Marching on

March brought us some visitors. The first lucky person to come visit us was my niece Dagny. It was her college spring break. Like we do with so many guests, we made her take a walk. We took her and Grandpa Keith to our neighborhood arroyo in search of some bunnies. It was also her first time to see Logan. I'm sure she was smitten.

Spring is here!

These three spent that night and the next morning playing canasta.

Our second visitor was my Dad, Grandpa Jay. He drove all the way from Phoenix to visit us. Since we already did the arroyo, we figured we better do our other favorite outings. Off to the aquarium and zoo! 

Look Grandma, a stingray.

Loves running in circles!

He really just loves to run.

It was Grandpa Jay's birthday while he was here so, of course, I had to come up with something. Pinterest to the rescue! He loves movies, so these cupcakes seemed perfect. The popcorn is made out of marshmallows.

Grandpa Jay tried to teach Logan to say "Primo" for yummy things, but Logan decided to rename Ice Cream to Primo instead.

Logan loved riding on Grandpa's walker. He took advantage of that every day too.

Kyle was able to take his lunch break at the zoo with us. Inevitably, when Logan and Kyle and are together, running ensues. This visit was no exception.

We finished up the zoo at the kid's play area.

Our visits were too short, but we were so glad Dagny and Grandpa Jay came to see us.

More of March to come.  Until then, here are some miscellaneous photos of down time at a park:

Let the cake decorating begin - March continues

In March my friend, Rebekah, asked me to help her make her daughter's Frozen birthday cake. We started out by scanning through Pinterest to get some ideas. Rebekah chose what she wanted to do, and the night before the party our families gathered at Rebekah's house. The guys and the kids played together, while Rebekah and I went to work. We had each baked part of the cakes the night before so all we had to do was the decorating. Rebekah did learn first-hand that you have to modify the cake recipes for high altitude. I had sent the directions to do the modification in a separate email, but they didn't make it into the cake baking process. My bad for not putting everything in one email. Let's just say that one of our cakes was a little on the flat side. Still super yummy though.

Here was our inspiration:

Here is our cake! I think it turned out fantastic. Rebekah did a great decorating job. I just showed her a few tricks along the way.

When I first saw what Rebekah wanted to do, I wasn't sure how we would do those trees. I emailed the original cake designer, but didn't get a response until after we had completed the cake. I thought play-doh would work. So I made us some play-doh and did some trial trees before we got together.

We made our trees for the cake.  Then the original cake designer emailed me. She told me that her trees were plastic. They had come from the kit of Frozen toys on her cake. I was so proud of our homemade trees.

My dear friend Rebekah.

I had such a great time doing this cake with Rebekah. Of course the best part was how much Aurelia loved her cake.

We had a great time at the party too.  It was fun to take part in a little girl's birthday party. I'm guessing Logan's parties won't have so many princesses in attendance.

A few random photos from March.

Here is Logan testing out all of the vehicles in the toy store.

He is helping me plant our seeds for our garden.

I thought we might have some fun if we put streamers up for the day. We spend so much time running around the house, I thought this might spice it up a little.

February flew by

Easter is quickly approaching, and I am racing to get these photos out on the blog before the end of April. To be honest, I don't recall much of February. According to my calendar, we took our first tour of a preschool, I played volleyball, and I went to a sewing class. Obviously, much more happens in our lives than what I have in my calendar, but I don't recall much of what that "more" consisted of.  Writing this blog helps to remind me though.

One of my favorite morning activities with Logan is to build a train track on our floor. We have a train table, but we have enough track to create other new layouts whenever we want to. Logan and I build the track together, and recently he is interested in playing with it after it is complete.

At the end of January, Kyle took Logan to a place called Gravity Park. It is a very large building with pretty much wall-to-wall trampolines for the floor. There are actually 3 major trampoline rooms and two big foam pits. Let's just say it is a huge hit with Logan. (He's gone three more times since then.)   Well, after his first visit to Gravity Park, Logan decided we needed to convert our guest room into a miniature version.

Logan is even holding the Gravity Park wrist band.

Another favorite activity is just a simple outing to our neighborhood park. This was the 8th of February, and it was the first nice weather weekend. That called for some running around. The soccer ball always goes with us, but it doesn't always make it home. An interesting thing about Logan: he appears to be right handed, but he kicks consistently with his left leg.

Shadows!!

Logan discovered some tree berries that he was completely fascinated with. He would pick them up, take them to dad, toss them. It was endless amounts of fun for him.

These were the Valentine's Day cards that we made this year. 

If my memory isn't failing me, this was the first time we played with "play dough". I made it myself, and Logan loved it. In fact, I remember being really surprised at how often and how long he wanted to play with it. 

For Valentine's Day, Grandma and Grandpa Neel gave Logan a golfing set. Their next few visits consisted of them trying to teach Logan the proper way to hold the club. 

We finished February with two visits to the zoo. I really need to vary our outings, but the zoo is such a great place to spend the day when the weather is nice. Another great thing about the zoo is that it's pretty close to Kyle's office, so he can meet us for lunch. It makes for a nice weekday afternoon.

This was the first time we had seen the polar bears in the water since Logan was born.

Zoo trip #2:

Apparently they put food in this container. The polar bear would take it up the slide and toss it down, hoping to get it open.

The other major activity for February was watching the Olympics. Kyle and I watched way more Olympic events than we have in the past, and Logan seemed to enjoy watching the skating. He loves music and dancing, so maybe that's why skating really appealed to him. Kyle particularly enjoyed the biathlon, and I loved the free style skiing.

Logan also saw a tiny section of the new Hobbit movie. It was in the beginning of the first movie where Bilbo is joining the Dwarf party. They are leaving the Shire on ponies, and the scene goes through many beautiful areas. Logan said "Wow" in a hushed tone the first time the camera pulled back to show the landscape. Logan was not allowed to see anything else in that movie (too scary), but I had to show him the ponies over and over again for at least a week.