An evening conversation part 4

(Imagine Brittany doing a super awesome dance move {a basic pirouette}in her kitchen and falling flat on her face when her toe hit the Anastasia DVD laying on the floor.)

Britt: "bahaha!" 

Josh: "Oh my gosh, did you break the movie?"

Ok, that really wasn't funny typing it out, but trust me, I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. It was funny. Really, really, really funny.

And because that was so short, here are some other random happenings going on at our house. 

Josh is heartbroken over the discontinuation (is that a word?) of Red Bull Cola. It's a natural cola that according to him, cannot be duplicated. However, he is trying to duplicate it. Over the last few weeks, we've gotten a variety of herbs delivered to us and now our home looks like a crack house. He's tried 3 (maybe 4?) times, but with no recipe and no directions to go on, it's all trial and error. A lot of trials and errors. I'll let you know when he gets it right...

The girls are constantly saying, "Wusthat?" Sophie points at things with a crooked little witch finger and asks what everything is. As much as I love it, they usually don't stop unless I give them an answer. I predict that I'll be pulling my hair out in a year or two from all their questions. 

I'm obsessed with Doomsday Preppers. It is by far the most entertaining thing on television. With our bigger Dish Package (thanks to our unhealthy need to watch The Walking Dead) I discovered it and I am fascinated by it. If you think you have a pretty good food storage and emergency plan, it's probably laughable compared to what some crazies people out there are doing. If you have the National Geographic channel, you need to start watching it.

I've realized in the past few weeks how amazing my friends are. All of them. Old and new. Friends I haven't talked to in months and friends I talk to every day. I'm really, really lucky to have such amazing people that choose to be in my life. 

Twice in the last 48ish hours have I been mistaken as a teenager. Twice guys, TWICE. Remember a while back when I said I want to be 30? Well this is why. I hate being with Josh and having people think he robbed the cradle. I hate people assuming that I'm the girls' nanny or babysitter (yes, it's happened several times). I hate looking like I'm 12. Maybe I'll look like I'm 20 when I'm 30. I can hope, right? I predict that it will be a long 6 years. 

My friend is going to New York this week to see another friend of ours. I'm jealous. Very, very jealous. And did I mention that she's going to Women in the World? And that Meryl Streep is going to be there?! 

So incredibly jealous.

I still haven't written about our new cotton candy machine. Our old one bit the dust (don't worry, I cried) but almost immediately, Josh bought me a new one. This one was a bit more of an investment that our other "play" machine and I've already used it at least three dozen times. Life is good people, life is good. 

And because every Evening Conversation post has a random picture of Mr. Mangelson and I, here's one from 2009 in Cabo. Oh what a fun week that was. 

And you get two old goodies today. I found this fantastically old picture taken back in 2007 back before we were even friends.

Who would have thought that literally 3 years after this picture was taken, we'd have a Sophie and a Lillian. Don't you ever want to go tell *that* person (aka yourself) how much your life is about to change when you see old pictures? Yeah, definitely didn't see my future coming with that one...

Agri-culture

We went to the Utah State Fair on Monday and it brought back memories of our trip last year. What were we thinking??? Taking 7 lb babies an hour and a half from home and going in a densely populated place with a bunch of farm animals?! Not to mention, that I had to pump in the car and I was only 5 weeks our from my c-section. I laugh about it now, but seriously...that seems so crazy!

This year, I didn't take too many pictures because my camera battery was barely alive, but I did get a few that I thought I'd share. 

Recreating this photo

 

We're finding out more and more that Sophie is not a fan of animals. Most of the time, she's completely freaked out by them. Besides for my mom and sister's dogs, I'm not sure there's an animal out there that she really likes. Parts of the fair were torture for her. Whereas Lillian, wanted to cuddle up with everything that had 4 legs.

 

Look at her face! She was not feeling the goats. Not at all.

This guy (who was incredibly creepy) came up to Josh and said, "You're a big one, sir!" Its definitely not that funny just reading it on this blog, but it was really funny in the moment.  He had this creepy, deep robot voice and the truth is, Josh is a big one. I guess the robot was trying to get the big guys to stick together.

 

I wanted to get a family picture, but it never happened. Oh well. Luckily, we're having our pictures taken by Lindsey Orton next week, so it's not that big of a deal. 

I'm glad I married a guy who appreciates sentimental traditions as much as I do. Going to the fair is definitely something our family is going to do every year!

And just in case you were wondering, the title of this post is from the billboards all around Utah. They have a chicken (or cow or pig) over the "Agri" part of the word and a person with tattoos, body piercings, or rainbow colored hair over the "culture" part of the word. They make me laugh every time I see them, but sadly, my 20 second google search didn't come up with anything, so this stupid explanation is all you get. :)

We have another walker!

After taking a few spills with crawling because she was trying to keep up with her sister

 this little girl

  

decided to start walking

 

She is definitely no happy in this picture. That probably had something to do with the fact that she was up from 12:30-2am last night. Morning nap, anyone?

It's crazy how it happens over night. On Saturday, she would only take a step or two at a time. Then suddenly, on Sunday afternoon, she started getting brave and she's now taking 10-15 steps at a time. Sophie is cruising  around everywhere and Lillian carefully studied how she did it. Looks like her observations paid off, because now we've got two toddlers instead of a toddler and a baby. :)

Toddler twins. Wow.

Also, school officially starts today. I realized that this is my 11th semester in college. Granted, the last 3 have only been filled with two classes, but still. Eleventh semester? Most people 'should' get it done in 8. 

Blah. 

The weekend

This weekend was a good one. I was scared it was going to be horrible, because we had a nasty 24 hour bug on Thursday, but after a 10 hour sleep on Thursday night, we were feeling OK on Friday. We decided to take it easy, but we still wanted to do something fun. Josh's work gave us a coupon booklet of free stuff to do in the month of August, so we decided to go check out This Is The Place Park and Red Butte Garden. Oddly enough, I've lived in Utah for all 23 years of my life and have never been to either of these places. Crazy! I didn't take a lot of pictures, but here are a few. 

Josh with Lillian by the horses. Sophie did NOT want to go anywhere near those things. I'm secretly (or not so secretly if you worked with me a few summers ago) terrified of horses too, so I can't blame her. 

Josh and Lillian recreating  this picture. There was goat behind that gate...

Lillian LOVED the animals. Sophie? She clung to me, freaking out. Hence no pictures of her. 

Tired Lillian and curious Sophie

And now for Red Butte

and since there's so many pictures of Lillian at This Is The Place, here's a couple of Sophie

Love, love, love her huge giggly smile.

I didn't really get pictures of the actual places, but nobody here really cares about that, right?
Thought so.

Happy Monday!

Busy

Things are busy over at our house. Here are some of the randomnesses that have been going on.

I'm going to attempt to make goodies for the girls' birthday party, so I've been searching for yummy recipes and the ingredients to make them.

I've been trying to unpack the last of our stuff and get things organized. 

I've been battling with myself over what I should do with school. I've come to the conclusion that there's nothing I can do until I officially see what I need to graduate. I'm pretty sure (and by pretty sure, I mean crossing my fingers, toes, and eye balls) that I only have 3 classes. If that's the case, I can't go to school until January, but that's OK because remember how I haven't taken a semester off since '06? Not even this past year of the girls' lives? What the H*#% was I thinking there? C's get degrees is my new educational mantra.

We've been trying to encourage Sophie to take more than 5 steps at a time. 

We've been chasing around a very fast crawling baby named Lillian, cleaning up the 6,892 messes she makes a day. 

We picked up Josh's brother from the air port after his two year mission for our church to Uruguay. He came home to two new nieces and a new nephew. It's crazy how much has happened to his family while he was gone. 

We went to the zoo with some of my family and Josh's family right after his brother got home. The company Josh works for is pretty awesome and gave us a booklet coupon thing for a bunch of free stuff to do this summer. The zoo was included. Wanna know what else was included? Food. Food as in FREE COTTON CANDY. That's was almost cooler than seeing the animals. My love for cotton candy is pretty deep. See examples here, here and especially here.

I've been busy making a slide show for the girls' birthday. It's almost 14 minutes long, so I haven't decided if I'll make people suffer through it because it's mostly for us. I'll probably stick it on the 'ole blog though. We'll see. 

We've officially mixed our last bottle of formula. The girls are fully on cow's milk and do great on it. I can't believe how quickly we go through a gallon now (especially since I really don't like milk, so I only have it with cereal) but it's SOOO much cheaper than formula. I know people call breastmilk liquid gold, but it's formula that is the price of gold. That stuff don't come cheap!

Josh has a taken a lot of over time recently because a few coworkers are out for a while. This means instead of being to work at 3 am 4 days a week, he's been doing it 5 days a week. 5 ten hour shifts that start in the middle of the night make for a very, very tired person. 

The girls have become obsessed with Josh. Obsessed. Yesterday, while he and Lillian were napping, I was playing with Sophie and she stops, starts looking around the room and says "Daddy? Da-da? DaDEE?" over and over again. They're officially over being with mom all day I think. 

And lastly, I've been frantically trying to figure out what to get Josh for his birthday tomorrow. He's usually not that hard to shop for because he tells you exactly what he wants. I think this is the first time since I've known him that he hasn't wanted something very specific, so I was at a loss. Luckily, he's pretty laid back about things like this and was OK with going to the mall and picking out a few things. I still feel like I have to give him something tomorrow, so I might make a late night trip to...somewhere... tonight and see what I can do. When the girls were born, he joked about how his birthday was no longer important because they were born just a few days after he was. Well, I'm DETERMINED to not make that happen. So... I've got work to do today. 

Because of all this, I haven't taken many pictures and the pictures I have taken have been kinda crappy. I'm planning on whipping out my little Rebel soon and once again the blog will be showered with pictures of adorable babies. Until then... here's this one. 

Have I already shared this one? Who knows and quite frankly, who cares?

Yesterday

First things first. Did you watch Oprah? Did you cry? I held back the tears only so Josh wouldn't make fun of me. Oprah Winfrey is amazing. I don't care what all the grumpy naysayers say, she is a remarkable woman. Her show has literally saved people's lives, she's sent thousands to school, encouraged reading, given away millions of dollars of her own money, and continually gives sound advice. I could go on, but I'm already gushing. Her final show was filled with incredible one-liners and I was reminded once again why she is one of my favorite women on the planet. Here's a recap for those of you who tragically missed it. It was incredible. 

Now, onto baby news...

The girls have been crazy lately. I mean crazy. They only nap for 30 minutes at a time, they go from drinking 10 oz one bottle, to 2 oz the next, they stay up until midnight, and are overall completely different babies than they were last week. I have no idea what's going on, but I'm trying really, really hard to get them back on their schedule. It's not even a schedule I put them on. They settled to a pretty consistent schedule around 6 months, and although I realize they'll change as they grow, they've been insane this week. 

One thing I don't like about babies (yes, I just said that) is that can't tell you what's wrong. Yesterday, I had two crying  screaming screaming babies. They had just woken up, been changed and ate 7 oz bottles. I fed them peas, apple sauce and a few cheerios and then they flipped. I had no idea what's wrong. I hate to say this, but when times like this happen, I pull out the Tylenol. I mean, what if they were in pain? I have no idea. They can't tell me. They might be teething again, right? So, I drugged up both babies and hoped that in a few minutes the crying would stop. Guess what? It didn't. I pull out all my tricks. Yogurt puff things, Backyardigans, Elmo, all the toys in the world, sang songs, danced a little (yep, did that one), and finally realized I needed a break.

I went to the fridge and got out a string cheese for myself. Then in dawned on me. These are my children. My children. My children are bound to like cheese. And it's true. The other day for dinner, the girls had their bottle, peas and some shredded cheese. Somehow all the cheese ended up in their bellies and the peas ended up on the floor. Smart girls. So, I pulled out another cheese stick, ripped it in two and handed a half to each baby. Take a look... 

This girl is drunk off cheese

This one's black and white because these were shot on auto with horrible lighting. I would have switched everything around, but the babies were enjoying the cheese too much and I just wanted to capture it. This picture in particular looked waaaay wacky, so I switched it to b&w and absolutely love how it looks. Wow. Way too much of an explanation there...

The loved it. And most importantly, it calmed them down. Happy babies, happy mom. 

We then me up with Lacy and Janiece at Liberty Park. That park is absolutely amazing and if you live within 50 miles you must go there. Now. Here are a few photos from that outing. 

And that was our day. 

Oh and you're not seeing things. There's a gigantic bruise on Lillian head. It was one of those 'face meet crib, crib meet face' kind of situations.

Don't worry, baby and crib are now both OK.

Thumbs up?

You guys are the best.

A kitchen of our own

We are really buying a house. I can't believe it. We walked through it yesterday and were a little disappointed on the lack of progress its made, but it's our home nonetheless.

Wanna see the kitchen?

Maybe someday I'll learn to cook. That will most likely happen, but I am certain I'll never learn to love cooking. 

And yes, Josh completely smacks his head on the ceiling fan. Heck, I almost do and I'm only 5'7. There's no way that a 6'5 man person can walk under it. Don't worry, we'll figure something out. Wanna see a ceiling that Josh can't smack his head on? 

I am in love. It's a home. It's our home. 

One with ample amount of natural light, beautiful views (I would show you, but I don't want you to know exactly where we live. If you're curious...come on over!) and a cozy little yard that's ours (except for right now it's a cozy little pile of rocks and dirt).

I get giddy when I think about it. 

I am so excited. 

And because I know you people want to see pictures of the girls, here you go.

They stayed like this for a surprisingly long time. I'd say it was at least a minute and a half before Lillian got  upset.

Sad Sad Babies

Yes, this is my profile picture on facebook because I cannot stop laughing whenever I look at it. I was almost in tears the first time I saw it. Don't worry, Bear really did love the girls (well at least Lillian because she was the one willing to play with him). They just didn't like being posed for pictures. What can I say, they might be 9 months old, but they've got the temperaments of 14 year olds.

Taken at Mindy's baby shower.

And yes, I finally bought the girls baby leg warmers. They're sorta a must have among mothers and especially cloth diapering mothers (for some reason that I still can't really figure out). I figured I could afford them for being 1 buck at Target. I'm still undecided on them. They're hilarious, but Lillian looks a little too much like Rainbow Brite. 

Weekend favorites

Here are some favorite moments of the weekend...

Being able to put Lillian in Sophie's crib after they wake up, allowing me to catch some extra zzz's while they play.

Sophie's cute chubby legs getting stronger. Her diaper hanging out is pretty cute too. 

Seeing Lillian pull herself up to standing position for the first time! This was taken super quick on my phone, hence the awful quality, but she did it!

And lastly, driving back from a missionary farewell for a good friend and stopping by this place. We'll be calling this home in a month or so!

We also went to Mimi's with Josh's parents and brother. Can you say delicious quiche?

  It was a really, really good weekend. 

And today's the last day to vote for this contest 

 

There's still a little while to vote for the multiple's one

 

If you have a few clicks to spare, we'd gladly take 'em!

Thanks!

Baby proof

Looks like we should get on that. At least she went for Elmo, right?

Thanks for the congratulations on the house. We're super excited and hope everything goes through. Details coming soon!

And mind sparing a little vote for us today? I definitely don't care about being in the top 5 or anything, but I don't want to slip too far down. ;)

An evening conversation

Brittany: My uncle Frank has a grapefruit tree at his home in Florida and when I was a kid, he sent us a big box of grapefruits for Christmas. He also sent a bunch of grapefruit spoons that had jagged edges to cut into the sections. Growing up, I got used to eating grapefruit with grapefruit spoons and now I'm not sure how to eat them with a regular spoon. 

Josh: {looks at Brittany for about 15 seconds before saying...} Seriously?

Brittany: It's true! {squirts juice in eye}

Taken two years ago in California.

Anyone know where I can find a grapefruit spoon?

p.s. The house we're hoping to get is no longer listed. Wanna know why??? It's under contract. 

 By us.

I'm back!

Ok. My semi-break is over. I know I cheated a few times and got on facebook more than I thought I would, but I hardly read any blogs. And when I got onto google reader this morning, I had over 400 posts to catch up on. Wanna know what I did? I deleted a ton of blogs. Even after my recent google reader purge, I still had a lot to loose. And it felt amazing. 

The first thing I want to discuss is this girl

It's my sister Brooke's birthday today. She is fabulous. Really, really fabulous. She a great interior designer and is currently designing three very large and very amazing homes. She's also getting her online design business up and going. So, even if you don't live in Utah, you can hire her to design a room (or whole house) and she'll hook you up with the blue prints to make your home eye candy. Besides all that, she's my older sister. Truthfully, we hated each other growing up, but since we both got some sense knocked into our heads, we've realized how great having a sister is. She is one of my very best friends and will drop anything to come rush to my aid. She is wonderful, talented, hilarious, and one of the coolest people I know. Check out her design blog here.

I had a good blogging break. We spent a lot of time together as a family, I did a lot of school work (Sadly, I still have more to do), I took a trip to Logan for a birthday lunch date and spent a few hours at my old stompin' ground of BRASC, I took a photography class, went to a baby shower, and the babies turned 8 months old. My next post will be about that, but for now I'll leave you with a few pictures that I shot on manual. Yep, I'm no longer a auto shooter. Granted, I'm not that good and messed up a bunch of times, but it's finally starting to make sense. Hopefully, with a little more practice, I'll stop messing up and I'll become a little more legit.

Lillian 

Sophie

We're going to look at houses today. Super exciting and super overwhelming. 

Happy Monday!