Adventure's of Adyson and Brock Van Tassell

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

The NBA season is finally here

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Fun times with Daniel and Whitney

Well it has been a bit since we had time to post anything so I thought since I don't have any homework this weekend I'd better take a moment and tell you what kind of trouble Adyson has found lately. So today we spent all day(all day means that I was watching college football and every commercial and halftime break) cleaning the house. We even took down the drapes and laundered them. When we finally finished cleaning I went to Pizza Hut and got us a pizza. I came in, set it on the table while I put the ice cream in the freezer and when I turned around this is what I saw. If you didn't already know Adyson loves pizza. Especially stuffed crust pineapple just like her dad. If you look really close you will see that because Ady is so skinny and being stretched out her pants are sliding down. The kid is already taking her first steps into turning into a hoodlum by sagging her pants. Don't worry mom, as soon as I took the picture I pulled her pants back up.

Uncle Daniel and Aunt Whitney came and visited us a couple of weeks ago and we had all sorts of fun playing with them. This is us at Haunama Bay. We went snorkeling there one morning. Ady loved it. She didn't get to go and swim with the turtles and fish but she loves running around on the sand and playing in the water. She was so excited that she wouldn't even turn around for the picture.

Just because we haven't updated the blog for a couple of weeks doesn't mean that Ady gotten into anything in that time. While Daniel and Whitney were here I was doing the dishes and I realized that it had been a few minutes since I had seen or heard Ady. So I go looking for her and this is how I found her. Apparently Whitney has an addiction to chocolate and always keeps a candy bar in her suitcase for emergencies. You know, when I was in high school we had this dog who could smell chocolate really well. In fact once during Christmas time we left him inside for a little while and he found all the packages with chocolate in them and tore them open to get at that chocolate. Ady is kinda like this. I guess she went right for this stash of Whitney's and found a little treasure. Doesn't she look cute and pleased with herself.

Ady and I took Daniel and Whitney hiking one day while Kasey was at work. Ady and I like hiking, and usually I just pack her along in the baby bjorn but this time she didn't fit the carrier and was way too heavy to carry the whole way. So I put her down which made her really happy. She climbed, and hiked on her own for a good chunk of the way.

Doesn't she look proud of herself. And yes she was filthy dirty when we got done.

Whitney wore crocs to hike in and due to the rain the trail was really muddy, so she had to have a stick cause she kept stumbling and almost fell a dozen times or so. Ady wanted a stick too. This is her stick. No worries that it is bigger than her!

We had fun taking Daniel and Whitney to many places including Waikiki. Daniel and Whitney were nice enough to watch Ady for a bit while Kasey and I went surfing. Kasey spent about an hour being frustrated and then we finally got her up on a wave. We had a lot of fun. This is all of us in front of the Duke Kahanamoku statue.

Friday, October 17, 2008

"Working Hard for a Living"

So Adyson has decided to help out with making a living. The other day Ady and Dad came to pick Mom up from work at the end of the day like they often do. While waiting for Mom to finish her work, Ady was outside running around and found the vending machine that she likes to push all of the buttons on. Well, she was pushing in the door the drinks come out of and Adam noticed she was looking in at something. Pretty soon she had her little hand down in there reaching for something back in the back under the change slot area. And then all of a sudden she takes her hand out and she was holding a quarter, smiling and showing Dad. Then she walked over to him and handed it over with the cutest "look what I got" face. I guess she earned her diaper's worth that day!

Monday, October 6, 2008

A really cool birthday present

Adam's birthday just passed and I got him a couple of great presents. A couple of months ago I bought him a Jazz hat and told him that would be his present. But I found another present and I think I did great. When it comes to giving presents to Adam, it's very straight forward. He would be happy to receive Legos, an old American coin, or a book. When it comes to giving me gifts I want something new and different everytime!
When it comes to getting gifts for the other...it is the exact opposite. I want to give Adam something surprising and different each time, and he would rather give me another board game everytime. This makes a bittersweet shopping experience for us. If I get what Adam wants...its not the new and different and thoughtful present from me. (but only to me...to him it is the best new lego set ever!!) Does anyone else have this dilemma, or something like it?
Even though this is just a minor dilemma for us...I think this time I found a great birthday gift this time that was new and different and it was something that Adam loves.

This is a book that I had made for Adam. It is a collection of pictures he has taken. For those of you who don't know, one of Adam's hobbies is photography. These are just a couple of the pages out of the book. There is a page for waterfalls, one for sunsets/sunrises, one for Southern Utah, a page with underwater pictures and so forth. It is really cool. He thought it was a great gift. The only problem is now he shows off his pictures even more than he did before!

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Fun in the Tub

Adyson loves taking baths and showers. Her favorite toy recently has been the cup that we use to pour water on her and the plug. She loves taking the plug out and then sticking it back in.

Doesn't she look so happy when she's clean! Usually bath or shower time is pretty uneventful and a not to difficult process. However sometimes unexpected things occur. . .

Yup, that's poop. And yes, Ady is pointing at it. All I know is that it was a calm Saturday morning, I was cooking breakfast, keeping an eye on a football game, and then all of the sudden I heard Kasey yell. I knew from the tone of the yell that something was wrong. I quickly crossed the room and threw open the bathroom door to see Ady proudly pointing at a pile of poop in the shower and Kasey looking mortified. My only thought; good thing they were taking a shower and not a bath!

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Helpful Ady

This is Ady playing with the Saran Wrap. I was getting something out of the drawer so she decided that she should help and got it out. Then she dragged it around till she had several yards unrolled. Don't worry though she tried to re-wrap it back onto the roll. She is always so helpful. We've learned something this last week, we've got about 3 seconds after she gets hurt before she screams really loud. Now for those of you who don't have children those 3 seconds are really important. They represent the amount of time you have to very quickly walk out of church before the wailing begins and interrupts the meeting.

Here's another picture of Ady being helpful, can you guess what she's doing?

Ady loves helping with the dishes. Of course, help is a term we use loosely in our house. But she is great at splashing water everywhere, moving dishes into the dish drainer that are dirty and putting the clean dishes back into the sink.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Playing with Ady

Hey everyone, I thought I'd take a break from all of my homework and bring you an update on all of our lives. This is Ady's newest thing. Hide-n-seek. She loves it. One of us will hide and then the other will ask "Ady where is mom/dad?" This is the face Ady makes. Its her "I don't know what are we gonna do?" look. Then she covers her mouth like she is trying to hold in her excitement and runs off to find the person. Usually we jump out and scare her right before she finds us and she shrieks and then starts laughing. After laughing and sometimes falling down cuz she is laughing so hard then she gives us a hug and waits for us to hide again. We don't even have to pick a new hiding spot. She loves doing this for hours. We always wear out way before her. But then yesterday there was a twist. During lunch Ady went and hid on the side of the couch. Of course her legs and rear end were sticking out and we saw her hide she didn't care. Kasey said "Where's Ady?" and Adyson jumped up and squealed. We all laughed and before we were even done laughing Ady hid again, in the same place of course. After several minutes of her hiding and surprising us I waited for her to hide and hid. Then when she popped up she looked around a little confused, looked at Kasey, gave her usual look and ran off to find me. We have now branched out and play everywhere we go.

This is Adyson playing yesterday. I don't know why but she put all of these random things under this chair and then sat under the chair for about 45 minutes playing with each of them. Now for those of you who don't have children 45 minutes is a very very long time. The items that she had under the chair with her were kinda interesting. In her hand she has her plastic fork, on her leg is a cloth book, that wadded up piece of paper is a homework assignment of mine that she got her hands on, that's my ankle brace by her foot, the piece of plastic that you can see by her foot is an outlet cover and her soccer ball.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Sea Life Park

Here are some pics from Sea Life Park. Ady loves animals. It's so cute to take her to these places. She is really funny, especially now she thinks that anything with 4 legs makes a barking noise! She see's the animal(even chickens), points at it, and will make a kind of oupf oup sound. She was very curious about all the fish and marine life at the park, and you could tell she was completely enjoying herself even though it was a very hot Hawaii summer day!

Adam & Kasey showing their inner child by riding the dolphins they could afford!(to swim with the dolphins was over $150 each!)

Adyson loved the aquarium. Or should we say loved to stick her face to the Aquarium glass? At one point a puffer fish was looking in the window above Ady. She was pointing at it, and whining, so I lifted her up to it, then she looked at it in the face and decided she didn't really want to be that close to it and was pushing away with her hands very hard, so I put her down and she would go back to pointing and whining to be lifted up again. We tried again, and got the same result. It was very comical.

Petting the turtle at the kids touching pool. By the way, "petting" has taken on new meaning to Adyson lately, its not "just a touch" anymore. She has to make sure to really pet the whole thing and she's not afraid to be rough with it either.

The dolphin hitting the red ball with its nose while jumping out of the water at the Hawaiian Animal Show.

More dolphins-at the dolphin show-these ones seemed huge. They were bigger than I remember seeing at Sea World. Adam informed me that it's because they are from the Pacific Ocean and they are 3-4 times larger. Good thing I have such a knowledgeable guy around! Which I will add that he has gone back to school...so he is gone to study at night and I am here updating our blog. I will miss my hubbie this semester. It was so nice to have him home watching Adyson and making sure I had lunch ready when I came home for my break, and doing lots of other helpful things this summer. But now Adam is taking a hard finance class and a 9 credit class called "the business core." I basically consists of being put into groups, coming up with and creating a real business-yes real as in real life(any ideas?)- and a bunch of work to make your group and business profitable thru learning marketing, finances, entrepreneurship, HR, management etc. Adam was selected as a President for his group-that means he will be even more busy! But we are hoping that it gets him in some good networking with some of the professors and people involved with the Entrepreneur center here at BYUH, and can help us out in the long run. Since, if you don't know already, Adam would like to buy his own resort and run it someday. Kind of like the one he worked for in Minnesota with cabins, boats, and a lake for fishing.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Labor Day Holiday

So we had a great Labor Day weekend, except we lost our camera Saturday. We went hiking to Maunawilli Falls and jumped of the cliffs into the pool-way fun-not sure what happened to the camera, but it didn't make it home with us. Monday we went to Sea Life Park. Our friends were nice enough to let us borrow thier camera for the park. We'll post pictures later after we get those pictures. But for those of you that have tagged me, I'm not ignoring you, I was even planning on doing the tags this past weekend, but since we don't have a camera right now, it put a damper on those plans. Anyway I am substituting a good joke. This one actually happened:

So I was explaining to my husband the other night about my new fixed asset job at BYU Hawaii and what I think am supposed to do and how I am slowly learning how to add assets and transfer them. I'm learning more about the university's methods for depreciation, etc., and I ended up with saying “I think I am supposed to Capitalize things, but I don’t really know how.” And he turned to me and said:

"Well, why don’t you just use the big letters?"

I usually don’t laugh at my husbands’ lame jokes so as not to encourage them, but even I was laughing pretty hard at this one.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Pounders and Sour Cream

Hi everyone, we've been having some technical difficulties for about a week now with blogger. For some reason it took the pics down from my last post and then wouldn't let me post a picture for about a week. Last week I took Brandon and Brock boogie boarding, they thought they had the waves mastered at Hukilau and wanted something a little bigger so we went down to Pounders beach. They soon learned that Pounders beach is aptly named, you can see here in the picture that Brandon is watching Brock get pounded. I headed out to show them how to deal with bigger stronger waves and this is what happened to me.

See that nice red line across my neck? That is where the blue bubble, a break off of a portuguese man-of-war (a type of Jelly Fish), got me. It went around my neck, and onto my shoulder and back. I had just caught this wave, and the next thing I know my neck, shoulder and back are stinging and I swear I am on fire. I guess that is the price you pay for playing in the ocean sometimes.

Last night Kasey made nachos and Ady loved them. Or maybe I should say she loved the sour cream. In our family we don't really worry too much about double dipping, but quadruple and even quintuple dipping well that's another thing. We tried to get Ady to use the sour cream on the plate but all she wanted to do was dip the chip in the container, lick off the chip and repeat process several times. She made such a mess but we thought it was so funny that we just laughed and snapped these pics. When she was done she had sour cream all over her, some on us, a bit on the couch and none left in the container.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Congrats to Sam and Rat

Brandon, Leslie's (Kasey's sister) husband, and his brother flew in on Monday. Leslie and Brandon will be living here while she is stationed at Schofield Barracks. So I took Brandon over to the base so he could get a house and this is the sign I saw while there. "74 days since last FATAL accident." This caught me a bit off guard. I've seen signs about safety and how long since last accident at various warehouses or factories but I've never seen one that tracks time between fatal accidents. I guess in the military they don't count normal regular accidents, just the fatal ones.

Adyson has this thing for climbing into her walker and sometimes she doesn't do quite right, generally the results are rather comical. This one was pretty funny, she was stuck and screaming for me to get her out but I had to take the picture first. Adyson has figured out that she can push her walker right up under the TV, climb up on it and standing on top of the it can reach the TV. I just hooked up the TV about two weeks ago so that Kasey could watch the olympics but I think I'm gonna unplug it cause Ady is always turning it on.
My sister Rachel and her husband Sam just announced that they are pregnant and we are super excited for them and know that they will learn so much as parents. I thought that I'd share a few things that I have learned from Ady. Playing rough, like spinning or bouncing or whatever with the baby is kinda like shaking up a soda can and opening it. The only two difference is that you don't control when it get's opened and puke being sprayed all over you is way worse than soda. Also it is amazing how far and much puke can be projected. We call it power-puking. Once when we were at the Fort Lauderdale airport Ady was about a month old and Kasey had just fed her then handed her off to me to burp and hold. Well I noticed that Ady's mouth opened wide and her eyes got big like they do right before puking so I quickly held her away from me thinking that she would just puke on the floor. Nope. This solid stream came out straight for my face and neck. The worst part of it was that in the carry on diaper bag we had back a half dozen changes of clothes for Adyson but none for me. Ady taught us then and there always make sure everyone has a full set of clothes at all times.
Don't get me wrong, puking is not the only thing we have learned about from Adyson. We now know that poop comes in many forms and colors. Not just the various shades of brown but also greens, oranges black and even purple. I never knew you could poop purple. Also when it comes to being thrifty be careful with diapers. Yes, sometimes you can say "well it's not all the way full, we can wait a while and save a little money on diapers." But, be aware that an empty diaper can be filled real quickly and spill out, so a half full diaper can fill even faster and spill out way more. Once again an extra set of clothes for everyone is recommended. Another thing about diapers is that we have learned that sand has no nutritional value and poops out just as it was, all you get is a diaper full of sand.
In all seriousness having a baby is really exciting and a major educational experience for all involved and we are really excited for Rat and Sam.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Here's a couple of pics of Ady. This first one is at the Pearl Harbor/Bowfin Submarine. They have these exhibits outside that you can touch, climb on and play with. Ady loved this one. It's the main chamber for the submarine and Ady was flipping switches, spinning dials and pushing buttons.

I thought this pic was really cute. My mom took this while she was here. If you don't know us well you might get an idea looking at this pic that we play a lot of card/board games. I guess we play so much that now Ady thinks that she should be playing also.

Do not get fooled by this cute face. Today Ady learned how to take the top off of her sippy cup. If making messes was an olympic event, Adyson would sweep all the medals. Actually there are probably several events she could win. Climbing on to the couch, then climing off the couch, back on the couch, repeat a dozen times. Maybe that one can replace the spots that baseball/softball are vacating. Or how about turning off the gas on the stove when dad is cooking. Maybe Ady's favorite: hiding various items in drawers, cupboards and under beds. We still haven't found my library card or SCUBA card. Fortunately grandma found her chapstick and lotion.

Monday, August 11, 2008

Trip to the Zoo

Recently Ady has shown a big interest in animals. Whenever she see's a cat, dog, fish or even a toad she squeals and points at it. So we decided to go to the zoo while Grandma and Grandpa Van Tassell were here. Ady had a blast. She loved finding the animals and pointing at them. She even tried to bark at the african dogs, if you didn't know dogs are her favorite animal. She was quite bored by the reptiles who just laid there and the sleeping lions. But the elephants, giraffes, monkeys, orangutans, tiger, zebra, cheetahs, chimpanzees, hippos, and especially the petting zoo was almost more fun than this girl could handle. Sorry this is another really long blog, I just couldn't decide which photo you didn't want to see. Knowing that you'd probably feel deprived if you didn't get to see how much fun Adyson was, I decided to give you the full unabridged version.

As you can see here Ady loved finding the animals and pointing at them to make sure that we found them also. She would go running up the path to when she spotted an animal and with the giraffes she even made an attempt to climb the fence to get a closer look.

The petting zoo was quite possibly Ady's favorite part of the zoo. She loved petting the Llama, the goats, the pigs, the sheep and looking at all the other animals like the Japanese Koi. She wasn't sure about the goats at first but it didn't take long and she was petting, climbing, poking, pulling ears and we had to take her out because we were feeling sorry for the goats.

We managed to be at the Hippo exhibit while they were feeding the hippos and Ady got quite the surprise. An apple landed right next to the glass where she had attached her face and all of the sudden she had a very close look at the inside of a hippopotamus' mouth. After jumping backwards she quickly got over her surprise and went right back to her spot. She loved it but I feel a little bit sorry for whoever has to clean all of those hand and face prints of hers off of the glass.

Here are a few more images of us at the Zoo. Notice how Ady is smashing her face against the glass at the Chimpanzee exhibit. Due to Ady trying to climb into giraffe exhibits and getting so excited when she would find another animal that she would take off running she ended up spending quite a bit of the day on my shoulders. Yes, that is a picture of Ady dancing. She would get so excited that she'd literally break out dancing(which basically consists of waving her arms up and down while turning in a circle and making weird squealing noises). And the final pic is when the Cheetah walked away from the window and ady started balling. She cried until it came back a couple of minutes later.