"Hi, Dad!"

Kaiana has been working on talking lately, and this morning she distinctly said, "Hi, Dad!" 7 or 8 times. She said it to Daniel, Caleb and me. So while she doesn't know who Dad is, she's excited to see him! And yes, we know that she's not really talking, but it she's getting good at repeating sounds anyway!

Kaiana is now really crawling, too. No more tummy scooting, she's on her way. She's also pulling up on furniture. Every once in a while she remembers how to get down without hurting herself, too.

Caleb is fully potty-trained now. He isn't even wetting the bed at night! We didn't let him sleep in underwear until we bought a plastic cover for his bed, but so far we haven't had to worry about it. We drove past Costco today and I said excitedly to Daniel, "Just think, we don't have to buy diapers there anymore!" (Since Kaiana is in cloth, of course.)

No accidents!

Woohoo! Caleb had no accidents yesterday, and he didn't wet his diaper during the night, either! We're doing a happy dance over here. So do you think I should make him this cake?

Okay, I'm not really serious about making him the cake, but we are excited anyway. :-)

Photo tag

I got this from Her Royal Highness's (One of my friends who would rather not share her real name online.) blog. Here's the instructions: Go to your pictures, open the fourth folder & post the fourth picture.

Here's mine:This is Kaiana in her blessing dress. My mom did an awesome job making it, didn't she?

And now, tag, you're it!

Playing Catch Up

Potty training has taken some good steps forward in the last few weeks. We've decided to go for the shameless bribery method, and it seems to be working. For every 5 times Caleb uses the toilet, he gets to blow bubbles, for every 10 times he gets an ice cream cone, 20 times he gets to buy a book, and at 40 he gets to go to the zoo. He just earned his first book today. The hard part is that if we spend time away from home, he has to wear a diaper because he's not reliable enough to go out in underwear yet, but being in a diaper makes him lazy. I guess we just need a solid week where we don't go anywhere, but I don't think that's likely to happen anytime soon.

I'm getting a job of sorts. A friend of a friend needs help with filing work, so she's hiring me to come over and do it. The nice thing is that she's really flexible, so I can come when it's convenient. I will probably do 2 evenings a week and Saturday afternoons. I don't know how much work she has for me, so we'll see how long-lasting this job is, but it should be fun. She sounds really nice. Tonight will be my first night of work. I'm kind of fretting over leaving Kaiana because she's been really clingy lately, but it will be good for her.

Nathan, Daniel's brother, just called with exciting news yesterday. He's engaged. His fiancee's name is Quincey. She sounds like a lot of fun. They're planning to be married March 27th, 2009 in the Boise, Idaho temple.

Recipes

I found a really cool blog this morning. It's called A Year of CrockPotting, and it's got a bunch of really great recipe ideas. I love using the slow cooker because that way dinner is actually ready on time.

Last night I made a butternut squash soup, and it turned out really well. We ate it with some homemade wheat bread, and they went really well together. Here's the recipe:

Butternut Squash Soup

Ingredients

• 1 butternut squash, peeled
• Nutmeg
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
• Salt and pepper
• 1 onion, chopped
• 6 cups chicken stock

Directions

Cut squash into 1-inch chunks. In large pot melt butter. Add onion and cook until translucent, about 8 minutes. Add squash and stock. Bring to a simmer and cook until squash is tender. Remove squash chunks with slotted spoon and place in a blender and puree. Return blended squash to pot. Stir and season with nutmeg, salt, and pepper. Serve.

In the comments section, someone mentioned that you should use about 4 lbs of squash for this recipe. I also added a gala apple with the squash, and I liked the flavor that gave it. The only thing I would do differently is that I wouldn't add the pureed squash to all of the chicken broth at the end. It was too thin, so I would recommend putting your puree in a different bowl, and then adding enough chicken broth to reach the desired consistency rather than dumping it all in together. Oh, and I also pureed the onions with the squash because I didn't feel like spending the time separating them from the squash. :-)

Kaiana's doctor visit

Kaiana had her 6 month old checkup this week. She handled the shots pretty well. She was mad when she got them, but as we were walking out of the exam room, she calmed down pretty quickly. She's still pretty tiny, though. She weighs 14 lbs and is 24 1/8 in long. The nurse commented that she's on the small side (which I already realized) so I decided to look up her percentiles on the World Health Organization website.

For length for age, she is under the 3rd percentile. For weight for age, she is around the 15th percentile. Pretty crazy, huh? But then for weight for length, she is in the 85th percentile. She looks pretty proportional, so that doesn't really surprise me. She's actually grown a lot lately, she's much bigger than she used to be, but it's weird to think that she still weighs so little! The nurse asked me about her activity level and how many diapers she wets per day (for those of you who don't know, that's the main way that they gauge if a baby is eating enough) and decided that she's just little, not unhealthy. I already knew that, of course. :-)

In other news, she started really crawling yesterday. I didn't see it, but she was trying to get to the bathroom and Daniel caught her actually crawling rather than just scooting around on her tummy. She certainly wants to be on the move!

French Toast

If all of the little stories about my kids get boring, sorry. I haven't had time to work on scrapbooks in forever, so I'm making sure to write the stories here so that I have a record of them for later. ;-)

I made french toast for breakfast this morning. Caleb came and and asked, "What's that?" I said, "It's french toast." He yelled, "Aaaah! It's French!" and ran away.