Blankie Pile

Hello to all!  It's been a great week out here for us, and I hope you've had a similar week.  Brooke has started taking to her 2nd room again.  It had been a while since she played in the box, at least when I was home, but on Saturday she wanted back in, and no amount of stuff was too much to have in there with her.  She said she wanted a book, which I soon found out meant she wanted all the books...

She's also started to enjoy climbing on things.  The couch downstairs is still a little too high for her to climb up on her own, but she can climb on the couch upstairs.  She also likes to climb on us when we're on the floor.  So now she'll climb into our laps, or sit on our faces as demonstrated last week.  She's also started to climb on her Unicorn that she got for Christmas.  I knew she'd eventually like to play with it!

We have a basket down in the main room full of blankets.  It's nice to have so that if we ever are cold we can go get one.  Well, Brooke has made the breakthrough of blankie no longer being one item, but every blanket she sees.  She was trying to pull them all out, so I kindly gave her 4 to play with.  She loved having all the blankets, though it was never enough if she could still see the basket...

Brooke really likes to look at the neighbors animals, and her favorite is the cat that sits on the hot tub behind the house.  The cat was out this morning, and Brooke was very excited to see it!  It's a little hard to see the cat in the picture, but it's there.

Also, Brooke enjoys playing with my dino.  The significance of this toy is that it's the first thing (that I remember) that I ever bought with my own money.  I got it at a neighbors garage sale when I was 5 or 6, and I've had it ever since.  When you push it's head down it drives away, and Brooke loves to chase it around the house!

Well... I believe that's all of the Brooke news.  Monica and I are also doing well.  This past week I officially started a company and put together a webpage in preparation for a (hopefully) soon release to my card game I talked about a few weeks ago.  The website is AshLoreGames.com.  Just as a note, the form on the contact page doesn't get email to me yet... I'm not sure why, but if you try it I won't see it.

Anyway, I hope everyone is doing great!  Have a wonderful week, and thanks for reading!

Valentine's Day

Why hello everyone!  I hope you are all doing super dandy!  This has been a great week over here.  Or... as good as it can be when you get down on the floor to play with your baby and she crawls up and sits on your face!!

It was so funny!  Brooke really enjoys climbing on us whenever she can and loves to sit on our laps most of the time now.

She's also been teething again.  She's getting another 2 molars.  Hopefully they'll both be in and done soon so she can have a little break!  Here she is eating something...  A lot of time when she eats it will hurt in her mouth, and she'll put her finger in her mouth and say "ow"!

For Valentines day we drew secret Valentines.  That means you get a person and you do nice things for them during the week, and then on Valentines you give them a present.  I had Brooke, and I gave her a stuffed kitty (now named Meow) which she loves!  They were inseparable until Monica and Brooke went to the zoo on Friday and on the zoo map there's a picture of a tiger, and now Brooke and her zoo map tiger are inseparable!

One day this past week Monica was feeling sick, so I worked from home.  I put the pack and play in the office and had Brooke with me as well.  She has lately become very good at playing on her own, which was excellent as it allowed me to actually focus on work during the day!  Here she is standing up playing peek-a-boo with me!

Brooke had a couple incidents on Sunday all in rapid succession.  She was sitting on the ground and fell backward and hit her head on the table.  So I picked her up and we gave her some graham cracker bunnies and she was feeding herself and shoved a bunch in and started choking.  I quickly picked her up and helped her get them out, but that started some additional crying.  So sometimes the solution is also the new problem.  Then I tried to set her back on the ground and she immediately started to fall back, I caught her but she started crying again.  So at this point I just held her in my lap until she was calm again.  What a Sunday!!

Our ward is also doing an indexing challenge this week. so Monica and I did some indexing when we got home from church on Sunday.  It's a lot more fun that I remembered it being!

Well... I think those are the highlights from this week.  I hope everyone else is doing well!  Till next week.

Love 'em or Leave 'em

Hello all!  I hope everyone is doing great!  We sure are around here!  Looking over my pictures from this past week it seems to be a little run-centric, but that's probably not a bad thing.  Before we get to that though, we have to do the customary best picture of the week.  Per usual, it's of Brooke.  We got some Valentines candy from Brooke's great aunt Alyson, and she was soo excited!  Just look at that smile.

A couple weeks ago we started all running together as a family again in preparation for an upcoming town 5k.  It was the Valentines Love 'em or Leave 'em race.  Of course that means training runs, and here's Brooke, back in the jogging stroller and ready to go.  I forgot to take a picture like this earlier, so instead of getting a picture of us training, and then another on race day, you just get them both together.

We really like running in our town races, and to be honest, after this past Saturday I wish we had more races each year we could run.  I think they do 3 or 4 currently.  I didn't place this race, but instead pushed Brooke and ran with Monica.  She even beat me!  Everyone had fun, Brooke included, and we got a free pancake breakfast after!

Brooke still enjoys playing with our rugs and door mats.  We recently got one to go by the sink.  I guess we're still giving it a try, so the tag is still on.  You know, in case it isn't as stain resistant as we want or something, then we can go return it.  Anyway, Brooke found out that she can not only peal up the edges of this one, but she can lift and move the whole thing!  I'm surprised it's stayed in the kitchen so far!

Brooke has also started to enjoy feeding herself more.  In fact, sometimes she will stop eating at meals until we let her feed herself.  Usually we just drop pieces of whatever on her tray, but she's started trying/learning how to use a spoon!  She usually puts it in her mouth and then sucks hard to try to get everything off, which works pretty well for things like apple sauce and yogurt, but less well for more solid things, like carrots and apparently ramen noodles.

Anyway, things are going great in these parts, and I hope everyone is looking forward to a great week ahead!

Sushi and the Beast

Hello everyone!  I hope all are doing well this fine week.  Things here have been going well.  I ordered some new running shoes because mine are getting close to their end, and they came in a pretty big box that Brooke has claimed as her second room.  She just started putting toys and books in it one day and then she climbs in and plays and looks at the books and lays down on blankie to take a mini-nap!

On Tuesday night we did Chopped (a food cook off) for mutual.  They split all the kids into 2 groups, and they first had to see how many people could pass off memorizing the theme for the year.  The winning team got all kinds of benefits in the next round (such as a recipe) which was making cupcakes.  Here is a picture of the final products.  It was pretty close :).

Here's another picture of Brooke in her second room, crawling around.

On Friday we had a team building event at work for my project and a few other of the small projects.  We went to an archery place, and I feel like I did alright!  We weren't shooting terribly far, but we also didn't have a great bow/arrow setup either.

I mentioned before that I was working on a card game.  Well, I sent it off to a printer and my copy came back yesterday!  Here's the box.
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And the back of the cards.

And the front.  Monica and I gave it a play once the cards came in and it sure is nice to have real cards to play with!  It's a lot better than flimsy paper that you can see through.  Now that I've got real cards it's time for more play testing as well as checking for any corrections/things that just didn't come out right in the print.  If you're interested in giving it a try let me know!

For Christmas Monica gave me tickets to Beauty and the Beast at the local theater.  That was last night, so we made a date of it and went to get sushi before.  We found a restaurant by our house for our house-aversary that was really good, so we went back.  It was a lot of fun and the sushi was great.  Neither of us is very versed in sushi, but we did get one with raw salmon.  Not very risky, but you gotta start somewhere!  I think next time we'll have to get some sashimi!

And here we are by a poster at the theater.  It was super good, and now I want to see both the old Disney one as well as the new one that's coming out in a month!  After the play we went and got some ice cream on the way home!  Such a night!

Today we took Brooke for a walk after church.  She (for what I believe was the first time) looked up and saw us through the little flap!  She kept looking up and waving at us!

Tonight at dinner she was enjoying playing with her plate.  She was holding it out like a steering wheel and turning it.  Did she think she was driving? No, but she had a lot of fun.  Then she started picking it up and putting it on her head... or... back.

We'll, that brings you up to just about an hour ago, so I guess you're all caught up!  Hope everyone has a wonderful week!