Happy Fall and My First Birthday in Washington! :D

We absolutely adore it here in Washington! It's almost been five months since we arrived and we've loved the trees, the trails, the parks, the lakes, the beaches, the blackberry bushes everywhere, the farms and apple orchards we live near, the public libraries, our neighbors, our ward, our callings, and now fall. It is so beautiful here, not only with all the deciduous trees losing their leaves, but all the coniferous trees are so deep green and all the grass is turning green again as it moves into the rainy season. :D We just love Washington!

Lydia runs through the leaves on the sidewalk in front of our apartment complex. :) She LOVES stomping on leaves normally and will go out of her way to stomp on one while we walk, but now that they're everywhere, she hardly knows where to begin stomping!

We love that we live right on the border of Woodinville, next to all of these beautiful farms. A friend from church told us about Minea Farm where they have a cider press that's over 100 years old. Every weekend they sell freshly made apple cider straight from the press, as well as raw honey they harvest there and eggs. We bought some cider and honey and LOVED them! They are so delicious! We got the raw fireweed honey in a big mason jar and we've already finished half of it. Good thing it's so close by! I love fall, even though my favorite season hands-down is summer, but there is something so wonderful about fall as we move closer to the Christmas season!

So going back to my previous post, I had just gotten called into young women's as second counselor, and I am LOVING it! Lydia loves playing with her dear friends at presidency meetings, which always last a few hours because aside from our meetings, we also just love chatting as friends. :)

We love our ward so much, Mitch loves his calling, and we love that Lydia can go with him to nursery and she loves it so much there!

Lydia playing with a giant Minnie Mouse at Whitney's house during our presidency meeting. :)

My friend, Liz, told me about Juanita Beach here just 15 minutes from our apartment, and we LOVE it there! It's a beach just off the shore of Lake Washington and we went there so much this summer! We love collecting shells there, playing in the sand and splashing in the waves. :)

Lydia discovers her love for watermelon this summer! :)

Mitch's family went on an Alaskan cruise in July and they were able to visit us the day before and a few days after! It was so fun to see them and they brought Lydia her AMAZING elephant chair! Right when she finished opening the wrapping paper, she knew just what to do and sat right down and started leaning back like it was her own little recliner chair! :D We cannot even put our heads on her chair without her grabbing us by the hair and pulling us off! She really loves her chair!

We of course took Mitch's family to Juanita Beach and we took a quick walk on the pier. It is so beautiful there!

We had a great 4th of July this year, and it was good because Lydia actually got to look at the fireworks and loved them! We went on a walk by the river close to our apartment and thought it would be a quick walk...and it was not! We thought there would be a bridge to cross back over after we walked for like 20 minutes or so, which isn't far considering Lydia refuses to sit in her stroller now and just wants to walk, and it's fun to watch her, but it takes a lot longer. We were quite dismayed when we looked up the way back home on Google and it said a 30 minute walk...like, adult walking pace...and we were already late for the 4th of July BBQ at our friend Britney's house! Good thing they were chill about it, because it took an hour! Yeah...probably not doing that walk again, at least not until Lydia can ride her bike on it or something! :)

Thankfully we arrived at the BBQ and had dinner and fireworks! It was a blast! We tried to get a picture of Lydia with a sparkler, but we weren't quick enough before it burned down. She wasn't so sure about how much she liked having it spark right next to her, but overall she had lots of fun and enjoyed seeing the fireworks!

We got a new tv when we moved here, we finally got away from an old tube tv and got a nice 64" Samsung one with my brother James' help using his family discount! :D It is quite nice, and as you can see here we are putting it to good use. Lydia's favorite show is Baby Einstein on youtube! Seriously, whoever invented that show is a baby genius, because it is so boring to me but about greatest, most hilarious thing in the world to Lydia! She laughs so hard when she watches.

We decided to have a pajama night when we first got the tv and watched a movie with pajamas in the title. So...yeah...that was depressing. We chose one we'd never seen, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a Holocaust movie, and wow, it was really sad. Definitely important to know history and what happened in the past, but it was incredibly solemn. It makes me so thankful for the liberties that so many have fought for and defended in our nation's history and pray that these liberties will continue.

Now that we have some more space in our apartment, I've dedicated half of a closet to food storage and have been enjoying learning recipes that you can use to rotate it and learning how to make bread from wheat I ground myself! I learned from Jenny Thornton in our ward, who is seriously amazing at making bread, and this was my first try on my own! We have bags of wheat now and a hand crank grinder and we love using it and feeling like the Little Red Hen. :)

After Mitch's family returned from their cruise, they stayed with us for a few days and it was a blast! We went to the Seattle Temple on Sunday to walk around.

We took some fun pictures of Lydia and lots of pictures of flowers! :)

I love hydrangeas!

And I love lilies!

The next day we went to Pike's Place Market. :) Lydia had fun spinning the Seattle Great Wheel. :D

We had so much fun and are so happy the Steeds came to visit!

So I have some great news. Lydia loves flamingos!!!!!! :D :D :D She has lots of stuffed animals, but these are her stuffed animals of choice! She carries them around with her all over, she sleeps with them, she feeds them and even puts food in her own mouth and puts their beaks in her mouth to feed them like she's their mother flamingo! :D It's so incredibly cute, and I, of course, am overjoyed that she loves them so much!

We had a great Saturday family outing to the Mukilteo Lighthouse Park! It was so much fun, and the lighthouse is so cute!

One of the old lights.

We went up the stairs to the top of the lighthouse and looked out over the Sound. It was such a clear, beautiful day!

Inside the lighthouse!

Cute little stained glass replica of the lighthouse.

We found lots of seashells and had fun playing and splashing!

Lydia was fascinated by the seaweed and not bothered at all with the icy cold water!

It was especially neat to watch the ferry coming back and forth from Whidbey Island. We need to go visit the island one of these days!

I came home one Sunday after morning meetings and found Lydia and Mitch asleep in her room! So cute!!!

We decided one day to make cookies and surprise Mitch with them at work! :D We texted him this picture to let him know we had arrived bearing chocolatey gifts! :)

It was getting close to Pioneer Day (July 24th) and I really wanted to dress up for our stake Pioneer Day celebration! I planned our costumes and Mitch's mom sent me some bonnets, fabric and an apron in the mail. I used the fabric to make a matching apron for Lydia. She loves it and it's so cute on her!

Seriously, cutest little pioneer ever!!!

It is an adult-sized bonnet, but sooooo cute!

She liked always touching it to make sure it was still there. :)

Pioneer Day was so much fun with our stake! The food was great and Lydia loved the Kersavage's cow, Bessie!

Also, I was very proud because I threw the Tomahawks and actually got them to stick in the stump! :D I felt very pioneery and I think my ancestors would be proud! haha

Lydia loves books, like, a lot, and it of course makes us very happy! She will sit and read and read forever, or hand us a book to read for her. One of her all-time favorites is Dr. Seuss's ABC! We pretty much have to read it every day.

We always do her personal scripture study (aka, I read aloud to her while she eats breakfast in the morning) from The Book of Mormon. Lydia loves carrying her little copy everywhere in the house too. :) She is in Alma chapter 51, reading all about Captain Moroni!

Another absolute favorite book of hers is the story of her first year of life! I got a $20 coupon from Shutterfly, which helped because otherwise this book would have been $60! I left it within reach for about two weeks until she was loving on it too much and I had to put it on my tall shelf! One day maybe when she's gentler to it she can read it without our supervision! :)

She also loves going to the public library, and we live really close to two of them! She loves the Bothell one especially because of the library bears in the kids corner! She always screams really loud when she sees dogs or cats or bears that she thinks are super cute, so that always makes being in the silent library a bit of an adventure!

Onward, library bear!!!

The Bothell Library is also very close to Bothell Landing Park, where Lydia loves to play on the playground and walk along the river!

Another park we love is the Wilmont Gateway Park. We are seriously surrounded with so many great parks, we just love it! Lydia's favorite thing is to go down the slide and climb all the way to the top of the playgrounds, and of course to swing!

She's always so serious when she swings though...it's kind of funny. She's swinging here, you just can't tell. She also loves wearing her sunglasses everywhere!

Here we are at another park, Grasslawn Park. :) Lydia loved the splash pad, the sandbox, and all the slides!

As I said earlier, I am absolutely loving my calling. The girls in our ward are seriously fantastic and I just love them!!! We had a smores night and Mollie Kersavage made the best gourmet smores set up there ever was! It was so delicious and so fun!

We've also been working on a service project that we're just about finished with! We are donating them to refugees here in the area, and our ward has been so generous in donating pillows, bed sheets, blankets, and my Mom sent me a bunch of humanitarian fabric for us to use as young women to make quilts! The young women did a fantastic job and it's been a fun project! Last night we tied a lot of them and will have one more activity to finish them up!

Lots of amazing sisters and sewing machines! :D

Lydia and I went to a small orchard at the home of a lady in our stake to pick apples and super tasty plums! Their son was so kind to drive Lydia around and around in his little car while I picked fruit. She seriously had the time of her life and cried and cried when I took her out! But we were covered in tasty, sticky, plum juice and needed to head home! Seriously, we REALLY want to buy a farm, plant an orchard, get some sheep (which were also there near the trees) and a little go cart for Lydia! :) Also, we are addicted to the show, Fixer Upper and now we want to move to Texas! Or we can just find a farm and orchard up here to buy. Either way! :)

Mitch and I worked all day one Saturday to can all the apples into pie filling! :D I learned a valuable lesson: apparently if you mix the syrup and the fruit in the pot and then pour it in the jars, you don't have this problem, where you cram it full of apples, but once you're done canning, you realize you have more syrup and less fruit than you wanted. Anyway, I'm still a novice, and learning more each time I can food, and will probably do peaches this next week! YAY!!!

A few weeks ago, the Sister Missionaries in our ward had transfers and we got a new Sister, Sister Chairoksa (I think I totally spelled that wrong...) but she is from Thailand, so I said, "Hello" to her in Thai because that's the only think I know how to say in Thai because two of my roommates in college, Erin Myers, Megan Hirshey, and their friend, Jade Jolley, served in Thailand!

Sister Charoksa asked me how I knew how to say that and I told her about my roommates and she said, "Megan Hirshey?!! She is the one to taught and baptized me in Thailand!" I was like, "WHHHATTT??!!!! Super cool small world!" :D

So that was fun! We took this picture and I called Megan and it's been great to be able to go out and help the Sister Missionaries in our ward here!

I also had the best night ever when we drove up to Lynnwood and had Cafe Rio!!! It was SOOO delicious and I was so glad they have one here! Plus, all the promos never applied in Utah, and they all apply here, like $5 off for your birthday, or on Taco Tuesdays, you can get a pork salad or a burrito for only $5!!! Best thing ever!

Also, Mitchy is the greatest!!! He offered one night to set up a perfect aroma therapy candle bath for me and took care of Lydia while I relaxed! :D It was so great! You can see my little toucan in my tropical bathroom where I've also hung a painting I did in high school of a tropical sunset. :)

Lydia also loves my bathroom and enjoys sitting on the counter while I do my hair and makeup in the morning and loves making faces at herself. :) It's so cute!

Early one morning at about 5:30, Mitch and I were up for the day and Mitch noticed my shirt draped on my toucan and said, "You're poor toucan, he's like, 'It's too early!'" :D He really does look like he didn't get enough sleep!

We decided to go to church matching one Sunday morning. :) Blue and white like BYU! But not quite the right shades. ;) It was stake conference, which is always a very long day of church for toddlers!

She had fun playing with my phone and took a few pictures. :)

That afternoon we went on a family walk along the Sammamish River Trail.

We love that there are blackberry bushes EVERYWHERE here! They were filled with ripe blackberries and we picked a few to snack on. :) It's always a hit and miss if you're going to pick a super sweet one or a sour one! They are all pretty tasty though!

I finished my family photo tree that I hung in our living room! I love being able to see and think about the legacy of our ancestors each day in our home. It's a 5-generation family tree from Lydia to her great-great grandparents. It's fun to take the pictures off and play a game of putting them all in the right spots, but now that we see them so much, it's kind of too easy. :) Maybe we can make it a timed game now to make it more challenging!

We put the extra prints of the family pictures in the green totes in our living room, and Lydia has decided to play with them and climb inside the totes all the time. So precious!

Me after an early Saturday morning trip to the Temple. I am so happy we have a Temple so close!

For weeks we had wanted to go see tide pools in Seattle, so we finally went! We had sort of a good time, but it was like, 95 degrees that day so it was kind of muggy there, and the only crabs we found were dead ones. :p

We found some cool sea anemones and Lydia liked running around a lot, but she tripped once and cut her knee on some sharp barnacles.

She was fascinated by her scab. Poor Lydia!

Lydia's hair keeps growing and growing! We haven't cut it yet, and probably won't until it's much longer and just needs to be straightened out. She usually wakes up with crazy hair, all knotted and fuzzy, but then after I brush it and get it a bit wet, it curls up really well and stays that way pretty much all day.

We thought it would be fun to try a pony tail in her hair, and it worked,

but it won't last long with how short her hair is, so maybe when it's a little longer will we try again.

Mitch called it her warrior's tail, just like Suko from Avatar. :) We're nerds!

Before summer ended, we had another visit with our ward playgroup to our lovely Juanita Beach. :) We splashed and played and I buried Lydia's legs in the sand! :D

After about five minutes she was done with that. :)

I taught Lydia how to smell flowers, and now she loves stopping each time she sees them to smell. :) It was so cute, she passed this planter and came back to it three times to just keep smelling the lovely blooms. :)

One lovely Saturday, we took a family walk around the trails by Microsoft. Mitch takes a daily walk here on his lunch break and wanted to show us where he goes. :) It is such a lovely walk! Lydia had a blast walking along.

Grocery shopping has gotten tricky since all Lydia wants to do is walk where she wants, as fast as she can, so going on family walks like this is her favorite thing ever because she can just go for it!

On the day of the first BYU football game, we went on another walk in a wetland near where we live. :) I found some straw and kept saying, "I recon," as we walked the trail. :)

We had fun walking along until Lydia realized there was a lot of water under the wood planks we were walking along and kept trying to stop and drink it! :p Yuck! We kept distracting her with other fun things along the trail. :)

It was next to a park that we went to afterwards, and Lydia loved of course! That evening we watched the game and were SOOO happy that BYU won! They lost their last two games though, so we'll see what happens this Saturday!

I went to visit my friend Britney and I often give Lydia my phone to play with when we're out and about if she's getting fussy. Little did I know she was taking secret pictures of the inside of my nose! :D haha!

Lydia also loves finding any shoes to wear, including ours! She puts her shoes on the wrong feet all the time to wear around the house. Here she is wearing Dada's church shoes and socks, with a little help from Dada getting them on her feet!

We recently went to the park as a family and Lydia had the best time ever going down the slide by herself for the first time ever! She was so proud of herself and doesn't like to go on the small slides anymore, just the big ones! :)

She seriously has a thing for sunglasses right now. She will put on a pair and say, "Wooooow!" for herself. It's so cute!

Wearing them on her red firetruck! :)

Wearing them at breakfast :)

She decided to wear them to church one day too, haha, but she didn't keep them on very long. :) Also, I kind of have good news, I've lost over 20 pounds since we've been here in Washington, and I feel like I'm in a good place now, I would like to just stay about where I am :) I feel like it's hard to really tell with me though, except for a little bit in my face, so you can kind of tell in this picture. I'm glad though and I'm feeling good :D

I took this picture because I thought it was cute how after shaking out this rug, it was soon covered with little Lydia footprints! I love those little feet! :)

We celebrated my 28th birthday last Sunday! It is my first birthday here in Washington, and it was positively amazing! Mitch completely surprised me the morning of my birthday with tasty french toast, and we decided since it was Sunday and we don't have church until 1:00pm to open presents in the morning, Christmas-style! :) He got me one of my favorite movies, That Darn Cat (the 1960's version with Haley Mills) and I had absolutely no idea that he'd gotten the cute brown leather jacket I'd found on Amazon that I loved! He was so sneaky, I had no idea until he handed Lydia a surprise package to give to me and it was so great! I opened cards and a kind gift from Mitch's family of an awesome bluetooth speaker! It's already been great to use! :)

After church, Mitch made dinner and an amazing chocolate cake and got these cool multicolored flame candles! It was super fun! So many kind people in our ward wished me a happy birthday and all my siblings called or texted and we Skyped with the Harpers and with the Steeds. :) It was such a wonderful day!