The Tangrens

Hyrum has always loved to see what was going on around him. It's one of the major reasons he hated being on his tummy. I tried to help him get gain neck strength by doing tummy time in new locations so that he'd be curious to look around, thus getting his head up. It was warm in the apartment one day so we decided to go out side and I put him on his belly and all of a sudden he was keeping his head up for long periods of time. For a while I didn't understand what was drawing his attention. Then I realized he was watching the cars on the busy street we live on. Since that time we've tried to take some time every week if not every day out in the courtyard watching cars (depending if I can get myself together or if there were big boys playing in the courtyard) Lately it's been getting cold and our outings in the courtyard are getting shorter and shorter. Now he prefers to be seated while watching cars. He's still a bit tipsy but he can stay upright for a second or two from time to time. I wanted to document his favorite pastime before the snow flies so I finally brought a camera out with us. By the time I got him stable and behind him I couldn't catch cars in the picture but we'll always remember what he was doing.





Unfortunately he's acquired another pastime that isn't as acceptable. Watching television. We really try to not let him. We do everything we can to avoid him seeing it but this little boy finds away to catch a glimpse. Every time we catch him watching we also find him with a HUGE smile on his face. We put his bouncy chair facing away and he'll crane his neck as far as it can go to try to see it. He can be screaming bloody murder, completely inconsolable and all we have to do is turn on the T.V. and he stops screaming and starts to smile. I worry about what it's doing to his little forming brain. Worry that it's creating an attention span the length of an ant. For that reason I'm really trying to push reading time where he needs to focus on something that is not constantly changing. But despite my best efforts he finds the T.V. So exactly how bad is it?

And now you also know how messy my apartment is. I hang my head in shame.

Hyrum has always been a natural flirt. He just gets these faces when he smiles that just crack me up. His eyebrows raise and his eyes get wider. The boy's just got it. I was taking pictures of him in these cute pajamas and after I took this picture and saw it I just couldn't stop laughing. You tell me if he's not flirting.

Labor Day was nearly 100 degrees but we were told that the heat wave would end on Wednesday of that week. On Tuesday night we sat in our living room with all the windows open and the fan going. Storm warnings were issued for Utah county so we took everything off our porch that could fly away and waited. The wind began to blow and the temperature dropped. We heard rumors of tornados in Lehi and shut all of the windows. The sky got dark. The wind blew, lightning struck and thunder roared. We heard something and figured it was just something shifting on the porch. One of our neighbors came over to ask Derek's help to move his grill. As he ran back across the courtyard he saw that one of our neighbors trees had fallen directly between the apartment building and the car port. It couldn't have fallen any better. After the storm passed we ran out to look and take pictures.
Pictures don't show you just exactly how close it got to hitting the building and cars. (ours was one of them that could have been hit) Not long after our landlord came and started to cut it up with a chainsaw. The sound scared Hyrum so I took him inside and gave him a bath by the time he was done the tree was gone. Everyone went out to help and took care of it quick. It was scary but it was over quick.