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.

Wah wah wah

Well, all your hopes and dreams of me blogging more now that I have a laptop have gone out the window.  I've concluded that the real reason I don't blog anymore is because I don't have anything to say.  I mean, a lot goes on in our life, but I tell people about it in other ways than blogging.  Most people I know have Facebook and I write some updates on there.  My brother who doesn't have Facebook has Instagram so he sees my life in pictures, and I don't think he read my blog anyway.  My sister and my In-laws who don't have/check facebook live in the same city as me and don't need to read my blog to hear our stories.  My parents gets plenty of pictures/texts/phone calls from me to hear/see everything that we're up to.  Therefore, my blog is pretty much null.  Now I'm stuck between not blogging and not really wanting to delete my blog.  I think I'll keep it for a while just in case there is a story that just HAS to be told on here.  Otherwise, I'll continue to get on every day and check other peoples' blogs! So keep posting. :)

Let's compare: Sleep

The thing about sleep is that you can do everything the exact same with each kid, and each kid will sleep totally different.  I'm learning this so much more now that I have 3 kids.  And I'm just going to throw it out there that if your child is a great sleeper from the beginning, you got lucky, it's not because of your parenting. Sorry.

Anyway, when Amelia was a baby we put every once of our being into getting her to go to sleep.  We swaddled, nursed, rocked, bounced, made sure she was in the perfect position, and then if she woke up when we laid her down we did it all over again.  Even after getting her to sleep she woke up every 2 hours until she was 10 months old! After that her sleep stretches got a little longer but I wrote in her baby book that the first time she slept through the night was at 14 months! We sleep trained her to fall asleep on her own around 5 months but I could never let her cry in the middle of the night because I think that's mean. She always slept in in the morning though. When she was my only child we never got up before 10. As for naps, she went down at 10 and 2 and would sleep for 2 hours each time. Ahh, that was the life. To this day she often wakes up in the night and will wander around the house or choose a different location to sleep, but is almost always the last one up in the morning.

Then there's Addilyn.   I don't think she ever woke up every 2 hours, not even the night we brought her home. This was my first glimpse at how the sleep depends on the child, not the parent. Addilyn always slept way longer at night, and it really threw me off! I'd often wake up and go check to see if she was breathing. By about 5 months she slept 13 hours straight through every night.  Getting her to go to sleep was tough, so we tried to sleep train her, thinking it would be just as easy as Amelia, and boy were we wrong.  She was just going to show us that the more we ignored her the louder she would cry and the more riled up she would get.  So we rocked, and rocked, and rocked her to sleep until one day we just set her in her bed, said goodnight and that was it. No rocking from us, no crying from her.  13 hours is awesome, except that it was from 6pm to 6am, and if you read the last paragraph you'll remember that I was used to getting up at 10 with Amelia, so early mornings were a RUDE awakening. Especially for the 4am and 5am phases. And as far as naps, she sucks. WHY did I not take advantage of Amelia's great napping when she was my only one? I tried and tried to get Addilyn on a 10 and 2 schedule and she was NOT having any of it.  Finally after months of trying and her just wailing (and getting more riled up) and me threatening mean things to her and to Amelia (poor child got the brunt of lots of my frustration) I gave up and was lucky to get one 45 min nap a day out of Addilyn.  Great night sleeper, lousy napper.

Now we have Avery.  She started off waking up every 2-3 hours for her first couple weeks. Then her first stretch gradually got longer and longer, and last night it was 8 hours!  I'm so happy, except that she goes to bed between 6-6:30 so 8 hours in for her is not 8 hours for me!  But I hope she continues to be a good sleeper. Also, she goes to sleep on her own! OMG, the first time I laid her in her cradle awake and came back a few minutes later to find her asleep, I thought it was a total fluke! Then it happened again and again and I'm just so thrilled that I might not have to sleep train this child. Right now Avery sleeps from about 6-7, waking up about 3 times to eat. I still feel tired some days but I try to go to bed early enough that I'm not too crabby. Also, I'd take this kind of tired over pregnancy tired any day.

Three children, three completely different sleepers.

Sorry if this was the most boring post ever, but I've been thinking a lot about how each one of my children sleeps so I thought I'd "think it out" in writing.

Easter

For Easter this year we were in Grand Junction!  We hadn't really made that the plan until we were looking at Jonathan's vacation dates a realized we were planning on being in Junction the whole week prior to Easter, so we decided to stay an extra day! On Saturday the cousins dyed eggs:

Sunday we went to church and then had a delicious Ham lunch.  Then the kids got their baskets which each had a chocolate bunny and a book.  Then the dads hid their eggs for them and they had a great time finding them! Of course I didn't do my motherly job and get lots of great pictures so a few in our dresses will have to do.

Happy Easter!!

Best brother-in-law ever

You might recall a while back I mentioned that one of the reasons I don't blog very often is because I never do anything at our desktop computer, and the iPad can't post pictures. I had thought about asking for a laptop for Christmas but decided it was too much money for the small amount I'd be using it.

This past week we went to Grand Junction because my mom was on spring break.  While we were there my brother-in-law, Brian, called me over to the couch to show me a picture on his phone of the new 13 inch MacBook he was getting. I was a little confused, but happy for him.  Then he told me that since he was getting a new one I would be going home with his "old" 15 inch Macbook. I am MORE THAN THRILLED!  Hopefully this means I will get around to blogging more since I can now upload my pictures to this computer and blog from the comfort of the couch!

What has your brother-in-law done for you lately?? :)

THANKS, Brian!!!