Butterfly House

So, I've been posting a lot since I've been here but there's a great thing called "Grandma" here to keep my little boy company. I've had some much needed "me time" while Brady follows around Grandma, Pop Pop and Mom Mom (Great Grandma). Also, Aaron keeps telling me he likes all the pics I post because then he can see what we are up to!

We've had some fun so far and here's some pics from our recent outing yesterday. Over in St Louis they have the best Butterfly House in the country. It's a big green house and it's like 85 degrees and extremely humid to grow all the beautiful plants that the butterflies love. I can't even describe how cool it was to watch all the butterflies flying around everywhere in there. They wouldn't stay still long enough to get good pictures of them but here's the ones I took of us in there.

Brady and Gracie by the waterfall

Brady on the butterfly bench outside

Baby Brin's first outing! We were hoping one would land on her too!

Look how friendly the butterflies were to us!

Here was our favorite butterfly. The outside of the wings are a plain brown but the inside was a really vibrant blue (the picture doesn't really do it justice!). We tried the whole time to get a picture of this butterfly with it's wings open and we finally did right before we left!

Cousins!

So we have finally met the little lady! Brady loves his new cousin Brinley. Here's a couple quick pics!

She is just so precious and oh-so-snuggly!

Brady liked her and we even got him to hold her and kiss her.

Then when he was done he looked up at us and said "I want you to take her off here now." or something similar to that. He wasn't really sure what else he was supposed to be doing with her! Funny! In Brady's words babies "spit and cry". I wonder how he will be when it is his brother doing those things???

Anyway, we are very much enjoying our time with her. It's so hard to not want to hold her ALL the time!

8 years!

Aaron informed me last night that on April 26th, 2002 is when he commissioned into the Air Force. Wow! He has been a grown-up in a career for 8 years! Crazy!
And not just any career-but something that he absolutely loves and believes in! He tells me all the time how lucky he is to be doing what he does every day. Well, he doesn't always say that right now since the conditions he is living in and dealing with are not the same as when he is here in the states-but you know what I'm saying!
Thanks for serving our country Captain Gray and you will always be my hero!

He just had this picture taken last year but I was looking at his uniform and those are the very same wings I got to pin on him in the ceremony when he graduated pilot training. And even that has been 5 years ago next month! Time goes by so quickly sometimes. Now if time could just fly ahead a little bit more to get him home quicker..........somebody start working on that for me OK?

On a funny side note-Brady saw this picture and said "Daddy is standing by the American Idol flag". I had to correct him and say "it's called just the American flag!" He knows that because he says American flag all the time when he sees it out flying, but at that moment he must have been thinking of American Idol (because he watches it with me sometimes)! Funny little boy!

Brady loves you too Daddy!

No use wasting food!

The other morning after breakfast, Brady decided he was still hungry. He also decided to raid the pantry himself to get some snacks. As he tried to get the box of crackers out, it of course tipped over and spilled on the floor. I heard the crash and by the time I was in the kitchen to see what he was up to, he was already "cleaning" up the mess himself. I was very proud of him for that. But his method of cleaning is a little different than mine.......he was just eating the crackers off the floor! I guess there's no use in wasting them and he got his crackers after all. Bo even got some too because he finished off the crumbs that were too hard for Brady and me to pick up!

Don't you love how kids can just squat like that forever? How do they do that?

Also, on a side note: I had just steam-mopped my kitchen floor the day before so it was still pretty clean!

New niece!! Baby Brinley's here!

I am the proud Aunt of another sweet baby girl. I am so happy to welcome our new little niece Brinley Ann Mortensen in to the world! She was born yesterday and weighs in at 8 lbs 1 oz and 19 inches long. What a little chunk! Those cheeks are too cute!!! Lauren-you did a great job!

I can't wait to get my hands on her!

Yesterday I was crying (happy tears) all morning as I was getting updates of her progress from the hospital waiting in anticipation. I'm already so emotional this pregnancy anyway, and with Aaron being gone and then you add this sweet little blessing on top of that and you get me=emotional baby! Only 10 more days until I get to see her!

Congrats Lauren and Mike! She truly is a little miracle and such a sweet little angel sent from heaven. I'm so happy she's finally here!

Things are growing here at the Gray's!

OK, I don't want to say this and jinx myself, but somehow we must have figured out how to grow things here in the desert! It's taken us almost 5 years but we've done it! (Now that I've said this, everything is probably going to start dying!)

So this year, I decided to expand my horizons and plant some veggies in our little planter box Aaron built for me a couple years ago. I used to just do flowers in it. The Bedonts did a little salsa garden in their yard and had some extra red onions, so we took those and I decided to add some more to it to do a salsa garden of our own. With this pregnancy, I have been eating chips and salsa like a mad woman. Maybe our little Bambino is part Mexican! :) Anyway, they won't be fully grown until the summer time so I can't enjoy them now, but it's doing so well and I'm very pleased with myself!

Here's what it is in case you're curious. Starting closest to us: cilantro, the onion sprouts, the larger leafy ones on the right are anaheim chilies and the smaller ones on the left are jalapenos, and in the back corner I did some zucchini. I wasn't going to attempt to grow tomatoes so those I will just have to get from the farmer's market to make our salsa.

I also got a big surprise when I was out watering this morning. I looked at our dwarf lemon tree (aka bush) and look what I saw:

The previous owners of our house planted this tree in the yard and we actually moved it twice since we have lived here. Aaron was pretty sure it was going to die both of those times (it was a lot smaller then) but miraculously it survived! And now it is thriving. We got big, sweet smelling blossoms this year and now after the blossoms fell off we got these little baby lemons! There's actually a lot of them on the tree. Is it weird that I almost jumped up and down with excitement when I saw these?

And finally, the other thing that is growing here at the Gray's:

A kind of profile shot of our second boy! He was not very cooperative so this wasn't a total profile shot but whatever. This is, of course, the most exciting of all of these things! So far everything is growing well and in another couple weeks I'll have a follow up to check on everything they couldn't quite see as well as they would like. Yay!

Baby Gray #2 will be wearing..........

BLUE!!!

Finally some good news to share. I haven't been very open about our good news this whole time yet but after the year we had last year, I couldn't let myself get excited until I saw that the baby was fine. I'm almost 20 weeks - halfway done! And everything looked great at the ultrasound today!
We also found out that Brady will be having a baby brother. I was sad (I hate to even admit this at all) for a tiny second that it wasn't a girl to even things out and give me some back up in this house full of boys......but then I got over it and decided that it would be fun to have another little boy. :) I've had so much fun with the first one-now I'll have twice the fun!! I kind of had a feeling it was a boy anyway so I wasn't that surprised. I was just so grateful that nothing was wrong and that we would finally be adding another little one to our family.
He was kinda stubborn as the lady was doing the sonogram so we didn't get a whole lot of great pictures to share but I have a follow up to check on a couple more things in 4 weeks so maybe we'll get some more pictures then. (She couldn't get a good view of a couple things because he was being uncooperative!) I was also kind of sad today that Aaron couldn't be there with us to see and this is all I have to show him. But it's better than nothing for sure!

(Ok, my scanner is not working right now so I'll have to upload them later when I figure it out and you can check back! Sorry)

I guess I will have to wait for my days of making hairbows and cutsie girly things. But by the end of next week I will have 3 nieces to do that for anyway! :) So excited for my new little niece Baby Brinley to be born! Good luck Lauren!!! I can't wait to meet her!

The rest of Easter

Brady woke up at 5 am on Easter wanting to go look for his Easter basket. I told him that he had to go back to bed until the sun came up at least! This is not just exclusive to Easter because he does it on other mornings too but he did remember that there was a basket waiting for him. So we went back to bed until 8 and then got up to go check out the goods the Easter bunny left.

We left the Easter bunny a carrot to snack on and Brady was excited that the Easter bunny ate his carrot! Playing with his new squirt gun in the yard. Love the bed head!

After all the Easter bunny stuff, I wanted to emphasize the real importance of Easter and my grandma sent this cute little book that explains it pretty well and is easy to understand. We've been reading it and I think he finally kind of gets it. But this kids was asking me questions I didn't really know how to answer in a simple way. Such as: "How did Jesus die?" I explained on the cross but he still wanted to know "how". Also: "How did he get back to heaven?" Uh.....???? I don't even know the answer to this one! I gave him the "he just got back there to be with Heavenly Father" which satisfied him for then. I have a feeling that more questions will be coming in the years to come about things that I don't always have the simple answers to so I guess I better enjoy these sweet moments now when these types of answers are OK!

We spent the rest of Easter with friends of ours that have adopted us on holidays. There's something about a noisy house on a holiday that actually makes it a holiday. I'm glad we didn't have to spend it by ourselves, especially with Aaron being gone. But this is the second Easter we have spent with the Bedonts so it's becoming an Easter tradition! Here's the only pictures I have from the rest of the day of the kids egg hunting in the back yard:

I took some video too for Aaron but it's kinda long so I won't post it here but we had a great day and when Brady got home on Sunday night he was so tired after a full day with friends! I hope everyone else enjoyed a wonderful Easter. I am grateful for all the blessings our little family has been given!

Easter Festivities

Last year we did not color Easter eggs. I'm not sure why. I bought the stuff but we just never did it I guess. But this year Brady has really gotten into all the Easter stuff in the stores. He keeps asking me if it's "Easter Bunny Day" yet. From some of his Easter movies or TV shows he's seen, he kind of knows how the Easter bunny works. I'll tell you why I say "kind of knows".
He knows that the Easter Bunny brings you treats and other little things. But somehow he got confused on what kind of things the Easter bunny brings. He saw a commercial for the game "Hungry Hungry Hippos" and told me:

"Mom, I want the Easter Bunny to bring me Hungry Hippos in my Easter basket."

Uh.....what? This is not Santa Claus! You don't make a list and get what you want! I told him the Easter Bunny doesn't really have help like Santa does from the elves so he won't be getting big things in his basket. Besides, he's gotten 3 packages in the mail this week with all kinds of Easter goodies. Is this kid spoiled or what?? I don't blame myself at all for that-it's those crazy Grandmas!!!

I got to escape to Target by myself yesterday to go get a couple little things to put in his basket that I know he's had his eye on lately. But even though he got plenty of candy in his little care packages this week, I still had to get a couple bags of Easter candy for ME! I couldn't help myself!

Tomorrow, we are going over to celebrate Easter with some wonderful friends who always adopt us on the holidays (and other days too since Aaron is gone!). We'll have our egg hunt then and hopefully I'll remember to take some pictures of that! More candy!

Anyway, here's some pictures of us coloring the eggs today outside. You didn't think I'd do this inside did you? Need I remind you of the modge podge incident??