Where did she get this from???

Do you ever look at the way your child is behaving and wonder to yourself, "She has to have gotten that from her dad....... "  ha ha... of course I'm kidding, because I'm sure all of her craziness comes from me!  Olivia LOVES yogurt melts, for those who do not know what these are, they are basically freeze dried yogurt treats.  You put them in your mouth and they melt into a liquid that tastes like yogurt.  As soon as she sees the package, she has to have them. And when I say she has to have them, I mean ALL of them.  She throws a complete tantrum as soon as you take them away.  If she is crying and she happens to see the package of yogurt melts, she immediately stops crying once you hand them to her.  Here is a little movie clip of a pretty tough morning when she realized that the package of yogurt melts was empty......

Liv & Cru

While living with the Nichol's Family for the past 4 months, Cru and Liv have become really good friends.  I thought this video was really cute!!

Happy 1st Birthday Liv

I can't believe that my baby girl is already ONE!  She brings such a ray of sunshine to our lives and we are so happy to have her!! We started singing Happy Birthday to her a few days ago, she doesn't like it as much as patty cake...  she will soon learn that birthdays are WAY more fun than patty cake!  Jake and I took her birthday shopping and holy cow does she have an opinion!  She would cry if she liked a toy and we tried to put it back on the shelf, but if she didn't really care for a toy, then she would hold it in her hand, lean over the side of the cart and drop it on the floor.  Which of course we thought was hilarious!

OH did Olivia love this cupcake.... she devoured every last bit of it!  I think she may have inherited both her mom and dad's sweet tooth!

She wasn't quite as fond of the birthday hat....

But she loved all of her presents...

Special thanks to Great-Grandma Fern, Grandma Margaret, Grandpa Charlie, Riley, Katie, Gage and Cru for sharing her special day with her!  And of course to her mom and dad and big brother.

A Place to Call HOME!

As our family has grown, so has the amount of "stuff" in our garage.... I have finally bought a new car and now suddenly I care about parking it in the garage.  So in December, we decided we would take advantage of what we felt was a great time to buy a new home, and put our home up for sale.  Well, little did we know, there are millions of short sale properties on the market and not very many homes with traditioonal sales.  As a result of this, we sold our home within 2 weeks of listing it.

So the search began.... We had initially thought that this would be SO much fun... We learned pretty quickly that the majority of the homes that we would consider purchasing were short sales... As the weeks went on, we weren't having a lot of success, there was a new listing for a short sale on Emmeline Drive in Herriman, we had considered not even viewing the home once we realized it was a short sale, but our agent had already arranged for us to view it, so we thought what the heck, we might as well go and look.... Upon entering the home, we were completely stunned... the home was gorgeous... So we decided to put an offer on the home and in the meantime to continue looking at houses...The bank accepted our offer in January of 2012, we knew that the short sale process "could" be a long process, but thought we could handle waiting 60-90 days to close.

We waited and waited and waited, finally April had arrived, we were two weeks away from closing when the homeowners filed bankruptcy.  This completely halted the sale of the home.  At this point, we had to move out of our home, we had been renting it from the new owner, so we moved in with Katie and Riley.  We were so upset and once again began the search for a home.  We had finally decided that we were going to build, I spoke with the builder in the morning and had mentioned that we would have an offer submitted on a lot by the end of the day.  Around 11:00 am, I received a call from my realtor stating that the bankruptcy court released the home on Emmeline and that we could purchase it.  She had said that we could close within approximately 2 weeks.  Two weeks certainly seemed like a better option than waiting for 4 months to build.  So we initiated the inspection and appraisal and were looking forward to moving into our new home.  Well, problem after problem arose with this property.  As of the beginning of July, we still have not moved into this home.  We finally decided that it was time to move-on.  We found a property that we love in South Jordan and will be closing by the end of the month.  We are looking forward to living in a central location.

New Year Celebration!

Happy New Year!   We partied it up at Fat Cats this year!  We had pizza and drinks and of course bowled!  After bowling, we went to grandma and grandpa's for fireworks.. a minute after the new year, we got a phone call saying that our beautiful niece Harlee was born, just seconds after 12:00.... we were really hoping she would be the first baby of the year for the state of Utah, but she ended up being born at 12:00:06 and the official new baby had been born a second or two ahead of her... dang it!! :) We were bummed at first, but in the end, happy that she made it here safe! 

and now introducing Harlee Ainsley Pulver.......



Christmas Day

Merry Christmas! This year was really fun with the addition of Olivia.  She had fun playing with all of her new toys!  Much to Ryan's dislike, Jake had a list full of Philadelphia Eagles stuff for his room!!  We hosted Christmas breakfast and were thankful to everyone who joined us. After breakfast, we drove to Fielding and spent the remainder of the day with my dad's family.  Both of our employers shut down for the week of christmas, so we were giddy at the thought of spending the next week together!  :)

Tim, Starla and Bostynn.. awaiting their cute baby girl Harlee....

Cute Little Cru

Homemade Vanilla

While thinking about making sugar cookies for Christmas, I came across a recipe where a lady stated she put homemade vanilla in her cookies. And once you try homemade vanilla, you will never go back to store bought vanilla again. I clicked on her link and voila -- here is the recipe for homemade vanilla --- who knew that vanilla was made from vodka.......

http://heavenlyhomemakers.com/making-homemade-vanilla-extract-aka-why-laura-bought-a-gallon-of-vodka

I don't know if I will become adventurous enough to actually try making this, but I do think it's quite interesting..... So if anyone makes it, please share a bottle!