a musician in the making

playing guitar with Daddy

my boys

the next August Rush? :)

my big boy playing the piano

do I have to keep practicing?

he loves it!

getting into the music

me and my adorable little guy

Busy Boy

Suddenly, our little boy is moving around like crazy and is into everything! Although this is sometimes exhausting, it is so much fun! He crawls so fast and will try to pull himself up on almost anything!

Here he is in my parents' kitchen trying to grab a milk carton - it was so light that he kept pushing it away and ended up chasing it around in circles, it was so cute.


James' favorite place to crawl to at my parents' house is the air conditioning vent on the kitchen floor - he'll sit on it or lean over it, and the cold air takes his breath away. It is adorable.


Our busy, busy boy loves his toys. Here he is having the time of his life pulling toys out of his toy box and playing. He can keep himself busy for a long time doing this. We ended up putting some of Jonathan's biology textbooks in the bottom of the toy box, so he wouldn't tip it over!

sad face :(

This has got to be one of the cutest pictures of James that we've got. We had dinner at my parents' house to celebrate Annie's birthday. We were sitting at the table eating cake, and apparently Aunt Abby scared James, and he was just so sad. Here he is with Grandpa, who is trying to sympathize with him. Poor kid.

*priceless*

girls' weekend out

This weekend my aunt Jamie took all of her nieces to Park City for the weekend. This has become an annual tradition to celebrate all of our birthdays. Jamie has always been so sweet to all of us and has always done fun things with us for our birthdays. This year we had more people with us than usual - two of my cousins got married in the past year and so their cute wives came along for the first time, and James got to come with us, too! What a brave kid to hang out with so many girls!

We stayed in a fun condo and played games and watched movies, and we went out to eat and had fun shopping at the outlet stores. It was a really fun weekend, and I am so grateful to Jamie for being so sweet and generous. James was really good, especially considering how tired he got, but he really was a champ. We ate a Mexican restaurant on Saturday night and he was getting pretty fussy, but Aunt Annie got sung to at the restaurant (we really were celebrating birthdays - plus, it's her birthday today! Happy Birthday, Annie!) and she gave James the balloon that she got, and he was SO happy after that.

Here is our whole group outside the restaurant - (back row, left to right) Kelsey, Annie, Kathryn, me, Jamie, Holly, Michelle, Whitney (front row, left to right) Megan, Liz, James, Abby, Sarah.

My happy boy with his balloon!

points

Growing up, my Dad always read and recited poems to us - it was something that we looked forward to and that we loved so much. He'd tell us "points," as we called them, before we went to bed every night. Some of our favorites were "Little Orphant Annie" and "The Raggedy Man." On our way home from our family vacation last week, we stopped at an antique/craft store that we love in Cedar City. My Dad found a copy of the poem book that he used to read to us all the time, the one that has all of our favorites in it. So Jonathan and I bought it! We are so excited to have it, and to be able to read it to our kids.

what I get to see every morning!

camping?

So we have a tent, but we have never really used it. Well, we have never used it outside. The other day we set it up in our family room, for fun, and watched a movie from it. Yes, kind of nerdy, but we had lots of fun. And James quite enjoyed crawling all around in there. Maybe sometime we'll really go camping :)

"What's wrong with the Bosters?"

While in St. George we went to Snow Canyon and played at the sand dunes there. It was lots of fun and was so pretty there in the evening, we got lots of fun pictures. My family has a running joke about the sand dunes; last year we went there, and Jonathan and I were standing on top of one of the dunes. The rest of the family walked far away to the next huge dune over. Unfortunately, they did not realize how the acoustics worked on the dunes, and Liz said to the rest of the family, in a normal voice, "What's wrong with the Bosters?? They're sure grumpy today," to which I responded "We can hear you."

I can't even remember why/if we were really grumpy that day, but I do know that I was pregnant at the time :) In fact, here is a picture from last year to compare with this year (at the time I thought I was a LOT bigger than I really was):


And here we are this year with our baby! My how your life can change in a year!


We've had a lot of fun with this "What's wrong with the Bosters" joke, but it also kind of backfired on Jonathan and I one night of our trip. We were playing a board game, Diplomacy, where you have to take over countries and you make alliances with people and plot to take other people out (we're kind of nerdy that way). Jonathan and I went to our bedroom to plot against my Dad or somebody, I can't quite remember, and we had this big long conversation - and then we realized that the baby monitor was in the room and was on, and the receiver was in the kitchen, where the rest of the family was. Oops! The moral of this story is, be careful what you say about other people, because they just might hear you!

Anyway, here are some fun pictures of our family at the sand dunes:

Pool Fun

Here are Travis and Liz, before attempting to stand up and balance in the inflatable boat we had in the swimming pool...


And here they are after. We really weren't very surprised that they fell in. I'll have to post the video in a bit, it's hilarious. :)

St. George Temple

While in St. George, we drove to the St. George temple on Sunday and walked around the temple grounds. It was such a pretty day - it was cloudy and rainy and a little bit cooler than it had been the whole week (which wasn't saying much). James was absolutely exhausted and was sound asleep in the car when we got there. He stayed asleep while I carried him around - man, he is getting heavy! Here are some pictures:

Our happy boy finally woke up

Poor James got his very first ow-ie (how do you spell that, anyway?) that morning. He was crawling around, busy as usual, and he pulled himself up on a coffee table and fell over and bonked his head. I felt awful, because Jonathan and I were even sitting right there and we didn't catch him in time. He got a pretty good bump and bruise, but it went away quickly.