Snow sliding

Today we went to the River Park in Spanish Fork Canyon. We really needed to get out of the house even though it's been cold and snow flurrying off and on. I had envisioned that we might walk along the river trail some and maybe play on the play ground. When we got there however the gate was closed to the park. So I did what every self-respecting toddler mother would do, I jumped the gate. Actually, I tried to go through a small opening first and didn't make it, so I climbed over and Munkey squoze through the opening and then we headed for the playground.

I was proud of Munkey for climbing up the entire playground assembly by herself, up to the slide, and then actually sitting down and sliding. The first time I ever let her go down a slide by herself she insisted on climbing up to the highest one and then ran over the edge of it with out slowing down or sitting first. Luckily I caught her before she smacked her head into something. That is why I say I am glad she has learned to sit now :)

As a side note, I wish people who make slides would put small drainage holes at the bottom of them. They always hold water and today it was actually a patch of ice at the bottom.

I think she liked playing at the playground even more with the snow flurries but it got cold fast so we didn't stay as long as she would have wanted. I didn't get a video of the screaming tantrum where I had to carry her back to the car while she was kicking her boots off and clawing at me. Then I had to climb back over the gate while trying to keep her from running into the barbed wire on either side. Still, it was good to get out of the house!

A musical Munkey

When Dan is at work, I turn on the Piano during the day sometimes for Munkey to play. I caught some pictures of her having a blast pecking away at the keys:


I really love that our piano is a player piano with hundreds of songs on it that we can listen to during the day.

She has really gotten into musical instruments lately. We have a picture book with a few pages of instruments and she wants to read it over and over and points to the instruments for me to say what they are. She particularly likes the picture of the maracas.

Granny Kepi got her a set of wooden musical instruments that are bells, and tambourine, a sand filled shaker, and castanets and she loves to play them. Also we recently have been singing jingle bells while playing a hand bell. I'm thinking of trying to find her a few more musical instruments that she can play. Also Granny Kepi and my friend in Provo play the flute, maybe we can arrange for her to have a concert. I need to get my violin out but I'm a little afraid it might be too fragile for her to handle and it would just lead to a screaming fit when she couldn't play with it. I need to find her a little solid wooden violin like I used to have when I started out.

Dan's music academy where he takes piano offers music classes starting at 6 months old, which seemed really young. I think it might be fun to take her to some next year just to see if she likes it. I've seen group music classes for slightly older kids where they sit in a room and each kid gets a keyboard and their parents sit with them and they have a group class. It looked like fun.

I so don't want to be one of those parents that is like you will play 5 instruments, and practice every day, and never miss a lesson. I think it would be more fun for her to just encourage her natural curiosity by finding musical things to do during the day and to try and keep it fun for her and provide her with the opportunities to learn about music.

Check out my Monster shirt

Dan and I aren't really into celebrating Halloween so this t-shirt will probably be the extent of our celebration this year for Munkey. It is pretty cute though and I just discovered it glows in the dark!

It snowed at our house today and Munkey decided she couldn't wait for me to put on her shoes. She made her way out into the yard barefoot. Then after a few minutes of standing in snow she realized how cold her feet were and stood out in the yard screaming for me to come get her, which I did.


I really like this shirt, it goes to show you can buy happiness at Kmart for $2.

We did get this pumpkin that I ended up cooking but before I did I put it on the floor because Munkey seemed really interested in it. She tried picking it up at first, grunting as she tried to lift it but she was never able to get it off the ground. Finally she learned that she could just roll it around and she really thought that was fun.

This is how are garden looks now. I think it might be mostly dead. It makes us very sad. Munkey seemed to really just be getting into the swing of it. She would ask to go out to the "Ganye" and eat "Tomanos". We've started calling them tomanos because it's just too dang cute. There won't be any tomanos until next year unfortunately :(

A Munkey that goes Moo

Munkey really likes doing animal noises, here's a sampler :

I haz fun at Daddy's work!

The Munkey Daddy needed to get some work done on a Saturday so we accompanied him up to Novell.  Munkey had a blast trying to grab all the fun stuff and computers off his desk.

Mostly she loved his magnetic geometry set, I did too.  It provided us with about 2 hours of entertainment along with zooming down the hallways in rolling chairs.  I am hoping we do not find any magnetic pieces in MB's diaper soon :)

Look, at the cool stuff I can build (OK, that last one was Mommies) : 

A tough day at the office

Today I decided it might be nice to ride my bike up Nebo with Munkey so that we could go see the fall colors.  I thought that if I went early enough we'd see relatively few people.  Boy, was I wrong. 

We got all bundled up because it was about 45 degrees when we started up the Nebo scenic loop.  Also the higher you go the colder it gets. Munkey was wearing a pair of fleece footie PJ's and her fleece lined winter jacket as well as my winter jacket covering her feet in the kid bike trailer.  We started to ride a mile below Benny Creek. The fall colors up there were stunning and that part of the ride was very enjoyable.

The traffic was initially light, soon however we began to encounter traffic of another kind.  Apparently  it was free-range cattle roundup day on the mountain.  We ran into herds of cattle being driven right down the road by farmers in pickup trucks as well as on horse back.  The only thing I knew to do was to pull over on the side and wait for them to pass.  Luckily we did not run around a corner head on to one of these herds but at one point there were cattle on both sides of the road and we had to travel in the middle.

Beef, road hogs: 

I ended up cutting our ride short because of all of this hoopla but we did make it up to a wonderful meadow where I let Munkey out to play in the snow.  She thought it was a smashing idea and I had a very hard time dragging her away from it.  She was very interested in eating all of the snow before we left.  We also saw some turkey tracks and when I pointed them out to Munkey, she tried to make the gobble gobble sound.

Turkey Track:

Everything was all fun and games until I went to put her back in the bike trailer so that we could ride back to the car and I noticed she smelled a little stinky.  Ah man! Changing a baby with 10 layers of clothes on in the cold is no fun.  I had even put her in an overnight diaper hoping that I could put off changing her until we got back to the car.  Neither one of us was happy about this occurrence and especially when I realized I had biked three bags of crap up the mountain and none of them contained any baby wipes.  Well, we made due with all her extra clothes I brought along and I changed her in record speed into a new diaper and full body PJ suit.

Smelling fresh, we loaded up everything, I gave her a whole piece of bread to munch on, and we headed down the mountain.  What really sucked was that now we were headed down in the same direction as the cattle, so I had to watch ahead of us and behind me to make sure they weren't sneaking up on us.  Also the traffic flood gates opened up. Apparently a school trip was in progress with 2 buses of kids with about 12 cars of parents following, which added to the fall leaf on-lookers and the ranchers.  Geez, we might have done better riding on I-15, there would have been less cattle.

Pics of cattle taken when we were safely in the car, they do look pretty in fall colors :

Still, it was a fantastic outing consisting of about seventy percent enjoyment, twenty percent annoyance, and ten percent cattle poop.  If there is a God, I think that if he loved us he would see to it that someone puts more bike lanes in Utah because sharing the road means something entirely different here.  I think I will wait to ride up there again until after they have closed off the road with snow gates and the beef is on the store shelf.