Another Year in Review

I'm a little late in posting this, but Penny is a year old! The main thing I want to say is... you guys, I did it. I breastfed a baby for a whole year. 12 months and some change. That might not be a big deal to most of you but if you know me or have been reading my blog for a while you know that it's a big deal to me. For a brief summary, I wasn't able to breastfeed Luke and I pumped exclusively for 8 months. It was very hard on me emotionally because I had always longed to breastfeed my baby. Well, I did! And I have to be honest that it wasn't my favorite thing. Don't get me wrong, I am so glad I did it and it was bittersweet to wean her but she was ready and so I was I. We've been weaned for about two weeks! It was never easy to breastfeed her away from home and now I feel a little more free to go out. It's also nice feeling to know that I could leave her at home with her dad and go somewhere and not have to be back by a certain time.

But enough about me. This little girl is still on the little side for her age. She's 20 lbs and I don't remember how long. Isn't that funny? I wrote everything down for Luke but life moves too fast now to give her the year in review she probably deserves. She's not walking-- she's done things a little later than Luke seemed to. He walked around 13 months so I'm not expecting it for a little while and I think that's okay. She can go at her own pace. She gets into everything, though. She is a great little crawler and loves to climb the stairs-- which is scary to me since she doesn't know how to back down them yet! If we don't have them blocked off she beelines for them. She cries more than I remember Luke crying but I think part of that is that Luke didn't have an older sibling grabbing toys out of his hand all the time! Oh, the life of a second born. She has the best smile and laugh and, of course, so much hair. I've given her less haircuts than I gave Luke by now but that's pretty understandable with her being a girl. I've trimmed her bangs a few times and evened things out in the back once. She doesn't hold still for much so for now I've had to delay my desires of fun hairstyles. If I'm lucky I can do a little pony on the top. She brings us so much joy and was meant to be a part of our family. We love our little girly!

September - October 8, 2017

Another month has come and gone. After a long summer Fall is finally here and all that comes with it! It is most definitely my favorite time of year. Here's what has been going on for us since I last wrote.

Luke has been quite difficult lately. He is still our sweet boy but he's definitely pushing his limits and having a hard time listening to us. All totally normal for this age but still frustrating for us (and him, sure). I think a lot of the issues stem from a desire for more attention, as it has definitely been divided with having a new (ish...) baby at home. I'm trying to implement some mom and Luke time each day during Penny's first nap and I hope that will help. Another thing he's started is a weekly playgroup with a few friends around here. We switch off who hosts and it's already noticeable how he's becoming more comfortable at friends houses without me and it's also helped with his socialization a lot.

Little stinker drew all over himself. 

Hiding from brother during a tantrum...

Penny is growing up so much. She is now eight months old! She's still not crawling because every time she flips over onto her tummy she cries and cries. It makes me so sad-- and also it's not something I was expecting since Luke crawled around this time. She is sitting up on her own so well, though. She also can stand holding onto things and I think she is even trying to pull herself up to things. She has found more of her voice and babbles mamamama, dadadada, babababa but more lately she has been growling and it's pretty funny. The other day she was eating some meat and I said, "Do you like that, baby?" and she promptly growled.

I love this sweet sitting girl.

Another adventure we went on was to SeaQuest with Grandma Sandi, Aunt Shelley and cousins. This place is so neat because you can actually interact with all the animals/fish/birds there.

Play hard, crash hard, 

We have also been enjoying some family park time and frequent Lodestone Park. We pack a picnic dinner and then play until time to put the kids to bed. It's been fun!

Standing up to her toy, as mentioned above.

A big thing that happened this month was General Conference. Every six months we have the opportunity to hear inspiring messages from our church leaders. I always come away wanting to do and be better. Now that my parents live here it has really become a family event, whereas when we lived in Boise we just watched out our own. Now we spend one of the conference days with them and the other with Bryan's family.

Another fun thing I did with the kids was to take them to Gardner Village to find witches. Really it's just a fun excuse to get out and enjoy the fall festivities with some of our neighborhood friends.

Last Friday was the day before my birthday and Luke decided he wanted to take me to McDonald's for lunch. That was fine by me and a nice little treat for both of us.

That evening we went to a Harry Potter Fall Festival at cousins Ava and Sylvie's school and while it wasn't the most authentically Harry Potter event I've ever been to, we still had a lot of fun with family. In particular, Luke, who got to ride a train, a pony and jump in a bounce house!

The next day was my actual birthday. Bryan let me sleep in, made me breakfast and then later that day we went out to lunch with my parents and Lindsay and her girls. I just love having some of my family here. Later we went out to a pumpkin patch and had fun picking out pumpkins, riding tractors, eating donuts, exploring corn mazes and riding on a hayride.

Luke exploring pumpkins with his cousins

Penny loving on Ava

Penny loving on Sylvie

My adorable, goofy boy!

Whitneys at the Pumpkin Patch take 2-- with a new family member!

Other than these things we've been busy working on a project in our basement (more details when it's done after Christmas!) and I've been making all kinds of crafts.

Lately

I figured I should post again one last time before this baby makes her debut in what seems like a scarily short amount of time. I can't even believe I'm so close even though I feel like I've been pregnant forever and physically I am feeling done. But I know that we will probably try for a third and that I'll long for these kicks and discomfort again because of what it means.

Anyway, jumping back a few months I had a birthday and not just any birthday... the big one. The big 3-0. That's a little strange to wrap my head around but no matter how old you are you always feel like yourself. I had just barely gotten completely over my horrible intestinal infection and we went out to eat and then to a Pumpkin Patch with our friends the Mannings. I've probably said it before but birthdays are pretty simple when you're an adult.

I was looking forward to the three crazy holiday months to move my pregnancy along faster and keep me busy and man did they ever keep me busy! To the point where now I'm wondering where all the time went and feeling like there is still so much to do! Halloween came and went-- Luke was Harry Potter and we went to our ward Trunk or Treat. On the day of my parents were in town looking at houses because they had decided to move here so they stayed at our house and handed out candy so Bryan and I could both go out with Luke. We took him out last year but he was more in to it (if not a little stubborn due to his age) this year and understood the whole knocking and getting candy thing. Around this same time we transferred him to his new Outer Space big boy room so we could start transforming his old room into a girly nursery (still in progress).

Bryan also had his big birthday and had to stop calling me a cougar for the one month he gets to each year. I honestly can't remember what we did the day of other than going to his new favorite Thai restuarant, Thai Delight, but I made him a couple different birthday cakes because his dad came in to town a few days before so we celebrated with him and then again a few days after with his mom. I also decided to host Thanksgiving (am I a maniac?) so I had the whole turkey and everything to do. It actually wasn't too bad (I was not as big then as I am now...) and the turkey, while it took a little while longer to cook than I'd planned, was great!

Then we celebrated our favorite (to that point) birthday in our family-- our sweet Luke turned 3! It's so hard to believe that he was my little baby and now he runs around and has full on conversations with us-- mostly sweet ones but some definitely stubborn ones as well. I have pictures from all these things but am currently too lazy to post them and pretty much all the people reading this are my Facebook friends and can and probably have already seen them. I had been planning on throwing him a real party this year and doing all kinds of fun holiday stuff with him since it's his last year alone with us and I wanted to make a big deal for him but... I didn't take into account that I wouldn't have the energy I normally have while getting bigger every day. I hope he had fun, anyway. My parents were in town again to close on a house they had decided on so they were able to celebrate with us. I took Luke to McDonald's for lunch and invited some of his little friends to join us at the play place and then we all went out to dinner later. My parents got Luke a train table and we got him a train set and he was so excited! Later we had another birthday party with his Grandma Sandi and Uncle Mike and she got him a neat Codepillar so he can learn to be a programmer like his dad! Whereas I had made Bryan's cakes from scratch I just didn't have the energy anymore and let Luke pick out a couple of box cakes for the different parties.

The day after Luke's birthday I took him to the pediatrician here for the first time and while I was sitting in the waiting room to go in I got a call from Bryan, which is odd since we generally only text while he is at work. He told me that, due to changes in his department, the Church would not be renewing his contract. Panic attacks immediately set in and worries about having to sell our brand new home while pregnant and feeling soooo not able to do that... I was so frustrated because we had moved our entire lives from Boise for this job. I wondered if we had made a mistake in accepting it. I felt the contracting agency had not been totally forthcoming with us about everything. Bryan knew the contract was technically for just one year but the agency really minimized that and said things to the affect that he'd definitely be renewed for a second year and likely be hired on full time after that. When Bryan first started it became apparent that getting hired on full time was a very difficult thing to do at the church due to their having a pension plan and other things. I think from the moment I learned that I started to feel an anxiety at the back of my heart. So we kind of knew that we'd have to be looking for another job but still thought we had two years. Luckily Bryan was still able to finish his contract while looking for other jobs so we didn't have a gap between jobs. He put out several resumes and had one phone interview and another scheduled but a recruiter coincidentally contacted him at the exact time he was looking and set up an in-person interview with him. That went really well and they ended up offering him a position soon after. The compensation and benefits were great and ended up being a better situation than we'd had before (for instance, as a contract worker we had to get our own private insurance which was quite costly). We decided to accept and finally realized that this could be a blessing in disguise. Bryan had never been truly happy with his job at the church-- mostly because of being a contract employee. He felt kind of disposable and not truly valued, which I think he needs in order to thrive in a job. I've decided that what really happened with our move from Boise is that Heavenly Father knew we needed to be in Utah but a job working for the Church was the only way to get us to move here. I very adamantly did not want to move to Utah but Bryan had had a dream of working for the Church since his mission so I couldn't ignore that. It was a really hard move at the time but we are happy to be here now. Bryan started his new job at Workfront last week and has already been really impressed with it and feels valued (yay!). He's been quite happy there, which makes me happy and I think I feel a lot less stressed now that "the worst" has happened and we've made it through. We were actually really blessed because the period of time between finding out we wouldn't have a job and getting a new one was pretty short. I'm grateful for that!

Well anyway, another huge thing that happened is that my parents officially moved here about a week before Christmas! It was crazy fast but has been so nice already to just be a half an hour drive away from them. One scary thing that happened, though, was that my dad had a heart attack scare on New Year's Day and had to be rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. We were all really on edge and emotional. He's had a major heart attack before and had to have surgeries. We were very lucky to find out that he was able to get nitroglycerin soon enough to stop it from being a full on heart attack. He ended up not needing to have any further surgeries this time and we were all so grateful for that. We need him in our lives for a long, long time. He is a stable, kind, thoughtful and loving father and I couldn't have asked for more.

Going back a bit, though, we had our first Christmas in our new house and had a nice, small morning with just the three of us before heading to church. After we were able to go spend the evening at my parents' house and have Christmas dinner. It was so nice to be there! We were unable to see Sandi because of a recent intense knee replacement she'd had but we got to go up and spend the following weekend with her. This Christmas was scary because right in the midst of present buying we had our job scare so everything was put on hold for a couple weeks until we accepted our new offer. Thanks for saving Christmas Workfront!

And now we are down to the final stretch of pregnancy before the baby is born. I am so ready/not ready. I don't know the last time I made so many Google Sheets trying to be organized for freezer meals, hospital bag, house cleaning, thank you notes, etc etc etc. There is so much left to be done and I really doubt everything on our list will actually get there but I'll try to do the most essential, at least. Everyone asks me how I'm feeling and I generally say I have no energy or patience (two things you really need with a three year old). I also feel enormous, she moves around all the time (amazing and uncomfortable at the same time), my heartburn is killing me, I have to change sides constantly at night for hip pain and of course I constantly have to pee. To reiterate from earlier, my body is feeling done sharing with another human being. This time my doctor plans to induce me at 39 weeks if I'm at all dilated at 37 weeks because of how quickly Luke came (or would have if we hadn't been able to slow things down with an epidural). I am always so scared of not making it to the hospital (20 minutes away) in time and having the baby in the car. Luke came at 38 weeks 6 days so as long as I can make it to 39 hopefully we'll be okay. It'll be strange to experience a full on labor instead of having my water break and already be dilated to a 9! Who knows what to expect? It's kind of terrifying. One thing I'm certain of, though, is that the next time I'm writing in this blog I'll be a mom of two and I'll be telling exactly how it all did happen. For now, I'm signing off.

A Year in Review

I am now the mother of a toddler. Yep, we made it through a crazy year. I've heard that the celebration of baby's first birthday is as much for mom as it is for him and I feel that is so true. If you've been following our blog for at least a year you should probably know that the beginning was rough. It is for everyone, in different ways. I'm pretty much terrified to have another newborn and deal with sleep and breastfeeding all over again-- but I know I will be very happy for Luke's little brothers and/or sisters to come when they do. I think about it all the time even though I know that is still a little while away. As my dad would say, I'm worrying about crossing bridges I haven't even come to yet. That's just me, I guess. I think I will always feel some degree of guilt over how breastfeeding went down with Luke, even if it works one of these times around. I'm glad the world is educating everyone on the benefits of breastfeeding but I wish there wasn't so much judgement from well-meaning moms regarding formula. I think you all know how I feel about that because I've been pretty open about it on here. I hope that my next baby isn't born in the winter but if that is what I'm given I'll gladly accept it. Hormones + postpartum depression + not wanting to leave the house + inversion made for a very emotional and depressing winter. Around March or April (after we'd gone to exclusively pumping and were able to have some sort of schedule) Luke and I started getting out of the house during the day and that made such a difference. Slowly life started to have a predictable pattern and I'd never realized how comforting predictability could be. Of course everything can't be predictable but overall things settled down. I started getting excited about sewing and crafting projects and that really helped that I could do something creative for me. Everywhere I would go people would gush to me about how cute my baby was and how much hair he had (that part has died down now that he's a year and a lot of babies his age also have a good amount of hair). He is so sweet and loves to laugh and smile. On the rare occasion he comes up to me, crawls into my lap and puts his arms around me I just melt.This is the biggest trial that I've ever been given because it is constant and forces me to focus solely outside myself-- but that is part of why it is also the greatest blessing I've ever been given. I've never felt so much nurturing love before. Just seeing his handsome face makes me smile.


Well, as he's the one who had a birthday I should give him a spotlight. To start, I took a picture for every month of his life (it wasn't always right on his month birthday... :/). Here's a little timeline progression.

He was born 7 lbs 3.7 oz and was 20 in long... now he's 23 lbs 7 oz and 30 in long! Wow! He has seven teeth (four up top and three on the bottom). He has had about 5 trims-full on hair cuts so far! In July I used his dad's clippers and gave him a huge hair cut! He loves to claps his hands and smile. He crawls up to things, pulls himself up and cruises around easy as pie. He has started standing on his own several times a day for a few seconds. He's going to be walking in no time. He likes to open cabinets and drawers and pull things out of it and still loves to put anything he finds in his mouth. He's said mamamamama and dadadadada for a while but its starting to seem like he knows what they mean. He still babbles them indiscriminately but sometimes seems to use them to get one of our attention. One of his favorite games is run from/chase dad around the house, up the stairs, anywhere. I can go up and down the stairs easily. He likes to eat string cheese, bread and cuties (little clementines) but does not like eggs in any form and is still wary of cow's milk. He likes to have books read to him and and turns the pages himself. He seems to like music a lot and seems calmed by it if he's upset. He has so much personality and love and humor and we are so grateful to be his parents! We are still in awe over him-- I can't believe we created him! This big boy once resided in my tummy.

Well celebrating Luke's birthday seemed tricky when I tried planning a bit ago. His birthday was this past Monday, right after Thanksgiving weekend where we'd just gotten home from being on the road and had no groceries in the house. I thought about having a little play date but his 12 month check up was right in the middle of the day and messed with that idea. I decided that we would just celebrate it early with family. We grabbed some pizzas from Costco and I made chocolate coconut cupcakes for everyone and a special little cake for him. We invited Bryan's aunt, uncle and cousins (one with a baby Luke's age) over and of course had Grandma Sandi, Aunt Shelley, Uncle Mike and cousins Ella and Ethan there. It was a lot of fun! We basically ate dinner, opened presents and ate cake. It was simple but that's what we needed.

On Luke's actual birthday he had his 12 month check up and it was fun to show off to Dr. Miller and see how far he's come. Then he and I went out to lunch together and I bought him a cookie that he enjoyed (with a little help...). That night we went out and bought our Christmas tree and then he got to open his present from us-- a cute little scooter. He doesn't quite get it yet but he was smiling so much when his dad put him on and pushed him around.

I can't believe my little baby isn't a baby. Time seems to have gone really slowly but also flown by. I think I say that all the time on here but I always feel that way. I'm so grateful for my little family and so, so grateful for my son who I have wanted to have for my entire life. Happy birthday, Luke! We love you dearly!