September

Early in September, just after Labor day, we were able to fly to Utah for Nathan's brother, Jacob's wedding. Sorry folks - all the Leavitt's are married off, not welcoming any new family members. Ah, that's just a joke - but seriously, they are all married now. Sooo, not really. They got married in the Bountiful Temple, and had a luncheon at the Joseph Smith Building, and a reception in Twin Falls. It was so much fun to see family and hang out for a (too) short weekend. We are excited to see everyone again come Christmas time.

Girls...

....and boys.

All the Grand-daughters.

 Also, at the end of the month I had a roommate reunion down in Oklahoma. It was lots of fun and a good catch up with Heidi and Ginger!

Summer Recap

Man, since I haven't had monthly onesies to photograph, I have seriously been lacking in the blog posts. Well, here are our lives as of late. After Quinn's 1st birthday, Nathan had a few weeks of school off, and we (I, let's be honest) worked on some home improvement stuff. We have painted almost every room in the house with the exception of the kitchen and basement. Woo. Lots of fun. Quinn had lots of fun through the course of the summer swimming and playing with her friends. Grandma Tanya even came for several days and took us to the Iowa State Fair, which was awesome!

First funnel cake - clearly worth documenting.

Famous cow - butter cow that is!

Dress made from balloons

No caption necessary.

Grandma hooked Quinn up with a sweet new ride.

Quinn LOVED the carousel at the Children's Museum

Next, we celebrated Nathan's 26th Birthday with lots of friends, and he got some German Chocolate Brownies for a treat, and grill pan for a gift.

This chalkboard was a recent home improvement creation - and I LOVE it!

And we finished off the summer the best way we knew how - family walks, ice cream and watermelon.

Happy Birthday to Quinn!

Happy 1st Birthday to Quinn!

I can't believe it, it's completely cliche to say, but it went by SO fast! Quinn is already a one year old! To celebrate she invited lots of her friends for a pink lemonade party. I basically just accumulated tons of ideas from Pinterest and threw together this fun little party for her. I think she liked it, I don't know we haven't really talked to much about what she thought, haha.

I have to assume that since this is my personal blog, the creator of the invitation that I copied from Etsy won't hunt me down and kill me for stealing her design idea, but it was just too cute not to copy, so I did it. I went to school for graphic design - and copied. Kinda lame, but just look how cute they were!

I also had lots of fun decorating and baking for the party. Everything turned out really cute!

Smash cake

Putting those monthly photos to good use!

Quinn didn't really like her cake, I was a little sad that she didn't eat more of it. I was kind of expecting she would eat some of it, but she just ate some frosting and played with it. I think the audience she had gave her a little stage fright, but here are her cake smash photos nonetheless.

She had a good time, got really spoiled with lots of new toys and clothes to spare. Nathan and I are so grateful to have such a wonderful "baby" like Quinn. She truly has been such a blessing for our family, and came at the perfect time. She has brought Nathan and I closer together, and we love watching her grow. 

Here are a few more photos from the party...

Tissue Paper heaven

New toy - what's in there?

Reese and Quinn - BFFs, whether they like it or not.

Quinn - 12 months old!

Quinn hasn't had her 'official' doctors appointment with all of the fun baby stats, but just for reference at this point:

She weighs roughly 18 lbs.

Currently wearing 6-9 month size clothes

Has 8 teeth - 8!

LOVES to eat pickles, eggs, green beans, lemons, and nilla wafers (just to name a few)

Attempting to walk and stand on her own, but it's not quite baby book worthy yet.

Hates the grass! Cries when she falls in the grass, and this is one of the only times that she will stand for a 'long' period of time - and its only because she doesn't want to touch the grass.

Loves to sit in chairs, you can see it in her face every time she gets in a chair, she feels like a big girl and loves the attention.

Wait until you see the news about her birthday party - it was awesome!

Quinn - 11 months old!

Quinn's 11 month pictures ended up being a little late with the move out to Omaha. But she did really great in the car for the 15+ hour drive. She slept most of the way, and shortly after we arrived to our new home, she started cutting 4 new teeth, making the grand total of 8 teeth. She was quite a gem for a few weeks, but I think the teething has finally slowed down a little and we could all enjoy our new home together.

Quinn - 10 months old!

Well, here is a quick update via photos. Quinn at 10 months old. I'm starting to think that all of these photos are looking a little similar.

Geocaching

Have you ever heard of geocaching? Nathan and I recently discovered this hidden little gem amongst the world wide web. It's basically real live treasure hunt! Ok, well there isn't usually any money or fancy jewels involved but it has the basics of your classic treasure hunt. With the above website, you can create a membership and look for geocaches that are all over the world. Each geocache is given a GPS coordinate and using those you are supposed to find it. You can choose the difficulty of the terrain you will be exploring or the size of your 'treasure.' Since it was our first time geocaching we choose fairly easy ones to find, but I have to say they gave us a little bit of difficultly, but we did end up finding them.

This all came about because I don't know about the rest of you, but Nathan and I have a hard time finding things we like to do together - add a baby in the mix, and gets a little more difficult. I'm your typical girly housewife (minus the cleaning), I like to shop, craft, bake and even organize from time to time. Those four words tend to send Nathan into a full blow panic attack, but not really. Nathan doesn't like doing any of those things. So I have been determined to find something that we both like to do, and I think that we did! Geocaching is a great way to explore the outdoors, and that is something that we both like to do. Our recent adventures took us to Hell's Half Acre - located just outside of Blackfoot. I mentioned it to some locals here, and they had never even heard of it - and they have lived here their whole life! I'm telling you, it's a great chance to see what you have been missing.

Hell's Half Acre is a lava flow field, and is right off a rest area off of I-15. It has sidewalk trails, which were great for the stroller, and tons of information about the site located throughout the trail. Here are some photos from our little 'adventure.'

Hell's Half Acre

I found this lonesome little bunch of flowers. Can't pass them up.

Quinn 'found' the first geocache. Meet Seymour Antler.

Nathan discovering the contents of the second geocache.

 Now, go geocaching already!

Quinn - 9 (1/2) Months Old!

Well this post is super late. Quinn turned 9 months old during Spring Break, and I guess time just got away from me, and I just now got to taking her pictures. So really she is 9 1/2 months old, but that's ok, at least we got the pictures. Here are her last stats from her recent doctors appointment -

Weight : 16.2 lbs. (6%)

Height : 26.75 inches (18%)

Head Circumference : 17.75 inches (76%)

So as you can see Quinn's "high" weight percentile of 14% went down to a whopping 6%. No worries though, the doctor is not worried, and neither are we. She eats really well, bottle and solid foods. Her favorites are chicken, carrots, peas and the occasional waffle. I was surprised to see that she only weighted 16lbs, but the doctor suspects now that she is crawling she is burning more calories, but she is healthy and that's all that matters.

This last month, a lot of exciting things have started to happen in the world of Quinn. She started crawling - officially, during Spring Break, which was a lot of fun to be around family so they could witness the excitement as well.

She also sprouted two teeth. Woo! During that time she got a little fussy, and stopped nursing as well - and let's be honest, I was a little scared of those teeth, so it was a mutual decision on both our parts, and we have switched to formula. She adjusted to the formula just fine, and it's nice to be able to have my body back to myself, I will be honest.

She has also started pulling herself up onto things, her favorite is the television stand. She loves to knock off the dvds that we have on there, among other things. She thinks it's pretty great, but this has also led to me beginning to pack up most of the bookshelves in the house. Yay for packing the boxes, I just barely emptied!

And that's about it. We are getting ready to move to Omaha, Nebraska next month to continue on in dental school. We are really excited about moving somewhere new and exciting, so stay tuned for more exciting pictures to come.

February Happenings.

Not too much happened in the month of February, though one event did occur that was worth documenting, I, Ashley Leavitt, had my 25th birthday. Boo. I can't believe I am 25. Oh well. It was a good birthday though. It was on a Monday, and Nathan only has one class on Mondays and so he was able to stay home most of the day. It ended with some tasty lasagna and a little Leavitt family get together and ice cream cake...also tasty. Nathan got me a new necklace for my birthday, I am wearing it in the picture below, it has two pendants on it, one that has a "Q" and one with a "N." I love it.

Woo. Birthday Picture.

Ah, earlier in the day, Quinn was just rolling around while I did some laundry - and we thought it would be funny for her to wear Nathan's gloves...and we were right. It's funny.

 

Aren't all babies 10x cuter in a laundry basket?!