Stay At Home Mommy

After a long hiatus, I'm finally getting some time to sit down and update our blog - hooray!

Back at the end of January, Dave had his annual guys' snowboarding trip to Salt Lake City. It's only the second year they've done it, but as all the guys except one are daddies, and two (including Dave) are stay at home daddies, they've come to cherish the trip and are hoping to make it annual forever and ever. So Dave hauled off to Utah for 5 days, which left me at home, being a stay at home mommy! And I just loved it. Sometimes it feels like Dave is the primary parent as he spends so much time with Evan during the day, and with my long hours at work I often get to see Evan for only a couple of hours at night before bedtime. This was my opportunity to be with Evan 24-7, and it was amazingly fulfilling and fabulous. It really set me up in a much better place to go back to work again when Dave came home.

So, while Dave was doing this:

I was hanging out with this:

All that, and I cleaned the house top to bottom too! What a good five days it was.

The Applesauce Experiment

In our efforts to expand Evan's culinary palate, we started giving him lots of new foods in January. So far he likes pretty much everything except spinach, though even that I can get down him if it's mixed with other veggies. He definitely has a bit of a texture issue - on certain days he won't take green beans (too chunky) or sweet potatoes (too sticky) - and on certain days only has a sweet tooth - pears, pears, and more pears please! He's also way into "big people food", and is always trying to snatch whatever Mommy and Daddy are eating. In that realm, he's now into rice cakes and pretzels, fruit in his mesh teether thing, biter biscuits, and his all-time favorite - frozen bagels. It's so cute to watch him try a new food though, as he goes through quite the range of emotions while deciding if he likes it or not. Here he is trying applesauce for the first time:

And the verdict is...he likes it!

Happy New Year!

So much for New Year's resolutions and the desire to post news in a timely manner...

Ah, well, to play catch up yet again, I should talk about how January was for the Horne family. It was a great month, a little warm for my liking (yes, I know it seems odd for me to say that, but even I think 80+ degrees in January is just plain wrong...), and as ever it just sped by.

We started out the year quite well; I had the day off on New Year's Day, so we went as a family, including Dave's mom who decided to stay with us through New Year's, to the Desert Botanical Gardens to see the Chiluly exhibit. Chiluly is the name of a wonderful artist who does huge glass installations all over the world I think. For anyone who's been to Vegas, he's the one who did the ceiling of the Bellagio. Well he has an exhibit in the DBG until May, and oh my is it impressive. I think the most amazing thing about it is how well it fits into the DBG landscape; it's as if he made all the sculptures specifically for the garden even though he didn't. Most impressive. It was a gorgeous sunny day when we went, which made it all the better! Here's what I've been blabbering on about:

I highly recommend this to anyone who makes their out to Phoenix before May...hint, hint!