So Big!!!

A week ago our little Booboo turned 3 months old! I can't decide if the time has gone by really fast or really slow. Kind of both, if you know what I mean. We spent the day at my mom's which was a present for me, really. She watched him while I took a nap and then a bath in her great big tub. It was great. Then later, just after he woke up from a nap, he was being all cute so mom took some pictures, and here they are! He's getting really really big and finally has some good chubbiness to him, although I'm not sure you can see it in these pictures. You'll just have to believe me!



p.s. sorry about all the red!

Any Other Bookworms Out There?

So apparently the National Endowment for the Arts is all worried that most Americans have only read 6 of the books on this list. So people are posting it on their blogs and showing which books they have read. I, being a former English major, have read more than 6. I wanted to do this list mainly for myself, to see how many I have read, and for some great ideas of some books to read in the future! I stole this list from my friend Jen and I'd love to see which ones some of my other friends have read!!

INSTRUCTIONS FOR USING THIS LIST:
* Look at the list and bold those you have read.
* Italicize those you intend to read, and/or books you've started but haven't finished
* Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma- Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility- Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (en francais)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


38!!!!! Sweet! Only a true bookworm would be proud of this! On the other hand, it's sad how many of the italicized items were books I started and never finished. Oh well!

A Highland Fling

On Saturday Jon and I gathered up our courage and our baby to try and get out and have a little fun. We'd attempted it a couple of weeks ago at the Salt Lake City Art Festival, but that was close to home, and we only went for 2 hours. This time we decided to try something farther afield, and for a longer duration of time. I'm a big fan of my Celtic heritage, and so I love to go to Highland Games, otherwise known as Scottish Festivals. So we packed a lot of stuff, picked up Mom and Joel (two cripples, what were we thinking? What were they thinking?) and headed down to Payson for their Scottish Festival. We were there for several hours, and then we stayed even longer to help Joel out and so I could visit with a friend I hadn't seen in a very long (pre-baby) time. By the time we got home we had had quite the time with a tired Booboolala and my mom summed up the day very well: "It's been real, it's been fun, but I can't say it's been real fun!!!"

The first half was a breeze because Walter fell right to sleep in the sling. Here's a pic of His Cuteness!

And I had to get some pictures of his first diaper change in a woodland glen...

...surrounded by bagpipers!!

All in all, quite the day, and a very good thing for me to get out of the house!!

A Belated Tribute to a New Daddy.

Yes, I know Father's Day was a while ago. But life in the newborn vortex is just as crazy as ever. Besides, I've included a cute cute video I just recorded on Saturday, so it all works out! Here is just a little proof that a great new daddy has been born!

Jon likes to take Walter out on walks in the baby sling. It's especially helpful when I need a break and some more sleep! Here is a great early picture of Walter in the sling, but he still carries him around that way even though he is now a hefty 12 pounds!

Here is a great, funny picture of a very happy baby on his daddy's belly! I love this one!


Jon has been really working hard to get our new little family's affairs in order and get us more prepared for possible hard times. Because of him, we have no more credit card debt and we own both our cars outright. We also now have more than a one year supply of food. All this in just one year of marriage! Let me tell you, it feels good to know we have it!

And as promised earlier in this post, here is a fun video that I took at the Salt Lake City Arts Festival on Saturday. Jon was performing a little maneuver on Walter that is called "the milkshake". It's just a really great way to get burps out. But we were at an outdoor concert and the milkshake became a sort of rock out/shimmy! So I got video; the beginning is mostly Walter, but there's a great bit with Jon also at the end of the video. Enjoy!


Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing - Photo Books

This Needs to be Seen.

So I'm posting it here. It brought tears to my eyes. I think it is one of the most important issues being mostly ignored today. It is slowly getting more press though, which is great. Anyway, here is a link to a video on CNN about autism and a recent march they had for the cause. Jenny McCartney is a celebrity with an autistic son, so that's why she and her husband are speaking in the video, in case you didn't know.


Watch Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy rally against vaccines:

http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/showbiz/2008/06/04/bts.carrey.mccarthy.vaccines.cnn