My New Best Friends

No, not Miles. He's great and completely adorable and at the top of my list, but my new best friends are:
The Swing
and The Playmat. Seriously. I volunteered to bake all the pies and rolls for Taylor's family's Thanksgiving which includes 17 people. I did this without thinking that maybe that would be hard with a 6 week old not completely in love with long naps. So yesterday when Miles woke up from his morning nap after just 30 minutes and I was in the middle of pumpkin pies, in desperation I threw him in the swing. And amazingly, he sat there staring at me for a while and then went back to sleep... and STAYED asleep another 2 hours. MIRACLE!

and he loves his playmat too. I try not to leave him there very long though for fear his eyes might get stuck in their "wide-eyed" look. I know, you don't believe me, but look- here's 2 more pictures for proof. I took a total of 5 of him on the playmat and I really could have used them all.

You try convincing Taylor to stop calling him Bugsy.

And these are my other 2 best friends: Isabella and Sophia, Taylor's little cousins. They've been in town since Saturday. Isaac loves Isabella and has been following her around like a puppy. He's even started ordering her around "mum" (come). And Ethan loves Sophia. Amazingly they're happy to be with the boys and have been really sweet with them so it's been nice to have friends to entertain them while I bake.

Ethan's Preschool Class Picture

Couldn't resist posting Ethan's cute picture. Next picture day I'll remember to think about which shirt he chooses- oh well, at least his hair got combed beforehand and that's saying a lot these days! All three of his teachers are native Spanish speakers from different countries so that he hears their different accents and doesn't pick up on one in particular. He's pretty cute and often catches us off guard with what he already knows. Isaac is also picking up on a few phrases and now says "guino" instead of penguin (penguino in Spanish) and "dios" for adios. The one word of Ethan's that really cracks me up is gracias. For whatever reason his is SURE- ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY SURE that you say it glacias- not gracias. It's hilarious, especially since no amount of me correcting him will make him change. So glacias for reading our blog! He's also starting to talk about some of his friends by name. He's right behind James, Darwin, and Cassidy which makes me laugh since those are the 3 he's always talking about.

Entertainment on a snowy Saturday???

In DC, the snow itself would have been the entertainment and of course there would have been no point in venturing out to a store since every gallon of milk and loaf of bread would have been gone days before. In Utah, it's just another day apparently- even the local high school played their football game through the snow storm.
Since I'm always cold, we chose a warmer form of entertainment- bowling! We really missed our friends the Aunas since they were always our bowling friends in DC and it was sad that Ethan didn't have Elise to dance and play with.
Have you ever seen these things? I never had. Apparently there are enough small children in Utah that come to bowl but can't pick up a ball (6 pounds is a lot for a 22 month old). So instead an adult can set the ball up on this ramp thingy and then the kid can just push it down. Isaac LOVED it! Of course he tried almost every time to pick up his own ball and carried it a few times (freaked me out that he'd drop it on his toe).
Of course Grams was a good helper. Isaac would roll the ball off the ramp and then hold onto the bars and jump up and down. Tragically he got bored after just 3 frames and decided that the snow outside was more interesting as well as all the other places to discover in a bowling alley.

Ethan is actually getting pretty good- he even bowled a strike once. I will admit though that this picture makes him look more perfect than he really is. Usually he more dropped/rolled the ball than actually throwing it.

And this is how Miles enjoyed bowling. I wish I had a carseat and blankets like that for me! All in all a good day.

Yesterday...

...while I was frosting birthday cupcakes, I sent the boys outside to play with Oscar. Ethan has recently become fascinated with raking leaves so I gave him a rake and let him go. He ended up throwing the ball to Oscar for a while and then when Oscar was tired, he sat down like he normally does (with his ball) and refused to get up.

When I looked outside to check on them, this is what I found. Ethan thought he might be cold. Isn't that sweet. Oscar is so good to put up with the boys and they love him for it! Thank goodness we don't live close to the beach!

Bugsy

In naming Miles, I tried to pick a name that would easily lend itself to a decent nickname. Milo was my hope but it doesn't seem to be sticking. Maybe later it will. Tragically for our boys, we seem to settle on rather bad nicknames that last a long time. Ethan is still Boozer a lot and Isaac still gets called Squeaker sometimes. Miles it seems is following in the same pattern.
Anyone seen the movie Bedtime Stories? You'll understand if you have. For whatever reason, Miles seems to always have VERY wide open eyes. Not just in bright light- almost always. It's become nearly impossible for us to get pictures of him without his eyes looking crazy. I took 6 of the above picture before getting a decent one.

And I took 4 of him like this last night without getting a single one with normal eyes. They're not abnormally BIG eyes for a baby, just abnormally wide open all the time. So Taylor had started calling him Bugsy. Let's hope it doesn't stick!

Metting Elder Scott

So the picture has absolutely nothing to do with the story, but it was too cute NOT to post. Miles has recovered from last week and we're settling in nicely. Still working on the sleeping thing though so we stay in pajamas a lot these days.
Taylor's parents were out of town this weekend so we inherited their University of Utah football tickets. Ethan is a great spectator and gets into all the cheers and chants. Isaac usually doesn't care at all but this time he surprised us by watching most of the game. It helped that he had an almost endless supply of cheetos. Miles mostly slept so we had a great time and Utah had a high scoring game so it was fun to watch.
On the way out of the stadium, we ended up in the same elevator with Elder Scott. Taylor couldn't resist shaking his hand and he kindly turned and shook mine, then Ethan's, then Isaac's. What was great was that he seemed to care more about shaking the boys hands than ours. He asked Ethan if he wanted to learn a new "fisherman's" handshake and he proceeded to shake his hand back and forth like a swimming fish. Ethan just seemed confused. Then he put out his hand to shake with Isaac. Being the good 2 year old that he was, he had another bag of Cheetos in his hand so when Elder Scott stuck out his hand for him to shake, he looked at him very confused and after a few seconds handed him his bag of Cheetos. He laughed, handed them back and tried to shake his hand again. Again, Isaac handed him his Cheetos. He did it a third time before Isaac understood. We all had a good laugh. Someday they'll appreciate living in Utah and having these experiences- for now their parents are enjoying them for them.

Halloween 2009

Ethan has been counting down the days to when he could go trick-or-treating. It's been really fun to watch how excited he is. He's been telling me since last fall that this year he wanted to be Super-Why off of a PBS show. After several failed attempts at making the costume I finally gave up and just bought one. Tragically no one really understood who he was. Oh, don't worry- he was happy to tell them that he was Super-Why and since he had the cape on they assumed he was some kind of super-hero so most asked him what special power he had. I had to laugh every time he excitedly declared "Super Why has the power to READ!!!" I think we thouroughly confused our neighbors but oh well, he loved it.
Isaac wore a dog costume that Ethan wore when he was 1 as well. It took some convincing though. He really wanted to wear Ethan's dragon-dinosaur costume from last year when he saw it in the box and kept shaking his head no as I was dressing him and pointing at the other costume and roaring. Tragically I'm still bigger than he is so I win and the other costume was too big anyway.
It's funny to see how different the boys are. The first year we took Ethan trick-or-treating, he declared he was done after just 20 minutes and then he never even ate any of the candy. He really didn't want it at all. He has since decided it's fun to collect the candy and dress up and he'll eat a few pieces but he's always very polite at people's doors saying "thank-you" and "Happy Halloween". Isaac is nothing like that. Taylor says he literally had to unclench Isaac's fists at every door to make him release the extra candy he grabbed (because of course 1 piece is never enough) and then he refused to say thank you or anything else besides "bye-bye". Oh well, it is just his first time.
And you can hopefully guess who's Bert. Apparently Taylor's company is big on dressing up. So we made a quick trip to the costume store and at least found him something he could take off if needed. He agreed to wear the costume trick-or-treating and all the kids loved it. Seriously, several started following him like he was the pied-piper or something. A little scary.

Our neighborhood does this thing for Halloween. They passed out flyers inviting everyone to a Halloween parade followed by a hot dog and chili dinner. We thought it sounded fun so we joined up with the group. Sadly, the parade is really just a large mass of people walking down a few streets to arrive at the party together. No one lining the streets. No one really "watching" the costumes. And it took a half hour to walk the route and by then Isaac was begging to be picked up and Ethan was very confused why we weren't stopping to get candy from anyone. So we skipped out on the party since our kids wouldn't have been happy and we tried to go trick-or-treating. But sadly, since this was a neighborhood party, most of the homes were empty and so the trick-or-treating was less than ideal. Our next door neighbors weren't anywhere to be seen and on Sunday they told Taylor they did the neighborhood thing for 2 years and now they just drive to another town and trick-or-treat there. We may be bailing on the neighborhood too next year.
I did go along for the parade thinking it would be a nice walk and the weather wasn't bad, but I wore out before the trick-or-treating and Miles never even made it. He slept the whole time in the bjorn. Oh well, he was a cute zebra at home. His costume even has a little detachable tail that I forgot to get a picture of. And he christened the outfit in true form- peeing on it so I had to change him out of it. I guess he wasn't really in love with it.

How do I love thee?

Let me count the binkies... one, two, three, four, five, six! Have we reached a tipping point here?

Girl's Night Out

I love my Mother-in-law! I wish everyone could say that! She truly is wonderful. She started and runs a charter middle/high school in downtown SLC. She never says an unkind word about anyone- literally- no one! She's kind and loving and my boys adore her. And even though she's not a member of the church, she recognized early on that it was important to Taylor and I NOT to go out to eat on Sundays and so she goes out of her way each Sunday to make a meal for the whole family at her house so we can all be together and we're not breaking the Sabbath. It's amazing how much she tries to go out of her way to make us happy. I hope we do the same for her.
So last week she called me up to see if I was feeling up to going out for an evening. Are you kidding? I've basically been a hermit the past 3 weeks- which is fine, I have a newborn, but it would be nice to feel normal again. And Miles takes a bottle nicely.
Apparently my Father-in-law Jeff was going to be out of town Friday night so my Mother-in-law Sonia asked him to get some of the company tickets to the Jazz game and off we went. It would have been a great night by itself and then guess who showed up to sing the National Anthem. I guess I shouldn't be surprised since it is Utah, but MoTab came to sing. THE ENTIRE CHOIR! It was amazing- you should have seen all of them file in and then they were so loud they didn't even need microphones. Truly powerful and inspiring!
The rest of the game was great and fun to watch and my mother-in-law was great company. Don't feel too bad for Taylor being left home alone with the 3 boys on a Friday night- he got to go with his dad to a Jazz game Monday night while I held poor Miles.

A Rough Day for Miles

So who knew there were so many things I could do one-handed? Okay, so the blogging is taking me a lot longer than normal, but who knew I could sort laundry, load and unload the washer and dryer (couldn't quite figure out the folding though), sweep and mop the kitchen (it helps that I used a swiffer), load a dishwasher, and make dinner (okay so it was just a frozen pizza). Who knew?

And why might you ask would someone try to do all these things one-handed instead of just putting the baby down? And the simple answer is because I just couldn't, not today- and probably not even tomorrow.

Does that look like a face you could resist? Poor Miles. He had a rough day.

Both our other boys were born in DC and both were circumcised the day we left the hospital. For whatever reason, the pediatrician here decided Miles should be a little older before doing his so today we went in for his first checkup. He's gained almost a full pound and has grown a full inch and a half in just 2 1/2 weeks. With the other 2 boys, they wisked them away to some nursery operating area and did the snipping. It was easier to pretend nothing bad was happening to them until they were returned to us swaddled and crying. So I was surprised at the end of the checkup today when the doctor declared he'd be right back with all the equipment. "Equipment" being a scary plastic board looking thing with leg restraints and packets full of scissors and surgical looking things. A nurse came in to help hold down his arms and squirt sugar-water into his mouth to calm him down. Her other job was to stick his binky in his mouth every time he cried and spit it out. I was very grateful for her being there even if she was just squirting and re-sticking the binky because he spent the whole time looking at her and I'm not sure I could have taken it if he'd been looking at me.

Let's just say it's not something I ever want to see again. They stuck him with a needle 6 or 7 times to numb the area and then started attaching scissors to hold skin down in certain places and then there was lots of sticking scissors places and lots of cutting. I did get light-headed a few times but was able to distract myself with Isaac who was watching the IPOD half the time and trying to color on the exam room walls whenever I looked away (thank heavens for baby wipes). And even after the trauma of all that was over for Miles, he had to get his heal pricked for a bunch of genetic tests. I've never witnessed one of those before either and it really was horrifying. They pricked his little heal and then spent literally 3 minutes sticking it to different parts of a test paper and then re-squeezing his heal again and again to get more blood to stick on another part of their paper. Again I have to appreciate Isaac distracting me- he played with the arm on the chair where they draw blood for a while and then he decided to type on their computer. I'm sure they appreciated him as much as I did!

They didn't give me any medication for Miles except he can have a little Motrin if I could get him to actually drink it (fat chance). With the other 2 boys, they got at least a little of the meds I was taking after labor (remember those horse-pill Motrins). So once the local anesthetic wore off, there was lots of screaming and tragically, his naturally reaction to pain is to kick his legs and pull him feet into the fetal position which just causes more pain and more tears and more screaming. He finally exhausted himself after an hour of screaming and fell asleep with me. I spent the rest of the afternoon on the couch holding his legs down so he wouldn't kick himself and rocking him so he'd keep sleeping. He was a little better this evening when he woke up but only if I held him. I don't think the Bjorn would be a positive sitting position for him so I've just been learning to do things one-handed.

The interesting part of my day has been the insights I've gained. Laying on the couch and holding him all afternoon gave me lots of time to think. Do you think it breaks our Heavenly Father's heart to see us in pain and not be able to sit and hold us all afternoon? He knows its for our own good but I'm not sure that makes it any easier for him to see. It healed my heart a little this evening to see how comforted Miles was just to be held by me. I know he's still in pain but just being held was enough for him. I'm glad I could give him that.