Our Family

Here are our newest family photos taken by Jeff Stafford. Enjoy!

8 months old

Atley is 8 months old! How time flies, huh? Ian says "soon he will have been out of the womb longer than he was in it!" That's a crazy thought, huh?

Atley loves to walk. We have to help a lot, but every chance he gets, he's always standing.

Here's his 8 month photo and a fun video!

Sleepy Baby

Atley has almost always been a pretty good sleeper. Now he's to the point where he tell us it's bed time! How great is that? The only odd thing about his sleeping is the way he does it.

He has to sleep as close to the edge of the crib as possible. When I put him down, he's usually in the middle and when I come back in the morning.... Well, seeing is believing!

His grandpa built him a giant crib and he chooses to sleep like this? Go figure.

Sunday Fun

We had a little mess on our bed (Atley loves to make messes) so we took the cover to our comforter off to wash it. It still wasn't back on Sunday so we decided to have some fun with it. Atley got a real kick out of it. Enjoy!

Independence Day!

We had the most wonderful Independence weekend. The first independence we celebrated was being out of school! We had a four day weekend and since a lot of our friends decided to leave town we spent all our time together as a family.

Thursday we were probably still getting used to the idea of not having class, so we didn't do much. Friday was spent running around Rexburg and getting rejected for all our errands. The library on campus was closed for the holiday weekend so our next best idea was to buy some diapers Atley needed. We came home and played in the box! It was fun.

After our box fun, we decided to go to the park. Ian and I threw around the old softball (in preparation for the 4th) and Atley tried to eat the grass.

When Ian got home from work he made us smoothies. Atley loves the taste of blended fruits and no added sugar!

Saturday morning I woke up first. I was really excited for the parade because we missed it last year. Also, this year we didn't have to reserve a seat! The parade went right by our apartment complex!

Here are some of the floats we really liked!

The local grocery store provided a self-driven GIANT grocery cart. It was the first one we found really unique.

I really liked this one because of the theme. The sign says "When kids happen" and there is a bathtub and toilet that sprayed water everywhere! It was a giant marching ad for a restoration company I think.

Ian liked this one. It was an X-wing from Star Wars (at least I think). Behind it was a bunch of jedi children fighting with light sabers. I'm not sure what it had to do with Independence Day, but it was fun to watch!

Some of the other things we liked about the parade was all the candy they threw out, the chocolate milk they passed out, and Atley even got a small Frisbee that he hasn't stopped playing with since! Here's a picture of his face after getting the Frisbee.

The afternoon was spent relaxing and listening to Michael Medved discourse on the Revloutionary War. We'd been listening to it all break so we could be sure we knew what we were celebrating. Also, we watched Ian's Revolutionary War DVD's that he got for Christmas. All this while we prepared our picnic dinner.

We decided not to buy fireworks because in our situation we might as well be burning our money. Instead we had a picnic on the top of the hill in Rexburg and watched more on the Revloutionary War while we waited to see the city fireworks.

Atley got tired of waiting so he took a little nap. Don't worry, he woke up just in time to see all the fireworks!

We were able to see fireworks all over Rexburg! Our favorite firework was one that looked like exploding gold dust. It really made me think of "the bombs bursting in air" (though the national anthem wasn't written until the War of 1812.)

We want to wish everyone else a Happy Independence Day and we hope yours was as fun and educational as ours!