Yesh.

I have been concerned over the past several months, that Violet will be a late talker like her dear sweet brothers. Little Lainey Rose already has quite the vocabulary, and Violet has been content with mama, dada, no, and nodding for yes. But just recently she is beginning to be quite the little talker (for one of my kids anyway). Whenever I ask a general question, like, "Who left these dirty socks on the living room floor" before anyone else can answer, Violet pipes up, "ME!" "Who left their bowl on the table?" "ME!" "Who left the toilet seat up? Who left the sink on? Who left the bathroom door open?" "ME!" So, that was her first real attempt at something other than mama, dada, and no. Then, finally, last week she woke up saying baby, which of course is just too cute. I've been waiting for so long to hear the word baby come out of my baby's mouth, I just think it's the cutest thing when babies can point to another baby and call them a baby, it's just so smarty pants-ish of them.

Then, last night during family home evening, we were talking about being children of God, and I was using the new nursery manual Behold You're Little Ones. I was pointing to a picture of nursery aged kids and asking, "Is she a child of God... Is he a child of God?" to the boys, and then I turned to Violet to ask her the same question, expecting her to nod her head in affirmation, but instead, in the sweetest, softest, just above a whisper voice came the answer, "Yesh." So I asked her the same question about several other little children, and got the same angelic answer, "yesh," each time. Then I asked her, "Are you a child of God?" To which she answered, just as softly, just as solemnly,"yesh." I had no words, Karl and I looked at each other, and there was nothing else to say. We finished up the lesson appropriately, but the most important part of it was in her sweet little word. I love her so much, and am so happy she is a part of our family. She adds such a wonderful new dynamic, and is such a naturally sweet and loving little girl.

Our Stay-cation

This week our family enjoyed our very own "Stay-cation." It was perfect because we've only been here a year, and were able to visit some of the local museums and beauties. Karl had taken a week off work for us to go south to Texas for his Texas momma's birthday, but at the last minute we decided not to, because no one in our family has been feeling tip top the last few weeks, and with the whole swine flu thing going around, we figured we'd be better off not compromising our immune systems any further than they already were.

So, Sunday night Karl and I sat down with our lap tops and searched for "things to do in Denver" and chose our favorite options. We decided on the Butterfly Pavilion, which is a year round exhibit that features hundreds of butterflies from around the world, for Monday. On Tuesday we went to North Pole, CO and visited Santa at his house, and rode all the rides (which were of the round and round fair kind). When we got there, we were the fourth car in the lot, and when we left hours later, there were still only twelve cars there, so needless to say, we had a great day walking onto rides. On Wednesday, we visited the Museum of Nature and Science, which is SUPER cool. They have a really neat space exhibit where the boys launched metal ball bearings into sand to make craters, and then were able to watch it backwards and forwards in slow motion. They also played with "mars" sand, watched the shuttle launch on a huge screen, created their own stars and watched their birth, life and death, watched an experiment on vacuums and so much more. And that's just a section of the first of three floors of this museum! We had a great time there. On Thursday we kind of took the day off, we went into Denver though to check out some craigslist items, and then went home. Today, we took family photos, none of which I'm really happy about, but they're alright. We traveled up through Sedalia, around Morrison and the Red Rocks area, through the mountains about and exited through Indian Hills. Then we went to this cool corn maze, which in all honesty sounds like much more fun than it is, at least with my aged children, and an already full week of fun things, but all in all we had a great week. Tomorrow we might try some redo's on the family pics, but tomorrow night Karl's taking me to see Wicked, so that should be pretty awesome. I assume I'll be blogging a bit more now that it's not summer. Summer was great, the weather was wonderful and we were able to travel a bit. It was really awesome experiencing the transition between summer and fall. One day I had zucchini's, tomatoes and sunflowers growing in my yard, and within days they'd frozen and died. We went from green, green, green, to various shades of gold, red, and bronze almost overnight, and right on cue! We love it here!

My little pupas

Violet was attempting to say "cheese" in this one

Happiness is obviously linked to chocolate chip cookies

I think I like this one the best, but the lighting isn't really good in any of them

I like this one too, except for Violet not looking in the right direction

The little boogers. Violet wouldn't stay, and They couldn't all make nice faces at the same time

These are the corn maze pics

This is the cutest little old school house I have EVER seen!