The end of the Summer

Around July 4th it was finally warm enough to turn the heater off.  Now it is cold enough to heat again, so the summer must be over.  We’ve had quite the summer, so, now I can share it with you.

Samuel is now 5 1/2 months old.  He is growing very fast.  He is bigger than Anna or Mariah were at the same age, so he is going to be a big boy when he gets older.  The most noticeable thing about Samuel is that he likes to put everything in his mouth.  Paper is his favorite thing, but hair is a close second

The upside to him liking everything in his mouth is he is willing to eat, even if all he can eat is Single Grain Rice Cereal.

 

One of the big things we did this year was to go on a “real” vacation to Utah.  As part of our real vacation we took the girls to Lagoon.  Well, I took them along with Jakob, Saralynn, Tiffany and Mike.  Sarah hung out with Samuel.  Next year he will be over one year old, so hopefully we can just leave him with one of his loving grandparents and Sarah can join us.

Anna loved running through the fountain

Because it is so much warmer in Utah, and my dad has a swing set, the girls spend a lot more time outside.

And of course, what is a trip to Utah without seeing people. 

Anna is with Aunt Tiffany and her cousin Emily

Here is the whole gang with Grandma Sherri

And the whole gang with Grandpa Alan

And Anna’s new friend Cocoa

This isn’t everything we did this summer.  But it was a fun part of it.  The other big thing that happened this summer was my work was changed a bit.  Last December I was moved to a new team.  Well, the new team was dissolved in June, so I was put on a different team.  I still work on phones though, so life is good.  As soon as the team was dissolved, I decided to take the paternity leave that I hadn’t taken since Samuel was born.  So I took 5 weeks off.  Part of that was spent in Utah, while the rest was spent trying to dig a big tree stump out of the front yard.  It was quite the project, but I did eventually (last Saturday) finish digging it out.

Here are a few more pictures

To the Zoo

We’ve had a pretty good last few weeks.  My birthday came and went.  In looking at the weather outside, summer may have come and gone.  Samuel’s first two months of life have almost come to an end.  Life is great.

On my birthday I took the day off from work so that I could spend it with the family.  And what better way is there to spend time with the family than to go to the zoo?  We really like the zoo up here because the animals actually seem to have a lot of area to be.

We see all sorts of stuff at the zoo:

Flamingoes

Some kind of monkey?

And sticks.  They are probably in the shape of a letter, or something smart like that.

I do have to say, that one of the best things Sarah and I ever bought was that wagon Anna and Mariah are sitting in.  It has made so many things more fun to do, especially now that we have 3 kids which means we can’t really carry everyone at once.

Samuel has done a lot of growing in the last month.  He is enjoying spending time with his sisters, who love him very much.  Mariah loves him so much that about half the time she wants us to call her Samuel and carry her around since she can’t walk because she is just a tiny baby.  Mariah actually really does love Samuel.  She is always so helpful in telling us what Samuel is doing, whether or not we are cheering him up, whether or not he likes a particular toy and such.

   

Since it is getting warmer, and Anna seems to have gone as far as she could with her little tricycle, we got her a new bike.

Here are a few more pictures, just for fun.

Samuel Likes to Sleep

A quick month with Samuel

Samuel will be 4 weeks old at 2:22 tomorrow.  It was a fast month.  We have Grandma Sherri to thank for that, since she was here for 3 of the last 4 weeks.  She went home a week ago, but since then Samuel has been nothing but sad since she left.  Thanks for coming grandma.

I was going to post a picture of her with Samuel, but I don’t seem to have any. 

The girls are adjusting pretty well to Samuel.  Mariah seems to be having the hardest time, since she doesn’t get as much mommy time anymore.  She seems to be acting up a lot more, but it might not be anything new either.

A few days ago Anna wowed us with her smarts about telling time.  She has a clock in her room because she is not allowed to come into our room and wake us up until 7:30.  So, looking at clocks is pretty standard for her.  Well, one morning this week she came in.  I asked her what time it was and she said, “seven thirty six.”  It was pretty amazing.  She usually just says “seven three six,” but now she seems to be able to tell all the numbers between 1 and 999.  Numbers and building things seem to be what she is good at. 

This morning she built a big train out of all the chairs in the play room as well as the slide and our big orange sitting chair.  Although it looks like we just didn’t clean up, it really was pretty cool to see what she made.  She put all the chairs together, but “higher chairs” on top of those chairs so that the babies could sit up higher, and she even had a spot on the ladder of the slide for small animals to sleep.

And one more thing with Anna this week.  When Anna was 2 we bought a little tricycle for her.  Up until this point though, she never had the hang of using the pedals.  She always found it easier to push walk it, then to pedal, kind of like a baby thinks it is faster to crawl the walk.  Yesterday though, I took Anna to the church so that we could help clean the parking lot and trim the bushes.  I knew she wouldn’t have too much interest in the raking and such so I brought the trike along.  She had a great time.  We live on a hill, so even though she is bigger, pedaling just never worked.  But in the flat parking lot she finally understood what pedaling is all about.  And when we came home, she learned to pedal in our cul-de-sac. 

Mariah has learned that is fun to jump off the toy box.

She also like celery.

Here are a few more pictures of everyone:

Almost a week later

 

Samuel has been with us now for almost a week.  It seemed like I should post some more pictures so everyone can see what he has come to look like.  Of course he still looks like a baby.  He is still really red too, which is interesting since Anna and Mariah, well at least Mariah, wasn’t this red for this long.  But it seems to be going away.

Anna wasn’t as afraid of Samuel as she was of Mariah.  After Mariah was born, Anna it took Anna months to acknowledge that she might even be part of the Family.  But with Samuel, in her prayers Anna is already thanking Heavenly Father that he is apart of our family.  And she even wants to hold him.  Mariah however, doesn’t seem to want to relinquish the title of “Swank Baby.”

Like Mariah, Samuel is pretty strong.  It is probably because he weighs so much, but doesn’t seem to have a lot of fat.  That weight must be muscle.  With tummy time he can pick his head up and move it around.  He can’t lift it all the way up to look around, but he is trying. 

So far, the strangest thing to me is to see how much Samuel sleeps.  Our history of babies so far seems to be going from bad to good.  Anna just never slept.  The night after she was born I stood in the hospital with my finger in her mouth just trying to get her to sleep.  I was so tired and really did not enjoy that time.  I can’t remember the night in the hospital with Mariah, so it must not have been too bad.   The night with Samuel was great, except that the nurse had to keep coming in to do blood sugar tests.  This of course meant pricking his heal which would cause him to wake up.  But, he wanted to sleep.  In the whole time at the hospital, I don’t think I had to hold him to get him to calm down and go back to sleep.  He just kept sleeping.  It hasn’t changed much since we have come home.  He sleeps all day, and then once we get him down at night he seems to sleep pretty well.  Sarah would probably say he doesn’t sleep as well I as I think he does, but that is because she feeds him, so I don’t notice when he is awake.  It’s great.

Of course, everything is better here because Grandma is up here helping us out.  Thanks Grandma.

And since we haven’t seen me, Mariah or Sarah here are some awesome pictures of us.

Look who is here

 

It’s been a while since we updated on here, and even longer since I wrote anything.  It seemed like it was time to write something, but Sarah is currently busy so it’s up to me.

Well, here is the latest addition:

No name yet, but we are leaning to Samuel or Caleb.   He was born March 22, 2010 at 2:22 pm.  He weighs 9 lbs, 2.3 oz and is 21.65 inches long.

Sarah went into labor arond 4:45 am, but it didn’t really kick in until around 10 am at which time we went to the hospital.  Sarah was already dilated to a 10, so no epidural for her, but she toughed through it for the four hours it took before junior decided he was coming. 

The firsts for us this time:

Sarah’s water broke on it’s own.

He came out face first.

Sarah laid on her side through delivery instead of her back.

He seems to be doing well.  He has already eaten, and he isn’t crying much, but is sleeping a lot.  Just what I like to see.

One more picture.

And since no one has seen a picture of Anna or Mariah in ages, here are a few.

 

Cinderella

I know it’s been awhile—blah, blah, blah.  I promised my mother I’d blog this little story tonight because I found it so adorable that it just needed to be shared. 

Tonight after dinner, Anna said, “Mommy, I’m Cinderella now.”  That is usually the beginning of one of her role-play activities, in which the entire family must always be involved—it’s the reason I signed her up for a mini-acting/storytelling class in the winter.  Anyway. 

“Mommy, I’m Cinderella now,” she says. 

“Oh, really?  And who does that make me?” I ask. 

“Prince Charming.”

“Oh, good.  So does that mean we are going to a ball tonight to dance all evening and fall in love?”

“No, that’s tomorrow night,” she says.

I look at her.  “Uh, then what are we doing tonight?”

“Tomorrow night we will dance, and then we will get married.”

“Okay,” I say, now very curious.  “But what are we doing tonight?”

And, with a roll of the eyes, she says, “Well, tonight we are getting to know each other first.”

One man’s indoctrination is another man’s… wise teaching.  And when she is a young woman, dating to find an eternal partner, I will be proud if she calls me one night and says, “Mom, he tried to kiss me on our second date!  We haven’t even gotten to know each other yet!”

Oh, and here’s the little wicked witch.  Wicked is often the right word, such as this afternoon, for example, when I went to change her very messy diaper and discovered that she had pulled out, one-by-one, every diaper wipe in the container and placed it in the Bumbo seat, where she could, obviously, get to them more easily to change her doll-baby’s diapers.  Duh, Mom.