Avery: 4 Months

Avery is already 4 1/2 months old! So, I thought I'd update you on all the wild and crazy things she's doing and saying these days. Oh wait...

Anyway~ we had her 4 month well visit yesterday so here are some stats:
14lb 13oz = 75th %
25 inches long = 75th %
Head circumference 40 1/4 inches = 25th %

Proof that her eyes are blue. (Please stay blue, please stay blue.)


She is such a sweet and active little lady. She has recently started screaming a lot, out of joy or boredom or loneliness or sadness, which is pretty annoying. I'm not a huge fan of loud noises. Luckily if I smother her with kisses or just hold her she stops. Her cry is really loud, too, and she just screams out of anger and I don't love it.   Jonathan told me today that I'm a good mom for having patience with her cry because he can't stand it. Hopefully she learns to talk soon! Ha. She rolls over all the time and then of course gets mad about being on her belly.  She chews on everything! Addilyn did not do this, so I'm not used to it.  I wonder if she's getting teeth, or is just going to eat everything (besides food) like Amelia. (Amelia still eats her crayons.) She has regressed on her sleeping, so she and I are going to have a little chat (and a little sleep training) here pretty soon.  She goes to sleep great, it's the waking up 4 (or more) times in the night that's killing me. The Doctor told us we can start her on rice cereal now, so I'm looking forward to moving out of milk-machine mode.  I think she looks a lot like me and my brother Eric as a baby, Kirsta thinks she looks like Elsha as a baby, and a friend told me she looks like my mom, so I'm thinking she's got a lot of "Smiley" genes in her. We're so excited to watch her grow.

I could literally take a picture of her EVERY time she sleeps because I love it so much.

getting old

There are few things I don't love. One is getting older. Another is pregnancy. I find myself being resentful of both those things. Mostly because things happen to your body that you can't change.

A few years ago my cousin told me that she had perfect vision until she got pregnant and after that she had to wear contacts every day, all day.  WHY is pregnancy so annoying?

Over the past couple months I've noticed that some things were starting to be a little blurry.  Just little things like when I'm sitting at our kitchen table and I look at the clock on the microwave I can't tell the difference between a 3 and an 8. Or when I'm reading the ticker tape along the bottom of our small tv in our room it has a little fuzzy sheen around it. This wasn't anything I was too worried about. No headaches or anything so who cares, right?

Then I started to notice that every night when I was reading my book I had a small black dot in front of my right eye.  This was very obnoxious because then as I'm reading, the black dot is moving back and forth with my eye and then I just start to follow the black dot and then I forget what I'm reading because I'm thinking about the dot.  So, I figured since it's been about 15 years since I've had my eyes checked that this was the perfect time to go.

It was definitely an eye opener, no pun intended.  When they popped up that screen with the 4 sets of 2 letters, I could only make out the top row! They switched out the lenses about 100 times and asked which one I could see better out of, which is pretty fun! After they made everything perfectly clear they said, "Here's your normal vision" and took it away, and i couldn't believe it was so blurry!

Turns out my right eye is 20/25 and my left eye is 20/30. So I got these bad boys:

They're only for driving at night (with 3 little ones I don't drive at night) and for watching tv, to make things crispy clear.  

So, I don't know if my bad vision is a result of pregnancy, or just getting old, but I'm going to continue to resent them both. :)

5 years

Today is Jonathan and my 5 year anniversary. Time is such a funny thing. On one hand it feels like yesterday, and on the other I think 5 years is nothin'. We're babies in the marriage world.  At the same time, a lot of peoples' marriage fall apart around/by 5 years and I'm happy to say that we have never even fought. ;)
I wish I could have a wedding re-do.  Mostly because HOW FUN ARE WEDDINGS? Especially your own?! I would absolutely love to do all that planning again, pick a new dress, and have all my friends and family together to celebrate us. Also because I still feel guilty about who I invited (or didn't) to our wedding. I know you can't please everyone, blah blah, but I got married at a very in-between stage in my life where I didn't really have any close friends and I had abandoned all my true friends.  Looking back, I wish I would've thought, "We were friends for about 10 years, I should probably invite them, regardless of how long it's been since we talked." So, I'm sorry to all who were left out. (Whew, hopefully that guilt will go away!) Anyway, moving on.

For our 5 years, I thought I'd list 5 great qualities about Jonathan:

He's motivated and hardworking.  Often to the point that I'm annoyed that on his days off we don't really get to hang out because he's working on one project or another.  I have to step back and realize how lucky I am that he doesn't spend his days off laying around doing nothing or leaving me at home to go golfing or something.

He's funny. Sometimes it's embarrassing when I laugh so hard I cry and get that super high pitched laugh that's not really even a laugh.

He's helpful. He works a full time job and then comes home and helps around the house full time. After dinner every night he either cleans up the kitchen or bathes the kids. He's always asking me, "What can I do to help you?"  Awesome.

He's honest. I've been trying for 5 years to catch him in some sort of lie, and I can't!

He loves his daughters. Often, at the end of the day I'm ready to throw the girls in their beds and yell, "I love you" as I'm running out the door to have some alone time. Not Jonathan. He always takes time to play, read stories, share snacks and hot cocoa, and lay down with them for a few minutes if they want.  I'm pretty OCD about a schedule and when Amelia doesn't nap her bedtime is 7.  Sometimes even 6:45. Jonathan has done her bedtime routine with her since she was born, so when it's her time to go to bed I just go downstairs to read my book or watch Dancing with the Stars, leaving them to their own devices.  I can always hear them upstairs eating, talking, reading, whatever, until well after 7 and I'm tempted to march up the stairs and yell at both of them, "It is way past her bedtime! Enough is enough!"  Until it dawns on me that he genuinely likes spending time with her. He could just toss her in bed every night with a story and a kiss and call it good, but he doesn't.  Their bond is immeasurable. When we got Addilyn on a bedtime routine and her bedtime was 6:00 he was sad that he didn't get to see her very much since he didn't get home from work until 5:30, so he switched his schedule to work from 6-4 instead of 7-5 every day. So sweet. Last night I even asked him, "Should we try one more time for a boy?" And he said, "Nope, I'm perfectly happy with my 3 girls."

I could go on and on, but then you guys would probably start to think that I'm making this stuff up.  NOPE, he really is that great! Many more happy years to come! Oh, and in case you think I forgot, we're taking our annual Botanic Gardens trip at the beginning of July, so I'll post our 5 year picture then.