Jane's new apron

Like most little girls that live within driving distance to a Costco, Jane got the fun, pink, retro kitchen for Christmas. Since then, she has been working hard to be a "good cooker" like her mommy, or her babysitter, or just about any one that can successfully prepare a pan of ramen noodles. Yesterday, she informed me that she needed an apron for her cooking. I don't know why, since I don't ever wear them (although I want to) but she was determined. Last night at Walmart I picked up some $1 a yard fabric and trim and thought that for$2.67, I would try my hand at apron making. Thanks to my new fancy sewing machine that my mom gave me, it was really quite easy and fun. Here are the results.

It was hard to get a good picture since she kept twirling around all over and please don't look too closely, since it's definitely not a piece of fine work, but for a 3 year old's play kitchen (is she only 3? I could have sworn she was 15), it will do. Maybe we'll try again later.

Bedhead

So, Brent and I got about the most awesome Christmas present this year. We wandered into the My Comfort store on Christmas Eve and they were apparently really desperate to make a sale because we got a screaming deal on a fancy intelligel bed. AND its a king. Ya, it's awesome. Problem was that we had a queen before and we didn't have a frame for it, and since we spent all our Christmas money on the mattress, we didn't have any to buy one. Well my mom came through like a champ, scouring craig's list until she found our dream bed. Not only that, it was only $250! So John drove my parent's truck to Vegas to pick it up and then drove it up here for us (thanks Johnny and Danielle!) and we set it up today. We had some problems, as you will see in the photos...

Our mattress is WAY thick with the box springs and I swear once we set it up, it was like over 3 feet tall. I tried to get a photo, but the light was really bad, you get the picture though.

We then decided to nix the box springs and Brent made a quick trip to the Home Depot to pick up some plywood. I need to get a photo of it all put together, so I'll post one as soon as I can get it (sorry mom!)
We took some fun pictures of the girls playing on the new bed. Lizzy had just awakened from her nap and was still bagged up.

My happy little Lizzy Lou.

I LOVE this photo. I know that it looks like Jane is squeezing the life out of her sister, but they look so cute in the process!

When Jane was a baby, people used to tell us all the time that she looked like a doll. I think it's because she has such creamy skin and rosy cheeks. I think that Lizzy looks a lot more like a doll. Isn't she sweet?

Thanks everyone for helping us get our bed! We love it!

boys can blog too

Soooooo, apparently my husband has been a little envious of my blogging ability. He SAYS that he doesn't want to participate, but I haven't ever believed him. Today, my suspisions were confirmed when he expressed his desire to start a man blog. Yes, a man blog. A blog that only men were allowed to post on about only things that men care about. I believe this man blog to simply be way to allow him to blog without having to lose his dignity in the process. Anyway, I believe that he would like blogging friends so if you have a husband that would like to participate in the man blog, check it out and let him know. The plan is to have contributors that can all post so there isn't the pressure of coming up with something yourself all the time. Unfortunately, he was not the first person with this idea, so all of the good names were taken. He ended up with http://www.the-man-anti-blog.blogspot.com/

Send you husbands over and they can all be boys together.

It will only be a matter of time until I get into his account and post some pretty backgrounds. He'll love that.

Visit the Stringham Digital Garage Sale

SO, Brent and I are getting rid of some of the stuff in our home that we just plain don't have room for. I'm listing things on craig's list and KSL, but since we have so much stuff, I set up a blog to post everything. Check it out, if you want to. We only have nice stuff listed there, although Brent intends to try to sell some of his old, oops I mean "vintage" coats. He's got this one leather one that he's DETERMINED everyone wants. Keep your eyes open for that. Visit www.stringhamdigitalgaragesale.blogspot.com Don't worry, I'll post a link on the sidebar.

water baby

I just took some cute pictures of Lizzy in the bath today. She LOVES her bath. She loves to splash and kick and squeal and the funniest thing is that she sticks her head under the faucet. I didn't catch a of picture of it, maybe next time.
Jane got some bath crayons from her favorite friend, Brooklyn, for Christmas. Her lovely artwork is on display behind Lizzy.

I can't get enough of her.

me whining

I usually wear a really cool ring that Brent gave me on my right hand and the other day, something weird happened. It started just burning and burning where the ring sits. I took it off because it was bothering me so much and I haven't been able to figure out what happened to it. It really feels like a serious burn and stings like crazy most of the time. It's been so bothersome that I thought about going to the quick care, but I haven't.
Anyway, today I remembered an email that Mom sent me about how Magic Erasers can burn small children. The mom that sent it out sent photos of her kid, who had rubbed it all over his face. His poor little face looked horrible, all red and blistery. At the time, I thought it was weird and moved on, but I remembered that the day my finger started burning, I had used a magic eraser to clean some Jane drawings off the walls of her room. My ring is a pave setting and there are kind of chambers inside, I think that some of that eraser junk got in there and that stupid thing burned me! Here are some freaky photos:

Its looking pretty good today. This is after about 5 days of recovery time.
So moral of the story is... be careful when using those erasers (I STILL love them. I forgive you eraser! No one can clean like you do!) and don't get burnt! It REALLY hurts!

too tired

Today was one of those very long days as a mom. You know? One of those days that you sit around wondering what on earth possessed you to have a child in the first place. It seemed like everyone was ornery and tired all afternoon. When Jane gets tired, she gets destructive. It's very un-lady-like. She rips things and kicks and throws things and pushes things off tables. She's a real treat. Ben and Lizzy were not quite so bad, seeing as how they are much smaller and not as mobile, but they didn't help any. All the kids were practically falling asleep at dinner, so I took some photos because it was so amusing.

I know that you don't look great, Leslie. Sorry. In all fairness, we WERE in the middle of dinner and she was trying to eat.

Jane was asleep in bed shortly after this was taken.
Lizzy was pretty chipper, all things considered. I just think this photo is funny...

"Excellent"

Holy snow day!

I believe that we are getting more snow than our neighborhood has seen in a long, long, long time. Our VERY knowledgeable 11 year old neighbor informed me that the last snow day in this area was in January of 1993. I'm not sure if it's true or not, but if you have to have this much snow to call it a snow day, I believe him.
Brent couldn't get out of our street this morning to get to work, so after an hour of trying to clear off the driveway, he called in and is now attempting to work from home.
Jane and I went to play outside for a while and got some fun pictures. I tried to get photos of the snow banks that are about 6 feet tall, but it just looks like white everywhere.

The snow in the yard completely covered Jane's legs and almost came up to my knees.

Me and my little Jane. It's been snowing this hard since we got up this morning and it's still coming down.

Jane was afraid to sit in the snow by herself. She said "I'm too small, Mommy. I'll get stuck!" She was right, she would have.

I love her bright pink coat against the white snow, Isn't she so cute?

Since we still have no form of television in our home whatsoever (can I at LEAST get some rabbit ears over here?) We only have the internet to tell us what's going on. They said to expect 4-8 inches. HA! We're thinking that our house will probably have at least 18"
It's kinda fun though and since my awesome dad brought us up a truckload of would this weekend (you're the best Dad! Thank you!) I find myself singing 'Let it snow' and we're enjoying the day with our daddy at home.

dinosaur eggs

Ok, this post isn't REALLY about dinosaur eggs, but rather dinosaurs and eggs. Just regular eggs that come from chickens, not dinosaurs. Allow me to explain...

Jane has been learning about dinosaurs in preschool and she's REALLY into them, so I thought that I would like to encourage her interest and take her to the dinosaur museum at Thanksgiving Point. Unfortunately, sometimes you have to force people to have a good time. It was painful getting there. We started out this morning discovering that Lizzy has an egg allergy and we had to learn the hard way. Brent ran to grab breakfast from McDonald's this morning and decided to give Lizzy some of the scrambled egg to munch on. He even got some pictures of it...

Little did he know that you aren't supposed to give babies egg because you don't know if perhaps they have an allergy to it. I'd like to say that I knew all of this, but it hadn't even occurred to me and I did nothing to stop him. She really liked the egg, but then promptly broke out in hives and was a total mess. We sat around for a while trying to decide if we should pay the money and take her to a quick care and then we decided that they would probably tell us to put some cream on her face, give her some antihistamine and keep an eye on her, so that's what we did. She's fine now, no worries, just no more egg. At least I now know that McDonald's really does use real egg, no matter how unegg-like it may seem.

So we headed to the museum, which was really fun. Here are some of our pictures that we took while we were there.

Brent almost peed his pants at the sight of the megalodon. He has a bit of a juvenile obsession with it.

They have a place where the kids can pretend as though they are digging for bones. Or rather, they allow the children to actually dig for fake bones...which was really fun.

Isn't Jane so sweet with her daddy? He loves his little girls so much. There's just something about a daddy and their little girl that I adore.

To answer your questions, yes, I am apparently married to a 12 year old boy.

I'm not sure what Jane is doing here. I think she might be channeling the T-Rex behind her.

My pretty little Lizzy was SO tired after her meds that she went over to Grandma's house and slept in Ben's bed for 4 hours! But not until after she participated in the clobbering of her grandma...

I'm telling you, Mom, you can't sit on the floor. It's like moths to a light bulb.

Anyway, the museum was really fun and if anyone has wondered whether or not they should go, I highly recommend it.
AND... if anyone has some suggestions on how to deal with my small child and her most inconvenient allergy, please do tell. I have a feeling this isn't going to be the last of these types allergies and such. She must get it from Brent. I would never do something like pass those types of gimpy genes to one of my children.

hokey pokeys and first words

The girls had to go in this afternoon for flu shots. They both had them in November, but they both had to go back and get another one. This was particularly bad for Jane, who remembered getting the first one. She's had one every year, but never two and I guess that you need to have two in the same season to really make it work once and then you are good with just one from there on out. Doesn't make sense to me, but whatever. She was mad. Screaming mad. And Lizzy was overly tired and miserable and the two of them screamed the whole time and once the shots were over they REALLY screamed. The nurse laughed at me and said "Have a great afternoon." Ya, thanks. I guess this will be my life with 2 dramatic girls.
Anyway, we went and got a 'pokey treat' and Jane wanted a Sonic drink. I asked her if the pokey was really all that bad once she got her blue drink and she said "No. I drink my Sonic and it goes into my pokey and it makes it feel better."

The other fun that has been happening around here is that Lizzy it trying to talk. Looks like she is going to follow in her sister's footsteps and say 'kitty' as her first word. its funny because when Jane started trying to say it, she started out going "ka! ka!"
Lizzy has been going about it a different way. She has been saying "ti! ti!" So funny that its the same word, but a different way. Anyway, she's made some progress and is now trying for 2 syllables. I took a little video of her saying 'kitty' but I have to preface it a little. For one, Lizzy looks B-A-D bad. She's been exhausted and I think she's a little sick because she's all weepy and grumpy and her skin has been really bad this week, so she looks all rashy. All the same, she's my little sweetheart and I wanted to document the occasion.

2007 is SO last year...

Since I largely use this blog as a family journal, I wanted to go write down some of our memories and events from the past year. I don't remember dates for everything, but I'll try to at least get things in chronological order.

The first major event of the year that I really took note of was the birth of Leslie and Cameron's first baby, Benjamin Barron Jackson, in March. I have some photos of his birth, but he wasn't looking all that good since they are from the delivery room, so I thought I'd post this one when he was a week old.

Four weeks later, in April, we welcomed our second daughter, Elisabeth Stringham. She was such a little, tiny thing when she was born and we couldn't get enough of her.

Here are a couple of my favorite photos of Lizzy from this year..



In May, we welcomed the arrival of IKEA to Draper! Yes, having an IKEA in Draper in definitely a noteworthy event in my life. At that point, we finally decided to remodel our kitchen. We had been talking about it for a long time and for some reason, I thought that it would be the perfect time to rip up the house when I had a newborn. With some great help from our family and Brent's mad skills, we did the whole thing ourselves. Brent (and John and Cameron and Danielle) tore out the old cabinets, refinished the hardwoods, built and installed all the new IKEA cabinets, installed the backsplash and did everything else (other than the counter tops). Here's a photo from the chaos and one that I took after the kitchen was functional once again. Brent STILL hasn't completely finished it. Maybe this May...

During the course of the summer, we found a snake in our yard. I just thought that was funny, or unusual or just downright frightening. I don't know, you decide. I know it was just a little garden snake, but snakes and me don't mix. Brent tracked it into my garden beds, so I probably would have fainted if it had been there when I was weeding or something. We had some neighbors come check it out and one of them took it home after it was named 'Lucky.' I wonder how Lucky is now...

In July, all the Barrons congregated in southern Utah for a little family reunion of sorts. We see each other so often that it hardly seems worth calling it a family reunion, but it kinda felt like one. We went to Bryce Canyon, which was way fun.

As soon as we got back, Jane turned 3. We had a fun little party for her. A Princess Party, of course, on our new deck that was built right before Lizzy was born. Our old one was REALLY bad. Jane called it the 'scary deck,' so we upgraded for an awesome new one.

August was a BIG month for our family. First thing that happened is John and Danielle got married. Danielle's mom did an amazing job with everything. Their yard was beautiful, the food was amazing, the decorations were amazing and not to mention that the bride and groom looked amazing. I've never seen my little brother look so good or so happy.


Jane was a (very tired) flower girl. I was NOT impressed with her flower throwing skills. I had to drag her down the aisle and throw most of the flowers myself. Poor show Jane.


Shortly after the wedding, Brent decided that after 6 years of working with his family at McDonald's, he was going to change careers. It was a BIG deal in our family. It took a lot of thought and prayer and more prayer and more prayer. We finally decided that the time was right and so he started looking. It must have been meant to be since he got the job at the first place that he interviewed. He now really enjoys his new position as the cost accountant at Stampin' Up! It would be torture to me, but for some reason he thinks that dealing with that kind of stuff all day is great and we are so happy with it. Emily, tell Justin thanks for me! :)

Brent also turned 31 in August, which makes him totally old. I can't believe he's over 30!

In September, our little Jane started preschool. Oh how I love preschool, and Jane does too. Since she attends a charter school, she wears this adorable little uniform and I can't even stand it! This is a picture from her first day at school.

In October, I turned 27. I remember when 25 seemed so old and now I'm 27! Jane and Lizzy were SO cute for Halloween. Jane was a little ladybug and Lizzy was a chick! I LOVED them in their costumes so much!

About the same time, I started selling baby accessories in a little business that I call Lou Lou Designs. It kept me SO busy through the holidays that the rest of the year felt like such a blur! Thanksgiving was at my parents newly finished home in Daybreak, which we love to get together at. We also had Christmas there and spent New Year's in Summit, which was also remodeled this year allowing each family their own room.

I have to say that 2007 was a great year. Hooray for 2007!