Can you see it?

A is holding her head up so well on her own now that I decided to try out the Bumbo last Thursday. She loved it! She really loves sitting up right now. When we're holding her or she's laying down she'll lift her head up to let us know she wants to sit. It's so cute and I love the little ways she communicates with us right now.
I love that she's still so teeny but getting bigger too. We moved her up from new born to 0-3 months size clothes last week. We are also taking her to church now (but not letting anyone hold her yet) and she's done awesome and pretty much sleeps the whole time. It's funny to me how many comments we get that "she looks like a little doll!" But my favorite is when people say, "She looks just like her daddy!" And the general consensus is that she does look like D. Can you see it?

Darling baby D

And cute me as a baby :)

Overwhelmed.

That is how my sweet hubby has been feeling the last few weeks. He has seriously been so busy and pretty stressed, but I think things are slowing down a little bit now. Thank goodness! He has 3 callings in our ward (not really sure why...we seriously have plenty of people to fill the positions). And not only does he have 3 callings, but they're all pretty major callings: 2nd counselor in the young men's presidency, scout master, and gospel doctrine teacher (it's my fault he still has this one though--they asked if he wanted to be released from teaching Sunday school when he was called into the YM presidency but I wasn't ready to teach on my own yet so I told him he had to keep teaching with me). He never complains though. He is that wonderful! He just gets super busy at times.

Even before he was called as the scout master, D was pretty much starting up the scouting program in our ward from scratch because not much had been done to get the program rolling forward. But now that he's the official scout master in the ward he completed a HUGE accomplishment this last week. He organized and held our ward's first court of honor! Granted, it's a fairly new ward (about 5 years old) and we don't have very many young men, but it's sad for the boys that no one has ever organized one for them before. D seriously did an AMAZING job!! Several leaders made the comment that D is the perfect man for this calling in our ward. And I agree 100%! The boys were so happy and quite excited to be recognized for their scouting accomplishments in front of their parents and other leaders. We had a great turn out considering the number of young men in our ward. I'm so glad it was successful! D put SO much time and effort into preparing and organizing the court of honor and I think the boys and other leaders now realize how important it is to hold one.

D teaching a popular scout song, Wadleley-Achee

He made a couple boys come up front and do it with him

The group.
This includes the old YM Pres who just moved out of the ward, and the 11 year old scouts.

Good job, sweetheart! Keep up the good work!

"I can do hard things."

It's one of my favorite motto's. I heard that quote during General Conference for our Church back in October 2008, and several things reminded me of it this morning. A sister in our ward is going through an extremely difficult trial right now and emailed me asking where I got the quote because I once shared it in Sunday school during one of our lessons. She remembered it and shared it with a couple of her friends during difficult trials of their own, who in turn have reminded her of it during her recent loss. Sister Elaine S. Dalton of the Young Women General Presidency shared it in her talk found here.

The other thing that reminded me of it was also in an email I got from my mom. This inspirational boy is in the family of one of my favorite seminary teachers back in High School. I remembered Brother Adams telling our class about his son Gabe, but it was neat to be reminded of him. What an amazing little boy! (I was trying to just embed the video, but it's not working for some reason. Click here to see the video.)

Happy Saint Patrick's Day

We hope you wore green!

Ah, warm weather!

We are so excited about the warmer spring weather we've been having and we're totally taking advantage of it! We went on 2 walks last week and we spent the day outside on Saturday preparing our garden and getting our peas in the ground. Bring on more warm weather!

A's 2nd walk with Mom & Dad (we didn't take pictures the 1st time)

All bundled up for our walk

She liked it so much she fell asleep about half way through.

Look at that strong neck!! She does really well holding her head up on her own.

Better shots of that beautiful smile

Getting the garden ready!
If there's one thing I love just as much as fresh snowfall, it's freshly tilled dirt! :)

D was almost done tilling when the rototiller stopped working...see the light patch of dirt? That's all that was left. But, being the handy-man that he is, he fixed it and was able to finish!
Planting PEAS!!! Wish us luck this time...we've planted peas for the last two years and we've only had 1 or 2 plants come out of the ground and produce pods. We think we know why now...
Because of these little beauties...Quail. They're seriously my favorite birds, but we found out from the guy at the gardening store that they eat the pea plants just as soon as the come up. Those little stinkers.
So we took some extra measures this year and covered the peas with chicken wire. Those delicious little plants better come up this time!! D has already babied those seeds like crazy!
Our beautiful rows of peas! Like I said...they better come up!!
We bundled A up for being outside, and she slept pretty much the entire time. Little cutie.
The sun came out after a while and it got a little toasty. I think she stayed pretty cozy though since I unbundled her a bit but kept her shaded from the sun.

Also, we took her in for her 2 month appointment today. I still can't believe she's 2 months!! I think it's pretty hilarious that she's two months old and still wearing newborn clothes. We'll probably have to move her up a size soon though. She got her shots today (I left the room while Daddy stayed with her) and she's been having a little bit of a rough time since then. Poor thing. D doesn't want to take her back for her 4 months shots now. This is the most we've heard her cry in the 2 months we've had her! And the first time we've seen tears. Wish us luck to get through the night!

A's 2 month stats:
Weight: 9lbs 5.5oz (15%)
Length: 22 inches (37%)
Head: 36cm (1%)
(She's still smaller than my baby brother was when he was born!
Just barely though.)

3-15-11 Update: We survived the night! She actually did really well once D got her to calm down. She slept from about 10:00pm-9:30am, only waking up to eat twice. Way to go, A!

Pray for Japan

My heart is literally breaking with the news of the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan. The horror keeps repeating itself over and over in my mind and can't help but imagine myself in their situation. Please. Pray for Japan. They need all the prayers and help they can get right now.

100% Perfect

If you haven't picked up on it yet, I'll say it again. I absolutely LOVE BEING A MOM to this SWEET LITTLE ANGEL OF A BABY who is sleeping so peacefully in my arms at the moment. (I think I'm getting pretty good with my one-handed typing, even if I have to look at the keyboard the whole time.) It's so hard for me to believe she's going to be 2 months already tomorrow. Holy smokes!! She's seriously the sweetest thing ever, and such a great baby! She's so mellow and happy about 90% of the time. Granted she is a baby and does get fussy at times but she hardly cries at all. She's really starting to coo a lot when I talk to her and I love the things she tells me about her day :) She has been so full of smiles lately that my heart melts about 20 times a day when I see her grinning at me. She loves to snuggle and be held all the time, but I honestly love it and I'm trying to soak in and remember every second of it since I probably won't have the chance to snuggle and hold our other kids as much as this when they come along.

So, since I'm having such a wonderfully perfect day with my darling little sweetheart, I thought I'd share some pictures with you that I took the other day trying to capture her adorable little smile. I hope it makes you smile too! (Sorry some of them are fuzzy.)

Not quite her full smile, but so cute anyway!

I love the little dimples she gets on her upper lip when she's working on a smile :) And I love that she has no neck. Cute little nugget!

I caught the beginning of a sneeze! Bless you, baby girl!

Still not her full smile but I love this picture!

Our darling little munchkin at 8 weeks

P.S. We also wanted to wish a VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my awesome BFF who is currently oceans away from us. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TRACE! We love you!

A Weekend of White Dresses

This past weekend was an eventful one for our family. The most significant to us, of course, was the opportunity to have Darwin give Aurora a name and a blessing at church. Darwin gave an absolutely beautiful blessing, and we were so very blessed to have so many family members and friends there to support our little family of 3. It was a wonderful experience. The day got kind of chaotic (although still enjoyable) so we didn't get the pictures taken that we really wanted to, but at least we got a few. (Thanks, Channing, for taking pictures for us!) We'll take pictures of Aurora in her blessing dress later. Thanks again to Grandma D for making such a beautiful heirloom dress!! We LOVE it! And thanks to all our family members who came and helped so much with food and setting up and everything else. You're all wonderful!! We love you!

The best family shot we got yesterday. Good enough, I suppose. Aurora was pretty exhausted by this point and fell asleep in my arms right after we took this picture. Poor thing.

The other white dress:

Aurora's cousin, Emma, was baptized on Saturday. I seriously can't believe she's old enough to be baptized though because she was 2 when we got married...time sure flies! Congratulations, Emma! We're so proud of you!
Because we had such significant things going on this weekend we had several family members come into town from out of state who hadn't met Aurora yet:

On Friday Aurora got to meet her great-grandparents who flew in from New York. Thanks again for making the trip out here, Omie and Grandpa! We love you!

We're so glad you came out too, Aunt Georgiana!

And a very proud Uncle Tayton. I think he likes her ;)

And here's another random one of Aurora just for kicks because I love that little face so stinkin' much!!!
P.S. Thanks to everyone for your tips and encouragement to my last post. We're back to pumping and bottle feeding because after 2 days of trying she decided she didn't even want to try to latch on any more. She just cries the whole time and the frustration isn't worth it. We'll stick with our other routine and just get over our jealousy :)

UPS & downs...needing some encouagement.

To start off let me say that I love, LoVe, LOVE being a mom! I told my mother-in-law the other day that I'm seriously living my dream job right now and loving every second of it! Who wouldn't love hanging out with a beautiful princess everyday? Seriously. Since our little one has joined our family we've had LOTS of big "ups" moments and luckily only one down to be honest...my current nemesis: BREASTFEEDING.

I've wanted soo bad to succeed with breastfeeding our little one because I know it's what's best for her. Before she was born I read several breastfeeding books and attended a breastfeeding class. But, she never really got the hang of latching on, even with a nipple shield. Then at about 2 weeks old she decided she really didn't want to breastfeed and would fight me the whole time I'd try to feed her--not to mention she wasn't getting much food because she wouldn't eat. So, I made the decision to pump my milk and feed it to her in a bottle. Not only have I just been pumping so she could eat, I've been using 2 hand pumps for the last month. I've been so diligent and we've really had a good routine going. It hasn't been too big of a deal because we're not out in public a whole lot. We were satisfied with our routine...until this past Sunday.

D & I decided it would be safe enough to take A to church this last Sunday because it was Stake Conference and we figured we wouldn't run into too many excited people from our ward wanting to see our new addition. And since we wouldn't be changing classes every hour we figured we'd do pretty well to keep her away from germs. She did really well to be honest. But about an hour into Stake Conference she got hungry, and since she won't take formula anymore (it was our back-up feeding plan for when we were in public) I had no choice but go to the mother's lounge and pump milk for her. It really wasn't a huge deal, but going in there to pump (being the only mom in there without a baby) made me realize how jealous I was of the other moms who were breastfeeding their babies. I honestly felt so silly being in there without my baby, pumping milk for her. I didn't feel like the other mom's were judging me, but I honestly felt jealous. I came home from Stake Conference determined to try again. Sadly that's probably the only thing I got out of Stake Conference because I was so preoccupied with keeping my new baby away from germs and keeping her quiet during her first time at church.

So, today was the day. We attempted breastfeeding again this morning, and it was a HUGE success!! Until we tried to switch sides...now she's back to fighting me every time I try to breastfeed. I know I've only been trying this again for just today, but with how well she did the first time I think it really got my hopes up that it was going to be a piece of cake. How wrong I was!! I'm trying to figure out why she did so awesome the first time this morning after nearly a month of not trying to breastfeed. I'm trying really hard to not get frustrated with myself like I did a month ago when things weren't going like I'd hoped. I guess I just need a little encouragement, and tips from successful breastfeeders would be AWESOME too. So, feel free to help relieve some of my stress and frustration over breastfeeding by leaving me some encouragement and tips! I'll gladly take them!!!