First United Bank of Dallin

Dallin has been doing well with getting around. He has a little scoot/crawl that he does. He takes a few crawling "steps' on his hands and knees, and then he'll do an inch worm scoot to get to his destination. Today he mostly crawled about 3 feet to the diaper bag, knocked it over and took out my wallet. He knew exactly where it was and what is inside it.

Coins!

Later on he pulled the credit cards out.

It's way too early for him to be interested in money!

Dallin's New Trick

Dallin has been doing this new thing with his tongue. It's really cute. He started doing it a few days ago, and now he keeps doing because he's know that we'll laugh when he does.

You'll laugh too.

Here's more of it.

Dallin's Room

The front part of our apartment has been put together and settled for a while, but it's taking time to get to the back bedrooms. They still have boxes lying around and it's hard to get through them or find things you need. I finally got around to straightening out and organizing Dallin's room. Here it is, for those of you that want to see it. It's not all that different from how it looked in Provo. Same furniture, same stuff, smaller room. Enjoy!

Dallin still enjoys his bouncy toy. He's finally tall enough for his feet to reach the ground without putting a book under it!

Notice the desk lamp on the right of the picture. The apartment doesn't have light fixtures in the bedrooms or living room, so we've had to make do with a few lamps, and this lamp is the only light in Dallin's room. (Have I mentioned how much I love this apartment? This is 2010! Why doesn't this place have built in light fixtures?!?!)

The view from the door.

The closet. Very exciting.

And the extra bed.

Mom, here is proof that the bed is all made up and ready for you when you decide to come visit us. You get a really cute roommate. And we might even get a bigger lamp for you.

Risotto Sunday

We went to church today. We've been having trouble getting there on time, especially since it's 20 minutes away, but today we made it! We're making more friends and getting to know more people.

I got a drink at the drinking fountain and Dallin looked really interested, so Mckay bent him over to the water. We've done this before months ago, and Dallin would just let the water flow on his lips or into his open mouth, but he didn't quite know how to drink it. Today, he knew exactly what to do! He was slurping up little bits of water and was actually swallowing them! Then he would get another gulp. It was so cute!

I feel like he's being making little steps of progress with the development of his mouth and such. The next step is eating solid foods, right.....?

For dinner I tried a new recipe: Dirty Risotto.

When my parents were cleaning out the house getting ready to move last month, they let us take anything we wanted out of the food pantry. We got a lot of good stuff, but one of my favorite finds was some arborio rice for making risotto. I'd never made a risotto before and I figured I should learn how. It was pretty easy. It takes a little bit of time and attention to prepare, but Dallin was a good boy and he sat watching me the whole time so I could concentrate on cooking. This risotto has spicy italian sausage, pancetta (or bacon if you're cheap like me and already have bacon in the house), bell peppers, onions, mushrooms (we omitted those), and some parmesan cheese. It was delicious! It has a lot of flavor to it because you cook the rice in chicken broth, not plain water. I might recommend using low sodium chicken broth. I used regular broth and the risotto tasted fine, but it did have a lot of salt.

I served the risotto with some ceasar salad and garlic bread. I've been really into caesar salad lately and it's usually the highlight of a meal for me. But when it was paired with this risotto, I almost didn't want to eat the salad because that would take up space in my stomach where I could be putting risotto. In the end, I ate too much of both and felt very full.

It was a good Sunday.

Relief Society Saturday

Our stake had a Relief Society Conference today. I went to the conference while Dallin stayed home to play with daddy. While I was gone, Dallin and Mckay were playing on the couch and Dallin got down from the couch onto the ground all by himself. He's done this before, but it's usually with a lot of guidance from us, or he does it accidentally and it really scares him, so he cries when he lands. This time he did it all by himself, he didn't fall and he was so happy and proud of himself.

(Notice the triscuit in the shoe at the bottom of the picture? That was all Dallin.)

The conference was from 3-5 pm. The annual Relief Society broadcast was also tonight at 8pm. (Being in the eastern time zone sucks for live broadcasts like this). So rather than drive 20 minutes back home from our church building after the conference only to go back a few hours later, I watched the broadcast at home on the internet. (We don't have cable, and they don't show it on the local channels here. Go figure. I guess that's a Utah thing. :))

Dallin was really interested in watching the broadcast too.

He really did just sit there and stare at the screen for a few minutes.

After a while though, he started playing with the computer...

...and laying on it.

Evening Walks

Evening is Dallin's crankiest time. It's also the time when we are exhausted and just want to relax, but Dallin doesn't like that idea. He wants us to hold him and devote every ounce of attention to him, especially during the time between us eating dinner and him going to bed. We've found that taking an evening walk really helps him. And it's good for us too. We can always use more exercise.

Now that it's getting cooler, we've been taking more walks. Dallin will sit there happily for hours watching all the cars and people go by. We walk through the neighborhoods near our apartment and look at the houses we pass. We talk about how someday we will buy a house. We point out features that we like/dislike and what we want our house to be like. It gets me really excited to buy a house, even though that is probably still a good 8 months away. We walked past a house today that was for sale. It was only $75,000. We could totally buy that! It was pretty small though (1000 sq. ft.). That's not much bigger than our apartment. But looking at all these houses gets us really excited for having a house of our very own someday. That day can't come soon enough.

Piano Player

In our Provo apartment, I always felt very self conscious playing our piano. It was very easy to hear our neighbors through the walls and, therefore, very easy for them to hear me if I played the piano. And we had our piano against a wall that we shared with a neighbor, so if I did play, I tried to play quietly.

I feel better about playing in our new place. I can't ever hear any of our neighbors, and the piano isn't against a wall we share with anybody. Nobody has complained yet, so I think I'm safe.

Dallin likes to sit on my lap while I play. He puts his hands on the keys. He doesn't really hit the keys repeatedly, he hits them once and then keeps his hands on them, pushing them down. It makes it hard to play a song when Dallin is using all the keys you need.

He rests his head on the keys too, blocking even more of them. Occasionally, he'll try to eat or lick the keys.

I'll teach him how to really play eventually.