We have moved!!!

Well, it has been forever since I have written on my blog but life has been busy (and without the internet for a while.) We were originally planning to move from sacramento to ST. George, UT where we were going to buy a house, at the last minute it fell through and we got to thinking about it, and since Ryan wasn't on the right track for his school this semester there was really no reason for us to move there (except for all of our cedar friends-which almost convinced us to move back) Instead we moved about a mile away from my family, which is also an hour away from Ryans family so we could enjoy being with them, and so they could see there first grandbaby-and I have to admit, the prospect of recieving help with maya is what made the final decision. It has been wonderful so far, we live in an apt. that is BRIGHT yellow and rather ghetto, but the price is worth making sacrifices for. We painted the inside with accent walls and such and now that we have all our stuff from out of storage, it is a snug fit, but is starting to feel rather homey.

I decided one thing when we got all of our stuff from storage....we have WAY too much stuff. So we are starting to go through things (namely ryans books) no joke in our last apt in cedar we had 5 1/2 large bookshelves completely full along with a few large tubs of other books. He has done a wonderful job of getting rid of a lot of those and put a lot in storage as well. Its been nice.

Right now ryan is doing the temporary christmas UPS delivery boy, so that is working out while he tries to figure out what he wants to do here. There are a couple of sales options, but I think he is getting a bit burned out in that area, so we will see.

We got a membership recently to the YMCA's here in Boise and we are in heaven. We LOVE going to them to work out. We have been able to go together most of the time which always motivates us better cause I tell Ryan that I can work out longer or more intense than him (even though I know its not true) so he has to be the "man" and show off for me.......ha ha....... its pretty cute.

I have loved bein next to my family, especially next to my siblings. Two of them are moving out within the next 8 months and as all of you probably know from experience, things just aren't the same after that, its hard to make sure you are all together at the same time, so I really want to take advantage of this time here. My youngest sister camille is the biggest help with maya ever, and the next one up Kaisa-is my workout coach. She has all these fitness classes she takes from school like advanced conditioning and volleyball exercises that she is just dying to teach me. She says if I stick with her the rest of my baby tummy will be gone-I did one work out with her and I am sure that is true...I just dont know if I will live through the actual excercises. She is 15 years old- 5'2" but I think she has been able to kick my hiney since she was probably 12...shes buff!

Maya is doing well and soaking in all the attention. She absolutely loves it and now gets bored when we go home, she always wants something to be going on. She is 5 1/2 months and still only rolls over one direction and we wonder if she will ever be able to roll back, she doesn't seem to interested in that or crawling or anything. We decided to feed her solids and she did wonderful her first time ( daddy got to feed her) but since then she hasn't seemed too interested in eating anything like solids. We also tried to get her to take a bottle because she is still having a lot of tummy troubles and I know that some formulas will help and I have come to a conclusion. If I were to randomly die-she would starve! She will not take it at all and gets so mad! We have tried probably 6 different types of bottles and she hates them all. She could be starving, happy, going to sleep, or just waking up but she refuses. She is a stubborn little girl. We have so much fun with her though. She seems to be growing so much and I took a look at her newborn pictures a few days ago and almost cried. She is growing way too fast. I need to figure out how to slow this girl down! :) Here are some pics, I added some of maya when she was a few days old, more for me than anything else. I forgot how much hair she had and how small she was.

Daddys pride and joy!

Any of you who know Ryan will know his excitement when he got this for our daughter. He picked it up at the mall when he went with his friend. When he came back, he ran in the door and said, "wheres Maya?" I told him I had just gotten her to sleep and would you believe he was willing to wake her up just to put her in the outfit??? I told him he had baby duty if he did that so he didn't wake her up. But as soon as she was awake the Jordan outfit was on and we had the cameras out.

Ryan compared it to how I get excited about dressing up maya and putting her in beautiful headbands and lacy socks and really girly things. As he was putting her in the outfit he said, "this is how you feel huh, its really exciting!" ....... he finally understands my unbridled excitement. It came with two different outfits, one hat and two pairs of socks, we didn't put the socks on but everything else made it on her. How cute is she? We have a Jordan baby.

Halloween Cookies!

A tradition in my family is that around all the big holidays my mom would always make sugar cookies and we would decorate. I just recently bought myself a decorating kit and decided to keep the tradition alive! I got some really cute cookie cutters from the dollar store-6 adorable ones for a dollar...what a deal! 

Since there are only two of us who eat cookies and I dont know enough people to give them away to here, I just halved the batch of cookies and frosting. So the decorating looks a little sad, but I was proud of my first attempt and plan to get better in the future. I cant wait for christmas to come! The picture of the lone cookie was the one ryan said was the cutest....and while it isn't much, I figured it deserved an honorary place on the blog. Sorry if its a little hard to see.

The second costume-fairy

So I though I was pretty good with just the alcatraz baby, but I went to visit my friend Janet-who also has a baby girl a few months older than maya. She was making her a fairy costume and wanted me to do one for Maya as well. She had picked up an extra skirt by accident so I bought it from her and dressed it up with ribbons and flowers all over it. I have to say that is looked pretty adorable, although looking at the pics I took I realize that you can' t even see it! I will have to take a separate picture of that. I found some wings for only 4 bucks -which I thought was a great deal. My friends Janet made an adorable wreath of flowers for her head. Our plan was to do a "anne geddes" type photo shoot of our daughters together. However we are still waiting for the weather to cooperate with us.....we may be waiting a while. :)

I wanted to take more pictures of Maya in her costume but she was sick with a cold at this point so she wasn't cooperating very well. Somehow I got the pic with that amazing smile, but after that she didn't want to have anything to do with that outfit.

Alcatraz Baby!

So for halloween I originally planned to dress Maya up as a lobster, until I found out that she had to be 6 months old to even fit in the outfit. When that idea flew out the window we decided to pick her up an "escaped from alcatraz" outfit from San Francisco. We thought it would have meaning since she went to San Francisco with us. Although it took me forever to find some black pants to go with the outfit- It turned out very cute!  We tried giving her a mohawk, but since she is going a bit bald, it didn't work out too well. I decided to make her a headband to go with it since she looked a lot like a boy dressed in black.  Anyways, we had fun with it.

Apple Hill and the accident

So apple hill is a tradition that Ryan has done with his family for years. It is a fun little town that has beautiful scenery, pumpkin patches, and apples everywhere. As you drive through the smile winding roads you find ma and pa type shops everywhere with anything from crafts to homemade goodies.

We met Ryans mom and his aunt Mary there and drove around trying to figure out where we wanted to stop first. They had packed a picnic for us and we were all really excited to be there. As we drove through the town and started to ascend to "apple hill" the traffic was horrible! We were driving so slow, and sometimes we were almost at a stop. Because the roads are so small it can be a little difficult when there is a lot of traffic. 

So as you probably have read before...maya HATES the car. Which does make traveling a  lot more difficult but it hasn't stopped us yet. She was in the back and had been screaming for quite some time already, our nerves were wearing thin. She had just woken up from a rather long nap and had been in the car for  an hour after that so she was hungry. We pulled over to the side of the road to meet up with his mom to find out where we were going to stop so we could feed maya. The cries kept getting louder and louder so we decided to just turn around and go back about 1/2 a mile. 

In frustration ryan backed up to get on the road but forgot to look behind him. I looked over my shoulder just in time to see him back into a nice big pick-up truck.  Luckily the guy was pretty cool about it....and even better was that we had just gotten insurance on our new car exactly one week before that. Hallelujah insurance! So yes we already have a ding on the back our car we have only owned a month. A little frustrating, but no one was hurt and that is what matters.

After getting things figured out we found a place to have our picnic and it was fun to just relax and see all the beauty around us. Ryan and his Aunt Mary stood in line for almost an hour to get a fresh baked apple pie-which was the most amazing pie I have ever had in my life! I want to go back there again just for that.  Carol bought us a few crafts for our home. One for halloween and one for Maya. Me and Ryan would someday like to go back there again just the two of us for a romantic get-away, it is so beautiful and quaint. We'll see when that happens! :) 

San Francisco Trip

I have to say that I LOVE San Francisco! Even though it is only two hours away, we had only gone once before. That was when I was over 8 months pregnant so it really wasn't all that fun. Well, it was, but walking around just made me swell up and I felt so slow...especially walking anything uphill. So it was nice to go and have maya with us ( no longer in my tummy, but in the stroller).
It has been tough doing stuff with Maya since she is so grouchy, but its getting to the point where we are sick of staying at home and want to go out and do stuff, and she is getting happier, so this was her first day trip. Plus I know I am not the only person in the world who has a fussy baby so I just have to buck up and learn how to deal with her.
We left in the morning when Maya went down for her nap so we could travel in peace. It worked for a while but 20 minutes away she woke up and started screaming. We thought-ok that isn't too bad, we can handle it for 20 min. easy, but then we couldn't find parking for less than 30 bucks for the longest time, so it took another 25 min to park-by that time she was one mad baby! On the bright side, we did find parking for eleven dollars! :) -but that was probably the only upside.
Once we got all the baby stuff out of the car (people always told me you have to have a ton of stuff when you travel with a baby-but I had no idea it would be that bad for a day trip. We needed all sorts of warm clothes and a hat and all that because San Francisco can get quite cold.) we went straight over to Pier 39 and went to the Sea Lion Restaurant and had clam chowder in a sour dough bread bowl. Ryan pretty much introduced me to sourdough bread because his family eats it all the time, and even though Im not a big seafood fan, I do love clam chowder.
The Blue Angles were performing that day-which is cool because I got to see there show in mtn. home at Ryans house only a few weeks ago, and I think that jets doing tricks is one of the coolest things to watch. The coolest things they did (which both me and ryan missed sadly) but they had one of there bigger planes fly under the golden gate bridge. That is so cool!
Afterwards we did some browsing around at all the shops and I got the cutest San Francisco sweater for really cheap, and we bought Maya an "escaped from alcatraz" outfit. We have decided that will be her halloween outfit. I wanted her to be a lobster but she isn't big enough for the outfit. Then I wanted her to be a tootsie roll, but knowing her-I dont think she would like something like that because she hates having things on her head. So we are just sticking with that. Maybe I can spike her hair with some gel or something and rub dirt on her face...I dunno....
Our last stop was Ghiradelli square where we bought chocolate trolleys (which were amazing) and split a sundae that had cheesecake and strawberries and blueberries. The coolest part of that was that they had chocolate blueberries on top that looked just like fresh blueberries! At that point Maya started crying-I knew she was tired but she wouldn't go to sleep. So after about 30 min of sitting on a bench with her, she finally gave in a took a nap.
We bundled her up in the stroller and started walking back to where we parked-which was quite a ways away, and for those of you who have been there you know how intense the hills can be! Luckily I had Ryan with me so I made him do all the pushing of the stroller while I just had to get myself up the steep roads. Man, am I out of shape...
We accidentally went up 1 road to many so we had to go back down, but it was one of the steepest roads of all...I just though, "how in the world are we going to get the stroller down that with maya in it? she was asleep and since sleep is so precious I couldn't bear to wake her up." We ended up having to go down it with the stroller backwards or she would have flown out and rolled down the hill... So I posted a picture of Ryan going down it with the stroller backwards and me standing at the bottom to show you how steep it was. Near the bottom there was a bush in the way so we had to carry it around that and the rest of the way down. It was great fun.
The drive home was doomed from the beginning....crying from the moment we put maya in the carseat. It was the beginning of her crying for an hour and fifteen minutes on the way home...it wasn't safe to stop anywhere in oakland, so we waited till we got past that and stopped at a Target. She was fine the moment we took her out of the carseat. I was even sitting in the back with her AND she had carseat toys and I know the straps weren't too tight, so go figure on why she hates it so much. If anyone has any advice on how to help babies enjoy the car more...feel free to leave a comment. :)

Funny Picture...

The other day I laid Maya Down on her mat that she plays on and I put her on her tummy so she could have some tummy time. I had some things to do, but after about 5 minutes she started yelling (which she often does, so i wasn't too worried about it) but finally she started crying so I went over to check on her because she actually doesn't like laying on her stomach-and when I picked her up, this is what I found..... she had spit up everywhere!! She isn't strong enough to keep her head up all the time so her face had bopped down into her spitup and she got it all over her face. Ryan was there and as I was about to wipe it off he said, "no wait-lets get a picture!" (how did I not think of that?) Anyhow, it gave us a good laugh, even if maya was mad.

Ryan and Half Dome

A couple weeks back when i was at home, Ryan went to Yosemite National Park and hiked half dome with his friend Jason. Ryan loves hiking, but said he felt out of shape after he hiked that. All I know is that he went a lot faster than if I had gone with him. I am quite the slow hiker-uphill or down. :) It took them 11 hours total to do the hike with a half hour nap up on the top and another half hour looking at the view and taking pictures. There were so many people there doing the hike, which I was surprised at because it looks quite hard (I guess not everyone is like me and some people actually do like a challenge)

On the hike they saw several deer, a bobcat, and a bear-its got to be so nice to escape all the business of life and see so much of nature like that. I have only seen bears at yellowstone park.

Anyways here are a few pictures.

Rolling Over!

Last night for the first time Maya rolled over while I was on the phone with my sister Raili (so she got to be in way part of the experiece). It was so cute to see and since then she has been stubbornly trying to roll over again and again but pretty much always gets stuck on her arm. Its funny because she rolls from back to front- but to help turn herself over instead of using her arms or legs to flip herself over she digs her face into the floor and keeps shoving to pull herself over. She has only succeeded twice but she tries constantly and gets so frustrated when she can't do it! All me and Ryan can do is laugh and help give her a little push over and laugh again as she still is frustrated as she lies on her arm. I love watching babies, they are so entertaining!!!

I FINALLY did it!

Yes, finally did it....I dyed my hair brown-which is of course my natural color, but it has been close to 5 years since I have had all of my hair brown, I usually have lots of blond highlights. There have been times where I am pretty much completely bleach blond. So this was a BIG shock to my system. I have been wanting to do it for some time now because I get sick of having to put hightlights in all the time. All you ladies know what I mean, you get highlights-they look great for about a month and a half and then they start growing out and by 2-2 1/2 months, you cant stand how you look anymore but you try to push it out as far as you can so you dont have to spend the money to get it done...

So yeah, I told My hairdresser Wes (he is my favorite ever!) and he said that he would put in a decently dark color but that it would fade probably a bunch because he was putting it on bleached hair. So the picture is the day i got it done, since then it has lightened a bit but I still like it. 

The funnest part was that I didn't tell Ryan I was going to do it, even though Ryan new me as a brunette when I was what-15? He fell in love with me as a blond (although I am sure it had nothing to do with it) so whenever I said I was thinking of going brunette, he would always tell me it was my choice and that he would be happy with whatever, but I could tell he wasn't anxious for it to come. I wanted to see his "true" reaction so I thought this was the best way.

The day came and after the deed was done Wes turned me around and I was horrified! I hated it, I cried on the way home and looked in the mirror once more and then didn't look at myself in the mirror again for about a day and a half. I guess it shouldn't be that big of a deal, but I just didn't feel like myself at all. I had nightmares about what ryan would say when I got off the plane.

When I went home, I got off the plane and I couldn't see Ryan anywhere. He had to finish an appointment with a client so that kind of took the climax out of the whole situation. When he finally showed up he came up hugged and kissed me, told me how much he missed me and then took Maya and we started walking away. I thought, what????? is that it??? he hates it I know it! So I asked him, "what do you think of my hair?"

He looked at me and said, "yeah, your hair is a bit different, what color is that anyway, cause its definitely not blond ? (in all fairness at the beginning it did have a tint of red" I thought to myself you have GOT to be kidding me....all this worrying for that! he didn't even really notice. I guess that just goes to show that us girls really worry more about our looks than our husbands do. After a bit, he said that he really liked it and that yeah, he could tell a difference. I am really starting to like it and next time I might go a shade darker. We'll see....

First Laugh!!!!

Maya just gave us her first laugh ever! It was so cute! Luckily ryan was home for lunch so he was able to her one of the very first ones. I love how when babies first learn to laugh, it almost sounds a throat gurgle or almost like a cough. How sweet it is to see her change so much!

Family Pics at blessing

The blessing went so well. I was also a bit worried about maya screaming through the whole thing but it fell at a great time of day-her naptime. So she got passed around to everyone that wanted to hold her  (which would not normally happen) and then she pretty much slept through the whole blessing. I would have to say that one of my very favorite parts of the day was sitting next to Ryan while he held Maya in her dress as he kept staring at her. He leaned over to me at one part and said, "isn't she so beautiful?" and then just kept staring at her through the whole meeting. Maya already has her daddy wrapped around her finger-which I know she will use to her advantage especially as she gets older. I feel so lucky to have such a great husband who loves his little girl so so much! He even does diapers! :) It was wonderful to have both of our families there. Thanks Aunt Mary for traveling all that way! I didn't get a picture of Ryans family because they had to leave right after but it was so great to have them there!

Professional Pics of Maya!

I absolutely LOVE these pictures of Maya! How cute is she???? Thanks to grandma Carol for the gift of giving Maya her first professional photo shoot. I was so scared that she was going to be so naughty for this -anyone who knows Maya knows that she is a tad bit, uh should we say----emotional? It was originally on a tuesday for 2 o'clock.  Our AMAZING photographer had to reschedule because her baby was sick which ended up being a good thing because Maya had the biggest blowout at 2:15- and at that point she would have been in her blessing dress! Thank goodness that didn't happen, but she slept up until the photographer got there and after a quick feeding, she was quite happy and worked with us really well (as you can tell). I was so happy with how these turned out! Maya is almost 3 months old and changing so much every day. I can't believe how much bigger she is already. Enjoy the pics!

More on the game

We went to a minor league baseball game on saturday night. The rivercats were our team and i have to say they stink! The end score was 17- 0....(zero being us)we were on the edge of our seats wondering who was going to win the whole time! :)  Maya slept through half of it under a bunch of blankets and then was pretty happy for the second half. We went with our friends Drew and Mindy, it was awesome to hang out with them. The best part was the fireworks at the end. Maya was crying before that but as soon as they started she stopped and stared for the whole show. As soon as they were over-she was crying again. We had a great time though-can't wait to go to a giants game now!

The Rivercats Game

I love this picture of maya and her dad, they are so cute! 

Lucky Shot

We were so lucky to catch this smile on camera! This is Ryans best friend Drew who is holding her. I took Maya to him to take a quick picture and she was frowning when I started to take the picture. She gave this huge smile as I took it and by the time I looked at her she was frowning again! What a cutie she is. So now we just show this picture to Drew's dates and tell them how he charms babies!  ;)

The Best Daddy Ever!

Ryan is the best dad ever! I was excited to see him with maya because he is an only child and never really been around babies before. I envisioned that the first time he would hold her he might be a little awkward or not really sure what to do with her. I was totally wrong! I think he was more calm with her than I was at the beginning! He was so good with her and could get her to calm down when I sometimes couldn't.

He was anxious to play with her-this was one of the things he always said he was most excited about, until he soon realized when she came home from the hospital that uh....she doesn't play yet. Nope she runs a pretty tight ship with only 4 things on the agenda-eating, pooping, crying, and sleeping. But he still loved holding her and I swear her favorite spot to sleep is on her daddys chest. She squirms a lot if I try to have her sleep on me like that, but ryan must be more comfortable because as soon as you lay her on there she goes right to sleep.

I love seeing the tender side of Ryan coming out with his little girl, calling her sweetie and angel and just staring at her. She is amazing I have to admit, we are so happy to have her in our home and she has brought such a wonderful spirit there. I dont think anything makes us happier than seeing our daughter smile, or bulge her big eyes out.