4 Years!

This past Thursday, July 26th was mine and Travis's 4 year anniversary! I can't believe we've already been married 4 years! Crazy how time flies when you're having fun :) On our actual anniversary, Travis surprised me with these beautiful roses and a few little treats around the house in the places I look first thing every morning. In the fridge, where I get McKinley her cup of milk, in the cabinet where we keep McKinley's diapers and wipes, and on top of the DVD player where I put on a show for McKinley when she wakes up in the morning. He knows me too well :) It was really sweet and fun to go around and find fun little treat for me!

 

When Travis got home I had this sitting on the table for him. It's a plastic Chinese food container full of homemade felt fortune cookies, with a tag on the box that said, "So FOURtunate to have been married to you for FOUR years". (I found the idea here, I didn't come up with it on my own :) Inside each of the fortune cookies was a little surprise for the evening. One of them said we'd be making Chinese food for dinner, his favorite. I was a little nervous about how it'd turn out since I'd never tried this recipe before, but it actually turned out amazing! We made our own sweet and sour chicken with fried rice! We loved it! It took a little while to make, but was fun to spend time cooking in the kitchen together, something we've enjoyed doing together throughout our marriage. 

Then on Friday, after Travis got off work, we dropped McKinley off at Brad and Emily's house and headed to Omaha to spend the night to celebrate our anniversary. It was our first time leaving McKinley overnight, and overall she did pretty well! It was a little weird not having her to worry about all night and the next morning! It was a nice break and a good way to celebrate our anniversary. We got to Omaha and went to dinner at Fuddruckers, a favorite of ours that they don't have in Lincoln, so we don't get to go very often! We actually met for the first time at a Fuddruckers, so it was kind of a fun place to go on our anniversary :) After dinner, we went to Dave and Busters! We had a great time there, we both love arcade games, so Dave and Busters was the perfect place for us! Travis won the jackpot of 300 tickets on the basketball game, no surprise if you know Travis's arcade skills :) In the 4 years we've been married he's won 2 basketballs at Six Flags, a HUGE stuffed bear at the Utah State fair and many other little arcade games here and there. We used our tickets to buy McKinley a stuffed Alex the lion from Madagascar. She loved it :) We spent the night in a hotel then woke up Saturday morning and walked around downtown Omaha, then shopped around at a nice shopping center! We had a wonderful time and enjoyed celebrating 4 years of marriage!

 

I'm so grateful I made the decision to marry Travis 4 years ago. He's my best friend and a wonderful husband! He's a great father to McKinley and works so hard for our family everyday! Here's a few fun pictures of us on our special day 4 years ago! What a great day that was!

 

 

23 Months

This month officially marks McKinley's last month as a 1-year old! We love her so much and are so happy to have her in our lives! She is so much fun and doing so many new, fun things! She loves to play and be active! Here she is playing at the Children's Museums and an indoor playground (it's been too hot to play outside as of late!)

Another thing she has really taken to lately is stickers! She loves putting stickers everywhere, especially all over me & Travis :) Another thing she has really gotten into lately is coloring. She always asks to color and can spend a good 10-15 minutes just coloring in her coloring books (which is quite a while for one activity for a toddler!)

We did have a few cooler days in July, so we took advantage of those days and headed to the park. McKinley decided she was too big for the baby swing and would only swing on the big-kid swings. She did a good job hanging on and loved it!

Another fun, new activity for McKinley that we were able to do this month is go see a movie! She loves Madagascar, so I thought it'd be fun to take her to see Madagascar 3 at the movies. She did good and loved it! We were the only ones in the theater, which was good because she decided she wanted to walk up and down the stairs after watching the movie for a bit.  She loved the movie though, and everytime she sees this pictures she says, "show, animas!" I think she wants to go back and see another movie there!

McKinley loves to get out and go places during the day. One of her favorite places to go is to the grocery store! Especially HyVee! At HyVee they have a car shopping cart that she gets to sit in and drive while I push the cart around. They also have free cookies there, that she loves and asks for every time we go! She also gets to ride on this horsey at the end of our shopping trip! She knows what HyVee looks like and every time we pull up she gets to excited and squeals, "HyVee" and asks to go there when I tell her we're going to the store. She also knows what many other places around town look like and whenever we pass by them she says what's there. She knows where we get ice cream and donuts of course! She knows the park, the library, the Y, the children's museums, and the McDonald's play place. She also knows she gets stickers at Target and they have the big balls outside which she thinks are great! She also knows where Home Depot is and always says, "Dada, work!" when we see it.

Another thing McKinley has really started enjoying even more lately is dressing up! She loves to put on hats, jewelery, sunglasses and still loves to wear mine and Travis's shoes around the house. She's even gotten pretty good at walking around in my heels! I'm pretty impressed, she's definitely a girly girl! She even has a princess dress she likes to put on and says, "princess" when she has it on. She has really started to love princesses and even knows who Belle and Ariel are.

 

McKinley still loves kids and has a few friends/cousins that she loves to see and talk about all the time! Of course she still loves Mya and Madison. She still calls Mya, "MyMy" but recently started calling Madison her full name, "Maisen" instead of  just "Ma", like she used to call her. We got to go to Madison's first birthday party which was a blast for McKinley. There were so many kids there and her 2 best friends, how could that not be a great time for McKinley! McKinley had fun helping me pick out Madison's birthday present. And when she saw the bag she knew it was for Madison and would let me know who the present was for! Her other friends that she likes to talk about are Dane, Evyn and Trey. She knows them from Nursery and we also sometimes see them at the Y in the child watch which McKinley loves! She always asks me if there going to be there when we go to church or go to the Y. She's always so excited to see them when they are there!

 

We've still just been enjoying the summer time around here. We've been swimming to keep cool and playing outside when we can beat the heat. McKinley likes to pick flowers outside and picked one for me, it was sweet :)

I can't believe this little girl has already been in our life almost 2-years! Expect a fun 2-year old post and fun 2-year old Zoo Animal birthday party pictures next month!

Fun Time in St. Louis

We had a great time the rest of the time we were in St. Louis! We spent a lot of time just hanging out with Grandma, Grandpa and Aunt Angie and Uncle Doug. Travis's sister Rachael was even able to join us for a few days while she took her oldest son Trent and a few of his friends to Warped Tour in St. Louis. Me and Jan even started a t-shirt quilt with all of my old t-shirts from Elementary School through College! We didn't quite get it done, but saved it for the next time we're visiting!

 Here's McKinley wearing one of my t-shirts from Kindergarten :) I thought it was pretty cute and fun for her to wear a shirt I used to wear!

 

McKinley even got her first haircut while we were there by Grandma! Her hair was getting a little crazy and her bangs would always hang in her face, so I figured it was about time to cut it. She did really well and was still through the whole cut! You can see below how cute her hair looked afterwards! We were sure to save a cute little curly lock of her hair from her first cut.

We even made the trek out to the St. Louis Zoo while we were there. They have a great zoo in St. Louis and it was so much fun to take McKinley there, despite the blistering heat! The days we were in St. Louis they were having record-breaking hot days, and it was very hot to be out in. We tried to go early to the zoo to beat the heat, which was not possible! We only spent a couple of hours at the zoo since it was so hot! We still got to see some very fun animals! Here's McKinley on Daddy's shoulders checking out the Rhinos!

Here she is asking where the hippo went. It was swimming around and had just gone under water. You can kind of see the top of it's head in this picture. The hippos were really neat and fun to see!

We even got to see elephants there, McKinley's favorite animal! She loved seeing the "e-fants"! They were really neat! They were swimming around in the water and squirting water on them with their trunks to stay cool!

 

We then went over to see the penguins. We got to go inside a cold building to see the penguins which was nice on such a hot day! McKinley kept saying "cold, cold" and snuggling up against me because it was quite the contrast to the hot temperatures outside! The penguins were neat and fun to watch swim and walk all around!

We ended our zoo visit with a ride on the train. McKinley loves trains and said "choo, choo!" the whole train ride! We loved the St. Louis Zoo and look forward to going back on another visit!
 

On Saturday we went over to the Car Show to see Doug's Mustang that he had on display there. They also had some firetrucks on display there that McKinley got to climb inside! We didn't spend long at the car show, because once again it was super hot outside, but it was still fun to see Doug's car and walk around for a minute!

We were sad to leave and head home! On the way back to Lincoln, we were ready to get out and walk around as we were driving through Kansas City. We decided to stop at the temple grounds and walk around a bit. It was nice to stretch our legs and enjoy the beautiful scenery!

We had so much fun and look forward to our next visit to St. Louis!