Your butt is big!

So I almost forgot about the funniest part of the trip out here. On the last day of the drive after a pretty long break from driving, I took Evelyn to the bathroom right before we got back on the road. I went too the bathroom also, and when I pulled down my pants and sat on the toilet Evelyn looks at me and says "Mommy, your butt is big." After a second of stunned silence I laughed and said, "yeah, I guess compared to yours it is pretty big huh." Oh the innocent honesty of children, I still can't stop laughing about it.

Welcome to Nashville

Well we made it to Nashville. It took three days of driving, one hotel from hell and some interesting rest stops but we finally made it. the first night on the road we stayed in Sidney Nebraska at the Fort Sidney Inn, and it was quite honestly a nightmare. The service at the front desk was horrible, and the room was smelly and dirty. After we got to our room and saw how bad it was my father in law went to the front desk and asked them to have it cleaned and the man running the place just told us to leave. He wouldn't even give us the name of the owner so we could complain, he just told us to take our bags and leave. The room was so nasty, it clearly hadn't been vacuumed in a very long time, Andy said he even saw a nail clipping on the floor. The toilet had urine and hairs on it, the sink had hair on it from a mans razor, the bathroom floor had hairballs in the corners and the shower was so gross, none of us dared take a shower. In the morning as we were getting ready to leave i noticed a brown clump of something stuck to the door frame. It was seriously the grossest thing ever. I cried myself to sleep. The remainder of the trip wasn't so bad, we stayed at a much cleaner La Quinta the second night, and were able to go see the Liberty jail, where Joseph smith was kept for about 4 months, and also went to the visitors center in Independence. I had been to the visitors center in salt lake so many times, it was quite an interesting change to go to some that had so much church history linked to them. We made it to Nashville Monday night, and got everything moved into the condo Tuesday morning, and the air conditioner broke shortly there after. The hvac guy finally came today and got it fixed. It got up to 91 degrees INSIDE yesterday, so we went and checked into a hotel. Needless to say our nerves are fried and hope that our life in Nashville improves over the next few days.

So much attitude

Evelyn has so much attitude, i don't even know how to handle it. She gets frustrated with me and Andy and talks to us like we are complete morons, and when she wants to do something herself, and thinks we are trying to stop her she starts yelling, usually at me. When this happens she wont listen to a word I say and then I get frustrated and start yelling and then it's all down hill from there. The other day she wanted to put cream on her own bottom so I told her to hold out her hand so I could put some cream on it, well she just started yelling at me, i tried to explain that she could do it herself, and that I was trying to give her some. She just kept yelling, and I started yelling and finally I just threw my hands up and said I was through, i walked out of the room and shut the door. Evelyn can open doors herself, but when she loses her temper like that she doesn't think rationally, so she started screaming and pounding on the door. I opened the door and picked her up and she kept yelling at me so I said it was nap time, and put her in her room. A while after she settled down and got quiet I went in there to check on her. She had calmed down and was playing quietly so I sat down and started talking to her about how it's not nice to yell and how nothing is accomplished by yelling, and that if she won't yell at me I won't yell at her. She looks up at me with her gorgeous blue eyes and says "and no hitting too?" I just laughed and said yes no hitting either. Apparently the billion times i told her not to hit she actually heard me, she just chose not to listen. Anyway, about ten minutes after our discussion, she started yelling at me over some meaningless thing, but this time, I kept my cool and didn't yell back. I thought it was 13 year olds that acted like this not 3 year olds.

Been a while

So it has been a long time since I last posted and a ton has happened! Evelyn will be three in two weeks, and she is completely potty trained! It is fabulous to not change diapers. We are moving to Nashville a few days after Evelyns birthday and we are all really excited. Andy got into Vanderbilt for their MBA program and he was also awarded some awesome scholarships. We are renting our house to a family and we are supposed to close on a condo in Nashville at the end of the month. I
  I have been doing alot with photography and i hope I will be able to continue with it in Nashville. I have been posting all of my photo shoots on my photography blog rigbyphotography.blogspot.com  I have been having alot of fun with it and have noticed a ton of improvement in my work. I have been crazy busy trying to get everything ready for the move. I haven't been able to sleep very well because when I lay down at night my brain starts going a billion miles a minute thinking about all I have to do, but surprisingly I haven't been too tired during the day, it must be adrenaline or something like that.

Potty Training!

So Evelyn decided yesterday that she wanted to go to the potty, which was awesome and she did really well, only 2 accidents including overnight! Well this morning she went into the bathroom and went potty again and then wouldn't go again. Over the next couple of hours I asked her about 3 times if she needed to go potty, and she kept saying no. When she started throwing a fit over something trivial I walked away from her. A little bit later she started crying even harder and I went to see what the matter was. Well she had had an accident, and peed her pants and was upset over it. I started getting her wet clothes off of her and when I took off her rain boots I realized that the pee had run down her legs and pooled in her waterproof rain boots! I laughed so hard and poor Evelyn was just crying and looking at me like I was really mean, but it was so funny I really couldn't help it!

washington trip

Last week Andy, Evelyn and I went up to Seattle for Andys UW interview. While we were there we were able to get together with some friends that we haven't seen in a while, and we had a lot of fun up there. Seattle is such a beautiful place, I couldn't get over how green everything was. While we were up north we stayed with Andy's brother Jay and his wife Camille. Andy's parents and sister Lyndee came to See us since we were only three hours from their town. It was a fun trip and I got to take pictures of Madison, my 6 month old niece while we were up there. She is such a smiley and good natured baby, she made it easy to get some good pictures of her.

Khloe retake

Here are some of the pictures from Khloe's photo shoot. She is such a cute little baby, and we had fun taking these pictures.

Whats my options?

When Evelyn is throwing a fit about something, usually the snack or drink she gets, I set it on the counter within her reach ad tell her to take the snack, drink, item etc. or don't. "those are your options" I find myself saying frequently. Last night while trying to get her settled down for bed, she was really wiggly and and wouldn't settle down. After some warnings i finally told her she could either cuddle with her dad or get in bed, and that if she didn't tell me what she wanted i would decide for her and that decision would be bed. After a couple of seconds she said "whats your options?" meaning what were her options. I was laughing so hard I couldn't even answer but fortunately Andy was able to keep it together. I need to be careful of what I say around her.

Evelyn was so excited when she saw her easter basket this morning. She kept running around the house flapping her arms like wings saying "I'm so happy, I'm so happy" and this was before candy! She was so excited about her "gardening tools" that her and Andy went out back to play in my dad's garden.

Kylee retake

So I decided that I hated the pictures I took of the babies last week. I called the moms and told them I wanted to redo the pictures. The weather has been horrible so yesterday was the first day I could take any with natural light. Khloe and her mom couldn't make it so we will redo hers next week, but here are a few of the ones of Kylee and her mom, Kendra. There is more to come, but I think these more up to my normal standard and I am really happy with them.

Flowers and a bow holder

The other day it was stormy and ugly outside so I went to the craft store for entertainment. I came home with a bouquet of silk daisies that I disassembled and rearranged into hair clips. I love how they turned out, but I had way more than Evelyn needed so I gave some away. I realized that Evelyn now had so many hair bows and flowers that I should have something to organize them better so I made another trip to the craft store and this is what I now have hanging on Evelyn's wall. I love it!

I had some old silk flowers at home, and since the creative juices were flowing so freely I decided to make as many barrettes as I had clips for. The arrows indicate the ones I made.

I added a page to my blog where I will be putting archived photos. I will add more as I get them edited, and many new ones that I take will also end up there, so take a look and tell me what you think. Most of my pics are obviously of Evelyn since she is the main reason I wanted to get better at photography.

evelyn easter pictures

I took some pictures of evelyn in her easter dress yesterday and I love them. She wasn't in the mood for pictures so I only took a couple. My outside pics turn out alot better than my inside pics (the babies were inside) so I should work on that. Tell me what you think.

Pictures

I have always loved taking pictures, even when I was little and couldn't take a decent picture to save my life. Well, over the years I have gotten much better. I have taken classes, read books, articles, and mostly practice, practice, practice. I'll take any chance to improve my skills.  I decided recently to take my photography to a new level, and have spent a lot of time practicing with my camera and playing around on Photoshop. On Monday I took some newborn pictures of some darling little cousins, Kylee and Khloe. Shooting two babies at once is great because when one was grumpy the other one was happy and vice versa, so the waiting time was greatly reduced.

I love this shot of Khloe. She was being kind of grumpy so unfortunately we could not get the Binky out of her mouth but it turned out really cute anyway.

I had so much fun taking pictures of these little girls. I will be taking pictures of their other little cousin soon so I will post those pictures then.

This picture of Audrey I took last year but i recently went through my old pictures and played with them in Photoshop and I really love how this turned out. 

pumping?

    This morning when I went in to Evelyn's room to wake her( I know, how awesome that I have to wake my two year old instead of the other way around?) and to my surprise she was already awake with her jammies unzipped down to her knees. Evelyn has recently discovered the joy of undressing herself so I didn't find this surprising. I laughed though when she offered up the reason why she was partly undressed- To feed stacey, her doll, of course. She then proceeded to nurse her stuffed mickey mouse, and then put her dolls play sippy cup up to her chest and then gave the doll the sippy cup of milk. Do you think maybe she was pumping? I do.  It's amazing how she will hear or see something just once and mimic it months later.
   She also surprises me with how she puts together a sentence, sometimes she sounds more like 22 than 2. Tonight while I was making dinner she noticed that the bag of suckers was almost empty and says to me word-for-word "I believe it's time to get more suckers mom" What kind of 2 year old says that honestly? I don't where she gets this stuff.

"It was funny"

I buy shampoo and conditioner in the really big bottles and then put it in smaller bottles for the shower. This morning I was refilling the little bottles and my big bottles were almost empty so I had them sitting upside down. I had left the lids off of the little bottles thinking they would be fine for a little bit. well I forgot about them and went into the bathroom a few hours later and looked into the tub where i saw a ton of my pricey shampoo in the tub spilled from the little bottle. As I was trying to salvage what I could, Evelyn walked in and asked what I was doing. After i explained what i was doing I asked her if the dog knocked the bottle over and she confessed that she had done it. I asked her if it was an accident and she looked at me like I was completely crazy and said "no, it was funny" I was so mad about my shampoo but I couldn't help but smile. What can ya do?

"i got pregnant"!

Evelyn is full of it today! after my shower i opened the door and called out to Evelyn to see if she was ok. she came into the bathroom and saw my bare stomach and said, there's a baby in there. I told her there was no baby in my tummy, to which she responded there's a baby in my tummy. I asked, really? and she responded, "yeah, I got pregnant." LOL

careful mom!

I love being a mom. Evelyn makes even boring things fun. This morning I was cleaning her room and she wanted to help me remake her bed after i changed her sheets. The next thing i know she has built a fort on her bed where she hung out while I vacuumed (she is a little scared of the vacuum)  She stayed in her fort while I was washing the little hand prints and other typical toddler marks off the wall. While i was cleaning the wall around where she taped up some pictures of her friends Bethany, Jessica and Rachel, she says to me very clearly and oh so seriously, "be careful of my pictures mom." the look on her face was priceless. She looked so concerned and her eyebrows were raised about to the middle of her forehead. She is so sweet and fun to be around. I love moments like that.