Halloween 2015

I've really been failing at this blog thing lately, but that's largely because we have our vlog now, which kind of serves the same purpose.  So at least our lives are still getting recorded somewhere.  But I keep telling myself I should still try to keep up the blog, so here is a quick post about Halloween!

We went with an Aladdin theme this year, with Coulson being Aladdin, me being Princess Jasmine, and Chrisser being Carpet.

I had intended to actually make myself a costume with the poofy pants, etc., but I didn't have time after Chrisser's, haha.  His took forever.  It wasn't hard, but it was very time consuming since all of the red and yellow pieces are hand sewn onto the background.  But mine worked out pretty well considering.  The shirt and skirt are actually dance practice clothes that I've had for a few years and the jewelry I just made from cereal boxes.  Coulson's was pretty easy and I was able to just use some fabric we already had for the vest and the pants.  The onesie has a design on the front, but we just put it on him backwards, haha.  And to finish it off we had a little toy Abu that Chrisser has had since he was Aladdin for Halloween when he was like 5 or 6 :).  We tied Abu to Coulson's vest so we wouldn't lose him.

As far as festivities, we went to the dance lab on Thursday (which is where the above picture was taken) and a ward party on Friday.  Chrisser wore his costume to the animation lab on Saturday, and we also wore them grocery shopping that evening.  We had one group of trick-or-treaters come, which was kinda fun.  We weren't really expecting anybody since we only have 2 or 3 kids in our ward who are old enough to eat candy and I think they went with relatives in a different neighborhood, but the group that did come looked like they were about 11-13 years old, so I guess they just came here because they could hit a ton of apartments in a short amount of time.

The ward party was mostly just a dinner, but they also had bought a ton of pumpkins intending for people to carve them at the party.  It was really cold outside so I don't think very many people actually carved one (though a few people brought one inside to carve once a lot of people had left so it wasn't so crowded), so there were a ton of leftover pumpkins.  So even though we didn't really have time to carve them, I took a couple and ended up painting them.

Had to stick with the theme :).  I think I might try my hand at baking with them this year if I have time.  I've never tried cooking a pumpkin myself before.  I've always used the canned stuff on those rare occasions when I have made something with pumpkin.  So that will be an adventure!

Picture Overload!

I'm just going to dump a whole bunch of pictures on you in this post, so get ready!

First up is a couple of pictures we took of Coulson on the 4th of July.

We didn't take any other pictures of us that day, but we did make a nice long vlog if you want to watch that.  It's like a half-hour long, though, so I won't be offended if you don't.

Lately Coulson has been trying really hard to sit up, so I've been sitting him in the Boppy pillow even though the tag says to do that around 6 months.  Coulson really enjoys it because he much prefers sitting to lying down.  I do have to prop him back up every few seconds, but whatever.

"Oh sorry, I think I blinked!"

Earlier this week we borrowed a DSLR camera from the library again.  Before I got around to Coulson's official photoshoot, I played around with the camera a bit to remember how to use it.

We got the camera this week because Chrisser's little brother was in town for a camp at BYU, so we had him take some family photos for us.

And we had fun taking pictures of each other, too.

Then I got to play with the camera for a couple of days doing a photoshoot of Coulson.

Behind the Scenes

That one of him sleeping with the ball is so great, because I didn't even pose him like that!  I had him sitting in the Boppy while I took a break and the ball was just kind of next to him.  He ended up slumping over to the side and eventually falling asleep.  A couple minutes after falling asleep, he fell a little further so he wasn't on the Boppy at all anymore and just happened to be cuddling the ball.  So I carefully moved the Boppy out of the way and snapped this picture :).  Here's one I snapped shortly before he fell asleep.

I decided to take a couple of detail shots and make a collage of the baseball pictures.

And, of course, I had to take some BYU themed pics!

And I took a couple of plain pictures just because.  I wish I had draped the sheet over his chair in such a way that it wouldn't have left that line where his chair ended, but oh well.

I Guess We're Vloggers Now

Chrisser and I started a vlog a few weeks ago.  If you don't know what that is, the word comes from "video blog," and it's basically just videos of our lives on YouTube.  We have been watching the Shaytards vlogs for several months (they are a family that has been vlogging for over 6 years and basically invented it; ok, maybe not invented, I don't know, but they made it popular).  Over time we became very drawn to the idea of having those videos there for the sake of remembering our lives and our kids' childhood.  And more than that, for some reason unknown to us we felt like we should start a vlog on YouTube, not just take a bunch of home videos and keep them for ourselves.  Weird, I know, but whatever.  In case you are interested, here is a link to our channel:

The Alvarai

We call it The Alvarai because we decided that should be the plural of Alvarez, since Alvarezes sounds and looks kind of awkward.  We are planning to upload a video every Saturday, and we currently have 3 videos up.  Enjoy!

1 Month

There isn't much to say about a 1-month-old.  He pretty much still just sleeps, eats, poops and stares around.  But I wanted to post these pictures that I took that show how much he's grown.

I hadn't realized he was that much bigger!  I measured him myself a couple days before taking the 1 month picture (I'm not a doctor, but it's gotta be pretty close, right?) and he was 22.5 inches and 10 lbs 9 oz.  As opposed to his birth stats of 21 inches (though we think he was actually a bit shorter) and 8 lbs 9 oz.