I'm way behind on my blog, so here's my first attempt at updating. We spent our annual summer week in Utah the first week of July. On Independence Day we celebrated Zay's birthday. The whole (Atkinson side of the) family came to Karee & Dave's for dinner, Zay's party, and fireworks. Jerel picked this dinosaur cake for Isaiah. He did better this year and actually attempted to blow out the candles. It was cute though because he wouldn't lean towards the candles, he just sat straight back in his chair and did little puffs of air from there. Afterwards he licked all the frosting off of his cupcake and then asked for more--he gets that from his mom!
I'm enjoying him being two. It was getting annoying at the grocery store when people would ask how old my kids were. I'd have to say "6 months, and almost 2" and that made it obvious that they are practically the same age. Now I can say "8 months and two" and that allows people to think Zay could be almost 3, and thus there is a reasonable age difference between the two of them. Should I stop worrying about this? Yes. Will I? Maybe.
After the cake we went outside to watch fireworks. Isaiah was completely uninterested but luckily found something else to entertain him...Just before leaving for Utah, we put our house up for sale. So for the entire month of June all Isaiah saw me do was clean house for Vickie (our realtor). Anytime I picked something up he'd say "Vickie coming?" and he always wants to help. So he found this broom out on the patio and got back to his usual game of cleaning up. (In the background you can see the normal kids watching fireworks while Zayderella does all the work!)
I asked Zay to make a mad face and this is what I got. He was trying really hard, and he has a really good mad face--his eyebrows go down so far you can hardly see his eyes glaring up at you--but he knew he was being funny so his little smile is creeping in. I love the way his eyebrows are fighting to push his eyes down but his smiling cheeks are fighting to push them up!
And finally, here's our manly-man riding a pink bike. When Isaiah was born, I had wanted a little girl so badly that I think Jerel was genuinely concerned I would put him in dresses and make him play with Barbies. Luckily I don't believe in cross-dressing, and I definitely don't believe in letting children of any gender play with Barbies, so Zay has been able to grow up boyish after all. (Unless you count the fact that after cupcakes, his shirt was so dirty that I grabbed one of his cousin's shirts for him to borrow. He closest-in-size cousin happens to be a girl and when he came out everyone laughed at the ruffled shirt he was wearing. I didn't think it was that big of a deal, but in defense of his masculinity I changed him into his boy cousin's t-shirt. I'm happy to report that he doesn't seem to have any long-term damage stemming from this brief episode of cross-dressing. Wait, didn't I just say I don't believe in cross dressing? I don't. But in a pinch you just do what you have to do.) As it turns out Isaiah, of his own free will and choice, happens to like pink. If I let him pick the color of something at a store he frequently picks pink and I say "For Eliza?" "No, me."
Thank heavens we're not having another baby, in case that's what you thought! With the addition of Zay Zay and Liza to our family, we just don't seem to fit in our house anymore. I detest moving and told Jerel I only want to do it once, so we are looking for a house that will suit our needs for quite some time. I further explained that I don't want to move since I've finally made some friends in our ward, and that means the sooner we move the better because if we wait longer I'll just be more attached. But the real prompt for moving has come from a lot of research into the education opportunities for our kids. We have a found a school with a learning approach that we really like and the only way to ensure our children can attend it is to move into that school district, and specifically into that school's boundaries. So we are looking for a house in the Bethany area and have put our house on the market just a few days ago. For those of you who wonder why you didn't get a personal notification, well, that's just the way we do it--our big announements are done via this blog.
We've been doing lots of big projects around the house lately. Here's Zay Zay next to a huge pile of barkdust that Jerel spread around. It sure looks nice now, but it was a ton of work. Jerel says next time he's going to just pay someone to put it in for us--it costs an extra hundred dollars but saves you 10 hours of work!
