Happy 2nd Birthday Bella

Bella in her new jumper dress made by Bubbie Ishi.

So my little one turned 2 this week, and it has been a week full of celebrations with various family members and friends. Starting off last weekend my dad came to visit to celebrate with both Bella and her aunt Emily. My dad subscribes to a very simple school of kid gift giving : take the kid to the store and whatever toy they stick to and refuse to release is the winner. Which is fine if you don't mind the tantrum that comes when you get ready to pay. Bella is the type who knows her mind and she did not want to release her baby doll to anyone especially not the stranger at the cash register. So yes, Bella got another baby doll, with a bottle and a stroller, thus feeding into her newest obsession with anything baby related.

The next celebration was at her daycare/school where they threw her a little party on Wednesday and I brought cupcakes. I of course forgot my camera (I was walking out the door that day with a tray of cupcakes, a package of diapers and Bella's blanket so the camera oversight is not too surprising). These pictures are from the teacher from a card she sent home a couple days later. I have to say I love her new day care, they are fantastic. Bella loves to go and the little touches like sending home pictures of what she does during the day are wonderful.

On Bella's actual birthday, we didn't do much. We had a play date with her friend Ella but since it was a school night for Papi we mostly just ate cake and gave her our present. On Friday Grandma came to visit and took us out to dinner at a local Chinese restaurant. The sweet old Chinese man who runs the place told my husband that he looked like Barack Obama. When he found out that Bella was having a birthday he brought her a box of Chinese pretzel sticks which were surprisingly flavorful. They are called Pretz, and we will have to look for them next time we go to the oriental market.

Being a general slacker mom and knowing that she is still to young to demand a birthday party, we decided just to invite a couple friends over last night, eat more cake and call it good. The other big barrier to hosting an actual child focused party is the space limitation at our house. We can fit one extra family comfortably and sometimes stretch it to two but beyond that we run out of sitting space and plates and things and it stops being fun. We decided to invite our two Argentinean family friends, they had actually never met each other but got along fabulously.

Here are some pictures of Bella and her cake. She wasn't sure about blowing out the candle and got a little grumpy at that point. She got a lot happier when she realized it meant she got to eat more cake.

Ariel, Andrea and Bella's friend little Ada. She was crawling around under our feet all evening.

Mario and Marcella, and their kids Francisco and Kaprielle also joined us. The kids were a little bored with the conversation but happily played Wii all evening.

And Bella did a good job of entertaining herself and everyone else. She found Marcella's glasses laying on the couch and decided to play movie star. Man I love this kid. Happy Birthday Baby.

Christmas Winter Wonderland

Here are our pictures from Christmas.
Bella and Papi trimming our little Christmas tree. It's fun that she is getting to an age that she can somewhat participate in the festivities.




We spent Christmas in Brigham City at Grandma's house. Christmas came in the middle of a week that we all spent sick. Bella got sick first the weekend before (while we were visiting family in Southern Utah) and of course she passed it to me a couple days latter. Deviating from the usual course of things the Blue Prince managed to avoid this round of the Plague. His foreign immune system usually catches whatever is going around the house and gives him a worse version of it. Anyway I was the one sick on Christmas which turned out to be fairly good timing since I had my mom around to take care of me and aunties to keep track of Bella.


This is Bella opening gifts Christmas morning. Santa got her a little red wagon and a stuffed monkey that she loves to pull around giving rides to. She got a little miffed the other day when I wouldn't let her take the wagon in the car to daycare.


A couple family shots


We have been getting a ton of snow for the last couple of weeks. This is the view of my mom's back yard Christmas morning. We decided to take Bella outside to play.

She liked the icicles that Papi let her take off the roof. Mom forgot to bring her gloves so she is wearing a pair of socks on her hands for mittens.

She wasn't crazy about the whole walking in snow part. (She is actually standing in a snow bank here)

Her favorite was of course Grandma's swing. Tears were shed when she was forced to come inside when her fingers were turning into Popsicles. The impromptu gloves didn't last too long.

Finally an update

As many of you have undoubtedly noticed, it has been quite a while since I've updated my blog. The main reason is that the mother board on my laptop died and so I was virtually computerless for several weeks. I did get a new computer for Christmas (thanks Dad) but since then I have been working on other computer projects and unfortunately this blog has taken somewhat of a backseat to those. I did want to share some recent pictures we had taken as a family. Those of you that are family members who would like copies please let me know which ones you would like and what sizes.

An actual family portrait. We went primarily to get pictures of Bella but figured that we would try a family shot while we were at it.

This is probably my favorite picture of her out of the bunch. As Aunt Caitlin pointed out, she looks so sweet and innocent with her "who me?" face, and then you look closer and realize she is strangling the stuffed puppy.

Halloweenish type activities

We started our Halloween festivities a couple weeks early this year with a trip to Lagoon. My mom gave us some free tickets from her work at the beginning of the summer but there was always something going on that prevented us from going. Finally, knowing they were expiring the end of October, we decided to just pick-up and go on a Friday afternoon.


Bella seemed to enjoy all the rides and movement. She drove her boat all by herself and didn't even try to lean over and play in the water. There was of course a fit after each ride stopped as it blew her little 20 month old mind that we would put her in a toy to play for 2-3 minutes only to tear her away when she was just getting the hang of it.


She clambered all over her train seat and tried to climb into the ones in front of us. Did I mention she answers better to the name "Monkey" than her own.



Here are Mommy and Bella bugs. Buggy is another of her nicknames, given by a doctor in the ER during our first visit when he mentioned that she was such a "happy and active little bug" in spite of being covered as she was in full body hives.



The Blue Prince hanging out in his shackles. He keeps complaining that living here (or my cooking) is making him fat. We keep reassuring him that he is fine but I think I will make a copy of this as photographic proof the next time he brings up the subject. :)



For her actual Halloween costume Bella was dressed as a Fairy princess/Butterfly. Mostly butterfly as she refused to keep the princess crown on her head longer than 3 seconds. She thought it was a game and would joyfully pull it off and try to put it on my head or on Papi's. She is pictured here with Aunt Emily who is of course dressed as Sarah Palin. I think she pulled it off quite well.


Here is the back view of Bella's Costume. She tolerated the wings well but didn't really understand that they stuck out farther than her body and so they would occasionally get mangled or knock things over when Bella tried to squeeze into small spaces.



She learned to say the phrase "trick or treat" quite clearly and would say it all the way up to the doorway, she would give a little knock on the door, and then would go suddenly silent the moment someone answered. She really liked her "Pumpkin" or "Box" as she calls it. She became quite adept at picking out her treat and putting it inside the hole. We stopped by my grandmother's house to show her off and of course she got several pieces of candy for her box. While we were chatting in the next room she snuck off and figured out where Grandma had stashed the candy bowl and helped herself to a couple more pieces before she got caught.

I guess that's what Halloween is all about, to see how much candy loot you can collect before some responsible adult puts a kibosh on all the fun.

Videos, get your videos here

I have stored up several videos from the last month or so and decided to put them all out for your viewing pleasure at once.

This first one is from our San Diego trip, playing on the beach with Papi. Sorry about the dizzying camera action half way through. The incoming wave was soaking me as I was recording.

This one is a video I affectionately call "Ping". It's for all those individuals who love baby laughter. No one can make Bella laugh like her papi.

This is a video I took a couple weeks ago when Bella was helping me harvest the green tomatoes from our tomato plants. Apparently she found a little green hard tomato and decided that it was a ball. She spent the next half an hour playing catch with herself, throwing the "tomato ball" across the courtyard and chasing after it. What can I say, the kid needs more playmates.

Bella is fascinated with animals and animal sounds recently. When aunt Caitie was here for a visit she found several leaves outside and decided to fashion wings. Here is Bella's birdy impression.

GIA graduation

At the beginning of the month my family all met up in California for my sister Caitlin's graduation from the Gemological Institute of America in Carlsbad. She is now a real live certified jeweler and has two sets of letters after her name. We are all impressed that she has turned her love of all things sparkly into a viable career.

Oh and when I said my family met up in California I was literally referring to almost all of my fun mixed-up family together at the same time. Here is a picture of "The Clan" (listed from the bottom left and moving up and around the table) when we went out to lunch. We have: My sister Shoshana, her boyfriend Casey, my mom, my mom's mom, my dad's current wife Kathy, my dad, My dad's second wife's mom Joanie, Family friend's the Jimenez (Joyce, Ron, Steven, and Nicki), my sister Emily, My sister Caitlin and her boyfriend Tom, myself and Bella. The Blue Prince is taking the picture and missing is my dad's second wife Ishi, who unfortunately had to go home the day before to support my littlest sister in taking her SATs. Needless to say it was quite a group. The term herding cats comes to mind but everyone got along well and it was fantastic to see everyone.


As you can tell from the picture, Bella is the only small person in the family so needless to say she got lots of love and attention. She held up well under all the adoration but by the end seemed to get a bit clingy with mom and dad. It is tough work being so overly loved all the time.

We stayed in Carlsbad and decided to spend Saturday afternoon on the beach. It was somewhat chilly and so we all decided to walk and wade a little bit on the beach instead of swimming.


Of course Bella didn't quite grasp the whole wading instead of swimming part and ended up more that a little soaked. The waves were quite rough so she wasn't the only one. All of us ended up with wetter than expected pant legs.


Bella had fun playing with Papi being lifted out of the way of the incoming water.


Shoshana and Casey decided to bury my husband in the sand, reminiscent of the sand necktie episode of Mythbusters. They didn't make it much farther that this, but it is a good view of what he would look like as a dwarf.



Caitlin and her boyfriend Tom were being all shmoopy and cute on the beach (and everywhere else). We liked to tease them about inadvertently matching. (I mean seriously, from the brown pants all the way up to the red hair). It was the first time that Tom met "The Clan" and bless his heart he had the initiation by fire of meeting us all at once. Well I guess we can't say that he got to meet everyone. The Big Brother and his Russian Bride were not present which probably made things a little easier as he likes to play his big brother protector role to the hilt on the few occasions he gets the chance. It's hard work having 5 younger sisters.

I didn't notice when I took this picture of the cute couples starring off into the sea, that Emily was sitting in the middle of them playing in the sand. Unfortunately I made the mistake of mentioning the juxtaposition of it to her, leading to a comment of "gee thanks, I didn't feel like a third wheel till you pointed it out". Emily understandably got a bit tired of all the coupledom by the end of the trip.
Always in search of a good family picture, this is the closest we got on this trip. Which is kind of sad considering the blurriness and scowl on Bella's face. All in all it was a lovely trip and a nice break from the cold Autumn weather in these parts.

Bathroom Remodel

The other Summer project that got mostly finished this month was my Mother's master bathroom/entire home plumbing project. Here are some pictures of the original bathroom.
We ended up tearing out the built-in cabinets, most of the back wall (to accommodate the new plumbing and electrical work), and enclosing the side window leading to the other bathroom. We also took out the gross 30 year old green shag, put down tile, installed a shower and a new toilet and sink. And of course when I say we, I mostly mean the Blue Prince. Other than some demolition, clean up and painting I mostly just chased Bella out of the work area.


Here are the post construction pictures. There is a reason my mom adores her son-in-law. "We" are taking a bit of a break before tackling her other bathroom.