A look in the life of Kelsi!

Hi! My name is Kelsi. I am 14 1/2 months old. I love to play on the playground, read books, eat, and play with my sister.
This is my friend Jack. This particular day I said my 5th word- "Je je" for Jack, and later that day for Jessica. Jack and I are 2 weeks apart and moved in within a week of each other. We will also live in the Village about the same amount of time and our moms are friends as well as our older sisters.
Jack is such a gentleman. He always signs "please" and even opened my door for me.

Just checking if you were still paying attention to me. I like attention. :) Although I am very easy going and very good natured and I put up with quite a bit from my sister. I am actually a different baby when my sister is not around. I love to have mommy read me books and have full reign of the toys.

I love to run. I learned to walk the week I turned 1. I took steps before then, but decided that One was a good age to master the walking thing. A week later I had mastered running. ha ha mom :)

My all time favorite thing to do is climb up the stairs of the slide onto a platform that has 3 open edges. I lean over the edge and smile at my mom, who is sitting wanting to visit with friends, but has to dash to my rescue so I don't plummet 3 1/2 feet down to the wood chips below. I think mom finally caught my mishievious grin, well, almost.

When mom does come to my rescue, I run to her with open arms. I like to give hugs.

As you can tell, I LOVE stairs and the harder and more dangerous, the better! Thankfully there is no shortage of stairs and stairwells to play in. As soon as mom shuts one door to a stairwell, there are about 11 others to choose from. Jack and I love to plague our moms by running to the stairwells, and if that is not enough, my sister Jessica's favorite thing to do it to open doors mom has just shut. I also LOVE to climb on the step stool in the kitchen. If it is out, I am on it and playing with the stuff on the counter. I haven't figured out how to climb down yet, and seeming as our kitchen floor is industrial tile, mom doesn't let me do that very often.

All in all, I am a very very good kid. :) I love my Mom, Sister and Daddy so much and they LOVE me!!!

Salt Lake Temple

Last week my mom and I went to Temple Square in Salt Lake to visit my Aunt Karen and Uncle Roger. They are serving a mission for our church in the Church History Center. My Aunt was able to find my Great Grandmother's jouranl in the archives and she is planning to write it up for our family. It was really neat to see what they do and feel the strong spirit that is present on temple square and even in the lunchroom where the missionaries eat. On our way back to the car we took the opportunity to take some pictures. Jessica is just over 3 years old and Kelsi is 14 1/2 months.

This is a beautiful mural in the lobby of the church office building.

For perspective, you can see Jessica in the bottom right corner. This is the Salt Lake Temple where we were married.

Grandma and Kelsi

The flowers on Temple Square are gorgeous! We had a good time taking pictures.

Preschool!

This week was Jessica's first week of preschool. We are doing a co-op preschool in our court. There are 8 moms involved and 9 kids (1 set of twins). We meet twice a week and the moms have teamed up to take a week- so you teach 1 week out of 4. So far its been a little crazy, but good. The kids seem to really enjoy it. Here is Jessica's "First day of Preschool" picture. She told DJ that she went to "Pre-swork"

We were excited that the weather has cooled off and we got to try out a few of the new clothes my sister found for the girls. We are a huge fan of Kid to Kid at our house and my sister Brittany scored on tights! I obviously need to make some more bows for Kelsi, though. :)

This is from a few weeks ago, but I'll still post it here. I went down to hang out with Brittany, my sister, before school started for her. Her boys decided to have a lemonade stand the day I got there. They charged 25 cents for a small and 50 cents for a large and each ended up making $5 after helping to pay for supplies. The lemonade was SO good since Britt had bought a block of ice to go in it. The girls enjoyed their fair share.

Here they are with a customer. They had a lot of fun.

Dance Class

As many know, Jessica is a very active little girl. This fall, a dance class started in our community that was a reasonable price and within close walking distance so we decided to try it out. Tonight was Jessica's second class and here are some highlights. The little girl in the pictures with her is her friend Noel.

She had a delightful time and I had great fun watching her.

Hair do's

I have been having fun with Jessica's hair. She goes in waves where she will let me do her hair, and then for a few weeks she won't let me TOUCH it to wash it or comb it or anything. I still wash it of course, but she is not a happy camper about it. My sister came over and braided her hair and got her to hold still by telling her wild stories. I remember her making up stories when we were younger and I LOVED them. Anyway, It re-inspired me and several stories later... This is what you do if you have 1:00 church and have hours to keep her occupied before it starts. My mom made the girls matching dresses and then I made bows and bracelets to match. Didn't she do a great job? Some of these ideas have come off of a couple hair blogs including this one I've mention before and a blog about short hair.

And here is the back...

This was an inside-out braid. This story involved her favorites- Jack and the Beanstalk and the Giant and Kyler and Casen and Pyper and Jessica and Kelsi and Matt and Josh and Ben... Sometimes we add in Julia and Blake and Luke and Rachel and Ellie...

This hair do is a standard. I can use 6 different colors of elastics and it matches everything. I usually leave it in for an extra day or so. This particular day it had even survived swimming. She has 3 more elastics on the other side. This has been GREAT for growing out her bangs.

We're still working on Kelsi's hair...

And I thought Jessica was bald. This is Jessica just over one year old.

And this is Jessica at just over 14 months. Look at all that hair! I guess good things come to those who wait. :)

We still love our bald beauty, though. She is such a delight. I really want to catch her mischievous grin and camera, though... I thought her lip was cute in this picture. And she is definetly starting to get more hair.

Birthdays!

The Month from June 30-July 31st is crazy in my family for birthdays. It starts with Kelsi on the 30th, Matt and Jen and Chad on the 2nd of July, then Casen on the 12th, Luke somewhere around then, Jessica on the 29th and Pyper on July 31st, and I am sure I missed someone else. Here are some pictures from Jessica's and Pyper's Birthdays. That doesn't even include August with Julia and both of my Grandmas.

On Jessica's Birthday I decided the thing Jessica would love the very most would be to go to Grandma Nettie's house and go swimming. Not only that, but Grandma made her a cake that Jessica got to help decorate! She turned 3, but if you ask her how old she is, she says that she is 2 and turns 3 in July. She is in denial. I thought that didn't start until you were older.

Grandma Nettie gave the girls a dollhouse. It looks like they are sharing so nicely in the picture. We'll let you think that. :) It came in the mail hence the packing peanuts all over the floor.

Here we are are Liberty park for Jessica's and Pyper's birthday opening presents. That is Kyler looking on. Jessica adores her cousins. Kyler and Casen can do no wrong.

My mom (Grandma Bear) made the girls fabulous tutus.

They proceeded to turn everyone into animals. Here Grandpa was just turned into a monkey

As you can see from the top picture, the girls are the best of friends.

Bricks and Wolves

Jessica has a fixation with wolves. She both loves them and is afraid of them. She loves all nursery rhyme stories that include wolves and made-up wolf stories, especially ones about Jessica wolves and Kelsi wolves. Tonight as she was going to bed she said that she was scared of the fish, tigers and wolves. I explained to her how lucky we are that we live in a brick house- she has a cinderblock wall in her room. Cinderblocks come in handy sometimes. :) Tonight as she said her prayers she said "thank you that my wall is made of bricks" and again "thank you that our house is made of bricks." She was really sweet as she was going to bed.

Me

So my Aunt pointed out to me that there are no pictures of me on my blog so she could not point me out to her husband. Here are a few random pictures of me.

This first picture is with my lovely nieces Pyper, Jessica (okay- my daughter), and Julia on the 4th of July.

The next weekend we went up to Rexburg, ID for a family reunion and my Great-Uncle Melvin took us on a 3 hour horse ride through the sand dunes. You can kind of see them in the background. The ride was awesome and a perfect length.

While Jen was visiting (DJ's sister) we went to Seven Peaks and had a blast. We borrowed that floatie thing from Jen for Jessica and it was SOOOOO nice.

Here is a picture of me with Kelsi at the Hogle zoo. We live within minutes and have a membership which is a lot of fun and a lifesaver in the winter.