The DandJ Edition

Melissa was having trouble getting Andrew to pop out, so Zach convinced her to give DDR a try.




Zach found every animal in the Bean museum. 200+ points. Way to go buddy!

With trips to Houston and then Denver we were away from home for the last half of November. This involved a lot of flying and Zach did well (for a little boy who never stops moving) on all the flights except the one to Houston. The lady who scheduled our flight scheduled for us to arrive at the Houston airport at 10:30 p.m. Being kept awake so much past his bedtime led to total meltdowns during landing, getting off the plane, and traveling through the airport.




We were terrible at taking pictures in Houston and I can't find a single one. We stayed with Jamon and Jean (Derrick's brother and sister-in-law) and really look forward to living close to them. Part of the first day there Derrick went to an office visit at Pariveda where he'll be working starting this summer (they paid to fly us to Houston). Almost every day was spent apartment hunting. We found several we like but need to wait until March or April before trying to get contracts. We're excited to move to Houston though it'll be a little weird living someplace totally new and far away from most of our family.

On our way back to SLC, we had a layover in Denver. Zach and I stayed in Denver while Derrick continued on to SLC so he could go to the last 2 days of classes before Thanksgiving. We had a great Thanksgiving with the Jones side of the family. Melissa, Nate and Andrew flew over with Derrick while Jason and Cassie split their time between parent houses.

While there we:
- played tons of games
- the girls got pedicures
- did lots of cooking and eating of food
- were joined by Cassie's family for Thanksgiving dinner
- watched Zach figure his way through almost every baby proofing barrier we set up against him (except for closed doors).
- took Zach to a few parks
- watched several movies
- and enjoyed spending time together

We didn't get many pictures with my family either. We were picture taking slackers...or just too busy having fun.

My mom had fun gathering lots of toys she'd saved from when we were little and Zach loved playing with them. He decided to display a few for us on the piano.


At the water/dog park in Louisville. It was very cold.

This morning Zach and I have been running all over Utah county and the SLC area. My brother Jason, Zach, and I drove to the airport to pick up my brother Garrett. It was crazy to see him all grown up and dressed as a missionary with a missionary haircut. We stopped to visit both sets of grandparents, ate lunch at the new In-N-Out in our area, and went back and forth to Derrick's work (so he could join us all for lunch) before dropping Garrett off at the MTC. My SIL Cassie, sister Melissa, and her little boy Andrew joined us for lunch and the trip to Grandma Eddington's house. Zach was a trooper with all the driving and only fussed for part of the time. It was so good to see Garrett one last time before he left for 2 years. The people in Charlotte, NC will be lucky to have him.

Jen alluded to some things in her previous post, so it seemed like a good time for me to once again contribute to the blog.

We've had so many things going on and projects to work on this last month that blogging has been put on the back burner. Maybe one of these days my posts won't be catch up ones.

To start things off, one Oct 27th, my little sister Melissa had her first baby. His name is Andrew and he's such a cute little guy. We've spent lots of time visiting with her and her little family.


Also near the end of October all 3 of us got sick. Luckily for us it was with colds and such rather than swine flu.

For Halloween this year we dressed Zach up as a dragon. To pull all our costumes together I dressed as a princess/damsel in distress and Derrick kept switching between telling people he was a dragon rider or a dragon slayer. We'd considered having him be a knight who would rescue the princess but we got too lazy and both just put our costumes together out of things we had lying around. We went to a ward Halloween party the night before Halloween and on Halloween we just trick-or-treated to the houses/apartments of different family members in the area. Next year Zach may be ready for regular trick-or-treating.



Due to hospital policies because of the swine flu, no one under 14 was allowed to visit Melissa in the hospital. Zach got to be a dragon the first time he met his new cousin Andrew.


While my mom was in town to help with the new little baby, she offered to watch Zach and give us our first night away from Zach. We went to California Pizza kitchen and then to a hotel in Lehi. It was so nice to get away.


During the first weekend of November Derrick flew to Dallas for a few days to see the headquarters of Pariveda Solutions (one of the companies he had a job offer from). He came back from the trip very excited about the company. On one of the nights Derrick was gone my mom, Jason (brother), and his wife Cassie came over. They're going to have a little girl in February and happened to have some girl clothes in their car. As a result Zach got dressed up like a girl.


In other news, after Derrick got home from Dallas, we gave Zach his first full haircut. He did pretty good as long as he was strapped into his booster chair, watching Blue's Clues, and had one of us helping hold him steady.








Another happening within the last week was that Derrick accepted a job offer. I'll let him be the one to post about that.

To end with a few more pictures:

We were given a 3-piece suit for Zach. Just looking at him in it made me really happy. What a stud!


With it getting colder we've been having to find more inside play options. The mall nearby has this great treehouse park inside it. The benches there look like big logs and one of them is hollow (which I think is pretty cool).



My mom, sister, her baby, Zach and I took a trip up to Sandy to visit my Jones grandparents. Here are the boys with Great Grandpa Jones.


Ever since Zach caught Derrick using headphones for schoolwork the other day he always wants to use them.


With a new baby around, some of Zach's old toys have been brought out again. It's crazy to see how much he's grown.


Zach really loves being lifted up high and touching the ceiling. This is great until he decides to start stomping on your face. The game ends quickly after that.


Posts yet to come: (1) Derrick's job for after graduation (2) Trip to Houston

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Zach is at such a fun age right now. Here are a few more videos. The first one is one that Zach loves to watch. I showed it to him and he kept saying "more more". (Basically Zach says more repeatedly until we either give him what he wants or distract him).

Zach's pretty much awesome.

I've been having fun creating things to decorate our apartment for Halloween. With a small budget I've had to try and get creative. Here are some of my creations so far:

For this shelf we used stuff we already had and added the Halloween tree/bush I made this year. I got the idea for it from a blog called Sutton Grace. I painted a pot from a dead plant we had and ended up only paying a couple of bucks for black spray paint I can also use on other projects. The branches are left over from a floral design class and I used dry white beans in the pot to keep the branches in place. The ornaments are made using colored paper and thread.


A few days after the top picture was taken my sister came over and we each made a pumpkin felt creature. All we needed was felt, pipe cleaners, thread, and a couple of beads we already had. We got the idea from this link. We used shredded paper instead of the excelsior wood shavings.


We bought the welcome sign from the dollar store last year. The bat is just made from pieces of felt that I cut out.


The "trick of treat" banner below is based off of the same blog post on Sutton Grace as the Halloween tree. Instead of canvas and freezer paper I used felt again. I decided to change the triangles into tombstone shapes and tie the pieces together with small pieces of string. I like how leaving the ends from the knots there's a barbed wire or vertebrae look. It seems more Halloween-like to me :).


For this pumpkin canister I just painted an empty formula container and added some fake leaves and branches I had left over from a floral design class. I did buy some orange paint, though not with this project in mind.


Total cost of decorating this year was about $6 for some paint and a couple sheets of felt.

I'm hoping that I'll eventually be done trying to catch up on posts. September was a pretty busy month for us over here.

My parents and youngest brother came to visit over Labor Day weekend. While out here, they took Garrett shopping for his mission things. On the 2nd we got a babysitter and went to the Provo temple to be with Garrett when he went through for the first time. Several members of our extended family were also there. After the session we met back at Melissa and Nate's house where we had peach pie and cream pies. Here's a picture of me with my brother Garrett and sister Melissa.



During the middle of the month, my sister-in-law Cassie and I threw Melissa a baby shower. I had fun making her a flower basket using receiving blankets.



My sister Melissa and I took Zach to the duck pond to feed ducks for the first time. At first he'd let me help him throw bread to the ducks (which he thought was really funny). After a little while he thought it'd be more fun to join the ducks and started really struggling to get in the pond.


Zach decided he really likes raisins and went through a phase where he loved playing in his closet. Playing in his closet led to him having a very messy room since one of the things he'd do in there was pull out all his clothes and throw them on the floor outside the closet.





Other events include:

- A BYU game with Derrick's parents and a baby shower for Derrick's cousin's wife. I appliquéd a dinosaur onesie for her baby.

- Organizing a ward service project and making a display for a stake activity for the weekend of the General Relief Society Broadcast. We made tutus for little girls at the hospital. I got a lot of help on the tutus from some of the other members on the Enrichment committee.


- A trip to an apple orchard to pick as many apples as we wanted. This led to making lots of apple spice muffins and desserts.

Now, for anyone who is still actually reading, here are some fun pics of Zach.

Tummy tummy! Zach loves running around lifting his shirt up. Apparently tummies are cool when they're usually hidden in a onesie.

Zach has started to get out the pans, lids, and spoons and pretend to cook. Though sometimes he comes up with other uses for them :).


Fun times running around with Jason and Cassie's dog Topanga.


Adventures in feeding himself yogurt. Yes, there is yogurt on his eyelashes.


Apparently relaxing requires holding one foot in the air.


That's it for this post. Congrats to those who survived to the end :).

As you may have noticed, ever since Zach came along he's kinda taken over the blog. He's the one who's always learning new things and who we love to take pictures of so we don't mind :). So here's post to update on things that all of us have been doing.

Derrick - Derrick's busy finishing his last year in BYU's Master's program for Information Systems Management.
- Since this is our last year here Derrick's been job hunting. He's gone to careers fairs, information sessions, and given out several resumes. So far he's gotten 1 offer and is in different stages of interviewing at other companies. It's crazy to not know where we'll be in just over half a year! We're looking forward to posting about the results since it will mean the end of the waiting game.
- Other things that keep Derrick busy have been his job as a programmer/web developer (not sure if I have the title right) at CleanBrain Software, a free lance job at EscrowTech International, and the Omniture Web Analytics competition.
- With all this Derrick isn't home much and when he is, he's usually working on homework. Things should hopefully calm down a bit in the next few weeks.

Jen - Most of my time is taken by Zach and the normal mom activities.
- In my ward I'm Enrichment counselor so there are meetings, enrichment groups/quarterly activities, and managing the email announcements, the ward blog, and the ward relief society calendar.
- Recently I've gotten sucked into spending way too much time reading through craft blogs and bookmarking more craft ideas than I'll ever get enough time to make.
- My latest projects have been Halloween decorations, baby shower gifts, and the beginnings of Christmas presents.
- My sister Melissa lives in the area and has deferred classes for the semester so we get together and do things almost every day. Her baby is due in 10 days and we are so excited to meet him.
- I've also been reading several books. My favorite has been one called A Mother's Book of Secrets by Linda Eyre and Shawni Eyre Pothier. I definitely recommend it to any moms (especially ones with small children) who read this blog.

Zach - Zach recently turned 15 months and is as active as ever. His stats are: height - 33.85in (97th percentile), weight - 26.4 lbs (73rd percentile), head circ - 50 cm (off the chart).
- Lately Zach's favorite things to do are to put little toys in a saucepan and stir with a wooden spoon, climb into boxes, stack things, run around outside, and make as big of a mess as possible.
- We've been working on weaning him off the bottle. We're doing it slowly so we're down from 3 to 2 and will take away another in a little while. I think I'm going to miss the bottles as much as Zach.
- He's getting practice at trying to feed himself with a spoon but usually gives up and moves to using just his hands.
- Zach's been learning a few words and combines sign with about half of them. He regularly says: "Ma", "Da", "Ma" (with sign for Grandma), "Baby" (with sign), "Ball", and "Bah" (which means more and sometimes comes with the sign). Zach will sometimes do the sign for "Again".

Zach's become quite the dancer ...


Zach loves to tease us...and climb on the table. It's kinda a never ending battle with him :).


The remote control batteries never stay hidden for long.


Being upside-down is a favorite position for Zach. He puts his head on the ground and butt in the air to let us know he wants us to pull him up by his feet.


Climbing in and behind things...