Since U Been Gone

SING IT, KELLY! Well friends, I am up at 3:00AM Hawaii time finishing up a plethora of posts so that I don't have to hear any more complaints about our sad little blog. To be honest, Grant was the only one complaining. So this is all for you, man. I want everyone to know that Nicole kicked me off of the blog about the same time the posting stopped. So I blame her. I retook control and fired her for that and for losing our camera, another contributing factor to the shortage of posts. She also forgot to bring the new camera we bought to Family Camp so I am going to need a little more time to get a few remaining posts up here before we are completely up to speed. I am really sorry if these posts are lame, as I have been doing this non-stop for 3 and 1/2 hours straight plus I have my own blog I need to keep updated. Geez, I cant feel two of my fingers right now so I am going to bed. Hope you enjoy.

Mommy, WOW! I'm a Big Kid Now!

I guess it's time for us to have another baby cause this guy is all grown up. I can't believe he is going to be two in a few months. Here is a little bit of info on Oliver. 

He loves to say, "hi," and, "good bye," to everyone. He'll say "goodbye" to the cashier when you are walking out of the store. His other favorite thing to say in "all done" weather that's with dinner, or his bath or he is sick of being inside the car. 

Oliver's favorite colors are yellow and orange. He will take the yellow and orange items out of any group of things, such as his blocks or his flash cards. His favorite toy varies based on his

attention span at the moment, but he loves his Lego's most 

of the time. 

His favorite dinner is spaghetti, but it is also the messiest. He loves grapes and raisins, but we can only give him those in limited quantities for obvious reasons...it affects his pooper. Oliver only drinks soy milk and I call him a Hippie all the time for that. But he doesn't care.

Oliver loves watching his Baby Einstein DVDs more than anything just about. I have a few of them on my iPhone for emergency situations, such as eating at a restaurant. Oh, Oliver's least favorite thing to do is eat at a restaurant. More than anything, he simply doesn't like being strapped down.

He loves bath time. He really enjoys splashing so much in the bath that we have to wipe down the walls afterwards and put towels on the floor to soak up the water. 

At night when he goes to bed he loves to read a few stories, his favorite of which are Good Night Gorilla and The Going to Bed Book. He has almost completely graduated from his pacifier, he only uses it when he goes to sleep.

I know this is a pretty sappy post, but even though I miss the baby stuff sometimes, I am so glad that he is getting to that age where we will be able to go play frisbee golf at the park or ride bikes or go sky diving. He is a really fun kid to be around. We love him very much.

Happy Late Fourth

We had a nice mellow 4th of July. I was a little bummed that Oliver didn't make it to see the fireworks. But since it didn't get dark until 10:00PM that night, it was probably a good thing he wasn't awake. Nicole and I did stay up and watch the Thanksgiving Pointe Fireworks. It's a great show...not as good as Disneyland, but still great.

Learning to Communicate

Oliver is a fun kid, but he's pretty weird. Not weird like a nerd or anything. He's really quirky and way too picky for a 21 month old. But don't get me wrong, he's super cute. 

He's doing a great job picking up new words and saying them. He does really good with the sign language that our wonderful friend, Dr. Baby Einstein teaches him. But I am always surprised when I get home on the weekends and he has learned a new word that I don't know about. 

One weekend, I came home and Nicole had somewhere to go, so I was watching Oliver during lunch. I opened the fridge to get his usual string cheese and raisins and he says, "Apple!" Then he opens the fruit drawer and pulls out a Washington Red and starts chomping away. I was astonished and proud of his new word. The way he ate it was so funny. He looked very similar to a chimpanzee eating an apple. Anyway, Oliver has had apples before, but we always cut them up before we gave them to him. So I took the apple, cut it into slices and put it on a napkin and gave it back to him. When he saw what I had done to his delicious snack, he screamed and cried and pushed it away. He walked back over to the fridge. I opened it up and he pulled out a new apple and started to eat it. 

Weird, right? A that moment I wished that he was fluent in English so that he could explain to me why it was such a problem that I had cut up his apple. Oh well. I took this picture of him munching his second apple.

Summertime

Winter dragged on and on and on this year here in Utah. We had the usual 2 weeks of Spring at the end of May/beginning of June and then came the heat. Now all Oliver wants to do is go outside and play which is a problem for us because we don't have a fence or window well covers. Sometimes he will spend a few minutes in the morning just staring out the back door. Poor kid.                                                                                                                                                                

When we do make it outside, we make it fun...well fun for Oliver. I will work on the yard and Nicole will wash the cars. Oliver loves getting hosed down. We need to get him a Slip-N-Slide for next summer.

Stupid Lakers

This was us on our way to see Game 1 of the NBA Finals...

We were too sad to film anything on the way home. Stupid Lakers. We got dressed up for a few of the other games, but there wasn't much cheering involved. I don't want to talk about it anymore.

The Last Elder LeSueur

Brady is the last of eight boys in our family to go out and serve a mission for the LDS Church. We were happy and sad to see him leave the beginning of April of this year to go to Cape Town, South Africa. But he didn't leave us without a handful of new stories to tell. For those of you that know Brady, you know that he is a character that if you could get on paper and into a TV series, you would make millions. He almost slept through his farewell talk at church, walked into the chapel 26 seconds before he was supposed to start his talk and somewhere in the midst of it all said over the pulpit something to the extent of "the LeSueur's are the bomb." Those of you that know Brady may be surprised to hear that he gave one of the most flawless and motivating talks about faith and the simplicity of the gospel. It was very inspiring to see him leave, not only because he completes a legacy of missionaries for our family, but also because he did it whilst leaving a huge impression on many others, including myself. When I left on my mission I was crying and blubbering all over myself. Brady went out strong and poised. We all miss him and wish him success.

Easter 2008

Nicole and Oliver came down to visit for a few weeks in March. There were a few events going on (see next few posts) and Grandma was in town. I was already down there for work, so I didn't fly home for a weekend. We had a really good time. On Easter Sunday, we had a little easter egg hunt for Oliver. There was a lot of pointing and clapping for a few minutes and afterwards I got to eat all of his candy, which wasn't a bad deal for me since I didn't have to do any of the setup or the hunting. 

Nicole got Oliver a little toy guitar that he liked a lot until we got back home and he remembered there was a real guitar there that he's not aloud to touch. I haven't seen that little toy guitar since.

Sk8ter Boi

Whilst in California, we were lucky enough to participate in a little gathering of friends from my old Stake. We got together at the old Skating rink where we grew up for a night of family fun. It was really good to see all of my old friends. I never expected to really move away from Orange permanently. One day I was simply gone. It was really good to catch up with them all. 

Nicole and I were very concerned about how to keep Oliver happy at such an event. Bildo and I came up with the great idea to push them around in their strollers whilst we skated behind them. 

However, we quickly realized that although this might seem fun from our perspective, it was ranked by the kids as "a little more fun than a regular stroll and a little less fun than riding in a car seat." As you can see Oliver was thoroughly bored with it. So we threw caution to the wind and let the boys roam free on the floor, trusting that all of the other sk8ters were responsible enough to not run them over.

And that's when the real fun started for Oliver and William who then proceeded to dance all night long. William's signature move was a simple knee bounce, but he surprisingly kept a prefect beat to his bounce. Oliver's moves were much more Mia Michaels inluenced (did I just out myself?). His favorite move was holding his head down and running in a circle always trying to keep his head in the same place.

Oliver's First Taste of Soda

This one is a little late, but the picture sequence is too good to not show.

We were eating some lunch at a Pizza place near our house sometime in February. I got an Apple Beer to drink as we waited for our food. Of course, since Utah food service workers usually are comprised of 14 to 16 year old kids who have no idea how to serve food, we waited for a good 15 to 20 minutes for our food to get out. And of course, Oliver's patience ran out about 3 1/2 minutes into our wait. He kept pulling at my cup and I got sick of it, so I got out my camera phone and let him take a big old sip. The funniest part (which I sadly did not get on camera) was when he kept scratching his tongue to get the fizz off.

...and of course, he went back for a second swig and we repeated the whole experience.

Happy Birthday Nicole!

Since I was busy working in Simi Valley in March, Nicole and Oliver came down to California during Nicole's birthday. Both of them had pretty bad cabin fever after the ridiculously long winter in Utah. Plus, Nicole, the true California girl that she is, needs a certain amount of sun every so often or else she will implode. It was especially nice because Nicole's grandma was there to see Oliver. 

Nicole's dad threw nicole a little birthday party/bar-b-que in the park. Oliver was not that excited about wearing the party favors, but was very happy to taste cake for the second time in his life.

THERE! ALL CAUGHT UP ON OUR BLOGGIN'!