Corn and smiles. Corny smiles.

I think if I could invent a camera that actually does justice to real life I'd make a lot of money! Here is Story giving a smile, but of course she is a even a million times cuter than this picture shows.

And Pepper has discovered that she loves corn on the cob! I was cutting it off for her, but she stole the sister missionary's cob right off her plate and started munching. Now she won't have it any other way and she'll down the whole thing!

Here is Pepper on the swing at the farm where we went apple picking yesterday (so cute, by the way). She looks entirely too grown up!

Christensens...who?!

Yes, I AM posting. I know. You all thought we had died. Turns out we're alive! And in Cleveland, Ohio of all places! We're here for medical/PhD school at Case Western Reserve University and we'll call it home for 7 years. At least. Taylor (side note: T.J. has decided that he is all grown up now and is going by Taylor. It's so super weird when your husband changes his name. I guess I'll just be glad he didn't choose to change his gender.) is doing an MD/PhD program that is perfectly aligned with his career goals of 1) being an awesome doctor and 2) changing our health system through research and policy. He is super excited and rightfully so as he snatched the single spot for the program and the attending grant money (awesome!). We're so grateful and really liking it out here. The people are so nice, we've made great friends, and there are tons of awesome things to do with the kids.

What else has happened in the last...year plus since I wrote? Well, I graduated and am now Master Christensen! :) My thesis was published in a good journal and I wrapped a few other publications under my belt for good measure. I'm still occasionally working with my professor on manuscripts just keep a toe in the door. Just in case.

We had a family reunion (well, half of the fam!) and got to see lots of family and we also got to see a lot of them on the drive out to Ohio. It was so so fun and made moving so far away that much harder! I may or may not have shed some tears.

Oh! And you know, we had a baby! Story Ann Christensen born in May and she is such a doll! We love her to bits! Ann is after Taylor's mom, Julie Ann. She and Pepper are 16 months apart and both are keeping me busy! Story is so sweet. She loves to suck on her hands and her thumb (much to my chagrin) and smiles and laughs and is starting to babble. We love it! Pepper likes her, but doesn't quite understand that she isn't a doll. She likes to see her and touch her and pull her off the couch on to her head. Needless to say it is impossible to leave them in the same room alone unless Story is safely strapped to something.

Pepper is growing up too fast and is all talk. Seriously, she talks all day! Full sentences and learning more and more every day. We love it! She runs all around and still loves to read books. She loves being outside, playing with rocks, sticks, dirt, dogs, and jumping in puddles (there are lots of those here - it rains a ton!) We have a tire swing in our back yard and she loves loves loves to swing. Taylor pushes her so high and she holds on like a champ! I just can't watch! She is such a smart girl, so helpful and so sweet. We can't get enough of her! Okay, occasionally I can. But, I still love her to bits!

The last few weeks we had our sister-in-law Krystle and her little girl Royal staying with us. It was SO fun!!! We had a blast and I loved having a friend around all the time to talk with, cook yummy food with, and help clean up and watch kids. We went to Kirtland (it's only 25 minutes from our house. So, if you're ever visiting church history sites...you'd better come stay with us! We have stellar air mattresses, good conversation, and great grub! Seriously though, we'd love to have you.), saw some Amish sites, went to a "petting zoo," the Children's museum, science center, libraries, parks, and Pepper learned how to be tough. We were so sad to see them leave!

Okay, I promised myself that I wouldn't try to play catch-up. But, I am going to sincerely try to be better about blogging every now and then from now on. I can't even keep up in my journal! But, since this counts as that too, I suppose it is worth the effort.

My New Toy!!!!!

Happy Graduation to me! Partly paid for by loving parents for my graduation, and partly paid for by my "I want a road bike" savings fund, I happily introduce my new beautiful bike! Thank you SO SO SO much Mom and Dad!

Pepper is also excited about it. In celebration she tried to eat the owner's manual.

Family Pictures

I know, you are all shocked - TWO blog posts in ONE day! Amazing!

My friend Vanessa needed someone to practice her photography on and we were the lucky ones! Thanks Vanessa! Here are a few of our favorites.

Weddings, Grandpas and Such

In the middle of June we headed down to St. George for my nephew Broc's wedding! He married Ashley and they're a cute couple. The sealing was really good and we're happy to have Ashley in the family! We stayed with Howie and JeLynn and had fun hanging out with their adorable family.

Here is Kaelynn at the wedding with her munchkin of cuteness, Emmalee.

The Happy Couple

Yay! They're married! (Check out Pepper's celebration dance at the top)

While down there we stopped by to visit Grandpa Ballantyne. He is so sweet! ...and incredibly hard of hearing. Combine that with a failing mind, a loud voice, and giant sense of humor and you've got yourself quite the fun experience! It was great to talk with him and to hear him say over and over, "What a little precious thing" about Pepper.

The next weekend we went to our friend Joe's wedding to Samy! We love them both and couldn't be more happy for them.

Here are Chloe and Pepper hanging out together! They are little buds and Chloe is teaching Pepper all her cool tricks. Oh, in case you don't know, Chloe is my niece Britt's baby and as you can tell, she is so so cute! Britt and James live in Lehi and we beg them to hang out with us all the time because they are so fun!

We also spent two weekends up in Huntsville lately with Karen and Austin and their fam. We are trying to get in as much time with them as we can before they move to Iowa in a few weeks for med school! We've had fun going hiking, playing soccer, frisbee, pool, football (if learning to throw a football counts!), games, made up games with an exercise ball in the middle of the night... etc!

This is a picture of our niece Meredith's beautiful hair-do that she did on an unsuspecting T.J. in his sleep. There are several more clips in the back that you can't see. I think she has a future in hair design.

We also had a cousins get together at our house a few weeks ago. William and Heather, Tyler and Nikki, Aaron, Maren and Annie, Brandon, Tyson, and Alan we all in our tiny basement! We had a pot luck and just had fun getting caught up on each other's lives.

Yes, this picture is illustrative of Pepper's current stats: 72nd percentile head, 4th percentile weight.

Pepper loves to stand! She loves it so much that she often refuses to bend her little legs (or any joint or bend point in her tiny body), making it nearly impossible, and quite humorous, to put her in her Bumbo or just make her sit on your lap. She is also SO interested in everything around her that she cranes her little head as far as she can to see it all!

She is such a good sweet baby and we couldn't ask for better. She is quite good at putting herself to sleep now, which is so nice. And, lately she has been sleeping for long periods of time at night - making her mother very happy!

Pepper loves her Daddy. She always gives him big smiles and turns to find him when he starts talking. She is "talking" up a storm now and usually chooses to grace us with her words and songs in the middle of my work meetings or during Sunday School. I try to keep her quiet for the sake of others, but I just think it is so cute!

This is just what we see when we go to get Pepper from a nap... Blanket (which did have her swaddled, everything but her arms) kicked off and big smiles. We love it!

Happy girl!

In other news... I am almost done with my thesis! Still! It is such a long process of revisions and prepping the manuscript for publication, but I really am almost done and am getting ready to submit it. Can't wait! Work at Flourishing Families is going well. Pepper does well going with me and I am really enjoying the people as well as all the weekly "tools" that we work on. We have weekly presenters on specific life skills, such as perseverance, zeal, trust, organization, prioritizing, etc. Each week we have to do some sort of project applying the tool to our lives. It has really provided me with a lot of introspection and hopefully is improving my character!

A couple of weeks ago we had a big stake picnic and talent show. One person from each ward presented a talent, and guess who represented our ward? Yours truly. I was really just trying to be supportive and told the activities chair that I could do it if no one else volunteered. As it turns out, I must be the only nice one in the ward. So, I dusted off my clogs, choreographed a routine and danced to Michael Jackson. Thanks to the relatively boring (no offense) performances before me, I was a huge hit and had the crowd loved me! Thankfully none of them were cloggers and therefore my simple steps looked really cool. It was actually so so fun to perform again. I forgot how much I love it! And miss it!

The big news for T.J. is that he submitted med school applications! YAY! He applied to 16 schools and hopes to make it into one of his top 8: Harvard, Stanford, UPenn, Mayo, Duke, Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, and Johns Hopkins. Not ambitious or anything...! Many years of preparation have led up to this and it is crazy to think that in a year we'll be off to somewhere like Boston or Philly or Baltimore! Who knows?! As soon as he hears back from schools he will have to complete secondary applications and then wait and hope for interviews and then wait and hope some more for letters of acceptance. Some schools don't tell you yes, no, or maybe until March or later, so it is a long waiting game!

He has also been busy presenting his ER staffing project to UVRMC hospital administration, organizing a student health policy summit on campus, and working in the lab. Oh yes, and reading as much as he can about health policy.

G, Grandma Orr, hiking and stuff

Pepper is getting really good at grabbing things and it is so fun to see her reach for toys and be more active with her surroundings. Many of the things she grabs go straight to her mouth or get crushed with her death grip. She's a strong little lady and loves doing the Super Baby flight pose. Here she is, asleep, but still grasping her little toy. ha!

We've been pretty lucky this last month to see T.J.'s Dad twice! He's a pilot and had lay overs in Salt Lake. We got treated to yummy lunches and had fun hanging out with G. Pepper likes him because he feeds her chocolate malts! (He got in big trouble for that one!)

We also got to hang out with T.J.'s Mom when she came for Women's Conference. It was so good to see her and have her watch Pepper for a while so I could get some work done. I wish she lived closer! We took lots of pictures on her camera, but none on ours! Dang! But, it was good times.

Yesterday we went up to Sandy to hang out with Lance and Karen and their families. We went on a hike and the kids had a blast climbing and getting dirty. Pepper was the calm one of the bunch and stayed relatively clean. :) We had so much fun hanging out and talking afterwards and I am starting to realize just how blessed we are to have family close and the time for us to move draws nearer.

Pepper liked looking around at everything (she LOVES being in new places and usually refuses to sleep so she won't miss a thing!), but after a while was ready for a nap.

A few of Pepper's favorite things these days are: 1) Daddy. She always gives him big smiles when he comes home and loves to play with him... okay, so "play" is a relative word at this point, but you get the point. She has him wrapped around her little finger already.

2) Tummy time! Okay, maybe she doesn't LOVE it, but she is getting so good at it. She's so strong and holds her head, chest, and legs in the air for a long time, but rarely uses her arms. We keep trying to tell her that those things on the side of her body will help her, but she prefers super baby pose, I guess. The other day she actually did use her arms and she plopped right over onto her back. It scared her so bad she started crying... and we started laughing!

3) Smiling. She is getting so smiley and almost has her laugh. She gives little chuckle-like things, which are so adorable, and is talking up a storm! I love it.

In other news, we're both busy and enjoying the Spring weather, when it chooses to grace us with its presence. I defended my thesis on the 16th of April and am just finishing up some revisions and will graduate in August! I am working for a research project on campus this summer, but it is super flexible, I can work from home a lot, and when I go in I can take Pepper. I really couldn't ask for a better situation, but will still be glad to finally really be done with school and work at the end of the summer.

T.J. did awesome this last semester with a crazy busy schedule of 18 credits, volunteering, work, more volunteering, and a newborn baby. He loves his business strategy major and is excited to be using his skills helping out the emergency room at UVRMC. (More on this at a later date.) He is just writing his personal statement for med school applications and will send in his application June 1st! It is crazy to think that the time for applying is finally here. He is still working in his research lab and reading up anything he can find on health policy.

Sisters and Easter

So, as many of you may already know, I have the coolest sisters on the planet. I am so lucky to have so many amazing people to look up to and learn from! We all got together (except we missed JeLynn!) to play before Karen heads to Iowa. Britt and Joc, my oh-so cute and fun nieces came too and we had a blast! We mostly hung out, acted immature in the swimming pool and ate way too much - it was great! We also got to go to the BYU v. U of U gymnastics meet, see "The Blind Side" (which is like the best movie I've ever seen!), and go shopping. The only bad thing about it was that it ended too soon.

For Easter we headed up to Karen and Austin's for the weekend. We love being with them and are going to miss them so much when they move! Dang med school. I only cry most of the time when I think about it! Hopefully we'll be somewhere close in a year when we also head off to med school.

Check out what we got for Easter:

Pretty cute, eh? Pepper is growing up too fast and getting way too cute for her own good. She smiles all the time now and is "talking" up a storm! I LOVE IT!!!

Well, this post is short, but frankly I am just proud of myself for blogging so soon! It hasn't been six months since the last post! Love to you all!