Buried in corn kernels!
We've had an enjoyable close to summer and beginning of fall. Unfortunately we haven't been able to do too much together because Paul has been very busy with an extremely challenging load of classes, but even so we've managed to do some fun stuff still! I'll start out with some of Rawley's most recent milestones and habits. Also, important, if you're looking for videos, check them out at my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheGrandLarseny It's too hard to get them to embed correctly into the blog unfortunately.
Rawley is our little bookworm. He loves flipping through books and has gotten past the stage where he wanted to chew on them. Now he points at the pictures and babbles while we read to him. If we're in the car and we hand him a book in his car seat, he'll happily sit and flip through it on the ride, talking to himself about it. He loves having a book read to him every night.
ANOTHER FOOD PLEASE
Rawley is able to eat pretty much anything now, especially since he has all of his teeth except for his two year molars (he's had all those teeth since he turned one, also, which is crazy.) He's starting to learn that whatever we're eating is probably tastier than what he is, so he'll often beg for food by crawling over to us and opening his mouth really wide repeatedly and banging his hands on our shins if we're on the couch. We're training him that he only gets food in his high chair, but his little wide open bird-like mouth is still pretty cute :)
Sometimes it's fun to tease him just a *little* bit haha
Rawley also loves to "feed" us. He already liked handing trash and various things he found on the ground to us, but making us eat his food is eve funnier to him apparently!
One cool and fun thing we did right at the beginning of the semester was viewing the total solar eclipse in Idaho Falls at my Grandma Larsen's house.
Rawley wasn't really a fan of the goggles, but he also wasn't interested in viewing the eclipse until totality anyway.
My cousins and friends setting up a special telescope and lens to get good pictures.
My grandma is actually super awesome and a boss, in case you couldn't tell from this picture.
This was towards the end of the brief period of totality. It was crazy how dark it got, and everything got unnaturally cold. I actually kind of hated how the lighting was, it felt creepy somehow. I can totally understand how people thought the world was ending way back before we realized this is a regular natural phenomenon.
Enjoying the light before totality.
These are fingernail shaped shadows during the eclipse through the tree leaves.
We got to spend some time with Grandma and went to church with her. Rawley thinks she's pretty awesome and so do we!
So while we were at Grandma's church we looked on the floor in one of the classrooms and saw this. I can't even believe it's real. Idahoans apparently take their potatoes SUPER SERIOUSLY. I guess it runs in the family, my ancestor a ways back was one of the very first farmers to farm on the nutrient rich lava flats out there. I can't even take these lyrics seriously, I mean, what was this for, a primary program or something?? "Dig'em and sack 'em we love the spuds. Sort'em and pack'em for ever and always, all together now we love the spuds. It's potatoes forever and always."
#bemused
We also went on a fun trip down to Saint George at the beginning of the semester and stayed a night with Paul's great aunt and uncle. We had a lot of fun there with them and then we hiked around in Bryce Canyon which Paul had never seen before. I've only been once and it was still very impressive to go a second time!
Rawley really liked pointing out everything to his great aunt Julie.
We were sad to leave the Olives but we were excited to go to Bryce Canyon and do some exploring!
Here's us on the rim of the canyon before heading down into it. It's quite the impressive view!
We also saw these awesome old lava deposits all over on the drive into Bryce. It was crazy because we noticed some areas with no trees or only dead trees, and we though at first it was from fires. Once we saw these huge lava bands of black rock, however, we knew there was a different story.
These were some other remnants of the awesome lava bands.
Hanging out by an undercut rock wall on the walk down into the canyon at the base of the rock formations.
Down in the canyon!
These two trees were at the base of the canyon, just chilling. I guess they're big enough that they don't get swept away when there's water down there, but I can't figure how they got big enough to not get swept out in the first place.
A big wash out area.
Rock has nice texture.
More and more cool rocks
I'm actually really afraid of heights so I legit won't get closer to the edge than that.
To me that place always looks like some sort of amazing fairy land.
On a different note, this was one of Paul's summer projects. He built us these shelves! Honestly, I thought they were going to turn out super horrible because he was making a big deal about how he hasn't really done many woodworking projects before and how he didn't really know what he was doing. But overall, they do a super good job of organizing our extra kitchen table space and I think they look pretty nice too. I'm glad he likes working with his hands to create stuff like this; he gets it from his dad in part.
Rawley is very food centered like his dad. We ALWAYS make sure to take cheerios and cranberries with us as an optimal snack for him to eat when we're out on the town.
Pretty much Rawley is only ever unhappy if he is hungry, hasn't gotten enough sleep, is thirsty, or if he just bumped his head on something. He's really a great kid!
Fun time hanging out with dad. Paul plays with him a lot and it's super fun to see them roughhousing and giggling like they're thick as thieves.
Snow up on the mountains in September, but no snow down in the valley yet thankfully.
I went to an "asia night market" in September and tried to sell my figurines and jewelry. Emphasis on "tried" - no one there bought anything, but a lot o people took my card. It was also a fun atmosphere and we got to drink a purple yam boba smoothie, which is reminiscent of my mission to the Philippines. What it did tell me is that college students are definitely not my target market, which I pretty much already knew, but I was hopeful older folks would show up. Since it was a relatively late night market though it wasn't really a middle age to older people scene.
Paul helped me make this sign - I stained and hand-painted it, and he helped me nail it together. I really liked the way it turned out! I've been making a fair number of online sales through my etsy.com site, so at least I know what I'm selling doesn't totally suck although it didn't do so well at the asia night market, haha.
"I choose you, dad!"
This is near Sundance, it was snowing a bit up there at the beginning of October. It was funny because there were a ton of people up there taking fall family and roommate photos, but they were totally getting snowed on which was kind of funny to watch.
The BYU Religion Dept. put together a replica of the Old Testament tabernacle for students and the public to tour. It was a really cool experience, and we learned a fair amount about Jewish traditions.
We then went to Hee Haw Farms with Paul's sister Becca and her husband Levi. They had a lot of fun kids activities and fun things to look at, like giant pumpkins!
This is a large back hoe type machine. Rawley has recently discovered a love for large heavy machinery when it's moving, at no prompting from us.
We did this last year when we went to the farms, but got a significantly worse picture this year hahaha.
Rawley was pretty excited about the goats, and toddled around some saying, "GO! GO!" and pointing at the goats.
Also, we found this giant potbelly pig which was pretty exciting.
This was the very large corn kernel pit where SO many kids were playing. We had a lot of fun burying Rawley. Some kids were scooping a ton of kernels into their shirts stuffed into their pants and were walking around pretending to be fat, which was funny to watch.
Hanging out together in the corn maze that wasn't very much of a maze since it was pretty much just one path.
Becca and Levi are super fun to hang out with - Rawley thinks so too.
Rawley carried around this corn cob like the rest of the time we were there. He also really liked the gourds and pumpkins!
We also got together with some of Paul's Hill family including his cousins recently. Paul and Jordan are first cousins, so maybe that makes Rawley and their son second cousins? Once removed? Anyway, they're really cute :)
Rawley has a lot of fun playing with dad's face. Sometimes he'll just stroke Paul's face repeatedly or headbutt him for fun.
We also went to a masquerade ball which was hosted at a reception center in Provo normally used for wedding receptions. It was a costume/formal semi-formal dance we heard about on Facebook. We had a whole lot of fun! It's always really nice to get dressed up and do something extra special. It felt a little like going to prom again, which of course was our first real "date" as a couple to my senior prom.
They had a really legit set up there with the decorations, so we had some fun taking pictures with them. This one was for a "charm of love" witch recipe which was fun.
Chillin' with my skeleton homie.
They had swapped out photos for creepy photos.
I really liked the kind of candle they had, it was flameless but had an interesting flickering type flame. They had some pretty good appetizers there too.
So I learned in class about something feminists and others call "shadowlording" - when the guy does essentially what Paul's doing in the picture. Pretty much creepily staring at said girl from a vantage point like this, but it's not actually creepy because he's like hot and mysterious.
We liked her costume, it was well done and very sparkly.
I liked his venetian mask and wings and her full dress.
She also had like white iris contacts in.
Here's a shot of the ballroom. They had spider webs around the chandeliers and creepy curtains and stuff.
So one of my favorite parts of the night was this couple. We sat next to them and they were interesting, but she had sewn both their costumes which were super legit. Apprently he was a photographer and he'd just take photos of her in costumes in various places for fun. He originally was wearing like high heels like they did during the Renaissance, but his feet were getting uncomfortable so he took them off.
I was super impressed with this. Once day I want to have a dress like that :)
Outside they had some fun decorations too, like skulls on this fountain.
Here were some creepy chandeliers in their gazebo area. They also had some "munchkins" hiding in nearby bushes that had glowing eyes and would laugh creepily when someone walked by.
They had a good mixture of entertainment and music. We particularly liked the house magician they had there; he had some pretty entertaining tricks.
They also had mocktails there, which was one of my favorite parts. This had blueberries and basil in it and was SUPER good.
Nothing hotter than this man in a tux.
We also enjoyed our ward Halloween party! Rawley liked playing with the other kids, and he legitimately enjoys wearing his pikachu hat and giggles at himself when he looks in the mirror with it on.
He also enjoyed all the tasty food and fun games he got to play there.
Rawley has generally decided that walking is preferable to crawling now, although he does crawl sometimes still. It was kind of funny to watch him go from not really walking much on his own at all two weeks ago to mostly only walking now. I think he was inspired by the other kids and by being more confident in his own balancing skills! For some videos of him successfully walking as well as some occasional falls, make sure to check out my YouTube channel listed at the beginning of the blog.
Paul and I were matching Rawley as Misty and Ash from Pokemon.
One of Rawley's favorite pass times is reading books.
In other news, and I looked through Paul's phone for pictures I found all these weird photos of machines he works with for his classes and assignments. He informs me they're wave form generators. He's been super over-worked with his current classes, which is hard because Rawley and I don't get to see him as much and when he is home he's almost always doing homework, but that's life. Soon it will hopefully get better, since he's taking a class more than half of the students who take it fail or withdraw from. We have high hopes that won't be his fate though!
Some sort of big chip? People who actually know this stuff can have fun guessing what it is.
And here's some coding. Someone's gotta do it!
Since Rawley is walking he gets to go outside and play more often. He really enjoys the extra toys and stuff since he's still a little too small for the big playground.
Sometimes he likes to crawl into his toy box and then one by one toss out all the toys to make room.
Utah may not be as pretty as Virginia but they do have nice sunsets here.
I don't know i I can emphasize enough that Rawley is extremely fascinated by ducks. He loves dogs just as much, but we see them less often as we have a constant duck population on campus.
When you have the chance to build a cereal tower, build one.
Sweeping about 24/7 is about half my job as a mom at this point!
Finally, finally Rawley went into nursery this Sunday. There he is, enjoying his experience on his first day. He's only 15 months old and technically the church's age for nursery is 18 months, but all he wants to do during classes is walk around and around and around the church and climb stairs. It was pretty much just Paul or I missing our entire classes at that point. So thank goodness our nursery is really nice and a bit of a special case since it's a student ward and there's not too many kids - they take them in at an earlier age. It was SO nice to just be able to sit in church class and not be completely distracted chasing down a toddler. Also, benefit, Rawley clearly had a lot more fun than he normally does at church, and even came home with a coo little medallion that said, "Families can be together forever." I suspect Sundays are quickly going to become his favorite part of the week.
Being a total mess is kind of the best. This is also why he is often naked except for a diaper around the house.
And for now, that's us! We're actually pretty excited for this semester to be over just because it's been so taxing on Paul's time and energy, but otherwise we still are enjoying time together as a family. Rawley's turning into a regular little boy as opposed to a baby which is both fun and a little sad to watch. Paul and I are excited for Christmas because my parents are flying out and we'll be with my brother and his family and my sister as well. On a slightly related note, if anyone wants to get any of us presents but isn't feeling super inspired, here's some wish lists we have going for each of us.
Paul: http://a.co/3hTaXlc
Marinda: http://a.co/6JvoG6m and https://www.etsy.com/people/avidartist/favorites/items-i-love?ref=favs_index_1
Hopefully we can keep on truckin' and make it through this semester in one piece! I applied to graduation and if all goes well I'll graduate in April, so that's very exciting after 6 years since I started school. Hopefully Rawley will really start talking to us soon and will have a lot of good things to tell us. For now, we're taking it day by day and enjoying the blessings we enjoy while tackling our challenges head on.
