Our new baby

In the midst of everything else that our family has been up to the last few months, we aquired a new little one at our house. If I had known what lay in store for us, we may have waited until another time to do this! Back in April, just before Averi was born, we saw an ad in the paper for chocolate lab puppies. We had talked about getting a chocolate lab and had been half heartedly looking at the pound and in the paper. This litter of puppies was closer and less expensive than others we had seen. I called the day I saw the ad, and because we were the first to call, we were told that we could have the pick of the litter. Well.......we made the mistake of going to look at the litter of puppies. They were so small and cute and irresitable. We were drawn to the smallest, darkest, female. We also were hooked on getting a puppy. Who could resist. Here is one of the puppies on April 30th. Little did we know at the time that Averi would come the next day!

After Averi was born and I stayed with Tiffany and her family for awhile, when I came back to Virginia, the owners were anxious for us to come over and pick out which puppy we wanted so they could let others come and pick out theirs. Glenn, Courtney, and I met up with Kenny and Cherish for the big event. We kept leaning towards a cute little, active female puppy. We made a final decision and they put a tiny little collar on her.

On June the 7th, we got to bring her home. Kaili was staying with us for the week, so she got to go too. We named our new puppy Mocha. We had a lot of names, but it was hard to find one that all of us liked!

From the day we got her, Mocha has slept in her crate... but she sure picks some crazy sleeping positions.

So being the lab that she is, she just keeps eating, pooping, and growing........

and growing.......


And growing!!!!!


I'm not so sure Oscar, our dashund is happy we have Mocha. She chases him and chews on him and pesters him anytime she can. So far, Oscar still lets her know whos boss, but I figure one day she will figure out that she weighs 4 times as much as he does. This is Mocha when she wasn't much bigger than Oscar. Now she is MUCH bigger.

We did take Mocha to Obedience School. I don't know who learned to obey - us or the dog - but she did graduate! She is pretty good at come, sit, lay down, roll over, fist pound, wait, leave it, and watch me. We still have some work to do though. One of her worst habits is jumping up and putting her paws on the cupboard. Here's the graduate. She looks so "intelligent" - :)

So - here she is now. I estimate that she weighs around 50 lbs or so, she was 7.5 lbs when we brought her home. She loves her dog chow!

Homecoming Dance

I have been promising myself for several weeks that I would get some updates to my blog. I thought I would start with where we are now and possibly catch some past activities later! Courtney started High School this year and along with that - all the High School activities. She is still doing competition dance team and piano, but now she is also in the marching band, has a lot more homework, and goes to Seminary Book of Mormon class at 6am every school day! She keeps busy to say the least, and so do we.


She's not old enough to date, so she went to the Homecoming Dance with some girlfriends. I got to make her dress. It is always hard to find time to sew, but I do love working with my daughters on their special occasion dresses. We had actually picked out this fabric, etc in April to make a dress to wear the a church formal dance, but when Tiffany's little one, Averi came early and was in the NICU for 7 weeks, we didn't get around to making a dress. The skirt has several layers, plus netting, the top was a beaded top that had come with a skirt I used for Kenny's wedding, and we made the jacket. Here is the whole ensemble.






Here's the back.




And here is the Courtney we all know and love!!!