Santa Monica Pier & Malibu Beach

Enjoying the carousel with daddy:

Pretending to swim in the mural with Uncle Kevie, daddy & mommy. Alec thought this was hilarious.

So, this needs a bit of explaining. Alec loves the shark, Bruce, on Finding Nemo. He goes around saying (in a deep voice), 'Hello, I Bruce!' So, I got in on film next to a shark painting.

Alec enjoying the view of LA from his great-grandma's backyard. This is his 'smile' still.

Saturday morning we found a quiet little beach in Malibu.

At first Alec was afraid of the loud waves and held on to his daddy's hand.

Paul kept trying to bury Alec in the sand and Alec kept kicking the sand about and giggling. It was awfully cute.

Self-photo of Paul and I:

After 2 hours, Alec was running towards the waves and having a grand time.

Afterwards Alec demanded to use the potty. He had regressed for a week (after several weeks of being potty trained), so we were a little apprehensive about the trip-"Should we put him in a diaper for the drive?"

We're so proud of him! The whole trip he'd warn us if he needed to go and give us plenty of time to pull the car off the highway and even slept through 'Harry Potter 6' in Paul's arms with no diaper!! Several weeks of no accidents and dry diapers after naps, I think my little man is potty trained!

Some more pictures...

There are a lot of good things happening out here right now!

Most importantly, my sister, Kari, is getting married on Friday in the LA Temple! She has always dreamt of a 10-layer cake and so I've been making loads of fondant and buttercream icing, which takes up all my free time.

Apart from that I'm working on: 1. packing organization (I threw out 4 boxes of 'stuff' on Saturday!), 2. moving van plans (can we trust someone to drive our 'stuff' to Colorado safely or drive our own things and our car?), 3. insanely missing Paul (video chatting twice a day just isn't enough. He may have to finish writing here and go back again for a few days to defend it much later), 4. caring for Alec (not that this is bad, but he is a VERY active & curious little boy), 5. the dogs (my family has left for California to go to a Dodgers game and California Adventure before the wedding, leaving me in charge of 7 dogs), and 6. refugee work (gathering donations & home visits). I do prefer to stay busy, so I would definitely choose all the commotion over sitting around and missing Paul.

In the meantime, here are some cute shots:

Here he is wearing grandpa's sunglasses:

Last Sunday we went to celebrate my Uncle's birthday and Alec (as usual) wanted to go out back and play with the 3 boxers they have. The dogs were very loving. If Paul would let me have a third dog I would steal Tank, their male boxer. He's so great with Alec and stands over to 'protect' him from the other dogs...who also want a turn licking Alec...

Here's Alec playing with his Uncle Christopher. My brother just adores Alec and Alec loves it when he comes over, because he'll play with him! Here he is carrying him around in nana and grandpa's 'garment hamper', then racing about in his car:

Here he is playing 'prison guard'. For some reason Alec thinks this is hilarious:

Uncle Kevie also loves playing with him and lately they've been practicing on recorders.


This past Friday night was Kari's bachelorette party. We went to Joleen's home (our sister-in-law) to watch a movie and eat pizza. Alec really liked the pizza idea:

Settling in

Paul and I managed to get everything moved into my parents' home last Thursday, thanks to my brother, Kevie, and his friend Adam. It's been a bit manic cramming all our stuff into one room, but luckily it's a huge room, so even the two dog crates fit with all Alec's furniture and our bed, leaving a play area for Alec. Good thing Paul and I tend to be minimalists.

Alec had a hard time adjusting to other noises in the room (the dogs tend to move from our bed to the floor several times throughout the night) and woke up a lot the first few nights, but he slept all through the night on Monday. On the other hand, he's adjusted quickly and happily to extra people around constantly holding him and pushing him in his car. He's such a social little man! While people push him in the car he waves goodbye to people he passes and will sometimes put out his index finger to touch someone else's-a sort of E.T. moment. He's also begun imitating animal sounds. When we were reading an animal book yesterday I was making a quacking sound for the ducks and he tried to imitate it, he did the same for elephants and kittens. It was so cute!

Paul and I are not enjoying our commutes now and lunchtime seems so dreary since he can't come home, but otherwise we've settled in more quickly than we'd expected to. Paul hasn't had much time to work on his PhD yet, but we still don't know for certain his extension was accepted and we didn't think he'd have much time before returning to finish.

The dogs are doing so much better than we expected. Paul walks them in the morning, then later in the morning I put them on the side of the house to rough-play together outside while Alec naps and I exercise. This seems to use up their energy, as the rest of the day they lay around the house. The collars are reminders if they get a bit excited, but we rarely need them. No one's bothered by them wandering around downstairs and we keep them in sight or sound at all times so they can't get up to much, it's turned out to be a huge blessing being able to keep them in the house here.

Kelsey's Christmas puppy was finally old enough to leave her mother. A little shih tzu she named Kippie. There are now 5 dogs in the house (my parents have a shih tzu and a pomeranian). I've included some pictures of Alec and Kippie, though we can't ever leave them alone since Alec's used to larger dogs he can tug on. During the day when I'm alone with the dogs and Alec it often feels like a mini zoo. Luckily the dogs all get on well and they nap most of the day, so with Kippie in my lap and the others laying around I can get some lesson preparation done during Alec's afternoon nap.

Let the birthday celebrations...begin!

My parents offered to take my brother, Christopher & I (and our spouses) to the Tournament of the Kings at Excalibur for our birthdays. It turned out to be a lot of fun! Paul and I really got into the table banging, 'huzzah' shouting and eating without utensils. We sat in the 'dragon' section and enjoyed cheering for...the villain. (Paul was very good-natured about the inevitable, 'does this make you feel homesick?' teasing).

Afterwards, Paul and I wandered the Excalibur, as we'd never been in it before (we don't like being on the Strip), and the best we could find was the SpongeBob statue to take a picture with...so we did.

It was our last Sunday in Cimarron Ward, which is rough. The hardest part about moving (for me) is getting comfortable in a new ward. We had really enjoyed the strong spirit in the Cimarron Ward and all the friends we'd made, also the opportunity to teach Primary so we could spend all 3 hours of church together.

At our Sunday family dinner mom had a strawberry cake for me and Alec helped blow out the candles. Everyone wanted him to put his hand in and make a mess, but he hates being messy. Kelsey and I put some frosting on him and he did NOT like that.

This brings me to an interesting subject Paul and I have been discussing (in jest) recently and Paul may have won-maybe Alec will be a clean astrophysicist like his daddy, and not 'dig in the dirt' as my mother so elegantly describes my choice. Too bad, I had high hopes of training a little anthropologist/archaeologist like me.

I've also noticed I only seem to take pictures of him in his little blue moose outfit lately...I'll work on that. Maybe it's because it makes his dark blue eyes stand out?

Alec had his 9-month old wellness checkup today (no shots-yay!) and he's now a staggering 20 pounds, 1 ounce and 27 inches long. The doctor was so happy, Alec's back on track, as far as his weight is concerned.

Classes began last week, and the first day was rough (partially because my textbook only arrived at the college 4 days prior- not much time to prepare), but Paul gave me great advice (and held me) afterwards, so Thursday went great and now I'm excited. I start teaching human evolution this week and am unsure exactly how I feel about it, so that should be interesting. Church leaders have all given very different personal viewpoints (McConkie's against it; Widtsoe, Eyring & Talmage all feel it has some merit), I guess I need to figure it out for myself. Any thoughts? Heavenly Father works with nature, not contrary to it and the outline in the Bible follows the fossil record. The more Paul and I use science to understand how Heavenly Father has created a natural order, the more my testimony increases (Paul can better comprehend how planets and galaxies are formed and I can better see species and ecosystems), we don't see science and religion at odds at all. I'm not sure why right-wing christians' hackles are automatically raised at the thought of evolution, but after discussing it with Paul several days now, we both feel the evolution of man definitely has some merits (we agree with the scientists in the Church), I have more specific ideas (since I've been studying it for over 10 years), but would love to hear others' thoughts on the subject. Obviously we don't have all the answers, all general authorities agree that the dating of the earth is better referred to in the POGP where it's explained as 'periods' rather than 'days'; as each one may have taken a different amount of time and radioactive half-life dating allows us to extract a date range from existing material when it was formed into our world of several billion years ago. As to man's spontaneous creation or evolution, we're just curious about opinions.

Everything is going ahead for our move on Thursday. My brother Kevie's been stopping by on his way home from work and carting boxes over for us, which has really helped. Moving down to one room is going to be tricky, but we're working really hard, so it should all fit. We're still concerned about the dogs in my parents' home, so we'll see how this first month goes, then work from there.