Heather's Walking

Well, sort of. Take a look...

Christmas

We had a wonderful Christmas this year. It was so nice to spend it with our family. We started off this years festivities by going to temple square to see the lights.

Heather stayed nice and warm wrapped in her blankets. She loved seeing all the lights.

It was wonderful to not only see all the beautiful lights, but to feel the wonderful spirit there.


We spent Christmas with the Standages and had such a fun time with all of our family. We went out and played in the snow. Heather LOVES it!

Heather opening presents with Daddy:

Heather woke up from her nap with a crazy hairdo!

Oh...I guess you cant really see it, but it's a cute picture anyway...

We had a great time celebrating Christmas with our family, and are sad that we didn't get to see our other family. We were able to talk to them all and we were also able to talk to Nathan. He is doing great, and is loving Alaska! We love our family! We are so grateful for all the gifts that we received this Christmas, but there is one gift that we are and will always be thankful for, and that is the gift of the atonement of Christ.

(I was going to put a picture of Heather as she played the part of the angel in the Nativity story but I guess we didn't get a picture...this will have to do. She is our angel, and a wonderful gift from God)

As always, the break always seems too short, but we are happy that there is only one semester left. In other news, we just got our grades back, and both of us got straight A semesters!

Heather is really enjoying mommy being home all day! Here is a sample of what our life is like during the day:

Christmas Card

In case you haven't already seen our "Christmas Card", go ahead and take a look. http://arclite.byu.edu/dan/christmas2009/

Yay! We are almost there!

The last several weeks have been SUPER busy! Daniel has been working on his graduate school applications, and has submitted two out of four. We are excited about that, and can't wait until we find out where we will be going. We are taking our finals this next week, and after Thursday at 10am we will be done with another semester! Only one left! Well...undergraduate education that is.
Well, we know why you are really reading this blog...Heather is doing great! She gets cuter and cuter every day. She is 9 months old, and weighs 23.25lbs, and is 28 inches long. She is a chunk. Here are some photos of our recent adventures:

We celebrated Thanksgiving at Mom and Dad Standage's house. Here's a picture of Heather helping to put the whipped cream on a YUMMY peanut butter pie.

After we were done "painting" with pudding, Heather was such a mess she was in bad need of a picture. :)

Heather and daddy dancing to our live music at our ward Christmas Party!


Family Photo at the Christmas Party.

Heather was the first one on Santa's lap, and she was one of the only kids that wasn't scared of him.


Heather learning what snow tastes like.

Pudding Painting

Today Heather and I decided to paint. I made some pudding, taped some paper to her tray, and pretty soon...voila! Heather had a beautiful (and yummy) painting for daddy. Here is some of the footage. Enjoy!

The last part is my favorite!

Hair Bow Party!!

There is a friend in my ward that is hosting a hair bow party! For those of you with little girls, or those that like to wear cute bows yourself, this would be a great opportunity to not only purchase a cute bow for a really great price, but help out a friend trying to start a business. It would even make a great Christmas present for one of your friends. Here is a link with all of the information:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=193242168543#/event.php?eid=193242168543

If you don't have facebook, here is the link for her website online:
marciwallace.etsy.com

Hope to see you at the party!

Story Time

Heather has become a lot more interested in reading books. She still tries to eat them most of the time when I am reading to her, but at night when Daniel is reading to her she seems very involved in the story. She is also learning to turn off the light. Here's a video. Hope you enjoy!

Halloween and other stuff

To start off our Halloween festivities, we had family home evening with the Standage family. We had dinner, a lesson, and then we carved pumpkins. It was lots of fun!

Heather had a lot of fun helping...

But not so much fun washing up.

Halloween weekend we went up to Park City to have a murder mystery weekend with our friends from Georgia, the Hortons. There were two other couples there, and we had LOTS of fun. It is a lot different when you are the only one with a baby though. We dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood, Granny, and the woodsman (complete with skinned wolf). Here we see little red attacking the wolf.

In other news, Heather is becoming much more mobile and active. I used to be able to do homework when she was awake, but that is becoming much harder now. I have to keep getting her out of sticky situations. Like this one:

She LOVES her baths and playing with a kitchen sponge that I cut in half. (It was new.) It doubles as a toothbrush. :)

Great news! Only 4 more weeks of classes for Daniel and I! We will be done with our second to last semester! We have applied for graduation, registered for our last semester of classes, and are so excited to be (almost) done with our undergraduate education!

The Long Awaited Update

We are sorry that it has been SO long since we have blogged. There has been a lot going on and the blog isn't at the top of our to-do list...sorry. But since I would rather do anything than study for my Stats 221 exam, I will provide an update. :)

We got the chance to go to a BYU football game as a family. It was a lot of fun. Heather had a hard time at first, but she soon fell asleep (how she could sleep through that is a mystery to me). When she woke up, she was chipper and enjoyed (well, let us enjoy) the game.

To begin the crazy month of October, I got my Wisdom teeth removed. That was a painful experience, but I feel much better now that they are gone. I was in a lot of pain before I got them out. Daniel was a great help, he even got up in the middle of the night with Heather!! (Which he had not done much in the past.) My family also was a lot of help. They came to Utah for October conference this year. Hannah and John stayed with us for a couple of days. That was really nice. I don't think I did my dishes once while Johannah was here. I was way impressed with her willingness to serve. Thanks Hannah!

The Monday after conference, Heather somehow got the flu. She screamed a large part of Monday night. I woke up on Tuesday with a massive sore throat, and Tuesday night, I knew exactly why she spent the night screaming on Monday (though I can't help but wonder if all that crying made her throat a lot worse). My body was achy, my throat hurt so bad, my head hurt, I had no energy, and the list goes on. So I guess we have officially all had the swine flu at our house. No, we did not grow snouts. Yes, we are all feeling better!

Rachel just came up for fall break. It was nice to have her here. We went shopping, and she babysat, we talked, and she babysat, she went to see a friend, and she babysat. She babysat a lot while she was here. I had some things come up and it was really nice to have Rachel here to take care of Heather. Besides her babysitting, we really had a great time together. It was really nice to catch up. It was fun to have "girl talk" (face to face), and to see how much she has matured since she left home. Thanks Rachel for babysitting so much, and for being such great company! Oh, and just so she doesn't feel left out: she did the dishes once too. :)

Heather is really enjoying all of the colors of fall. We played in the leaves last night for part of FHE. It was fun to see her investigating the leaves not only with her eyes but with her mouth. We are not excited for the time when it will be too cold to play outside.

We have been super busy with school. Daniel has also been busy with work. We are just trying to plow through until graduation. We are so happy that at this time next year we will be done with our undergraduate education and silly general education classes (that we really don't want to take...for example Stats221)! We will both be doing what we really want to be doing. Daniel will be working with professors learning and doing what he wants to in research, and I will be a full-time mom. We can't wait to move on to a new phase in our lives.

We love you all!

Family Update

This past Monday we had a break from school for Labor Day. We made the most of it, hiking Y mountain in the morning with my parents' ward, and then spending the afternoon at their house in Cedar Hills. We also took some time to celebrate Stephanie's 21st birthday. My mom and Stehpanie made a chocolate raspberry cake and some peach ice cream, both of which were delicious. It was fun to see siblings and cousins and have a good time together as a family.

We took some time to do family photos. However, Heather stole the show (in my opinion) with her monstrous grins! This photo is only the tip of the iceberg!

Heather has been eating solids for a few weeks now. She seems to enjoy it, especially when she gets to hold the spoon. Recently we've just been trying to get as much as we can in her before she gets impatient, and then we turn the spoon over to her and she tries to do the rest herself. Very little food actually gets in her mouth, but she's happy to just chew on the spoon. She's cutting her second bottom tooth, so she's actually happy to chew on just about anything!


We love you guys. Have a great week!

New Teeth

We've been anticipating Heather beginning her teething phase for a while, but we finally have visual confirmation. A little stump of a tooth is poking out of her bottom gums! We are feeling a mixture of excitement and horror--we are so happy she's growing up, but we don't enjoy dealing with the growing pains. Oh well, this too shall pass...but we welcome any suggestions on how to make it pass quicker!

In other news, Stephanie just celebrated her 21st birthday on Friday! Most of the day was a typical day--classes, work, etc. However, we did have a special dinner at Stephanie's request--blue cheese & bacon burgers with homemade fries. It really hit the spot. As an added bonus, Stephanie's sister Rachel came over (for the long weekend) and watched Heather while we went out for a date to see Up. Unfortunately, it was sold out at the theater, so we ended up going to Blockbuster and eventually we agreed on Labyrinth. It has been about 15 years since I've seen that movie, and although we had a good time, I don't think I would mind waiting another 15 before watching it again!

We're excited to celebrate Stephanie's birthday and Labor Day with my family tomorrow! For those of you that aren't so close, we love you and can't wait to see you!

Heather's Laughs

Heather has been laughing for weeks or maybe even months now. She's always been a happy baby, but she has recently become a big laugher. We put together some video of her laughing...hope you enjoy!

She's also starting to become more vocal. Hopefully we'll be able to post some video soon of Heather "talking."

Anniversary!

We celebrated our 2nd anniversary yesterday. We can't believe that it has been two years...Life is so short! It has been a wonderful two years, and we still love each other. :)

We actually went out to celebrate our anniversary on Saturday. We started off the morning by going to the temple. It was great to be able to get away from life (and Heather) for a little bit. That afternoon we went to Trafalga and played miniature golf. It was a lot of fun. Heather loves being outside, so she was pretty good. Then we went out to dinner at Chili's. Heather wasn't so happy there. She really wanted to eat with us. She kept diving for our food or our water...I think she's ready to start solids on a more regular basis. We followed dinner up with some shopping. Daniel needed some new pants, and I needed some new shoes (my old tennis shoes died last week), and I wanted/needed a new skirt. [I guess I didn't NEED one, but it is a cute brown skirt that goes with just about any shirt I own, and I guess I do need variety :) ]

Yesterday was a very normal day, except for the evening. We had dinner, and I made a Chocolate Chip Pound Cake for dessert. It was super good and very moist. We put Heather to bed, and then we celebrated by doing pedicures and foot massages at home. I found a recipe for foot scrub that works wonders! The best part about is that it is homemade! My feet feel great! Daniel's reaction was, "I feel like a new man." His heels were very cracked and...well...gross, but they look and apparently feel a lot better now. We will have to keep doing it.

We really enjoyed our weekend and our day yesterday. But we have enjoyed our two years together even more!

PS. We do have pictures, but blogger isn't loading them right now. I will try to load them later.

Home Stretch

We're on the home stretch--the last 3 or 4 weeks of our summer, and the last year here at BYU! We're much more excited about the latter than the former, but we will be grateful when things cool down a bit in autumn.

It was wonderful to see Mom and Rachel this week. Rachel is about to start her first year at Dixie State, and they stayed with us two nights before driving down to St. George. She seems excited to go, and we think she's going to do a great job. The only thing she's going to have a hard time with is keepin' those boys away!

Yesterday we went to the library to check out a book. Stephanie and I have been reading together this summer, and we recently finished To Kill a Mockingbird. It's fun to read together, and I haven't done hardly any casual reading since before my mission. Anyway, we're about to start A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain. It should be fun.

We love our new piano, we love our cute giggly baby, we love the warm summer (when the heat doesn't kill us), and we love you all. Have a great week!

Update

The month of July has been one big blur to me. So much has happened in such a short period of time, and Stephanie and I are always talking about how quick the summer has gone by. Not too long and we'll be back in school again. Our only comfort in that regard comes from knowing that it's our last year (as undergrads)!

Stephanie did a pretty good job of documenting the first half of the month, with camping, family reunions, Heather's blessing, and the GRE. Recently, I went on a trip to North Carolina for some job training. It was nice to be back in the southeast, but I was really glad to be home with my girls! After picking me up from the airport this last Monday, we went to the Oquirrh Mountain temple open house and then visited some friends in Taylorsville. Tuesday it was back to the grind again!

We've been saving up for a piano for a while, and a local store had a sale recently. We found a used piano just our size and within our budget [thanks to some help from Mom and Dad Coleman...Stephanie wonders if we'll ever get Christmas again ;) ]. We spent a good portion of the week trying to figure out how to get it from Orem to Provo. Dad Standage got off work early and brought his pickup to Orem, we loaded the piano, brought it home, and carried it up the stairs (with the help of some elders in our ward). The piano goes great with our front room, and we're so glad to have it!

Enough about us adults, we know why you really read this blog...for Heather updates! She is as cute as ever, and she is now a professional at rolling on the floor. She can roll from her back to her stomach to her back again, and that will get her across just about any room in our apartment. She is laughing and giggling and exploring everything with her mouth. She's such a hoot and we're lucky to have her.

Below are two pictures Stephanie captured recently. The first shows Heather showing off her contagious smile, while the second shows the effects of her movements as she naps.





We love you all!

Cow Appreciation Day

This last Friday for our semi-date, we dressed up as cows for the Chick-fil-A Cow Appreciation Day. We were dressed up enough to get two meals, and a kids meal! What a great deal. Look dumb...get food. I guess we just felt kind of weird because the closest Chick-fil-A was in the mall. It was very fun, and we enjoyed our meals. You can't really see Heather's spots, but she was dressed up too.

The reason our Friday night date was only a semi-date, is because Daniel had to take the GRE Saturday morning. He did very well! We are glad that it is over with.

In other news, my family was here this past week, we had family reunions galore, and we were able to bless Heather. It was a special experience. Here are some highlights.

Camping with the Standage clan.

Grandpa meeting Heather for the first time.

Heather and Uncle John-John. I thought this picture was priceless.

The Grandpa's and Daddy at the baby blessing dinner.

Heather's first swimming trip in St. George.

This is the only picture we got where she was semi-smiling. She actually really enjoyed it.

It has been a great two weeks, but we are ready to get back to normal life. Love you all!

Our Heather B.

Heather is growing up so fast! She smiles often, and has started giggling. In the past, she hasn't really laughed before, but Daniel has gotten some very hearty laughs the last two days, and it is music to our ears! She has also been rolling over on a regular basis when she is done with her nap, she just hasn't rolled over on the floor for me. She did for Daniel on Saturday. But everytime I go into her room to pick her up from her nap, she has rolled over. So she can do it (for real)! Here are some cute pics!





Heather is really starting to develop more of a personality and it is fun to see her learn and grow!

Father's/Birth day

This week we celebrated Daniel's birthday and Father's Day. We had a picnic and went to Beauty and The Beast at the Scera with Mom, Dad, and Laura for Daniel's birthday. It was so good! We really enjoyed it. For Fathers Day, Heather and I made some yummy breakfast. Daniel's favorite: sausage, eggs, orange julius, and french toast (He actually likes pancakes better). Daniel only had one meeting at 10:30 yesterday, so it was nice to have him home in the morning.

Daniel is so wonderful and such a great father to Heather. He treats my like a princess, and makes me feel good about myself, he works hard to keep food on the table, and the rent paid, he is so patient, and makes Heather an me so happy! I love you so much Daniel!

Happy Father's Day to our dads! We love you!

Weekend Update

This week was crazy. Between work, Nathan going to the MTC, a work party, and taking care of Heather, we've been stretched to the limit. Just to give you an idea, as I was packing up to leave work on Friday I realized that I had forgotten to stop and eat lunch. I am definitely not one to skip meals, so needless to say Stephanie and I were really looking forward to the weekend.

Friday morning Stephanie and I agreed to do a mall date for Friday night, including eating out (even though it wasn't really in our budget). Instead, when we got to the mall Stephanie sat us down at a table right outside the mall and pulled out a "fast food" meal she had prepared herself--complete with burgers, fries, fry sauce, and milkshakes. It was very delicious, and a lot of fun to have our own "fast food" at the mall. After that, our mall date consisted of Stephanie and I going to various stores and picking out outfits for each other to try on. It was a lot of fun.

Heather is getting biggerer and cuterer every day. She's the Apple of our i!

Elder Coleman

Heather and I had the chance to drop Nathan, now Elder Coleman off at the MTC this morning. I was anticipating not being able to say too many goodbyes and stuff, but they really wanted me in and out. They seemed even a little bit reluctant to let us take this one picture. But, Elder Coleman is now safely there, no Swine Flu, and he is ready to go!


We made him a nice last home-cooked meal this morning our International Flapjack and Sausage Breakfast (sausage, eggs, pancakes, and orange julius). We enjoyed it, and he certainly did. He fidgeted around all morning, we went through his luggage again, he talked on the phone to the family, and now he is off. I can't believe my little brother is a missionary! It seems like just yesterday when we were running around in the mountains, building treehouses, wrestling, and of course involving ourselves in the little bit of sibling rivalry that occasionally happened. :) So much is changing! I guess you can't stay young forever. We will miss him, but I know he will be a great missionary serving the Lord in the Anchorage Alaska Mission.

Family Photo

Well, we finally took a family picture a couple of weeks ago. We want to wait until Heather's just a little bit older before we take her in for professional photos, but these turned out really well. Hope you like them!

She Did It!!!

Daniel and I walked into Heather's room this morning at 6:30 because Heather started making noises and we thought she might be waking up. We peeked over the bed only to find that Heather had ROLLED OVER! We were so surprised! I am not sure if it was an accident, or if she is starting to figure it out. I put her on her tummy a little bit to see if she would do it again, and she got really close, but she didn't quite make it. We will be doing a lot of tummy time today to see if she can do it again. If she does, we need to be more careful where we put her. If not, we need to be more careful where we put her. She did it once and she can do it again. :)

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

It's been a pretty good spring/summer "vacation" so far (the mild sarcasm is due to the fact that we are working almost as hard even though school is out). My favorite job is being a dad, and I love the time I get to spend with Stephanie and Heather. I definitely don't get as many special experiences with Heather, but as you can see from the pictures that we have fun together.



Unfortunately, I have a couple of jobs that pay me to spend a few hours per day away from my two favorite girls (ok...maybe 10 hours is more than a few). Regardless, I am loving what I am doing almost as much as I love being with my family. I love finding ways to use technology to advance learning and science.

Speaking of work, I am pretty excited to be going on two trips this summer. In June, I will be spending 3 days in Piscataway, NJ at a conference planning and implementing an open platform for learning/training technology. In July, I will be spending 5 days in Durham, NC at a conference receiving training on how to use software to analyze and visualize genomes. Not only is this exactly the kind of thing I want to do for grad school, but it is also very close to where I want to go to grad school (Duke). This will be a great opportunity for me to network.

The only regret I have about this summer is not being able to bring Stephanie and Heather along. We almost bought a plane ticket for them to come out and visit New York City while I am in NJ, but we would not have had enough time to enjoy ourselves. Oh well, one of these days when we're rich and famous we'll be able to travel the world and visit all sorts of places. For now, we'll just be content with helping Heather learn about her new and exciting world.

We love you all. Can't wait to see you again!

Growing Pains

I think Heather must be growing this week, because she has been fussy, and eating tons, and not sleeping very well. Today she slept in until 10 (okay 9:40), went back down at 11, woke up at 12-ish (we went shopping and as we pushed her over the tiles as you walk into walmart, she woke up), then went down at 1:30, and has been sleeping ever since. It is nice to have her sleeping so much today because I have been able to get a lot done, but it also has made me realize how much I miss her. Here are some pictures that we took this week. I know it is a lot, but she is just so darn cute I couldn't leave these out!

Heather has been scooting. The other day, she scooted out of her pajamas and her blanket. She left a little cocoon behind her.

She didn't quite make it all the way out of her PJ's.

Daddy showing off his talented girl.

Helping Mommy sort through her clothes. She is already into the 3-6 month sizes, and truth be told, she is a little big for some of them.

She was so smiley and happy I wanted to take some pictures, but you just can't capture everything on camera I guess...

Sound asleep in her car seat. Finally!!

Hope you enjoyed these. Love you all!