First, Daniel is almost a year old. He was 11 months two days ago. It's crazy how fast this year as gone. But it also has felt so slow at some points.
He didn't really sleep very well until he was almost 10 months old so that was really hard for David and I. He was up multiple times a night and it was just starting to wear all of us a little thin. So just before New Years we started sleep training him and he is now down to one wake up a night!!! We are so happy about that! I forgot what it feels like to sleep for a 7 hour stretch without interruptions.
In case you don't know, it feels like heaven!
He is the happiest boy though. He loves to jabber and screech. He ADORES Kollyn so much and she loves him (just not so much when he's trying to come into her room to play with all her toys). And he loves to eat. He was almost 21 pounds when we were at the doctor's office yesterday. :)
He's had two bouts with croup and 2 ear infections since Thanksgiving. Hopefully that trend doesn't continue. Poor little guy has seen the inside of the ER more in his life than Kollyn has in hers. Even when he is sick though, he is still so happy. We are very lucky to have him in our little family. :)
So here are some highlights of our year!
Easter. We have an amazing realtor, Joe Willis, who (even though we haven't bought a house from him yet) always invites us to the parties his real estate office puts on. They do a big thing for Easter, a pool party in the summer, and always give out big pumpkin pies at Thanksgiving. We seriously love him and recommend him to anyone looking to buy a house in Utah County!!
Daniel was blessed on April 24, 2016. It was so special and I'm glad that we were able to do it when David's parents were here and able to be involved.
The next day, April 25 and also April 26, was graduation for David. It finally happened! He graduated with his Bachelor's in Information Systems. I am so proud of him and all the hard work he's put into getting his education. Heaven knows it wasn't easy. But it was so worth it! He is such a good example for me and for our kids. He is the biggest supporter of me finishing my education and I can trace it back to this moment, watching him graduate and knowing that because of him, I want to have that experience too.
I love that we have some great-grandparents close by that we are able to see. My grandpa and David's gradmas both live close by and we love being able to see them (even if it doesn't happen as often as we would like).
Daniel's first day at church was the week before his blessing. :) I just loved this little outfit and wish he could've worn it more than a couple times before growing out of it!
I love watching them together. From the time he was born Kollyn has loved him and wanted to be by him and help him learn. She loves spending time with him, even almost a year later, and I love that I have so many pictures of them together (this is only a small fraction). And he adores her so much. He follows her everywhere, tries to talk to her, and just looks at her with so much love. One day I asked Kollyn who her best friend was and she said, "Luke, and Daniel too". I hope they can continue to be best friends as they get older.
Speaking of best friends, we are so lucky to live so close to so many family members. Kollyn loves to play with Carli, Shaylee, and Kayla, and whenever she gets to see Kenley and Riley she is so excited as well.
And then there's her special relationship with Luke. I am so glad that she has him. They have a unique bond that I haven't seen with other kids and I hope they stay so close as they get older as well.
Driving up to the island where the wedding was taking place and I got to play with one of her birds named Archer the whole way. :) I'm pretty sure he loved me by the end of it.
This is the island the wedding was held on, Port Hood Island. It was so beautiful (even if the cell reception sucked. ;) ). And the company was pretty great too!
I have never had my hair and makeup professionally done before. I seriously loved it and wish I could do my hair and makeup like this all the time!!
This was my little bouquet. It was too pretty not to share!
After I came home from Canada, we had the first Dynes family reunion the following week and it was also a lot of fun. I don't have any pictures from it, but Kollyn really loved having all her Dynes cousins together and had so much fun running around and playing with them all. There are 5 little ones who are the same age so they naturally all gravitated together which was so much fun to watch.
And now, a Daniel picture dump!!!
2 weeks old. :) That was one of the onesies I drew on when I found out I was pregnant with him.
He has loved baths from day one. Splashed up a storm and never wanted to get out. He still is that way and just loves to play in it. I'm pretty sure if we could just keep hot water circulating in the bathtub, he'd never want to get out.
Of course he has Batman clothes galore. :) Daddy's Lil Crimefighter indeed!
I love how snuggly he was as a baby, and still is. He loves to just sit in our laps and watch what's going on. He's a very observant child and is perfectly content to sit and watch.
Ever since he learned to smile, he basically has never stopped. Most of my pictures with him have him smiling. He is so happy and just lights up the room when he laughs or smiles.
He wasn't totally sure how to react to our pool over the summer. And then he fell asleep. He did seem to enjoy just floating around without a care in the world.
He is such a chewer. He sticks anything and everything in his mouth. We got these bibs with the teething corners on them and they were a win-win. He can chew on the teething corner and it catches his excessive amount of drool.
I love how much Kollyn wants to help him. This was her helping him eat by feeding him little bites of dinner off his tray.
He LOVES to swing. He could sit in a swing for hours if I let him I'm pretty sure. K never cared to swing so this is so much fun! I love how happy he gets when he's in the swing and how excited he gets when he sees them.
I have pictures of K sitting like this so of course I have to snap a few of him sitting this way. :) He refuses to sit straight in a cart. As soon as we put him it it, he pulls one foot out and sits sideways.
Because he adores baths, he was quite sad that K got a bath and he didn't (she had been a little bit sick and had thrown up so we were giving her a bath after cleaning her off to help her feel better). He kept trying to climb into the bathtub with her.
He also loves to "help" us with the dishwasher. Basically that just means he likes to climb onto it and play with the clean silverware so we have to rewash it.
I just love this little guy. He is so sweet. :)
And a Kollyn picture dump!
When Finding Dory came out (in May) we took K to see it because she loved Finding Nemo. It was her first movie theater experience and she had a lot of fun. She went and saw it in the theaters with one or both of us 3 more times after this. We even took Daniel one of those times.
Because this year had some pretty crazy rainstorms, Kollyn was in heaven with the puddles. She would ask to go "jump in muddy puddles" almost constantly and wears her boots around all the time, just in case there's a puddle that needs jumping in. She still gets so excited when we go outside to jump in them. Thank you Peppa for introducing that to us.
We went up to City Creek a few times and had a lot of fun watching all the fountains and the little river going through the mall. I think Kollyn was so fascinated by that.
We went to Lavender Days at the Young Living Farm and Kollyn actually let them paint her face! She loved it and was so sad when we had to wash it off. I wasn't sure she was going to actually let them paint her face but I was pleasantly surprised. She sat so still while the lady was painting her face and couldn't stop talking about it for at least 2 weeks afterwards.
David got a job in downtown Salt Lake in August and rides the train to work everyday to save on gas and avoid the traffic. We have ridden the Frontrunner up to Salt Lake a few times, we even have a pass to the planetarium, and Kollyn LOVES it. She just stares out the window. Daniel loves it too. It's a fun little family outing each time.
Hang Time in Orem has a kids area and Kollyn and Luke love playing at places like that together. They spend the whole time running around and screaming. It's so fun to watch.
Kollyn has become the selfie obsessed queen. She constantly asks if we can take pictures together and she just wants to keep taking them. These are some of my favorites. She also likes to stick her tongue out in the selfies for some reason. ;) I definitely didn't teach her that.
She is so meticulous. Things have a specific order and she will make sure they are in that order. She likes things to be just so and if it's not, she makes it the way she wants it. She lines things up all the time, be it her snacks, or her toys, or her shoes, or her clothes, anything. She likes patterns and definitely has many other adorable quirks.
Halloween was a lot of fun for K. She painted her own pumpkin (after picking it out at Jaker's) and kept talking about it. She also really enjoyed watching David carve the pumpkin, but she wasn't too interested in helping him gut the thing. More content to just watch.
In June David and I celebrated 4 years together. It's crazy that it's been that long because we both were saying that it really doesn't feel like it's been that long, but I also have a hard time remembering how my life was before I married him. I'm absolutely the luckiest girl ever. Of course we have our ups and downs, but the ups are better and the downs aren't quite so bad with him by my side.
We are still enjoying the family pass to the aquarium. We go with friends a lot (because we can get in 2 guests) and the playground has been a lifesaver on the days when it's too cold or snowy to want to be outside. Kollyn spends each time glued to the tank that they have the Blue Tangs in trying to find Dory and gets so excited when she finds her, "There's Dory!! I found her!"
More pictures of them together. They are so cute to watch together and I can't get enough of it!
Halloween this year was a lot of fun. Kollyn wanted to be a ladybug so we decided to make Daniel a bumblebee and have David and I be bug catchers. Thanks to my amazing friend Jordyn, we were able to make their costumes. Kollyn still talks about how she "was a ladybug and Daniel was a bumblebee and we went to Ryut's house and he made the costumes for us!" Who knew he was so talented. ;)
Ward trunk or treat. We've never been one of the ones to decorate our trunk so we had fun with it. :)
And of course we went trick-or-treating with Luke. Kollyn still talks about Luke being Captain America and wants to buy him every single Captain America thing she sees. Daniel's costume was kind of falling apart, but he had a lot of fun just being involved.
Christmas this year was pretty low-key. We spent a lot of time at Karin and David's. They had their second, a little sweet girl, just before Christmas, and it's been so much fun going over to their house and letting Kollyn and Luke just run around and play together. They love going back into his room and playing with the toys he has in there (just so Daniel doesn't try to eat all the toys they're playing with). They had a lot of fun decorating the sugar cookies!
We had a Dynes Christmas Eve party and that was crazy, but fun. We did the Journey to Bethlehem and then the traditional Night Before Christmas gift pass. Kollyn and Daniel both had a lot of fun with it.
We had a very low-key Christmas Day. We had my parents and grandpa over for breakfast and Kollyn had fun showing them all the presents Santa had brought her and opening her presents from us. Daniel had more fun with the wrapping paper but he was happy with his gifts too. Then we went to church with my sister and her family (where Daniel had a moment of hysterical laughter because of a toy frog he was about to chew on which was the cutest thing I've ever heard) and then over to Karin and David's house for Christmas dinner. David had smoked a ham (in the new electric smoker I got him for his birthday) and it was a huge success.
In August I went back to school. I decided to do it in April after watching David graduate and was able to make it happen in August. I am lucky to have such a supportive husband and parents who are happy to have the kids come play with them while I'm in class. I've been lucky both semesters to have my classes only be on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I am at UVU getting an Integrated Studies degree with emphases in History and Classical Studies. Ancient cultures have always been my passion and I am so excited to finally be pursuing something that I am passionate about and excited to learn. I don't love the Philosophy classes, but I am in a Roman Empire class this semester that makes it all worth it. This is what I love and I can't wait to continue with it. Ultimately, I would like to get my Master's and work as a museum curator once the kids are in school. But really, I'm just excited to be within 2 years of finishing my degree (finally!!). I couldn't do it without the support of my amazing family and friends though so I definitely don't take it for granted.
