Yesterday I took Wes and Carissa on a mini-outing. We had ice cream first.

Wes ate (nearly) the whole shake. It was a beautiful afternoon to sit outside.

Then we went bowling. Wesley’s first time. Surely not his last.

Wes played two games (just him). I missed the score of his first game, but he bowled a 66 the second time around.

In retrospect, I should have maybe saved the ice cream sugar-load for AFTER bowling.

The music in the background is “Livin’ the Good Life.” And so we do.

Carissa turned one year old August 15th. Her doctor stats say she is a little over 18 lbs, tall and lean, with kind of a big head.

She is a chameleon, quickly changing from this:

to this:

That’s because she insists on feeding herself. It keeps her busy and quiet for several minutes at a time, which I appreciate. But wow, the paper towels we go through.

She likes draping things over her head.

Also a fan of balloons.

And today, a new skill! Two new skills, actually.

I saw her climb up the slide all by herself. And, then, ta-dah! Go down, all by herself. I didn’t even see it coming. I happened to have a camera in my hand to catch her coming down for the first time. (In my defense, I was on the phone with my folks at the time, which accounts for my chattering and laughing to seemingly no one.)

Check out her look of wonder as she goes down. She loves it.

The many faces of our now 1-year-old girl.

Carissa wore her first pair of shoes last week to church. I spent most of Sacrament Meeting putting them back on her feet and trying to convince her that it’s a good idea to leave them on.

She is 11.5 months old now and can stand on her own, and sometimes she takes a few unsteady steps by herself.

She is getting more personality and playfulness. She’ll pull herself to standing on the couch, and then plop herself back down and laugh, and do it over and over again. Sometimes she’ll make a noise, and I’ll make it back, and she’ll make it back to me, and we’ll go on like this for a while.

She has her two front upper and lower teeth, and is getting two more teeth on top.

Since she gets kind of upset when I try to feed her baby cereal or food, and since I won’t let her feed herself because I’m not willing to give her a bath after every meal, I’ve been giving her more baby crackers lately. She can feed them to herself, which she likes, and they’re not too messy, which I like. Wesley will have to adjust, since I give them to her in what has previously been known as his “pretzel cup.”

Today for church I dressed her like this, in a froo-froo skirt, flower for her hair, and a bracelet on her wrist.

You can see she’s already taking off the bracelet, and the flower came off next. She ended up just in a dress, but at least she had that.

She turns one in a couple of weeks. I look at her and can’t even believe that just a year ago I was still pregnant with her. Here she is, practically a lady already.

The other day I gave up trying to feed Carissa her morning rice cereal and let her do it herself. Unlike Wes, Carissa has no qualms about getting her hands messy.

Since she got her top teeth (grand total of four teeth now), she likes to bite things between her chompers. Like this toothbrush holder.

Speaking of teething, I just discovered tonight that Wes is getting a new tooth! Considering he didn’t get his first tooth until he was 19 months old, I guess I shouldn’t be too shocked that they’re still coming in when he’s about a month shy of turning four. He’s getting his lower left canine (the one next to the front row of four teeth). I’d often wondered why he had a gap on either side of that front row of teeth, but after a while I kind of forgot that he had teeth missing. He still chews on his fingers, a lot, and maybe this helps explain that.

Last week we let Wes play in this mini-water park where water shoots up from the plaza. He didn’t want to go when it was time.

And Carissa looked on.

Today I saw Carissa crawl for the first time. As soon as I saw it I ran to find the video camera. And then followed many minutes of persuasion to try to get her to do it again. This is a short crawl, shorter than when I first saw her do it, but it’s on video at least. She turns 10 months this week on Wednesday.

Wesley, by the way, started crawling at 11 1/2 months. So they’re not all that far off from each other.

I found that I have a video of Wes from 9-5-10 when he was a week away from turning one, just after he started crawling.