to page 76 without even looking at the map. It was like he was wondering if we knew where we were. Weird again. Then he kept insisting that we park and take a walking trail to some peak. Needless to say we just wanted to get as far away from him as possible.

We drove around some more and then decided to take a trail that looked like it might head in the direction we needed to go. Never again. The trail soon began going straight up. It was crazy narrow (no way to turn back) and just rocks. I'm not much for off roading - especially when it's rough and high up. I think the high up part gets to me more because I have a somewhat debilitating fear of heights. I ended up having a panic attack and crying. Nothing new to Landon seeing as how he does this to me quite often. We hit a peak and I made Landon get out and look down to see where the trail led. We had a chance to turn back, finally, and I wasn't going to go any further if it was going to be scary. He looked over and said he knew where we were and coaxed me into continuing. We ended up here:

A place called China Camp. It was very pretty. I'm not sure I could deal with the drive again, but I did enjoy our picnic here. There were plenty of trees and concrete slabs that we sat on to eat our lunch. We took a little walk and explored the area some before Landon tried to take some other trails to see if they headed back the same way. They didn't seem to and were just as scary, so I made him go back the way we came. I kept it together a little better going down. I'm a wuss I know. Despite the creepy foreign guy and the crazy 'are we even on a trail anymore?!' trail, it was a very nice picnic.

Disneyland

Yes. Yes. I do know how behind I am on posting. I actually uploaded these photos over a month ago and just haven't gotten around to finishing up. We took a trip to Disneyland Presidents day/Valentine's day weekend. Not the best idea if you're trying to avoid a crowd, but we were going to be meeting up with a friend from Landon's mission and his family on one of our days there. He's in med school and this was the weekend that worked for him, so we forged ahead. We left on Friday and had a brilliant idea to leave later in the day - around Rory's nap time to be exact. It worked out great!

Rory napped until dinner, watched some Sleeping Beauty on her little DVD player (best invention ever), and then slept till we arrived at the hotel.

We stopped in Gila Bend for dinner and ate at Space Age. Not the best food in the world, but it beats fast food. We spent a little time letting Rory run around while we were waiting for our food and then while paying.

Rory was wide awake after we pulled up to the Hotel. It was like 10:30! She was just soooo excited about everything! She was especially excited about the beds. It was too cute.

After her bath next morning she just wanted to lounge around. Lol. If she only knew what we had planned. I kept trying to tell her and would sing "It's the Mickey Mouse Club House! Come in side. It's fun inside." But she would just scream at me to stop. Weird. She usually loves my singing.

It was a little rough when we first arrived. Rory isn't used to having to ride in a stroller and was not having it. We picked the Small World ride to go on first. It's my least favorite due to it being especially creepy, but Rory seemed to like it.


Lunch was awesome. Expensive, but awesome. I think you have to expect to spend a ton of money on food. Otherwise, it will just make you cranky. I went for a hand dipped corn dog, Landon had fish and chips, and Rory had the toddler meal (forget what it's called) that consisted of a little yogurt, cheese stick, apple slices, gold fish, and a juice. I was surprised they had such a healthy lunch choice, but it is California.

We only stayed till 3:00 that first day. We had planned on coming back, but were too tired. We did stop for a picture with Goofy on our way out. Rory really like seeing all the characters. We pointed out Pluto ealier in the day and she started barking at him. Lol.

She was OUT after that first day. When we got back from dinner she slept through us changing her clothes and diaper. Crazy.

We arrived a little earlier than our friends the next morning so we decided to wait in line to get a picture with Minnie! We did have a huge family cut in front of us and everyone else because their time was more important than all of ours. I usually say something, but the mom was pretty scary looking and probably would have punched me, so I just left their fate to karma.

We had sooo much fun with our friends. Again, Landon know J.D. from his mission and I had met him and his beautiful family at a wedding we had all gone to a few months earlier. They live about 30 minutes from Disneyland and have season passes - lucky. Their little girl, Laura, is a few months older than Rory so they knew all the great rides and how to navigate D-Land with a toddler. I'm so happy we were able to meet up with them and celebrate Valentine's day.

Rory had a lot of fun on all of the rides. I wish I would have gotten a picture of her on the Tea Cups. She would not stop screaming and laughing on that ride. It was by far her favorite. She also had a blast watching Micky's Playhouse at California Adventure. It was a mix of Micky's Club House, Handy Manny, My Friends Tigger and Pooh, and Little Einsteins. They were just puppets that came up out of the stage, but Rory's eyes almost popped out when she saw them. It was like all of her favorite cartoons were REAL!

We ended the day with Landon and J.D. on the rapids ride at California Adventure. I thought they were crazy because that water had to be freezing, but they insisted. It was funny to see them soaked after they got off.

We had hoped, the trip back would be as easy as the trip up. It started out that way, but didn't last for long. It was worth it though. The trip was AMAZING. We had so much fun. I'm so happy we didn't listen to all the nay sayers telling us we were crazy for taking an 18 month old. Rory was the perfect child. I wish we could go back again and again. It was really the best vacation we've ever taken.

Valentine's Day

We started our Valentine's celebration the Monday before. My mother in law invited us and Landon's sister and her kids over for a special Valentine's family home evening. It was pretty fun. The kids all got to make their own personal pizza - except Rory. Now that she's tall enough to reach things close to the edge of the counter, you have to push everything back towards the wall. Janice didn't realize this until we saw Rory walking around and stuffing pizza crust in her mouth. She ate the entire thing. She's such a carb monster. After dinner we had a small lesson. Rory did a good job of trying to hold picture up for us to see. For the Finally we decorated Valentine's day cookies. They were so yummy.

Rory spent her time licking the frosting off the cookies we helped her decorate.

We then spent most of the week getting ready for our Disneyland trip. But I did take a little break on Tuesday to make my mom and her coworker a special treat. I saw this super cute idea on how to use up leftover candy canes here: http://www.pleasant-home.com/2010/01/quick-and-easy-valentines-treats.html They came our really cute and I heard they were delicious.

Because we were going to be spending money at Disneyland, we decided to go giftless for each other this year and made our own cards. I was really surprised at how cute the one Landon made turned out. It was probably our best Valentine's yet. A Disney blog is soon to follow.