11.22.13 - 8 months!

Our sweet Savannah Belle turned 8 months old last Friday. It doesn't seem real that our baby is 8 months old.  I guess I just have to accept that reality whether I really want to or not.

At EIGHT months:
-Savannah is SO close to crawling!  She's up on her hands and knees all the time, rocking back and forth.  Or she'll straighten her legs so she's in downward dog position, and push with her toes.  It's pretty cute, but I'm still not sure I'm ready for a mobile baby!
-Even though she's not quite crawling yet, she rolls everywhere!  She can get pretty much where ever she wants to go by rolling there.
-She learned how to pull herself up to the coffee table.  She did it for the first time on November 20th.  She hasn't gotten into standing position on her own yet, but she is getting better and better every time.
-She's getting better at feeding herself finger foods and loves doing it.  She LOVES Grandma Sycamore's white bread (it's a delicious Utah brand), cheerios, Gerber puffs, and most recently--bananas.
-She LOVES to play in the tub.  As soon as we start the water and get her undressed, she almost lunges into the bathtub.  She loves to play and splash.
-She loves to be up-side-down and is getting more comfortable with us throwing her up in the air.  She doesn't love being thrown into the air all the time, but sometimes she thinks it's pretty great.
-She's always so happy and smiley.
-She LOVES when Daddy comes home, and loves to have Daddy and Aurora make her laugh.
-She's a momma's girl, and I love that she is.  I cherish the time when it's just me and Savy having some snuggle time--usually before nap time or bed time.
-She's pretty particular about her sleeping.  She's a GREAT sleeper, but loves to be in her crib with her room dark and quiet.  She has a hard time sleeping for a good amount of time away from home.  I don't blame her.  I like my bed too.
-She always wakes up happy in the mornings.  I love waking up to her happy sounds and babbles.
-She shakes her head "no" really well when we're trying to give her something she doesn't want.  It's pretty cute.
-She has started to wave a little bit.  So far she hasn't done it for anyone else besides us.  She can do it though!
-We started her on formula last week because I'm starting to lose my milk.  It makes me sad.  I'm still going to stick with feeding her "mommy milk" as long as I can, but we're supplementing with formula now.  I'm glad she takes it really well and that she's finally taking a bottle!  Good news for those cousins who babysit for us all the time :)
-She's getting more chatty and babbling a ton now.  I love that she says "ma-ma" and even "mom" the most.
-She loves to pull Aurora's hair and takes the opportunity any time Rori's head gets close to her little fingers.  Silly girl.
-I guess she likes hair in general.  She likes to play with and/or pull mine when I'm nursing her.  She seems to especially like playing with my hair when it's wet.  She always tries to eat it--but don't worry--I don't let her.
-Her personality is developing more and more.  She's still our little sweetheart and such a precious little thing.

She rolled herself into this corner--but she was able to get herself out of it too!

We finally bought a high chair off KSL for $25.  No more sitting in the Bumbo to eat. It was so worth the drive to Bountiful.

Getting ready to start crawling!

And she's a pro-roller in the meantime.

Our beautiful brown-haired baby
She was pretty wiggly and uncooperative for her 8 month photo shoot, so I had to take lots of pictures trying to get a good one.  I got several cute ones though and I love that you can start to get a sense of her personality a little bit in these pictures.

 

She loves to play with the doorstops

She doesn't like to wear bows on her head.  Stinker.

Trying to pull it off again as soon as I put it back on :)

Playing with her big sister

They like to wrestle

BFFs!

Aurora still asks to hold Savannah.  It's funny because they're really almost the same size--Aurora's just taller.  They're only about 6 pounds apart right now.  Savy weighs about 19 pounds and Aurora is around 25 pounds :)

Savannah's usually a pretty good sport to put up with her sister.  It makes me a little nervous sometimes when Aurora tries to pick Savannah up though.
I also think it's fun that they seem to look more like each other the older Savannah gets.
We love you, Savannah Belle!  Happy 8 months, babe!

November

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!  I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and that you were able to spend it with family, or really awesome friends if you didn't have the chance to be with family :)  I love Thanksgiving and the opportunity we all have to be grateful for all of our blessings (although we should be grateful every single day!).  I'm so grateful and so blessed to have such wonderful family and friends who love me and support me in all I do.  I could go on and on about my blessings, but that's not really the purpose and intent of this post, although it would be great to do!

I'm finding myself with less and less computer time to do the things I want to do because I'm spending the computer time I get doing the things I need to do, and that's perfectly okay.  It just means I'm getting behind in my blogging again.  Oh, well.  We really didn't have a whole lot going on this month to blog about anyway, so I'll do my best to get as caught up as I can in this one post.  Here goes. . .

Aurora:

Believe it or not, this little girl of ours actually has enough hair to do braided piggy-tails!! Woot! Woot!  This is one happy momma!  Although I've only done it once, and it came out within a couple hours, but it was totally worth it.  Look how cute those braids are!!!  You usually can't tell how long her hair really is because of her cute curls.  I LOVE her curls but these braids were a huge stepping stone for us!

Rori helped me a lot in the kitchen this month.  I love that she loves to help me cook.  Thanks for the cute apron, Nanny!  She loves to wear it when she helps me in the kitchen.  She was so happy I let her lick the beater when we made granola bars together.
(A little disclaimer--she doesn't like me to fix her hair most days anymore.  She either tells me she wants it in her face or she wants it "in the breeze".  Thus, her messy hair in most of the pictures below.  Funny girl.)

I tried to get her to help me gut some of our pumpkins to bake pumpkin seeds--one snack she LOVES to munch on--but she wasn't too fond of the slimey pumpkin guts.  She wanted me to take over pretty quickly, but I'm glad she tried something new :)


One of the rare days she let me fix her hair, she also wanted to put on some makeup.  I gave her one of my eye shadows I don't use and let her go to town with it :)

I told her that her makeup was so pretty and shiney and she said, "It's not shiney, Mom.  It's HAPPY!" (In her silly high-pitched voice she does)

Applying it to her chin.  I guess it needed some "happy" makeup too :)

Another one of the new things she does is making lovely faces when I'm trying to take pictures of her.  She thinks she's so silly!  You'll see more of these to come...

Dar did a demonstration at work with dry ice last week and brought the extra dry ice home.  Rori thought it was pretty cool stuff!


The story of the band-aid: Dar and I went to the temple last Saturday and Grandma and Grandpa came over to watch the girls for us.  While we were gone Rori hit her head on her bed and got a band-aid to help her feel better.  Well, she wouldn't let us take the band-aid off.  So, it stayed on from Saturday afternoon until Tuesday night.  I had to sit on her to pull it off--I made sure it got nice and wet in the tub before hand though.  She had a nice red spot on her forehead from the band-aid being on for so long.  I hope she learned a lesson.


Sisters:
I'll save Savannah's pictures and updates for her 8 month post.  So, here are some of the girls together.  I love that they love each other so much!  Aurora loves her baby sister and Savy just adores Aurora.  We're so blessed to have such great kids!
They love to snuggle together in the mornings.  It's pretty cute.  Two of Savy's favorite things are Aurora and her bunny.  They make her happy :)

Aurora loves to play in the pillows on our bed.  Savannah gets in on the action sometimes too.

A few weeks ago we spent some time outside in the really warm November weather watching Daddy help Grandpa clean up a great big Cottonwood tree.  Aurora found a grasshopper and had a great time watching it jump around in the grass.

She also loves to play with sticks.

Savannah wasn't so sure what to do with the grass.



This is my favorite.  They were so cute with their snuggles a couple days ago so I took lots of pictures.



Such cute, happy sisters!

So precious.

I guess that basically sums up November, except for our holiday stuff.  I'll post those later.
Happy November and Happy Thanksgiving!

A new chapter.

I have officially joined the world of working moms.  Kind of.

I've been really blessed to recently get hired on with vivint.  The best part, and huge deciding factor to even take the job, is that I get to work from home.

I honestly wouldn't do it otherwise.

It's a must and an enormous priority to Darwin and I that I stay at home to raise our children, and I have been so blessed to be able to do so.

I know that I make a huge contribution to our family by being a stay-at-home-mom, and I really love that I'm able to be home with our girls full time.  It's the best thing ever!! [Most days, that is :)]  It's nice that I now have the opportunity to contribute a little bit monetarily too though.

I've been working from home for about a month now, and I'm honestly learning to love it.  I do a minimum of 15 hours a week, and sometimes it's super hard to get my 3+ hours in a day, but I've been able to do it so far!  I do most of my work while the girls are sleeping--they don't let me work otherwise.  Days when they have two hour naps at the same time are even more wonderful to me now than ever before!  I appreciate the days when I don't have to stay up late working to get my time in.  I enjoy my sleep too much.

I feel really blessed that jobs have always somehow found me.  I really haven't ever searched very long or hard for a job.  This time, I was referred by our Young Men's president at church who Darwin has worked with in the Scouting program for 3+ years now.  I still feel extremely grateful to him that he thought of me, referred me, and gave me this great opportunity to work for a great company.

I feel so blessed.  It's hard and challenging.  And it's already so rewarding.  My manager told me on the phone the other day that she's so glad I'm "getting it" and that she's so glad she hired me.  It's nice to get that feedback :)  She's so patient with me and been so great to work with already.  I've learned a ton from her in the last few weeks.

I'm so grateful I'm enjoying this new chapter.  I'm  so very grateful for Darwin's love and support, and also grateful for my awesome cousins who watch our girls all the time for us to have our date-nights to the Temple and so I can go to into the office for meetings when I need to.  Alice and Martha, you're both so great and angels to take our girls on a monthly-basis (sometimes more).

SO, what do I do?  I'm working in vivint's field service billing department and do billing-type stuff.  I'm joining a team of about 15 employees and all are moms with kids and we all work from home.  We're a unique department in the company but really effective at what we do.

It's great to have this opportunity, and a big answer to our prayers.

Just in case you missed it.

Our cute girls in their Halloween costumes:

Savy the Spider

(Her friend, Mia, had the same costume but we didn't end up getting a picture of them together.  Thanks, again, April!)

Savy the Zebra/White Tiger
I'm still not really positive which one it was supposed to be, but it was cute either way :)  Thanks, Chels!

I didn't end up getting a picture of just Aurora in her costume but tried to get some of the girls together.  This is as good as it got.  Silly girls.
(Savy kept trying to eat Rori's dress)


I love that Aurora loves her baby sister so much!

Aurora getting annoyed with Savannah trying to eat her dress

Aurora had enough

 Happy Halloween!
Until next year . . .