The Taylor Family: Summer 2009

Here we are on the beach in North Carolina:

Look at these two beautiful faces!

Speaking of beautiful: This photo won't do it justice, but for Heather's birthday her mom commissioned Marci to draw this amazing portrait of October. Amazing.

Haircuts and Fancy Desserts

We recently gave Tober a much-needed haircut, and Heather put him in my "Haircut Umbrella" which, on a toddler, looks more like a futuristic dress of some sort:

While we're on the subject of haircuts, Heather donated another Lock of Love in March. Here's the before and after:

Heather is very good at growing hair quickly to donate to chemo patients, but she is AMAZING at making fancy desserts. A couple of weeks ago we had a combined birthday party for her sister, Marci, and Marci's husband Dan. Heather had never made cream puffs before, but she decided to give it a shot. Even though it was her first attempt, she decided to step it up a notch or ten and we were treated to cream puff swans filled with custard and vanilla bean ice cream (and swimming in a chocolate sauce pond):

She used the leftovers to make a little family of swans for our little family:

Signing Time with October Taylor

So, we have had the first 6 videos in the "Signing Time" series since October was about 12 months old. We have found them extremely helpful in that they help him express himself and tell us what he wants even though he can't say the words yet. His spoken vocabulary is growing quickly (the second video was taken right after he started saying banana out loud), but he still uses signs for a lot of things.

Swimming at Shayne's birthday party

So, Tober has become quite a fan of swimming this summer. Here are some photos and video clips from my birthday party. You'll see that he's pretty adventurous and daring, but doesn't quite have the motor skills to back it up.

Photos from Mom's 60th

Mom's party was a luau, and Karissa made this amazing cake:

RAAAAARGH!!!

Dance photo with Heather:

Dance photo with Jason:

Aloooo-ha!

Mom's 60th Birthday tribute

Here is a little medley we put together to honor all of our mother's lovable little quirks on her 60th birthday.

Birthdays!

Okay, so we've been blogging slackers for a while now. Hopefully we'll get back on track soon but, for now, this video of Tober's 1st birthday will have to suffice. We tried to recreate the cake from Shayne's first birthday--the first part of this clip is us showing the footage to Heather's family. The recreation didn't work out that well, but that's okay.







And, while we're on the subject of birthdays, some of you may not know that we have another birthday coming up sometime in November--that of Tober's baby sister!
We just found out yesterday that we're having a girl! Pretty darn exciting if you ask us. We really didn't have a strong preference either way, but Heather's sister, Marci, is pregnant with identical twin girls that will only be 2-3 months older than our daughter, so that will be fun. The only downside is that October will remain the only boy cousin on the McPherson side. With these 3 newest ones it will bring the total to nine girls and one boy. The Taylor side is much more boy-heavy, so they were excited to add another girl to the mix (the new total will be five girls and ten boys).