CURRENTLY LISTENING

These crazy kids won a cover contest on Perez Hilton's blog, aaaaaand it's incredible. Seriously. I don't like people messing with my Adele, but after hearing this I bow down. This just makes me more confused as to why some people are famous singers and other are not. The whole process is so wacky.

Warning: their emoting is a bit dorky for such a tight shot so just close your eyes.

CURSE YOU ELMO

So Elmo is totally a Rock Star in the baby world, right? If Finley hears "La La La La, La La La La, Elmo's World..." She'll stop whatever she's doing and sit still. Like as in, sit of her own volition and stop moving for an entire twenty minutes. It's remarkable. I don't know what sort of voodoo witchcraft went in to developing him but he puts Finley into a trance. She'll dance and laugh, but she is totally in the Elmo zone. For the record my mom says I was never interested in Sesame Street, but oddly enough I liked Mr. Roger's, I'm not sure what that says about me. Anyway, the reason I curse Elmo's name is that his theme song gets stuck in your head like none other. It's like that scene in How I Met Your Mother when Marshall's car only plays that I Would Walk 5,000 Miles song.

And now so you can have both of these song in your head head for the rest of eternity like me, enjoy:

TEN FAVS

Ever since I saw this post on Cup of Jo I really wanted to document Finley's ten favorite toys. I think it would be a fantastic thing to do yearly as another way to show progression. If I had done this post the same time last year these pictures would have been slightly different. She is just now becoming truly picky on what she'll play with, except of course if it's something Brad and I are holding. Then it doesn't matter what it is, she inevitably wants it immediately. Like it's a life or death situation and the world will end if she doesn't have it now. But other that that fun trait she does have some favorites that she goes back to every day.

1. Piglet: She has a love/hate relationship with Piglet because she knows it's bed time or nap time when I pick up Piglet for her to snuggle. She'll push him away in protest then change her mind and want him back right away for comfort.

2. B Book: This was one of my favorite books as a kid because I thought it was written for me (B is for Bridget, right?). So when I saw this at DI I couldn't say no to the 25cent price tag and it has more than paid for itself. I encourage her to pick out a book before bed and she has picked this one every night for the past week, plus today she randomly went and got it out of her room to read.

3. Tape recorder: She found this in a box in our closet last week. It's from my days as a sports reporter for the Daily Universe (that's right, I'm fancy, be impressed). She loves pushing the buttons, I guess because they are a little more of a challenge than cell phones and remotes.

4. Mrs. Tea Pot: This is the perfect trifecta of opening/closing, singing, and buttons. My favorite part is that randomly Mrs. Tea Pot sings one of the songs in a fake British accent. And I'm guessing I'm A Little Tea Pot was too expensive because she doesn't have it in her repertoire. What kind of Tea Pot are you?!

5. Candlesticks: This one is weird. But for some reason she LOVES these. It was one of those items we left on the lower shelves because they aren't breakable. You can see the paint chipping from when she has thrown them down the hall. She's not much of a thrower but for some reason these are just the right weight and size for her liking. I've just resolved to call them artfully distressed, I totally meant for them to be chipped.

6. Containers with Lids: She really enjoys taking lids off and on, and these two pose a special challenge. The Butt Paste is too big for her to unscrew and the Mouth Wash has a safety lid. Both are empty so if she ever manages to get them opened I'm not too concerned. But for now they are like baby rubik's cubes. (NOTE: Right after I wrote this I turned around and she had finally managed to open the Butt Paste for the first time. I guess there was still a tiny bit left in the bottom because it was smeared on her pants. Fun.)

7. Keys: She doesn't go for the fake kind so we let her carry the spare set around the house. We have old fashion doors where every door nob has a key hole below it and they are only about two and half feet off the ground. She loves trying to "unlock" closed doors with these keys. The other day she stood in the hallway trying to unlock the bathroom for about twenty minutes laughing the whole time. I really think she thought she had foiled our plans to keep her from playing in the toilet.

8. Shoes: One of her recent favorite games is getting one shoe at a time out of her room and bringing it to me to help her put them on. Then she'll take that shoe off and proceed to the next shoe. Once she finds a shoe she likes she wears that one shoe on the one foot around the house for the rest of the day.

9. Hair bands: These are her bracelets. If she ever sees one on my wrist she wants it to be on her wrist immediately. I'm pretty sure I've lost hundreds of these out and about over the last few months.

10. Tire Gauge: I know what you're thinking. How did she even discover that she liked this as a toy. Well the problem is she LOVES pens but she can open and unclick every version of a pen. Usually she isn't fooled by imposters but this was an acceptable substitute for a pen. The gauge reading pulls out and and it has a clip - all sorts of fun! She's allowed to play with this until she starts beating the coffee table with it like a drum stick. Not only does that leave nasty marks it's really loud.

So that concludes the toy tour! She also has some favorite big toys but I didn't count those in the collection (toy shopping cart, kitchen chairs, the printer). Hopefully I remember to do this in the future. It was fun whittling down her toy collection to her favorites. I guess we have boxes of toys to get rid of now!

HOLDING OUR BREATH

It has been a wee bit crazy in our house the last few months. We aren't totally out of the woods but we have crossed the biggest hurdle. We finally have all our applications in for the various residency programs that we are applying to, 23 to be exact. It was an excruciating process, they truly make it much harder than needed, but I went to work full time as Brad's executive secretary and I figured everything out. So if anyone needs to hire a personal assistant to help them apply to school I'm here for you. I'm available 11:00am - 2:00pm and in the evenings after 8:00pm (aka when Finley is asleep - let's just say that she amounted to negative work completed every time I attempted to get things accomplished while she was awake). Now comes the hard part, waiting to hear which schools would like to interview him. He already has two interviews but we are crossing our fingers for at least a few more. After the interview process is over at the end of December selections will be made around mid January. We rank our schools from least to worst and then the highest choice on our list that picks Brad will be the winner. We will be committed to that program and that is where we will be moving next summer. It's a lot to take - but we've been preparing for this for a long time. I'm more anxious than anything to just know where we will be a year from now. Each program only takes 1-3 residents so this is quite the rat race. But we feel like Brad has done everything possible to make himself a very attractive candidate. We keep saying that if we don't get in, then it just wasn't meant to be.

So if we seem a little on edge it's that our life is about to change dramatically and we aren't sure how or in what way. Isn't that what they call the "spice of life?" Either way it seems we will pretty much be holding our breath until mid-January. Yeesh!

ANATOMY OF AN OUTFIT

Just another regular morning around these parts. Finley getting into everything and attempting to somehow put it on. Just be grateful I didn't post the one of her with four pairs of my underwear around her neck.

PS - I secretly think it's adorable when you see toddlers out in public clearly having won the outfit battle that day. You know, the ones wearing a swim suit, rain boots, and a feather boa. I just nod my head and think, "Rock on kid. Rock on."

BAG O TRICKS

The stars aligned and Finley was in an especially cooperative mood so we grabbed the camera as quickly as possible so we could catch up on documenting all of her "tricks." We are really bad about taking video so it's amazing that she was being so agreeable. 

 It's a bit long, but I'm too lazy to edit it. So here are the cliff notes, watch for:

- High five

- Clapping

- Blowing a kiss

- Doing a Native American chant

- Waving 

- Saying "bye" and "slide"

- Walking (she's been walking for almost 7 weeks but we hadn't documented it yet, oops)

- Doing her fake laugh 

- Pointing to her teeth

- Trying to jump

- Doing her shoulder dance

- Being extra cute in just her diaper (we usually strip her down for dinner)

One last note. Focus on Finley and not me - I look a hot mess, and is that really what I sound like? Yikes.

THE HELP

Girlfriend loves the broom. No complaints here! Now I can FINALLY get back to eating bon bons and watching my stories. You know, fulfilling what Brad thinks I do all day anyway.

10 YEARS

Ten years ago today I made the following entry in my journal:

"They are saying that this day will live in infamy, just like Pearl Harbor. It's hard to think of it in those terms but with everything that's happened today it must be true."

(Justin Lane/Pool/AP Photo)

I was a freshman at BYU just a few months out of high school and living on my own for the first time. That morning I had Mass Communications 101 with my roommate Sage. We were walking to our 8AM class up the long hill onto campus from Helaman Halls when we started overhearing people say, "A plane hit the twin towers." And from there the comments we overheard kept getting stranger, "The White house is on fire!" We couldn't make sense of it, in fact I remember thinking that this must be some kind of prank. I was able to process the thought of a plane accidentally hitting a building, but I couldn't begin to understand a terrorist attack. Or what that would mean. We arrived at our class where our teacher tried to connect our state of the art classroom up to a television feed, but couldn't get it to work. Welcome to higher education. Wasn't this supposed to be a class on mass communication? Eventually our professor started asking everyone to volunteer the general information they had heard. She started writing each comment on the board, each more awful than the last. Most of the rumors ended up not being true. That just goes to show the confusion every was experiencing at the time. After about fifteen minutes we were dismissed to go find the closest television possible. We heard that the Wilkinson Center had televisions on but we happened to be one of the few people with a TV in our room. We thought our roommates might still be asleep so we rushed back to the dorms and started watching CNN just in time to watch the first tower fall. From there the day is a blur but it wasn't until the special devotional that President Bateman held that I first cried. I don't remember much of what he said, except that they were words of comfort, but at the end he asked everyone to sing Come Come Ye Saints. And to this day I still can't sing the phrase, "And should we die before our journey's through, Happy day! All is well!" without remembering the Marriott Center filled with all those students overcome with so many emotions.

I don't personally know anyone who died. But thinking how some one who did lose a loved one on 9/11 must feel, then multiply that by 3,000 plus all the resulting military deaths and injuries and it becomes truly overwhelming. There is no other way to express it but to say it's tragic.

One of the saddest aspects for me is that a day will come when I'll have to explain 9/11 to Finley. She'll live quite a few years before she even knows terrorism exists and then she'll learn that evil things can happen. Even in our country. I'm not looking forward to that day. It used to be hard to think that a Pearl Harbor could happen in my lifetime, but not anymore. 9/11 does live in infamy, it's a day I'll never forget.

AUGUST IS DEPRESSING

So August is kind of awful, right? It's hot. Summer is winding down. Everything is brownish. Summer movies are over. School starts again (although that might be a plus for those parents). The new season of Parks and Rec STILL hasn't started. See!? It's lame. So in honor of this white-washed, no-fun time of year we did a whole lot of nothing. In fact I took basically no pictures other than the first part of the month when I was still in Utah. So in order to stop my reoccurring dream where I drown in blog posts I should be doing, I'm going to do a catch-all and recap August all in one post and pretend like this month never happened.

I don't know about your family but we traditionally water our plants in pjs. What's that you say? This looks to be about 11AM and Finley was still not dressed? Yeah yeah yeah. We were on vacation, some days it's just not worth spoiling the mood.

Finley's cousin Avery had a birthday party while we were there. So we got to join in on all the bubblicious fun. They had a kiddy size pool filled with bubble soap and I think almost every kid tasted it but only two fell in. That's pretty impressive! I didn't get any pictures of the decor but Angie had it decorated so adorable. Yummy food, good company, and fun for the kids. You can't ask for much more.

I did a lot of sewing while I was at my moms. She actually has a sewing room easily accessible while Finley took naps. As you can see I didn't get much done while the wee one was awake - she's a little too helpful.

 

Bath time at grandmas! My mom has a west facing window right above her bath and every night I would admire how great the lighting was. So the last night we were there I made sure to get some pictures of Finley.

And this was in the Denver Airport. I've spent my fair share of layovers there and I have to say it's one of my favorite airports. Is that sad to have a favorite airport? It's just so open and it's a breeze getting through. We had two hours to kill and found a quiet corner to watch a movie and run around without disturbing anyone.

TADA! August is so over! September, you are only slightly more awesome mainly because you are cooler (temp wise), new TV starts up, and trees start to turn all colorful. It's hard being the mediocre opening act for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.

ASPEN GROVE TAKE FIVE

This is my final post on Aspen Grove. I swear! We had such a fun week and I would recommend this vacation to anyone. Really. I don't think a better bang for your buck exists.  The following is kind of a mishmash of leftover pictures from the end of the week:

So I totally lied about only having one family portrait from our vacation... this is the third of 3. The one from the pool is still my favorite. But I can not get over that view. I die!

Exhausted! This really sums up the week. Too much fun was had that we almost needed a vacation from our vacation.

Garrett's sunglasses.

Ken's Family Portrait - GO COUGS!

I love those dark eyelashes, Cover Girl needs to bottle that!

Scott and Morgan soaking up summer.

ASPEN GROVE TAKE FOUR - THE POOL

Having ready access to a pool for a week was fantastic - especially now that Finley can actually somewhat enjoy the water. Once the sun set she would turn a little blue, but before that she usually had some fun. Her favorite thing was to try and push me away from her, as if she could swim on her own. And her second favorite was having Brad throw her up in the air. She would kick her legs mid air which which made it look like she was positioning herself to do a swan dive. It's too bad here in Alton we don't have easy access to a pool otherwise I think we might have a little swim monkey on our hands.


Chris, Angie, Avery, and the new baby staying sorta afloat on a raft.



Bryn, Grandma, Finners, me.



That Avery is such a sweetheart. Look at those cheekies!