It's February already?

Right now Josh is trying to figure out which song would best out-blast our upstairs neighbors with their ridiculously loud Latin version of an old Ace of Base song. If only the kids weren't try to fall asleep...
I will never understand why people like to listen to music with the base so loud that it causes your neighbor's ground to shake. You know things are bad when you secretly wish your neighbor will stop paying rent and get evicted (or at least get their power turned off so they can't use their stereo system). Enough ranting...

This week has been average at best. Ellie has been recovering from a cold and Harrison has had a little runny nose, but nothing major. Ellie continues to climb on everything. This evening I turned around for one minute and in that time she pushed the step stool toward the kitchen table, climbed up, and took two bites of a cookie that was fresh out of the oven. She also took two steps tonight and is so close to walking. She loves to stand up and cheer for herself ("yeah!"). The best news though is that she *finally* started sleeping through the night on a consistent basis about two weeks ago. It's like my kids have a magic sleeping switch that kicks on around 13 months because Harrison started sleeping through the night around that same time. It's worth the wait though because they are awesome sleepers. They both go to bed at 7pm (but do wake up on the early side) and take 2+ hour naps every day. Since all the other moms get to brag about their kids sleeping through the night at like 2 weeks I thought I should get a turn :)

Harrison picked out a semi-truck "project" at Michaels this week. It came with 26 pieces or so, paint, glue, and sandpaper. That was probably the best dollar I spent all week. He was so anxious to put it together and paint it. He did a great job gluing with daddy and then painting with mommy. He decided to paint an "H" on one side but he couldn't stop there...he added a "D", "M", and "E" on the other sides for daddy, mommy, and Ellie. He did the "H" by himself, but I had to help him with the rest. That night we glued the final pieces on and told him he couldn't play with it until the following morning because the glue needed to dry. So what did he do? He woke up at 5:15am the next day and wanted to play with his truck and was not amused (or willing to give in) when daddy tried to get him to go back to bed.








I learned a valuable lesson this week. Don't jump the gun on your tax returns. I filed our returns this week and a random, unexpected 1099 came in the mail the following day. So I called my dad, "Topper the Tax Man" (pretty good super hero name, don't you think?) and he said "what a great learning experience--now you know not to file too early AND you get to learn how to do an amended return" (always the teacher). Thanks dad. So now I get to do amended returns. What's really pathetic is that I will have to go to all that effort over $2 to the State of Utah and $10 to our federal government.

I took more pictures this week but for some reason they appear to be damaged. I don't know what happened but they have funky colored striped through them. Sorry. You will have to be satisfied with that cute one of Ellie. Don't look to closely at her bangs; there's a reason I don't cut hair for a living.