Thursday, January 16, 2014

Christmas

Ward Christmas Party. It was so so awesome!


Mom, dad, and Jake for dinner and cookie decorating.

Christmas Sunday.


Cheese soup at my family's Christmas Family Night


The Santa Lucia girls and Star boys
Lucy's turn to be the Santa Lucia this year.
(Side note: all the sudden I'm wishing we would've named Lucy, Lucia for the Swedish in our family. Duh! We still could call her Lucy. Oh well.)

Cousins make the best friends

Everyone in their new jammies! and Uncle Jake ROCKS!

New additions this year

Christmas Eve family of five!

The Nativity

Preface to the following three pictures. I got these Superman pjs for Jake last year and Erika found a pair this year for my dad. BUT, there was only one pair left, and it was a medium! A little "fitted", shall we say? Haha! It was sooooo hilarious!


Santa came and the children are nestled all snug in their beds.

 
 Everyone was nestled in their beds until about 1am, when this little peanut decided she needed a sneak peek at the loot. She (who has been sleeping through the night for over a month) was up for 2 hours; all smiles like this, and cooing and happy. I actually really enjoyed it, and we laid by the tree almost that whole time talking and smooching. She is the sweetest little chubs.


New backpacks!


New scooters! These are so fun, just put your feet up and turn the steering wheel back and forth and you're off!

It was a really nice Christmas, I can't believe how much fun it is to have kids at Christmas, I thought there could be nothing better than being a kid at Christmas when I was little, but now I know my parents were having all the fun! Can't wait until next year!

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Catching up (SUPER LONG)

Whoa, this third child is sucking the life out of me! No, shes actually pretty mellow and we've gotten into a nice groove, but somehow blogging has fallen off the list of things to get done. Since I'm no journal keeper, I do like to have this to look back on and one day print into a book of sorts.

Here's a semi-short (haha) update on what we've done in the last few months (mostly in pics, because if there's one thing I'm good at, its taking LOTS of pictures. Just ask my hard drive) :

Lucy took part in her first Primary program. She did great saying her part by memory and entertained the entire ward with her dramatic singing. For reals, I had people coming up to me telling me they watched her the whole time. She was that kid.


 We celebrated Halloween. and they girls were witches. We went trick-or-treating at Grandpa Spjute's work and went back to their house for chili that I made. After dinner we went to see grandma-great and show her their costumes. Luckily the girls aren't old enough yet to know about real trick-or-treating. I will let them be ignorant for as long as possible.

 Millie got chubbier and baby Tate was born!! BCF!! Best cousins forever!

For my 30th birthday, Johnny threw me a surprise murder/mystery dinner party with some of our friends. I had never done one and it was a blast! I was the murderer, which seemed unfair since I was the birthday girl and all...

Thanksgiving came and with it brought sickness to our house. Well, really the sickness hit before. Lucy was sick starting the Saturday before Thanksgiving and finally felt better by Tuesday. By Tuesday night, Jenna was heading downhill and Wednesday I knew she was destined for the croup. She has a tendency to get it. I tried to beat it to the punch by getting her into urgent care and getting steroids for it, but alas, she was really sick and completely missed all festivities except a couple hours at the Waites until her wheezing and pale skin got so scary we went home where she stayed in bed for the next 3 days.
At the Waites before Jenna's health took a nose-dive.
Johnny's 2 brothers were in town for the holiday. WE barely got to see them :(

I went to Thanksgiving dinner at my sister Sherstine's house (it was AWESOME!) and Johnny stayed home with Jenna. It was great, but I could barely enjoy it without Johnny and worrying about Jenna. It was the worst!

Heidi and Randy got hitched last month!!

Pie eating contest. I think Gavin won.


Face-timing with aunt Ann.
Millie snuggling with grandma-great












Sassy And ready for church! Maybe a bad combo...


Liv got baptized! Lucy thought it was pretty cool


Millie is growing like a weed and the girls are just loving having a baby around to dote on and laugh at.


Millie found her fist! And she loves it
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Still can't believe I have 3 kids. Whoa.

Ok, I can't finish up on Christmas right now, Millie is crying. Hopefully it will happen sooner rather than later!


Monday, October 28, 2013

Lucy turns 4

Lucy-goose turned 4 years old on the 10th! Since I had just had Millie 5 weeks before and things were still pretty hectic, I was in mood to plan her a big party with her friends. Luckily, I just didn't mention it and she was perfectly happy to have all her cousins, aunts and uncles, and grandparents over to celebrate.

The night before her birthday we went to Krispy Kremes for her traditional birthday donuts! Grandma and grandpa Waite came with us again, which is always a treat.


Lucy is such a good girl. She is so good to her sisters and is really helpful with Millie. She will totally feed her a bottle if I'm needing to get dinner started or something (which has proved to be a lifesavor more than once).  She is helpful and happy most of the time.

Lucy is one of the most creative kids I know. She is very imaginative. She can play for hours with just a little doll and nothing else. Everything is very dramatic in her playing, someone's always getting captured or rescued. She thinks up the wildest things and I find it really entertaining to just sit and listen when she's playing. She's pretty good to let Jenna play with her, but Jenna doesn't always go along with everything like Lucy would like. That's good for Luc though, she's learning to compromise, as hard as it can be sometimes.

I'm learning more what it means to "become like a little child" through Lucy. She says things sometimes that make me realize how thin the veil is for children. Just the other day she said "when you and daddy got married I wasn't here, I was in heaven, but I watched through the fog, there was a little hole and I could see the earth, and the temple, and you and daddy got married and lived happily ever after for lots of days."  Where does stuff like this come from? Her prayers can be so sincere at times too.

She loves her sunbeam class and is learning a lot from her awesome teacher Sister Koyle.
She's given 2 talks in primary and I'm proud to say she did both by memory. When I was  a kid it was expected to memorize talks and our part in the primary program. That seems to be quite rare these days. Well, my kids will be the exception then! Lucy will be in the primary program next week and already has her part memorized. I think kids can do a lot more than parents give them credit for, all they need is a little push.

Lucy LOVES her cousins. We are lucky to live by all of them on my side and they really are her best friends. She would jump off a cliff if Livia told her to. Anything Liv does, she does. No questions asked. It's a good thing Liv is such a good girl or I might be worried. She loves when her Waite cousins come into town as well and wishes she could see them more.

Lucy is learning so much. She can write her name, knows sounds of and recognizes the whole alphabet. I swear she remembers everything. She'll bring up stuff that happened a year ago, that I wouldn't remember if she hadn't brought it up. It's really crazy. For instance, when Lucy was 2 we went to Target one night and on the way out got some popcorn and then went to look at Christmas lights. When we got to the neighborhood, we let Lucy climb on my lap in the front seat so she could see better. Well, just a few months ago we were at Target and got popcorn. The girls were eating it in the car on the way home and Lucy said "remember that one time we went and watched the lights with popcorn?" It took me a minute, but I realized she was talking about that time we went looking at Christmas lights. Not only was she only 2 years old at the time, but it had been almost 2 years ago and she remembered!

We love having Lucy in our family, she is hilarious and makes us all laugh all day long. Happy birthday little girl!








Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Staying BUSY

Things have been a whirlwind since Millie arrived. Oh yeah, I had a baby! Can't believe I haven't posted about her yet. To my credit, I do have a private blog that I write on, more like a journal, and I wrote down the birth story over there. It's suuuuupppeeerrr long, so I don't think I'll post it here. Long story short, after being a full week over due, I had a relatively short and painless labor and delivery, (hooray for that!) and out popped our third beautiful girl. We named her Millie Jane. She shocked us all, weighing in at a whopping 9lbs. 11oz.! Holy huge baby! Over a pound bigger than my other girls, 2 pounds bigger than Jenna! Adjusting to three kids under the age of 4 (Lucy turned 4 last week) was a little rough at first. It doesn't help that like every other baby I've had, milk supply was once again an issue. That always stresses me out when all I want to do is be able to feed my baby, but can't. Once I mourn the loss of breast feeding things always start looking up and we are getting into a groove as a family of 5. Millie turned 7 weeks old today. She is such a sweetie and adored by her sisters. Life is crazy and fun!