Cora making faces

Yesterday we noticed that Cora was starting to scrunch her eyes up when she smiled, like Josh does. Today she was doing it constantly, so I took some pictures. I think she's figuring out how to copy our facial expressions, because when I scrunched my eyes up at her she would do it again. It was cute!!

The new apartment!

Okay, I've got the house cleaned up enough to take pictures!
The apartment manager gave us a few things when we arrived: a dish sponge, some dish soap, toilet paper, and this lovely dish towel.






We have a washer and dryer in the apartment! Hooray! Of course, it means I can only do one load at a time, but at least I can wash things as soon as they get dirty! That's been really helpful because Cora's been pooping out of her diapers a lot lately.





Walk-in closets for lots of storage, yesssss!











This is Cora's room. She doesn't have much furniture, but come one, she's only 5 months old. She's very excited that she no longer has to share a room with the computer and guest bed.






This our room. In our Wymount apartment, our king size bed barely fit in the bedroom. Now it fits with plenty of space for our dresser, nightstands, filing cabinet, and writing desk (the desk is still pending).





Cora playing in our living room. Just a corner of our living room, actually, because the rest of it's still a mess. We have a couple boxes full of crumpled newspaper that I want to recycle, some bins waiting to go into Cora's closet for storage, and other random things. It was worse before we got the bookshelf, because then all our books were in boxes everywhere, too. We don't have a couch yet and may not for a while. But overall, the living room is in pretty good shape, relative to a week ago.

Christmas

Cora had her first solids at her Grandma Stewart's before Christmas. She actually seemed pretty okay with them at first, despite how this picture looks. But she did let us know when she was done. I haven't been consistently giving her rice cereal, though, but I'm going to start giving it to once or twice a day.













Can you believe we had a white Christmas in southwestern New Mexico? It snowed on the 22nd, I think, but there was still snow on the ground on Christmas day! And yes, that is a cactus.










"Wow, Grandma gave me wrapping paper! What an awesome present!"
Cora did enjoy her actual presents as well. And she had fun with the wrapping paper.
As you can see in this picture, she's also sitting up by herself now! She loves it and complains when I lay her on her back or tummy now. She can keep herself entertained much longer because she can reach her toys so much better. She's also started putting absolutely everything in her mouth. She even likes to grab our faces and pull them towards her mouth! Awww, baby kisses are so sweet!


"Hey, check this out, I've got reindeer on my feet!" Aimee, my oldest sister-in-law, let me have my pick of Christmas clothes at her secondhand kids' clothes store, so I picked up these pajamas and some other things. The stroller was Cora's present from Santa, and we've already made use of it. Unfortunately, the roads here in Spring aren't as walking-friendly as the roads around BYU, so sometimes I can't use the stroller.











I couldn't resist putting this picture in, because the expression on her face is hilarious. It's like, "Oh, no, you caught me!" The Santa suit is another thing from Aimee's store. And I still need to get a picture of her in the Santa suit; I realized I never took one after I had already changed her out of it. But it was really cute.








Enough said.













Cora and me and the saguaro (pronounced sah-WAH-ro, as I learned). Josh's family went to a vacation house in Tucson the day after Christmas for a week. This is on a nature trail a mile or so away from the house. Josh was actually in Washington for his friend Joe's wedding at this point, which is why he isn't in the picture with us.













Visiting the Sonora Desert Museum, which was awesome. If you are ever in the Tucson area, you should go. These are bat ears, to scale.













Cute baby bat!













Cute daddy bat! :D

So begins the blog

As we left Wymount, lots of people asked if we had a blog. So I decided to start one. It's a great way to keep in touch with those we've left behind, as well as family.

We're enjoying Spring, Texas, so far. It's about 60 degrees and sunny out right now--woohoo! I took Cora for a walk in the front carrier Josh got me for Christmas after her afternoon nap. I like being able to do that in January, but I kind of miss having snow. And we'll see how I feel come summer, when it's 90 degrees and humid!

Our house is slowly coming together--the bathroom and kitchen are completely organized, the two bedrooms are close. The living room is still a total disaster. But we're going to get some bookshelves today so that we can put all our books and games away. We don't have a couch and have no clue how we're going to get one. We went to Goodwill, and it was tiny. The only furniture they had was an entertainment center, which someone bought while we were there (not that we'd have any use for it, since we couldn't fit our TV into the moving truck). So we're going to go couchless for a while. We might get a futon or something cheap like that after a little while.

The ward here is great. We've already been invited over to dinner 3 times and I got invited to a girls' night on Saturday. There's a funny story about that. The sister in charge of it talked to me at the ward activity the night before, saying something like, "Would you like to come over to our house and hang out on Saturday?" Josh and I assumed she meant both of us come over for games and dessert or something. On Saturday I called her to ask how to get to her house, and asked what we were doing. She said we'd be going to a restaurant and then to a movie. I was very surprised--she hadn't mentioned anything about going anywhere. I was wondering if we would need to get a babysitter.

Saturday night we drove to her house, and as we were pulling up, people started walking out--but they were all women! So Josh went home and I got to know some of the sisters a little better. One of the sisters I talked to said that she also didn't know it was a girls' night until she got an email from the sister organizing it. So I wasn't the only one confused.