Autumn Playtime

Today brought a cool front of autumnal bliss. I absolutely LOVE autumn. And now Anika gets to be all decked out to play outside. I think it makes her look more grown up. *sniff *sniff

This is the Day that the LORD has made!

Let us rejoice and be glad in it!

God decided to give us a break today from all our humid, story weather. He gave us an especially beautiful day; so beautiful, in fact, that we just had to take a trip to the park. Anika was very excited. She loves the park. She also got to make a new friend: static electricity.
Here are a plethora of pictures so that you can feel like you were there with us!

(side note: I realized I look like I have abnormally large incisors when wearing my rubber bands on my braces. Combine that with my pasty-white flesh, I can safely assume that people think I am a vampire.)

One Year Later...

A year ago today I submitted myself to the world of orthodontia. I am both relieved that it has been a year, and surprised. I think that having a baby to take care of made time go faster this past year. So I will put a picture of my teeth a year ago and a picture of them today.
Hopefully only six more months! I am in the rubber band stage now, and I am wearing extra bands to hopefully make my teeth move faster.
Considering the final result of my teeth is the cost of a decent used car, I hope I like my smile!
On another note, it's nice to see that my face has thinned out since having a baby. I was looking pretty puffy. Haha.


So you can see that the one side of my upper teeth were sliding backwards into my mouth. When I would bite down, the top teeth would land INSIDE the bottom teeth, which is not a healthy bite. It was starting to get uncomfortable. And my bottom teeth were pretty crowded, but you can't see that as well.


Right after getting my braces. They didn't hurt....yet. The start of the pain came a few hours later.


And now today! I think we are getting closer to all my upper teeth being even!
A close up of my hardware. For those of you who don't get to see me smile every day. :)

A View of Our Blessed Life

We have taken so many pictures lately that I'm not even going to bother writing anything right now. I'm just going to show you the GRACE that God has given us in a happy, healthy, beautiful girl. I am humbled by His goodness and mercy to our little family.
Oh, and for any of you who knew me as a baby, the resemblance in some of these pictures is almost terrifying...but still cute!

August is Flyin' By

Wow. I am having difficulty comprehending that we have already experienced 16 days of August, but not for lack of activity in the Riezebos house.
We started the month off with my birthday and our anniversary and a cousin's wedding all within the first six days of the month. We traveled up to Minnesota briefly to drop Anika off with Grandpa and Grandma so that we could have a night away on our anniversary to Sioux Falls. We saw a movie, Captain America (which was awesome by the way), and ate at the restaurant where we had our first meal as man and wife FIVE years ago, and stayed in the very nice Holiday Inn Express. I took my camera along to document our date night...but I forgot to take pictures. Fail.
But here is a picture of us the next day at my cousin's wedding! Congrats Erin and Michael!

After the wedding, my family came to Omaha to visit us for a couple days. We enjoyed swimming at the parent's hotel pool and going to the zoo on Monday. Gotta love the zoo!







In fact, we love the zoo so much that we just had to go back later with our friends who came to visit us and the zoo. Saturdays are much busier than Mondays. We didn't even get to see the desert dome because it was extremely packed, and since we had two strollers to maneuver around instead of just one, we decided to pass. There was still plenty to see!
Anika absolutely loves the zoo. The yearly pass was an awesome investment.









In other Anika news, she has two more teeth poking through, so that brings our grand total up to SIX TEETH!
She has been fighting a cold, which has made her appetite decrease, which has made her weight decrease a little too. I'm hoping she gets better soon and starts eating normally again.
She can now stand by herself for a few seconds at a time. She looks strange when she stands, probably just to me though, because her standing means I am one step closer to not having a baby Anika anymore, but a toddler Anika. Sigh.
Anika is also a professional waver, waving whenever anyone says goodbye or goodnight.
One of her favorite things to do is find noses on people or on pictures and on our cats. She even poked Mimi's nose and said "nose"!
We love her more and more every day.

Oh and on a side note, I used the Force to create some pretty awesome pancakes.


Okay, okay. They were pancake molds, but still amazingly awesome. I think pancakes taste better in Star Wars form.