Friday, May 31, 2013

Blessing day!

I hope you appreciate what is happening right now. I promised last week that I was going to post this week about blessing weekend, and what am I doing? Posting. I deserve a medal.

As you can probably guess, we blessed the boys this last weekend. (Just in case someone besides my family reads this and is like, "what?" giving a new baby a blessing is a tradition for us comparable to christening in other faiths.) And it was especially awesome because all of Mike's family came to town for it. Party time!

Here's the run-down of my weekend. Saturday, I took Mike and Katie out to the farm because Amy and Jared had already arrived the night before, then left to go wedding dress shopping with Hannah (who's getting MARRIED?!!!!!?!?!???!). BUT, on my way down the hill, I, um, got pulled over. It was terrifying. He didn't give me a ticket (either because of the two squirmy, crying babies in the backseat or because I was hysterically sobbing) but I was pretty much traumatized for the rest of the day. Good thing my mom had chocolate when I got to the dress place.

Three things I learned from helping Hannah look at wedding dresses:

1) She has the kind of figure that looks good in EVERY kind of dress. It's disgusting. Nick, you better appreciate this girl, 'cause she be good-lookin'.

2) Hannah and I have radically different taste in dresses. Mostly because she just wants a straight skirt and lace, and I'm all about the tulle and the sparkles. (Her color is yellow, and I've already decided to come to the wedding as Belle, ballgown and all.)

3) If I were to go back and do my own wedding, things would be way different. I was thinking all simple back then, but oh boy. *See above note about tulle and sparkles.

After several long hours of doing that (and also discovering that almost nobody sells cute yellow dresses), I went back to the farm to wait for all the rest of Mike's family to get there. But oh man was I tired. We had pizza and chatted and had fun and all that, but I was quite exhausted. I don't actually remember what else we did that night.

Saturday night, at approximately 3am, so I guess I mean Sunday morning, I woke up before the boys because I was all shaky-achy and discovered that I had a fever of 100.8. Awesome. Good timing, Britt. But I took some ibuprofen and that made it go down, so it was all cool.

Sunday would have gone slightly smoother if Mike hadn't had a surprise Young Men's presidency meeting early in the morning. We were still on time to church (and all three children were clean and pretty), but we only got squishy chairs because both of our families beat us there. Yeah, we're cool.

The only thing that went wrong was that Josh was really mad at me during Relief Society. See, they usually sleep for like 4 hours in the afternoon anyway, and have never needed to eat at church before, so I totally wore a dress that I can't nurse in. (Also, I looked really good 'cause I'm skinny these days. I was going to put up the picture Mike took of me, but he forgot to tell me to put those hanger ribbon things back in my cardigan, so no cigar.) But Josh decided at the beginning of Relief Society that he wanted to be awake, and therefore threw a fit. So I spent the last hour of church walking around outside (in my 5-inch heels) because he started yelling whenever I even went inside the building. It's okay, though. We got to hang out with Mike's dad who was outside with cousin Bryce, who's not quite old enough for nursery.

After church we went home and all changed out of our pretty clothes so I could feed the boys. Without taking a single picture of the little men in their blessing outfits, probably because I was slightly feverish again and therefore a total space cadet. More on this later.

After nap time, we went out to the farm where pretty much everybody we're related to was already eating dinner (I had to wake up my family to get them to go before midnight). The party was huge. It was not just for my boys, but also for Sarah's high school graduation (the night before) and approximately five May birthdays that had as yet been uncelebrated. And we sang all of our birthday songs and now my in-laws know now exactly what kind of a crazy family I come from (crazy AWESOME!)

And I did bring my camera to this event, so we got pictures of both families while we were all together. But that was mostly my mom's fault.



Then, Monday, we spent the whole day out at the farm playing with Mike's family. It was awesome. All of the able-bodied people played ultimate frisbee while I played with little people, we played games, and various siblings got father's blessings. We stayed out way too late and were rather strung out and emotional by the end, but it was worth it. We finally carried Katie's unconscious carcass home around 11.

And then we went places and did things Tuesday and Wednesday, so yesterday was the first day we had to just snuggle on the couch and watch movies and recover from the weekend. But I did do two productive things.

First, I realized that Katie totally had a hair-in-the-face problem. So . . . she got her first haircut! Just the bangs, you understand. (Like I would cut off any if those curls when I'd been coaxing them along for so long!) And for trying to cut hair on a kid who is incapable of holding still for any length of time, I think I did pretty well. (Also, it looks a lot better today, when she let me brush it out all nice.)


The second productive thing I did was to finally take portraits of my sons in their blessing outfits. Because I'm a space cadet mom and forgot on Sunday. So I got out my sheet again and . . . ta da!






Joshy hanging out in the bull pen
And the results are rather cute. But I now have to wash the little white outfits again before I can send the borrowed one back to Mike's sister (sorry, Kliss!).

I think that's it for this time. Maybe I'll start a new sticky note for next time. Happy June! (Well, almost.)

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Six-week Photo Shoot

My boys are six weeks old today. No more words. Just pictures.











(Okay I lied, there are words: Sarah gets a picture because she was an awesome photographer's assistant.)







Stay tuned for next week when I blog about blessing weekend!

Friday, May 17, 2013

Don't Eat Josh!

Any of you guys ever play "Don't eat Pete!" as a kid? Mike and I both did. If you didn't, it involves somebody eating candy until everybody yells "Don't eat Pete!" at them. It was one of my favorite family home evening activities. (Also the thimble game, but that's another story.)

Well, at five weeks old, my boys still sleep the best and act the happiest when they're all snuggled in together. And occasionally one of them will get hungry or something, and not be able to get his binky out of his hand and into his mouth. So, he'll turn to the closest thing to his face and start gnawing on it--usually his brother's head. And guess who is most often the guilty one in these situations? Pete. (Hehe, I just love it.)

It also distresses the big sister quite a bit. Peter starts chewing on whatever part of Josh is closest (head, fingers, nose, etc.) and Katie notices and runs over yelling, "Don't eat Josh!" I usually start cracking up, but mostly because I'm so sleep deprived that even breathing is either hilarious or tragic.

As I mentioned before, the boys were five weeks old on Wednesday. They're totally not newborns anymore. But now that the boys are a rather established part of our family, I almost feel like life could be back to normal. Therefore, this is a sticky-note post. (Yay!) Did you like how I included one of my anecdotes as an introduction? Oh, but I have more. And maybe pictures if I can remember to get out my technology (you know, like the memory card from my camera or the hard drive where I keep all my pictures because the laptop is unstable).

Here goes. There are a lot of them.

Funny Things Katie has Said

(To her gummy bear vitamins) "You're not a real baby, you're a fancy baby! Come on, baby. Let's go home and eat a lion."

(After the boys' cords fell off) "Look! My brothers have normal bellies! And they have big fuzzy heads!"

(See if you can recognize this song) "Little bunny poo-poo, I don't want to see you scooping up the forest . . . um . . .and bopping on the head!" (This is funny because otherwise, she totally doesn't have trouble with Fs.)

"Not in Spanish! Read it in normal person!"

"Nice to eat you!" (After we explained that it's "meet," not "eat", she does it now with her mischief face on.)

"No, you can't love me! I'm dangerous!"

(After watching Arthur) "Mommy! Arthur's teacher is mean! He's Mr. Ratbird!"

(Wearing her fairy wings) "I can fly through the air! I'm flying to Albertsons!"

"Okay, Daddy. I'm going to unlock your head and get somebody out. Oh look! It's a big walrus!"

Conversations Worthy of Note

Katie: I like airplanes! Can I come?
Me: Katie, are you going to be my daredevil and teach the brothers how to get into trouble?
Katie: Yes, yes I am.

(When I was upstairs and Katie was down)

Me: Katie, what are you doing down there?
Katie: There's a spider! Mommy, what do spiders eat?
Me: Little bugs, why?
Katie: What do little bugs eat?
Me: Leaves and grass.
Katie: What does leaves and grass eat?
Me: Dirt and sunshine.
Katie: Oh, okay.
Me: Katie?
Katie: . . .
Mike: I think she wants to keep the spider as a pet.

See what I mean? I've been stocking up on cute things Katie has said. So I kind of didn't tell you the whole boring story for each one.

However, now I think I'll tell you about some of the differences between my boys.

First, Josh is still noticeably bigger when you lift them. Peter is a long, skinny baby like Katie always was, but I have to clean the lint out of Josh's fat rolls. Little chunk. Don't get me wrong, Peter is totally gaining on him and now has cheeks to rival the best of them, but he's still skinnier.

Peter has a rather normal baby cry, complete with high-pitchedness. Josh? Well, he's got more of a roar. It's very manly. Also, while Peter gives out warning shrieks when he's getting distressed, Josh goes from happily calm and asleep to total freak out in about 4 milliseconds.

Okay, last one. If they're snuggling together and I'm busy doing something else (like, I dunno, worrying about my 2-year-old) and one of them gets sad, the other will notice. If Josh gets sad and starts crying, Peter will either put his arms around him and snuggle (it has happened multiple times) or fling his arms around and punch Josh in the face. Yeah. But if Peter starts crying, first Josh looks quite surprised, and then he wriggles around until he's face-to-face with his brother, then starts furiously licking his face. And somehow, Peter likes it. He calms right down. Weird little puppies.

Now, because I know the real reason you all get on my blog, I will put up some pictures of the last month. You're welcome.

Here's Peter at 1 week old.
Here he is at 1 month. Hello, cheeks.

Here's Josh at 1 week.
And here he is at 1 month.







All three kids at once means somebody's gotta be uncomfortable, right?





And that's our life. So, the boys just woke up while I was doing this and now Katie's trying to plug in two binkies at once. Gotta run.