Woohoo!

Sorry for the relative blogging silence over the last few months. It's been pretty depressing to try to blog without any pictures to go with my stories. I LOVE taking pictures and I have missed my camera immensely. I decided that I just couldn't stand not capturing my little ones as they grow. Ryker is getting so tall and Raelin hasn't stopped growing in about a year. And Alaina has this smile lately that just kills me! With her little mouth full of teeth and her pinchy little cheeks! I just couldn't stand letting all these moments pass me by undocumented! So I started looking on KSL (I love KSL!) and researching things on the internet. I talked to Brice and told him what kind of options were out there and asked him if he thought this was something worth investing in right now. He said he loves all the things I do with our pictures (like blogging) and that we should definitely remedy our camera-less situation. After several hours of research, I decided to get this one:from someone on KSL for $30 (but then I talked her down to $20)! It certainly isn't my dream camera or anything but I won't be getting that anytime soon. So for now, I'm just happy to be able to do this:I think the kids were almost as excited as I was to have a camera again! Ha! It doesn't always take the greatest pictures and some of the pictures are blurry in low light situations, but at least I have pictures again! Now I just have to fiddle with my computer so it will let me upload the pictures without so much hassle.

The kids both have a set of these blocks (called Trio blocks) and they love them, and so do I. I highly recommend them as a before-they're-ready-for-Legos set.

Alaina just makes the best faces! Just look at this funny face with all those big teeth! (We all know how much I love taking pictures of her, but there's also a bazillion more pictures of her than the other kids because she was home with me all day today and the other kids weren't. Just so you don't think I'm TOO biased!)

Have some drool! And some really big eyelashes to go with it...
She loves watching the dogs in the backyard.
This is her mad face:
So now I'm back to feeling motivated to blog and I'm wishing I had more to talk about right now! Hopefully, I'll get around to taking some belly pictures with this baby like I did with Alaina and get those posted soon. I fear I'm going to be HUGE! I mean, I was huge with Alaina and all my muscles and things are no where near back to normal, so I'm kinda scared of just how cow-ish I'm going to become. Anybody want to start a women's soccer league with me? Basketball? Rugby's probably not such a good idea... I was playing basketball with my ward on Saturdays for a while, but that's over now. I was surprised by how hard I was willing to work when I wasn't just "working out." Going running by myself, or biking, or yoga or anything else that I do by myself is not nearly as much fun or as productive. But I think I'm going to need something intense to keep from being so huge that I turn into a beached whale.

Oh, here's a good group of pictures. Alaina loves this little song and here's Brice helping her with the motions (he's such a great daddy!):

I had a little turtle,
His name was Tiny Tim,
I put him in the bathtub,
To see if he could swim

He drank up all the water (gulp, gulp, gulp)

He ate up all the soap (chomp, chomp, chomp)
And now he's sick in bed with

Bubbles in his throat
(use your finger across your lips to make a bubububub noise as you say this line)

Bubble, bubble, bubble,
Bubble, bubble, bubble,
Bubble, bubble, bubble,
Bubble, bubble, POP!!

Because of this song, "bubble" is one of the few words in Alaina's repertoire. She makes the bubble motion with her hands and says, "bub, bub, bub" after we finish the song. Every now and then she'll say, "bubboh, bubboh," but usually it's just "bub."

Well, that's all for now! Hopefully I will be a better blogger now!