Olivia is 11 months!

Olivia is nearly a year old, we can't believe it!  She has seven teeth and a wild personality.  She loves cruising along furniture and is painfully close to walking.

Her first word is Dada, which she says all the time.  When Bob leaves for work in the morning, she crawls towards the door crying and yelling, "Dada!  Dada!"

Action shot.  You really don't get any other kind of shot with Olivia around.

Aunt Didi came to visit from California for some party times before law school starts.  Olivia loved playing the piano with her, hanging out, and we even went to the pool with Aunt Didi and Nana.

Bob loves taking Olivia out mountain biking.  Now that she's gotten a little bigger, she really enjoys long rides in the bike trailer.

You can sort of see her leaning forward.  She loves going for rides in the stroller as well.  She sits calmly back and watches the world go by, which is really rare for her!

She has fallen in love with the kids show Yo Gabba Gabba.  It is weird, but it's full of awesome music she loves to dance to.

Summer Fun

Olivia, eating toilet paper.

We have been loving summer and just having a blast!  While Bob was in Europe, Cassandra took Henry and Olivia to Park City to hang out with her side of the family.  Olivia enjoyed floating and splashing in the pool.

She loves hanging out with her Grandpa Dean...

...Especially if he's got some ice cream to share!

Olivia loves swimming and water.  We like going to the splash pad with friends.

You can see Olivia in the pink hat sitting on the ground.  She's hanging out with her friends Grant and Mason and their mom Jamey.

We also picked up a blow-up pool for our backyard so we can go splashing whenever we want!

We recently went to the Ogden Dinosaur Park with a bunch of Bob's family.  Uncle Carter enjoyed pushing the kids around to see the various dinosaurs.  (Pictured behind: Cousin Logan, Grandpa Chris, Aunt Michelle, Grandma Christa, and Aunt Arla)

Aunt Anna pulled the whole thing together, and here she is showing Olivia a raptor.

Aunt Arla tried on Olivia's hat, and it fit perfectly.

Grandpa Chris and Olivia hanging at the playground.

Olivia hanging out with Anna after running through the sprinklers and getting a bottle of water poured on her head.  She's very wet!

Olivia's loving her mobility.  She stands up on everything she can reach, and you can just tell how excited she is to walk.  She also enjoys standing on her tiptoes.

She loves her brother!  She doesn't like him to play with toys and rips anything Henry has out of his hands.  He thinks she is hilarious!

 Everything she picks up, immediately goes in her mouth for inspection and chewing.  She loves eating paper and any "food" she can find on the ground.  Needless to say, we spend a lot of time fishing things out of her mouth, much to her chagrin!

Her favorite food right now?  Meat.  Here she is eating pulled pork, but she's not picky as to meat type.  Her favorite is meat from the smoker, as it is tender and juicy, and easy to chew.

 Olivia is a real handful right now!  She loves the stairs and can climb a flight of stairs in less than thirty seconds.  Every time you turn your head, she's at the top of the stairs, or splashing in the dogs' water bowl, or eating something she's found off the ground.  But for every difficult moment, there's at least one sweet one in return when she wants to sit on your lap and read stories, or give you a hug, or hide behind the couch so she can crawl out and giggle at you playing her own form of peek-a-boo.  We adore her!

Happy 4th of July!

Olivia celebrated her last first holiday, the 4th of July!  We got a bunch of fireworks (way more than we needed) and stayed up way late one evening to set them off.  Bob's family was in town for a combination birthday party/4th of July BBQ and everyone gathered around to see the show.

Olivia was very interested in the fireworks until we shot off one of the noisier ones.  Then she started to cry, she didn't like them at all.

We tried again on the actual 4th of July, and she was much happier about them.  Shelli happened to be in town, so she stopped by for an explosive time! (Good pun, eh?)

That night tons of fireworks were going off and Olivia woke up.  There was no chance of her going back to sleep with all of the noise, so we stayed up and watched fireworks from our deck.  She loved it!  She clapped after the big ones went off.

Not the best picture, but it's all we've got.

Other than holiday celebrations, we've just been enjoying the beautiful summer.  Cassandra took the kids to Logan, where they got to go swimming for the first time!  

Olivia is so excited to be going swimming, she kisses Izzy the dog!

This pool was perfect.  She could crawl in and out of it, and she could be carried around next to all of the kids (!) through the deeper water.  She played and played in the pool until she was so exhausted she was yawning and rubbing her eyes.  She still kept playing though until we took her home!

We found this cool park near our house one morning, and we had the whole place to ourselves!  Bob and Olivia ran through the splash water toys and both got very wet!

Then Olivia played on the jungle gyms and swings, she loved it.

We've been going on hikes as well.  Bob usually shleps around Olivia and Cass carries Henry.  On this particular hike though, after we found this waterfall we kept going and Cass got quite tired.  So Bob carried both babies for another mile up and all the way back down.  He-man!

Olivia loves playing and moving around!  She has become incredibly proficient at pulling up and cruising around.  If there's anything that stays still for a moment (bags, coffee tables, dogs, our legs) she will pull up on it and walk back and forth.

She is obsessed with drinking, especially water.  She loves figuring out how to use new cups.  Here, she has her very own camelbak bite valve cup.  She is so excited to drink from it the first time.

She loves her brother.  She continues to love patting his head and feet, kissing him, and poking out his eyes.

She so sweet.  Her babbling has taken a more purposeful tone.  Instead of flipping through different sounds, she says specific 'words' like dada, eh, and plah.

Olivia, Trouble Monster

Olivia is the craziest baby right now!  Everytime we turn around, she's found some new trouble to get into.  Here, she's crawled into the pantry and is trying to get herself a soda.

On this particularly hot day, she snuck into her closet and wanted to unpack all of her and Henry's diapers.  Don't you love that little naked back!

 

Since she has learned to feed herself, she is employing those skills everyday!  She loves picking small things up and putting them straight in her mouth.  She loves eating hair and fuzz from stuffed animals, and dirt and removing doorstops and eating those.  She is good at sharing though; she's pictured here offering a bite of the piece of grass she found.

With her getting into trouble all the time, it became very difficult to get anything else done, especially take care of Henry!  So we invested in a playpen, which we affectionately refer to as the Baby Cage.  She loves crawling in and out, and doesn't mind it too much when we lock her in.

Olivia loves stuffed animals!   We realized we hadn't posed her with her dog in a while, and she quickly attacked it with kisses.

She's always quick to share. Would you like to kiss the puppy?

And like all babies, she's obsessed with tags.

She still obsessively rubs her eyes when she is tired, it's cute.

She's also learned to clap, which she does seemingly randomly.  She claps when she wants to be picked up from her crib, when she bonks her head, or when she's in trouble for yet again trying to unplug the computer.  The only time she doesn't clap, is when you want her to.

For Father's Day, Bob bought Olivia a present (he got confused), a six-foot tall bear.  Olivia loves attacking it with hugs and kisses and crawling all over it.

The bear is so big, you can't even see it all here!

We've been enjoying the hot days of summer!  Sometimes we eat popsicles to cool down.

Or we play with Baby Henry to pass the time.

Don't forget to give the dog a kisss!

We recently went to the zoo with the whole family.  Olivia liked the jaguars, giraffes, gorillas, but most of all she liked watching the children.  Fascinating!

She went to the doctor last week for her 9-month checkup, and she's doing great!  She weighs 24 pounds (>95%), and is 29.5" long (95%).  She's started eating dairy products.  She loves yogurt and ate so much cheese in one sitting that she was constipated!  (We learned our lesson on that one.)

Olivia has such a great and fun personality.  She is a ton of work, but we wouldn't have it any other way!