Easter, only a little late...

 I realize this post is late, but better late than never, right? We had a wonderful Easter here at the Carlile home. First the Easter baskets. Abraham's:

Tyler's: 

 Baby Rex's:

 The kids were pretty excited to see all of their treats. 

 And enjoyed a few moments looking through everything before we had to get ready for church. 

 We didn't have new Easter clothes this year, but got the boys all dressed up for the day. Sadly, this is about as good as a picture gets with all three of them. I took several shots and this really is the best one.

 After church the Boyers joined us for an Easter egg hunt. 

 Grandma Carlile had sent a Golden Egg with $5 in it and it was the last egg to be found. Dallin and Abraham both saw it at the same time and, since it was in a tree, neither could reach it! I felt bad, so I went upstairs and quickly made a second Golden Egg. 

 Rex just enjoyed watching everyone. 

 Here's everyone checking out the loot. 

It was a wonderful day spent with family and remembering our Savior. 

Rex is 8 Months Old!

Where do I even begin in talking about this sweet baby? He turned 8 months old on the 11th and while I took these pictures on time I'm just posting them now, so it will kind of be an 8 1/2 month assessment of his skills and accomplishments.

 He's sitting up like a professional these days. It took awhile to get him there, but he's finally mastered it! He's also just seconds away from crawling. He'll inchworm (face plant?) to get to things he wants and he often goes up on his hands an knees, he just usually moves backwards instead of forwards!

 He's a champion eater and has really started table foods. He loves Nutra Grain bars, but makes a nice sticky mess of them. He's just getting the hang of feeding himself and given a handful of Cheerios on his tray probably gets 1 in 4 tries actually in his mouth. He can also hold his bottle by himself, hooray! 

 He's started to imitate sounds, our favorite is when we fake snore, he totally chimes in, it is hilarious. Also, at Tyler's speech session the other day, the therapist was really working on "p" sound with lots of purple and peppers. About 3/4 of the way through the session Rex starts going "puh, puh, puh". I guess we have a genius on our hands here!! (he gets that from me:-)

He's still losing his contact on a regular basis, so we are looking forward to his surgery on May 3rd. They'll be putting in a permanent implant and we can kick the contact to the curb. We'll still have to patch him, but it will be a huge relief to me to not have to stress out about his contact.

So, you may notice that he's wearing 2 different outfits in these pictures. It is because I took them on 2 separate days because 90% of the pictures I took he had his eyes closed. Then Abraham wanted in a picture and 100% of the ones I took of them together...they BOTH had their eyes closed.

Lost and Found

This morning Rex woke up and we followed our normal routine. First, I changed his diaper and got him dressed and then we went into the kitchen to put on his patch. He's been having trouble with his patch ripping his skin, so we've been putting a barrier on his skin before we put on the patch. I was rubbing the barrier on (it is the white stuff you see on his face in the picture) when I saw something odd on his skin below his ear. I looked closer and realized it was his contact!! He'd lost it at some point in the night and it had been stuck to his face. It was attached on there pretty tight, so we went ahead and put his new, spare contact in and left this on in some solution to see if we could salvage it. We can't wait for his upcoming surgery so hopefully we won't have to worry about his contact any more!

The Boys

We were so glad that my Mom could come and stay with the boys while we were gone. They had so much fun together. I think Abraham wishes we would go on vacation more often. I was sad when I did my other post to realize that I hadn't taken any pictures of my Mom with the boys. Then my sister came through with this one. I love it! Thanks again Mom!!

Cruise With Me, Baby

Ken and I had the wonderful opportunity last week to go on a Caribbean cruise with some amazing friends. My mom came and stayed with the boys and we flew to Miami and boarded the Carnival Glory.

This is the second cruise we've gone on with these friends and we were determined to once again dominate games and trivia and win all the trophies and medals we could. Sandy is proud to display the first trophy our group won.
That night Ken started things off right by being the first in the group to karaoke. He rocked some Bon Jovi. Greg and Sandy performed also and were awesome.
This is a camel from the casino. Taking this picture is about the extent of our time in the casino on board :-)
I love this picture.
This was in the room where they had all the art for the auction. You can't pass by a photo op like this!
This is from our first formal night on board. We kind of interpreted formal as 'what you might wear to church'
Our friend Emy took this picture. I love it.Each night our room staff would make little towel animals. This was my favorite.
Our first stop was Cozumel, Mexico. We went snorkeling there. It was so beautiful.

Emy had an underwater camera and got some awesome pictures of our snorkeling excursion.This was while playing cards on deck one night. It was pretty windy. Later they ended up kicking us inside because of the wind.Unfortunately because of weather, we had to miss our port in Costa Maya. We were so excited to see the ruins there, but had a great time on the boat with our friends. Our next stop was Roatan, Honduras. It was absolutely gorgeous. We did a swim and snorkel with the dolphins. It was so incredible to spend a half an hour just snorkeling with 20 dolphins. What amazing creatures. I had a huge smile plastered on my face the whole time.


Our dolphin was Mr. French. Here we are kissing him, hold the jokes please.Can't you see Ken's excitement to kiss a dolphin in his face?Here are all the guys from the cruise.


Ken and I walked around Roatan a little after our dolphin swim. We found some great photo opportunities.This sunken ship was right by our cruise ship where we stopped. So cool.


Rowing in the jungle is hard work.
Our last stop was Grand Caymen. We'd rented a sailboat and had an amazing time. The water was unreal, like someone poured blue raspberry jello in there. We snorkeled with the sting rays. I'll admit it freaked me out. I got in though and loved it, until they started feeding the sting rays. Then they got very comfortable with us and I got very uncomfortable with them swimming all over me.They were so huge. It was a really incredible experience. We also got to snorkel by a reef. It was equally beautiful and amazing.We participated in as many events on the boat as we could. Robyn won a Minute to Win It game and got over $100 in prizes! She was awesome. It was so fun.Here is our whole group with our favorite magician, Paul. He would do some crazy cool card tricks and we caught his show whenever we could. One day they had a dance class where they taught us the Thriller dance. Luckily Ken and I had packed some 80's clothes. Here is a picture I stole from my friend Sandy. It is our dinner table one night. This is after they'd already cleared away the appetizer plates. We ate SO much good food. We'd spend 2 hours every night at dinner, eating, laughing, and having a wonderful time.





This is Miami when the boat pulled in after the cruise was over. When we got off the ship we had a day in Miami with the Porters before we flew out. We found this amazing open air Cuban market and had some awesome food and walked along the beach.





Anyway, if anyone has made it this far in my long, long post I'll thank you for indulging me as I reminisce our wonderful vacation. It was beautiful, fun, and so nice to leave everything behind and just enjoy hanging out with each other and wonderful friends for a week.

Favorite Places

Abraham didn't want to go to church today. He really, really didn't want to go to church today. So, in an attempt to help him I told him that church was one of my favorite places. I told him I felt good and happy at church. He then asked what my other favorite places were, so I told him I had 3: home, church, and the temple. I told him I really loved to be at all three of those places whenever I could. We made it to church and he had a really great day and his teacher even gave him an awesome little dinosaur trinket that he was wild about. On the way home he says, "Mom church is one of my favorite places too". I told him I was glad he'd decided that. He then says, "but I have 4 favorite places, not 3. Golden Corral, home, church, and the temple." I love that kid.