Saturday with family

I found out from my mom that my aunt and uncle from New Mexico were coming to Buckeye. Also, one of my cousins, George, and his little family were coming over from San Diego. George's brother, Gage, lives in Buckeye with his wife, Kalauna, and new son, Brody. So I invited ourselves over for a visit! How nice of me huh?
Savannah meets some cousins for the first time. The newest to the family is Brody Gibson, he's 5 months old. His dad, Gage, is my cousin.
Savannah has taken to yelling out at random times, usually when she's excited. She meets Brody and does of couple of yells at him, and poor Brody, didn't know what to think, it scared him! I felt so bad! In this picture, it looks like Savannah's tongue is sticking out, but it's not. It's actually my aunt Suggie's finger. She is holding Savannah's hands and her index finger is poking out. That's George's son, Joshua in the background looking on.
This is Kalauna holding Brody as Savannah and him meet.They let us stay for dinner and afterward we played dominoes. That's Jason with Gage, my cousin, in blue and a side view of my uncle Gerald.

I didn't get any pictures of George and his family, Nora, Joshua and Natalia. My Aunt Suggie went to bed pretty early, so I don't have any pictures of her either! I didn't do a very good job at photoing everybody. Good thing Photography is not a hobby of mine, cuz I'd be terrible at it!

When I was younger, my aunt and uncle lived in Yuma, so I spent lots of summers in Yuma with their youngest daughter, Sariah. We were best pals all growing up (not to fret-we're still best pals!). I have memories of swimming in their pool and my uncle playing on his guitar and singing.

Anyway, it was great to see them again and to see Brody now. What a cutie pie! He has the sweetest smiles! Savannah kept making him cry by yelling and squealing! Poor little guy!

TA-DA! (Tommy's somersault)

Tommy Griffin is our neighbor boy, his dad, Dave is one of Jason's roommates from before we got married and has been a great friend since. Dave likes to come over to visit and play Halo 3 with Jason, so on last Saturday he came over, Tommy came too. Tommy "played" with Savannah. Afterward Tommy found our boppy and somehow it started him on doing somersaults!

Here he is: (it's a little shaky because Jason is holding both Savannah and the camera and Savannah wanted to "help"!!)

Sept 21---Jason's Birthday!!!

Jason turned 31 this year! Unfortunately Savannah and I were not feeling well come Sunday, so we weren't much company for him. On Saturday, we got to see some of my family in Buckeye, and we had cheesecake, which is Jason's favorite kind of dessert.

Needless to say, this year went by without much fanfare. He appreciated the phone calls he got from his family.

He did get to spend some time with his friend, Dave, playing Halo 3 on Saturday and Sunday.

Tommy came over with Dave, on Saturday, and played with Savannah-kind of-as much as a 16 month old boy can "play" with an 8 month old girl! It was kinda cute.

Before they left, Tommy got the Boppy out and started to entertain us with his somersaults! It was so cute to watch him. He would stand right inside the curve of the Boppy, put his hands up and then bend over and he'd fall over onto the floor and then he'd clap!! I have a video of him, I'll have to add it tomorrow!

Playgroup

Savannah went to playgroup for the first time on Thursday the 11th. Even though she couldn't really "play" with the others-cause they are older than her by many months-she enjoys being around others. Here she is with Lucy Buchanan and the head of Tommy Griffin in the picture.

Almost Hurricane in Tempe!

It all started on Thursday night August 28th. (This happens to be my cousin's birthday too). We were at home watching TV when the newsflash/warning came across the bottom of the TV for Maricopa County. Jason checks outside and there's some lightening and the trees are blowing hard. He advises that we turn off the TV just in case-it's not plugged into a surge protector. Maybe 10 or 15 minutes afterward, the electricity goes off! Shortly afterward we hear sirens, they end up on Hardy Dr in front of our apartment! Some trees and fallen down and knocked out a power line. The sidewalk to our parking spot was flooded to about ankle-deep, so I had Jason go out and check things out. He got someone to take a pic of him by a fallen tree in front of our apartment.

Our neighbor, who happens to be our Ward's Elder's Quorum President, came over to make sure we were alright. He invited us over to his place to wait out the storm-at least until power came on. Since it was flooded pretty bad, Jason pulled us in this heavy duty wagon that we have.
Here's the 3 of us at the Griffin's house playing the dice game, "SNARF", but the other neighbors that brought it call it by a different name.

We got done with the game, but everything was still down, so we decided to go ahead back home. Here's a picture of us where a tree branch broke and fell into our "assigned" parking spot-good thing we didn't park there this night or else we would've most likely had damage to the hood of the car!!! WHEW! Savannah fell asleep while over at the Griffin's and stayed asleep on the ride home. She was tired.

Here you can get a glimpse of the flooding-though it's not really doing justice in the dark. It really is deep! I promise! The next morning Jason got up around 5 to get ready for work and the electricity was not back on yet, so he stayed home with us. Here's the tree that fell on the street in front of our place. Hardy Dr was blocked off from 5th St to 1st St. We almost wouldn't have been able to get out of the aparment because the crew would be working on the tree, so all of us in the apartment complex had to move our cars down the street. Walking back from where I had to park, I saw so many trees that fell down, some even pulled out at the roots! That's how powerful it was.Here's a tree that fell down on one of the buildings in my apartment complex, you can see that it fell down on the roof. Luckily there wasn't much damage to the place. We didn't get to have electricity back until sometime Saturday morning. We stayed over at our friends' house, Greg & Brenda Geisler, on Friday night. They were so sweet to let us crash at their place last minute.

So needless to say, our Labor Day weekend started out with a BANG!

She's Mobile now!!

Early this week, Savannah finally showed us her crawling skills. For the longest time she would just rock on her knees and hands, then flop down. But if ever she got the chance to hold our hands, she'd instantly pull herself up to standing position and would start to go forward-walking. We had to keep putting her on her bottom so that she'd learn to crawl. In my previous post, I said something about " more freedom" once she went mobile-I take that back. I'm not any more free than I was before because I keep having to watch her to make sure she doesn't get into anything! We haven't baby-proofed our apartment yet!!! She uses her left knee and right foot to crawl, the right foot is what pushes her forward, it's soooo cute to watch!

She has a new language-she's been squealing and yelling now for about a couple of weeks. She sure lets me know when she's happy or not! She squeals when she's excited and yells when she's not happy! She's actually a very happy baby. She loves attention, and knows that if she smiles, she can get more. Everyone comments on how happy she is, because she smiles and grins so easily at people.

Here's a picture of her learning the crawling position: