10 Months and Growing

Here are a few pictures from this last month that we thought you would all enjoy.  We appear in some of them, but we're realists.  We know what our public wants.  And so we present to you what a month with Madison Ames is like.

She absolutely loves her toys.  Lauren's sister, Jeni, was so nice to give us some of her old toys and M can't get enough of them.  The hair in the picture above was just after a swim.

She loves to drag this dinosaur around.

Madison mistakenly thought that if she acted happy that she could push back her bed-time.  Too bad for her we are pretty firm with her bed-time.

This was one more attempt to shmooze her way into a late night.

She wasn't as happy once we turned the camera off and put her into her crib.

10 months on this day.

Going to church

"Hey you over there! Wanna buy a pink ball?"

When we take her for a ride in the stroller she likes to ride in luxury.  She only has one foot up here but normally she throws both up to create an extremely posh experience.

She loves to swim!

We went camping over labor day weekend and the mosquitoes were thick!

We stopped at city creek on our way home from camping and ate lunch with Shawn Poor.  Madison really enjoyed herself on this water feature until the security guard came and told us that everybody, crawling babies included, had to have shoes to be on the pad--in case they slipped.  I'll decline to comment on that.

chicken alfredo

And here is Madison again, on her way back from rehab judging from the look on her face.  Lauren thinks I have a tendency to look like this in pictures.  hmm.

The Beginning of Logan

Our last week in Provo Madison and I stopped by the new Provo temple to see the construction.

Right now the temple is on stilts as they are digging up the basement.

Dinner time.

Madison loves corn on the cob.  Unfortunately she might have a food allergy to it.

She also loves watermelon.  Pretty much she loves food in general.

Her hair is starting to get longer.  I like to give her a mohawk.

Helping dad put the crib together.  She is helping hold the hardware.

Mmmm...tastes like metal.

Such a happy baby.

Trying out her new crib for the first time.  I think she likes it.

Some people like prison...

We went to Illinois to visit Tyler's brother.

Getting ready to go to Nauvoo.

Having a taste of her first pickle.

She likes it.

Sitting outside of Brigham Young's house.

Getting ready to walk down Parley Street.

Madison's first night sleeping in her crib...it really only lasted a few minutes before she started screaming and ended up sleeping in my bed.

Our Provo Souvenir

We have a triumph to declare.  We recently turned this:

into this:

Okay, not quite.  But pretty close.  We didn't dye ours a mocha color, Lauren didn't want turned legs, and we decided not to bend the back of the crib.  But we do have the pictures of the crib we made below.

We built it with some ash wood that came from an ash tree around the corner from our house in Provo. Our neighbor saw the ash trees being cut down and convinced the city to give the wood to him and knowing I was planning to build a crib he gave some to us. Thanks, Jeff!  I really enjoyed trying some new techniques on this project such as the laminate bending for the arms, and cutting the molding on the table saw.   Lauren did an amazing amount of work on this crib by putting in hours and hours--tens of hours--of sanding. She surprised me once by sanding the molding all the way smooth and getting out all of the table saw blade marks. When I came home from work I was very surprised. Unfortunately it gave her blisters because she did so much. she was a trooper.

Oh, also, the raised panels are maple. We had to buy some maple to make those, everything else came from the local ash. We were talking with someone about it--though I forget who it was now--and they asked where the wood came from.  We answered, "a tree."  The person gave us a shocked look, then the look turned into, "duh" and said something like, "for a minute I thought that you got it from a tree you chopped down or something.  But of course all wood comes from trees."  We then said, no, the wood really did come from a tree like that.  It came from around the corner about two blocks.  We had to let it air dry before working with it. We have a few figured pieces of maple and Lauren, like me, loves the figured pieces of wood.

What is something unique about you?

So we moved into our new ward a few weeks ago and the relief society asked Lauren to fill out a questionnaire.  One of the questions was "What is something unique about you?"  Lauren wrote down, "my husband and I are both non high school graduates."

Yes, in case any of you did not know, neither Lauren nor I graduated from high school.  And we didn't get our GED either.  I just barely graduated from my undergraduate program at BYU but before that, the last thing I graduated was Junior High--but with flying colors!

In any case, Lauren found our new ward's blog the other day.  Each new relief society sister is highlighted and it gives different facts from the questionnaire about the sister.  Anyone who visits the site will read about Lauren and will read: "What makes Lauren unique?   Both Lauren and her husband are high school graduates!"  Our picture is posted just above.  I'd just as soon have our picture taken down so that no one associates that "fact" with our face.

The blog is http://smithfield14.blogspot.com/ if you would like to see it for yourself.

The conversation that I think will be really awkward for anyone involved is when somebody at church decides to congratulate us on our high school diplomas and we'll have to tell them that we didn't even graduate from high school.  We're frauds!