Christmas Dress

Just wanted to share a couple more pictures of our little angel. She is so precious! The girl who baby sat for us a few weeks ago was sitting next to us in church and seemed so amazed that Sabrina was sitting calmly. Sabrina threw a mad fit the entire time we had left her with the babysitter, you see. I handed Sabrina to her today and she seemed so nervous. She said she kept expecting her to start crying at any moment. I guess we have traumatized that poor girl.
Yes, since you are wondering, that is TP on the couch behind Sabrina, but it was for her runny nose, I swear.

Jibber Jabber

We've enjoyed our little girl's new discovery of her voice so much, we wanted to share with everyone.

Christmas Tree Party

We put up our Christmas tree this week, and Sabrina had the honor of having her ornament hung first. She was having fun when we were putting up the tree, laughing and smiling and trying to tell us funny stories. I was relieved when I set the tree up and its lighting system still worked. Hooray!

Thanksgiving

Sorry, we forgot to take a lot of Thanksgiving pictures. Oops. We went and ate at our nearby delicious Mexican restaurant-Cessy's-for breakfast, since that is where we ate breakfast our first Thanksgiving together. Then we went and ate at the SNCO club. It was really nice. I think we were a little overcharged since we didn't make much use of the open bar, but it was very good. Then that evening we had a second dinner when we ate our own free-range turkey and home made stuffing. So we definitely got our proper eating done, even if we didn't watch any football.
Of course, Yogurl also introduced Sabrina to the wonderful world of looking through Black Friday Sales Ads,a duty which you can see she already takes very seriously.

Muffuletta

Yogurl finally decided to make one of our favorite foods in the world--the Muffuletta. It was a big delicious beast of a sandwich. Unfortunately, we had already scarfed down three quarters of it before we realized we hadn't taken a picture. I thought it was pretty amazing for a first go at making one, and I can't wait to taste the improvements in the next!

Paparazzi

Our little girl is getting smarter everyday and our ability to take candid photos of her is diminishing.
She hasn't figured out exactly what the camera is, but she definitely seems to be weirded-out by it. Must be hard being such a cute celebrity!

Your Patriotic Inspiration for the day

Quick, turn on "Fanfare for the Common Man" by Aaron Copeland while you look at this picture. Gives you that inspiring, proud of America, love the military kind of feeling, doesn't it? Manburger had the opportunity to participate in the Marine Corps Birthday run and carry the national colors. There he is in all his Marine glory :) The really sweaty man behind him is the commanding general of MCI West. He told Manburger after the run that he enjoyed running with a man who was in step the whole time. Way to be Manburger! By the way, this picture is so motivating that it was even on the official Camp Pendleton website.

MC Ball 09

Hey everybody, yet another Marine Corps Ball has come and gone. This one, which will be our last, was also sadly the crappiest. I was running around all morning doing color guard stuff, and then by time Yogurl showed up at the ball I had to go back to work doing more color guard stuff. Since we had a sitter and the ball was running behind schedule, we didn't even get to hit the dance floor. Then that evening I had to go back to work and return all the gear. Since I had duty the next day, and my motorcycle decided it was a good day to be broken, I spent that night sleeping on a faux leather couch and then woke up to work a 24 hour duty shift. Happy Marine Corps Birthday and Veteran's Day to me! Anyway, we can't go a whole post without mentioning our pride and joy. We bought her a swing after visiting Yogurl's sister who had one at her house. Thank you Craig's List! The swing entertains her and helps her catch a few extra Zs during the day. What a great invention. She is also slowly discovering toys and holding onto things. In this photo, her little plush bunny is the happy recipient of some gumming and drool. Earlier this evening we were talking about how our sweetie doesn't fall asleep when we hold her on our chests like she used to, and lo and behold while our home teachers were over, she fell asleep on Yogurl like she did when she was a much smaller baby. How sweet!

Rhode Island

The last part of our trip was a visit to Rhode Island. We saw the fabulous city of West Warwick as well as Newport and Providence. West Warwick is home to the world famous Petertammenson Clan. Probably our favorite thing about Rhode Island was being there at just the right time for the fall colors. The picture of the trees and the water, which the camera does absolutely no justice to, is a view on the drive to church! How cool is that? The big stone wall Yogurl is standing by was probably 4 or 5 feet thick and ran for quite a distance. There were many homes with stone walls, but this one was pretty exceptionally huge and well done. In Newport, we went for a walk along the beach, which was very different from our beach. We also saw this gigantic house, called The Breakers. It belonged to the Vanderbilt family and was built at a cost of $150 million in today's dollars. It's bigger than the White House! While we were there, we ate Italian food at a VFW lodge. It was so cool being there surrounded by all the old people. I would assume most of them were vets, but maybe they just knew good Italian food. The last picture is Laurel's response to the super loud fire alarm that was triggered accidentally by maintenance guys.

DC

Well I got to go back to DC, which was super cool. This time I got to stay with some great friends, and bring my family, which made it way better. We visited Arlington National Cemetery, which was a beautiful place. When we saw the changing of the guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier, some foreign jerk kept talking during it and even worse he kept snickering every single time they did a facing movement. I was so angry I could hardly breathe. If I didn't have a baby strapped to my chest, there would have been some serious Mortal Kombat moves done right there. While we were there, we of course toured the mall area and saw all the monuments, the White House, etc. We also got to see My Obama Shop. If only we had one of those in California! Sabrina slept through the night for the first time while we were in DC, too. I guess you don't need a fancy crib if you have a laundry basket. DC was so fun, we might even go back and live there for a few years.

St Louis

Our trip started out flying to St Louis, where we stayed with Mike, Elizabeth, the Lydia and Isaac too! What fun we had! We went of course to the Arch, which actually has a really cool museum below it. I had no idea. The craziest thing about the museum was that there was a big bull just wandering around. We gave him some feed in exchange for getting a picture with him. Yes, believe it or not those two ladies are sisters. The shot of all of us in a tiny little room is to show how small the transports that take you up the arch are. We didn't actually go up the arch because there was a really long wait. While we were there, Isaac and Lydia showed us their amazing trampoline skills, though in this picture, Isaac is clearly showing off how good he is at breakdancing. Yogurl and I did some trampoline jumping too, but I didn't include any pictures because it didn't turn out too well for poor Isaac.
The picture of video game playing was staged--no actual video game playing occurred (wink wink).

Ridiculously Cute

Manburger finally convinced me to put this tacky, quasi-70's style baby outfit on our little one. It was one of those outfits that I was ready to put in the give-away pile, but Manburger fought me tooth and nail to keep it. I guess he saw it as too absurd to get rid of. Well, much to my chagrin, Sabrina looked pretty dang cute in it. I really shouldn't have been surprised, our daughter is so cute, she'd make anything look good :) The hat is just for laughs, we didn't actually take her out with the hat on.
We also invested in a baby carrier for our upcoming trip. Here is Sabrina's first test-ride. How cute is she? We've taken her for a few walks since and she loves looking around.
On General Conference Sunday we took a walk on the beach to get some fresh air. The California coastline sure is lovely. Here is a neat cave that was along the way. As you can tell, it's pretty tall because you have me as a reference point. Whenever we move away from here, I'm definitely going to miss the walks on the beach, listening to the waves, and hunting for grunion!

2 months old

Our little girl sure loves her parents. It's fun how she watches us, even when one of us is across the room. Here's some "Daddy's girl" photos, having fun with bath time and both tuckered out. Even though she loves Momma now, I mean, hey, I feed her, how can you not love that, I highly suspect that she will soon be a "Daddy's girl". What little girl doesn't love her daddy? I weighed her this morning at the breastfeeding support group I've been attending and she is already 10 lbs 10 oz. She really is growing up so fast.

Baby Bonnet

Sabrina wore this outfit to church last week. She looked cuter than the picture turned out. I felt like I had a baby from some time in the last century as most people don't put bonnets on their babies anymore. The bonnet lasted until I had to feed her, but it was cute for the short while. We also discovered a new holding-style that Sabrina really likes. She was so fussy this week that we were very glad to discover she could fall asleep in this new hold.

Smiling Baby

Week 7

Here are some more adorable photos of our little girl. Sorry that we don't have any of us, but I'm sure most of you don't mind. Sabrina is way cuter than we are. I started doing tummy-time more regularly this week. I have to make sure and do it when she's in a good mood or it's not so much fun. She also started smiling just in the past two weeks and she is so cute when she does.

Sabrina incognito

In case you didn't recognize this baby, it's Sabrina. She's pretending to be Opa's favorite cartoon character. Yes, if you watched Beavis and Butthead, you know exactly which character that is.

My Girls All Tuckered Out

Baby Blessing

We just blessed our baby yesterday and a lot of our family was able to come visit for it. The dress Sabrina is wearing is the dress that Yogurl and her sisters, as well as their daughters, were all wearing for their blessings. Our parents were all here as well as a couple of my brothers. We sure enjoyed having so much family come down here to visit.