Attack of the Girls!

Remember when these two got Nate all dressed up as a princess?  

Well, now it's Jason's turn...

9 Months!

Jason,

You are 9 months old!  Time just keeps on going and you just keep on growing.  I am so grateful to be your mom.
New things this month...

You are improving every day on self feeding.  Once you discovered that you liked the little morsels placed in front of you, you made sure to train those crazy arms that flail around and taught them to focus a little.  Things are getting much better now.

You are crawling.  Today was actually the first time you left a room though.  Normally you are content to play wherever you have been placed.  But today, you decided to follow the sounds of the voices in the other room to find friends.

Sleeping...it's a pretty big issue.  It used to just be a slight annoyance.  Now it's an ISSUE.  You will not go down without a fight.  Like a four hour fight.  Once you fall asleep, you are down for a solid 9 hours, but you haven't been going to sleep before 11:30 for days and days.  Rage!

Despite the sleeping part, you are the happiest baby around.  I love walking into your room in the morning or after a nap and watching your face light up with joy when you see me.  You wiggle your little body around and wait for me to pick you up.  I love that you can be in the middle of a sad cry and you can't help but smile back if we make eye contact with you with a smile. 
Dad teases you a lot.  He can break your heart with his "rarrr!", but you are quick to smile again when he changes a grumpy face to a happy one.

We had a pretty crazy scare last weekend when you and your car seat fell off the shopping cart onto the concrete (don't judge!) at Sam's club.  It was terrifying and I am grateful you are okay.  I learned lots of lessons from that.  The most important one is that I love you more than ever.  Even on these crazy nights when you won't go to sleep, I still love you.  I love your happy faces and I love your sad faces.  You bring me so much joy.  I love you when you are happy and I love you when you are crying.  I am just so grateful for you.  The you that you are.  Thanks for being my boy!

Love,
Mom

If you want to check out the others at 9 months...click HERE.

Conversation in the kitchen

Allie was at the kitchen table painting with water colors.  Here's the conversation...

Allie:  I really love to paint.

Me:  You could be an artist!

Allie:  No.  Remember I want to be...(thinking hard)

Me: (trying to help her out, I listed all the things she has told me she wants to be) an astronaut?

Allie: No

Me: A scientist? 

Allie:  No

Me:  A mom?

Allie:  No.  It was something I was thinking about yesterday.

Me:  I don't know what you were thinking about yesterday.

Allie:  I remember!  A missionary!

I laughed.

Cozy Boy

Allie and Jake are always trying to make cozy little "nests" for Jason to hang out in.  He is such an easy going boy that he doesn't mind a bit.  He lets them cover him in blankets and is generally happy to stay.  

p.s. don't mind the naked Nate in the picture.  He just can't stand to stay in one place for too long.  That explains why he spends most of his mornings half dressed.  Sometimes I just don't want the fight of getting him dressed.  He is also eating cereal out of the bag...out of the kitchen.  I have obviously changed from the mom I was when Jake and Allie were little.  Nate has his own set of rules for sure...

Allie

I've told you before that Allie has a hard time falling asleep.  I can send both kids to bed and Jake is asleep in minutes while Allie tosses and turns and eventually comes out to tell me she can't sleep.  On nights that she doesn't come out, I find evidence of her sleeplessness when I go to check on her later.  Toys will be strewn all over the room, or there will be countless drawings stacked up next to her crayons.  I feel bad for her, but I get so mad when I find her awake in her room long after even Mike has fallen asleep.

Anyway, that's the background info, and here's the picture...

On this night, we had gotten some videos from the library and she had set herself up for a "late night".  They call it a late night if I let them watch a video before bed.  When they were younger, we'd start our "late nights" at 7 on a Friday night and Jake would be asleep before the movie ended.  Allie has started having her "late nights" alone.  When things are quiet, I just assume she is sleeping and don't know that she is watching show after show.  No wonder she has such a hard time waking up in the morning.
The thing that makes me smile about this picture is how she set herself up with a little drink of water in the corner in case she woke up thirsty.  I love this girl of mine who is so like me in so many ways...

Boating

We have been boating slackers the last few years.  We didn't get the boat out until July this year!  The kids are always begging to go, but it seems like there are always things going on and we rarely have a free Saturday.
They all love it though...

Things I don't want to forget...

Summer mornings...

Some help in the kitchen

On Sunday things were a bit chaotic around our house.  We have 1 o'clock church so when we get home we are always starving.  It doesn't matter that we never eat dinner at 4 on regular days...it just seems too long to have to wait on church days.  Jason is always starving right when we get home and Nate is delerious from skipping a nap.  So things are always a bit crazy.  On this day, Jake was jumping off the walls and I asked him to help me (rather than continually ask him to leave Allie alone).  He chopped up the potatoes...

...and Nate sampled them raw...

It's great to have some help.

Conversation in the morning

Allie was snuggling Jason on my bed...

Allie: Jason, your breath smells like puke...or yogurt. 

Me:  Nice.  Puke or yogurt?

Allie:  Yes.  Did you feed him yogurt today? 

Me:  No.

Allie:  Then it must be puke.

Smart girl?

Splash Pad

I have 2 amazing friends now that I wouldn't have had if it weren't for Sam.  Our cute babies all had HLHS, and we met because of that, but they are people I would have chosen to be friends with anyway.  Diana and I were both pregnant at the same time.  She had Merideth in July and I had Sam that following September. Then we met Lisa and she had Cale in June 2 years ago.  We have been friends ever since.  We have met at the splash pad a few times since then and let the kids play.   

 Between the 3 of us, we have 14 kids!

Our kids are all at similar ages.  Keaton and Jason are only 2 months apart (Keaton is younger), and I meant to get a picture of Christian and Nate who are only 6 months apart, but they were off playing.  

I know both of these women have helped me get through some times of grief and fear and I hope I have been a help to them as well.  I'm so grateful that they have been put in my path.  This splash pad play date has become a tradition now, so we'll have to carry it on for years.  We joked that we'd be dragging our teenagers out here so that we could all still get together.  It is so fun seeing these kids grow up and for us all to be happy.  We have great lives.  A very sad thing happened to all of us.  Something that has changed us all. But we are all the better for it.  I'd like to think that Merideth, Sam, and Cale would be glad that we are all friends and that we have good times together.  I'm glad that they brought us all together. 

False Advertising

Nate has been sadly disappointed in some of the product labels around the house.  He sees a picture on the product and thinks that's what he's going to get.  For example, the can of spaghettios that had a race car on the front had him searching the can and its contents for a long time.
And, no one could help him understand that he wasn't going to get berries from this box...

And when he came to me with this, I felt bad that I couldn't give him the grapes, oranges, and limes that he was requesting.

Sorry boy...these things aren't really covered in "chockit" (chocolate).

It's a hard lesson to learn...

4th of July Parade

We went to Star Valley for the parade.
This year, instead of riding in the poop spreader, they chose to ride in the Studebaker.  They were sadly disappointed when it broke down a fourth of the way into the parade and we all had to get out and watch from the sidelines.

This kid was awesome as usual.  He chilled in this most of the day while I chased all over with Nate.

After the parade, we went to Aunt Helen's for a BBQ.  She is always so good to us.  She had an activity for the kids.  They made containers for an egg drop and then they dropped them from Uncle Lynn's cherry picker.

Both Allie and Jake's eggs survived.  They were pretty excited about it all.

 Helen has little boats attached to chalk lines so you can reel the little boat in from the river.  Jake always loves playing with them.

Nate got plenty of motorcycle time.  Mike took Allie and Jake on a ride that went to the top of one of the mountains.  He was so proud of them both for making it through a pretty difficult ride.  They love the adventures in Star Valley.  

Guess who's crawling!

Yay Jason!  You are such a cute crawler!

For a little while, you could only crawl backward and mean mom took a few pictures of you stuck in awkward places...

But you've got it down now!  Guess we'll have to be extra careful about leaving small toys out.  You like to put all sorts of stuff in your mouth.

A four wheeler story...

The other day, I was riding with the boys up the canyon and I looked down at the cute little bodies in my arms and I wished that I had my camera.  Nate had his arm around Jason and I had my arm around both of them.  We were looking at a beautiful clear blue sky and a smattering of wild flowers on the hill side.  It was all so magical...I wanted a picture of it.  I wanted to take it from the angle of what I see every day.  My cute Nate holding on to the handlebars with his feet kicked up, or Jason's head bobbing as he started to grow sleepy.  They are memories of a daily event that I love.  I wanted to capture that.  Is it too much to ask?  I came to find out that it was.

I asked Mike to help me out.  He wasn't getting the vision of things, and as many of you know, he hates pictures anyway, so he only gave it a half-hearted try.  This is the best of what came from that. 

 Then he left, and I started taking them.  I ended up with a lot of these...

Then Nate started to get bored of sitting there and not going anywhere.

So he started the wheeler.  He knows how to do that of course...

I didn't know he could put it in gear though...and he did that.  All the while, I am snapping pictures thinking that it was cute because it tells my story (the one of our perfect daily wheeler rides).

Then he started pushing on the gas....

This was also fine because I had my foot on the brake...right?  Well, just after this picture was snapped, I found out that my foot wasn't securely on the brake and we shot across the road.  I had Jason firmly in one arm, (and luckily the camera strap was around my neck) but I had fallen back on the wheeler and couldn't pry Nate's hand off the gas.  Luckily he let go, but that also meant that I shot forward over the handlebars with Jason.  Sadly, Jason's chunky leg and Nate's body prevented us from going all the way over.  Jason's leg is still bruised from the handlebars and my wrist might never be the same.  (Kidding, but it does hurt.)  I'm not sure if Nate has learned his lesson because he still loves to push on the gas, but I know I have learned my lesson.  My foot is always securely on the brake and I haven't tried to re-create the "perfect" picture again.  That will just have to live on in my memory.