Goodbye Baby!

The time of Adria's babyhood is quickly drawing to a close. We are so proud of her! She is walking! Sometime in the last two days she finally decided that walking was as good as crawling. Today she followed me from the kitchen all the way through the living room to see her Daddy without falling down. I cannot believe how quickly this day has come. People tell you to appreciate your newborns because it goes so fast, but no matter how hard I tried to appreciate it, it still went too fast! I love all the stages, but it's always a little sad to move on. When I was looking through my CDs of pictures to find a cute picture of Adria, I came across the Christmas pictures my mom sent me that I forgot to look through. There are so many adorable pictures, but I will just post a few of my very favorites!

Adria charmed her way into Aunt Jessica's stocking....And Uncle Josh's hat!Here is Ben buried in a pile of snow. It took them 15 minutes to dig him out.This is my girls with their Great-Grandma Stoddard, my dad's mother. She is an awesome grandma and they both adore her! Julia was so excited about Christmas, she just loved every minute of it. Isn't this just the sweetest picture? Julia always reads her sister books. Our little family.

All the excitement of her first Christmas made Adria quite tired.

Picture update

One of the many good things about having such cute kids is that I love taking pictures of them. Especially when the picture is of both of them together! Over the weekend, I got a couple of pictures worth sharing. For a while I bought the sliced olives because they were easier for Julia to eat. Last time though I got the whole olives because they were a lot cheaper. Julia had a lot of fun with them. (She has really weird taste in food, she loves olives, hot dogs, sweet pickles and green beans, but she hates hamburger, apples, strawberries, brownies and chocolate chip cookies). We were also down in San Diego and stopped by to do initiatories at the temple. Julia really wanted to go in and kept trying different tactics to get Ben to let her follow me in. "I'll use Mommy's recommend actually" was the one she kept saying over and over. I don't know where she comes up with this stuff. I guess the rest of my pictures have to do with food. In 2007, I got Ben a dwarf orange tree because he LOVES oranges. Last year our awful neighbors stole the oranges before they were ripe. But, this year we got two oranges. Yesterday we ate one of them. It was so yummy!! I wished for a whole garden of orange trees. The girls were very upset that there wasn't very much to go around. The second orange is all Ben's and he is saving it until the perfect moment. Anyway, I thought I would show you a picture of our little orange tree behind the fence we had to put up to keep little 2 year olds from destroying it. Then today I gave Adria some spinich-filled raviolli. She could not get enough of it and ate it so frantically that I was quite worried about her breathing it in. Here she is saying "mmmmm" which she does all the time when she really likes what she is eating. So cute! And this is her licking her tray clean. Yum!She wasn't even that hungry since she had already eaten crackers, peas, and bread with jam. So far, Adria doesn't share any of Julia's aversions to food and will eat whatever we give her. Thank you Adria! Finally, when I was taking pictures of Adria and her spinich, Julia really wanted me to take a picture of her eating her peas and pasta and it was just too cute not to share. I just have to smile when I look that happy face!

So true...

I saw this picture today and it was so true I couldn't really laugh too much. I will never forget reading a story about a mother who was so excited to move from her small apartment into a big house so that her kids wouldn't always be underfoot, but she found that even in her new house, her children always wanted to play where ever she was. That pretty much describes motherhood with two kids. I really do love my girls though, and I'm glad that I get to be a full time mom. Heavenly Father has really blessed me that way. I am grateful that my girls always want me to be there. I love them so much!

Random Things

I haven't taken any pictures lately, but I just wanted to type up a quick update of random things we have been doing. Adria is getting so close to walking!! It's really amazing how fast those little newborns change into toddlers. She now takes three or four steps before falling down. She does it all day long so I know that walking is not far off. We have progessed with her sleeping to a point where she will still wake up once or twice a night, but now she will fall back asleep as soon as I let her know that I'm still here. At least I don't have to sit and feed her for 10 minutes a few times a night. As soon as Julia is fully settled into her big girl bed, we will move Adria into the crib and reclaim our bedroom. I have to say that of all the difficulties I have had with my girls, the sleep issues tire me out the fastest. That said, I love those girls to pieces. Adria has developed a great love of animals and her favorite thing right now is to have me read her books with pictures of animals. It is really sweet because she gives each animal a kiss when I tell her the sound. Something unique about Adria is that she likes showers! Julia hates getting water on her face, but the other day I used the shower to wash off Adria and she loved it. She could not get enough of it. It is really fun to me to find all the little differences between the girls. Julia's favorite toy this week is her umbrella. Who knew that a simple umbrella could keep her imagination going for so long. I had found a beautiful pink silk and wood umbrella with flowers painted on it at a garage sale a while back and Julia wanted to play with it all day long. Unfortunately it was a full sized umbrella and she was having trouble with it. Rachelle found a little toddler sized princess umbrella at WalMart (your favorite and mine) and so I got that for her and she takes it anywhere she can. Also, today Rachelle and I took the girls and Zach up to the Spectrum in Irvine and Julia and Tori had so much fun! So did I! We let them play in the water fountain and then they got to ride on the Carosel (Julia keeps saying over and over "Julia ride shorsey and Tori ride deer round and round really fast!" one day we'll teach her that horse doesn't start with an s) Then we went to this little pet store that my friend Ashley told us about and the girls got to take one of the puppies for a walk. Rachelle named him Snowball since was very fluffy and white and we got two leashes for Snowball so that Julia and Tori could each hold one. I wish I could have gotten it on video because it was really cute. The girls really enjoyed taking the puppy on a walk. Julia even got to finish the day off with dinner at Corner Bakery (yummy!!) and ice cream from Golden Spoon. What a lucky little girl!