Merry Christmas 2016!

Looks like the last post here was from a year ago. Welp, it's been a great year. Merry Christmas!

And click HERE to see all past videos for your Christmas entertainment ;) !

Merry Christmas 2015!

Just you know, like 10 takes this year. Thanks to Mariah for distracting from the fact that I missed just a few of my lines hahah. Eden probably has a future in lip-syncing, she nailed her part on the first run through. Here's video number five- Christmas tradition going strong!

All About Eden

Eden is about 9 and a half months now! Oops. Another few weeks went by since I started writing this. Eden is 10 months now! She has been the biggest blessing to me and brought so much joy to our family. I realized I have not been the best at documenting her milestones, but I want to record some things about her.

Eden "woke up" when she was just a few days old and never really went back to doing the sleepy all day newborn thing. I'm glad she's generally happy while she's awake. She loves riding in the Ergo and the sling, and she has definitely been a tummy sleeper. She loved her swaddle, but we stopped swaddling her when she was about 6 months old and we moved her into her own room. Eden started sitting up around 5 months (she was never really into the rolling over phase) and I think that age is one of my favorites. It was great being able to set her down and watch her contentedly play with a toy and just observe, and know that she's safe and can't go anywhere! It's a short phase but a great one. She also learned to give kisses on demand around then and that is REALLY my favorite thing. We still get lots of Eden kisses and they are the absolute most slobbery best thing ever. 

We started solids at 6 and a half months, and she eats like a champ. She has loved everything she's tried. Her favorites have been green peas, brown rice pasta, berries, oatmeal,  pumpkin, avocado, and puffed millet. 

She started scooting around at about 7 months, and true crawling at about 8.5 months. It is hilarious watching her explore the house. She just does her own thing, crawling around getting in to stuff. She says "mama" and it melts my heart every time! She also says "dada" when Matt gets home from work and gives him big kisses. She also got her first tooth at 8.5 months, and the second one on the bottom came in right after. A week shy of 9 months she started pulling up on furniture, and now she is attempting to cruise around the furniture, and when she's feeling brave she lets go and tries (unsuccessfully) to stand. She's gotten quite a few bonks on the head from falling over. 

Eden loves finger foods and feeds herself at most meals. It's really messy and she's really happy. She takes three hour long naps a day around 9, 1, and 4, sleeps from about 7pm- 7am and still gets up to nurse once a night (sometimes more..:-/) Wearing size 12 month clothes. Seems to usually be around the middle percentiles for height and weight. After another yucky teething week last week she has 2 new teeth on the top (with what looks like two more on the way).

Learning to wave has been the cutest. She waves hi to herself in the mirror as we walk down the hallway, and she'll wave at anyone around that says hi to her.

Eden loves Mariah. And I really mean that. She gets excited to see Mariah first thing in the morning, and crawls after her trying to keep up with her. She gives her big kisses and wants to share toys with her. I am so grateful Mariah loves her just as much. They are quite a pair. 

Mariah is Three!

Wait, wasn't it just like not that long ago that I was typing "Mariah is Two!" ??

Mariah was VERY excited about her birthday. She was telling everyone everywhere for the past few months, "Hi my name's Riah. I am 2 and a half and on Otober for-eff (fourth) it is my bert-day and I will be FREE (three) and den my daddy will BA-TIZE ME!!" then we have to remind her every time that she will get baptized when she's 8....she's still working out some of the details.
(if I had more time right now I'd go through and actually edit these pics...maybe later...)

So, leading up to her birthday, Mariah had a very specific vision for her birthday party. She started talking about it more and more as the big date approached. She wanted to eat oatmeal with her friends (most important thing) and put things in it (also important) and then have birthday cake (peripheral to the oatmeal, but still necessary) and party hats (obviously). Oatmeal with friends, we can do this. So we invited all her buddies over for a birthday breakfast on Saturday morning. We had a huge pot of oatmeal, with little bowls of berries, walnuts, shredded coconut, dried cranberries, spiced pumpkin seeds, and brown sugar and maple syrup to mix in. I also made mini veggie egg muffins, strawberries with honey yogurt, we had a big bowl of bagels from our favorite bagel shop. I was hoping this is what she had been envisioning.  We also made a big carrot cake (I've made it for her birthday for the past years also) and she made her very own smaller cake all by herself too and put whatever she wanted in it and we baked it. It was weird but she ate it so whatever.

Mariah's personal special blend cake. You almost can't tell it includes yogurt, oats, strawberries, pineapple, green peas, coconut oil, cinnamon, egg, coconut flour, baking powder, salt, maple syrup, blueberries, carrots, and almond milk.

 

 Still working on getting the three fingers up!

Eden takes 3 naps a day so she was in and out for the party fun, but she liked wearing the hat!

From Two Year Old Mariah

Mariah turning three seems like as good as occasion as any to dust off the ol blog!

I've been sort of writing down Mariah's little things as I write Rebecca every week, so I'll compile some of her stories here for now.

"Got-fer" = Forgot
"Younember when?" = Do you remember when?/aka the start of every other sentence
"Magic finding glass"= Magnifying glass

Sorry it seems like my stories are all about church or the potty. They are both hot topics around here.

"MOMMY! Jesus is coming to our house TONIGHT!!"

"He is?? We better get ready!"

"Yeah he's coming at five terty o cwock! When he gets here we will play chasing games! and run around and around! and play with my toys....Oh. wait.................Not Jesus....... Daddy. Daddy is coming home tonight."

I was trying to put Eden down for a nap and Mariah kept coming in and waking her up, so I asked her really seriously to wait outside and stop coming in. She said, "Mom, just choose to be happy! Like this!" (...and mimes wiping a smile across her face)

She took her "very very most special rock ever" that she'd been carrying around for two weeks, and dragged it in a big circle all the way around the perimeter of Matt's car. Huge scratch all over. NOT COOL. so we were kind of upset. When we got in the car to go we were just driving in silence. Mariah was like, "You guys. Sorry you are fwustwated because I did a big scratch on daddy's car. I can make it better. I just get two bandaids and a bucket and I can fix it....I can hear car now it saying, "I all better! I have a scratch but I starting to feel better!"

Mariah has been really in to loudly saying "pee pee" and "poo poo" everywhere we go (FYI these are terms she adopted from her buddies, not even the terms we initially used.) It is actually embarrassing. At home I generally try to ignore it so I don't draw attention and inadvertently  encourage it, but in public I really feel like I need to respond. So we were in Mystic Pizza, and we kept trying to distract her, and I was like, "let's talk about our favorite colors. I think right now mine is turquoise." And she said, "You mean your favorite color is POO POOS??!!" 

Then another day she was playing her princess maze game on the iPad and making up stories like this, "Once upon a time there was a little pee pee and a little poo poo..." And I was like, "You know what, princesses do not use potty words like that." And she said, "Oh, okay I will teach them! And she leaned into the iPad and put her mouth right up to the princess and said, "Just go like this!: pee pee poo poo pee pee poo poo!" 

This is a constant, constant battle. Sigh.

We had stake conference, and I was singing in the choir, and when we stood up to sing Mariah was like "GO HALEY!! GOOD JOB HALEY!!!! YAY HALEY!" And from what I heard people were like "Oh how cute is that her mom?" ....nope...just her friend's sister.... hahahah. And she spent the rest of conference making a congratulatory card for Haley. So cute hahah, but what am I, chopped liver? ;)

Yoga is basically her excuse for doing anything now like climbing on furniture she's like "I'm just doing yoga!!!! Namaste!!!!!

Likewise, whenever I ask her to quiet down from banging on things with toys or utensils she always says, "I'm just making beautiful music!"

I got a scrape on my ankle and Mariah said, "oh mom, that is NOT Cute."

During the sacrament prayer in Church Mariah loudly interjected, "and bless Eden to not pull my hair!!"

Mariah told me the other day, "I am so good at watching shows and eating things!" Glad I've set reachable goals for her. Good self esteem booster.

She was in the bath for a long time "decorating" with her toys and letters.
Her favorite toys right now are, predictably, all Eden's baby toys. She takes her plastic rings and strings them on the cabinet knobs, and when Matt got home she was like, "Wook! I decorated a party for you!!"

I should've known it was too quiet, when I walked in the bathroom to find a discolored smelly mass rapidly disintegrating in a pool of water in the baby bath tub in the sink. Mariah said "I just making a treasure hunt for Big Nutbrown Hare..."  He would have been so delighted to find a hundred mushy prenatal vitamins. Great. 

I said, "Please stop hammering the walls, I need you to be obedient." she told me, "I am NOT obedient I. AM. MA-RIAH."

In church as the sacrament started, I reminded Mariah to be quiet and reverent, and Mariah said loudly in her nicest sing song voice, "Mommy I am just thinking about JESUS!!" (She confuses nice voice with quiet voice)
"That's great Mariah can you do it quietly?"
"SURE! I WILL GO AND DO!! I WILL GO I WILL DOOOO!!"

When Eden made a loud baby sound the other day, Mariah said, "Eden, stop, you sound like a boy."

Was trying to get Mariah down for a nap and she said, "It's not sleep time, it's not nap time, it's not rest time, it's not sit or stand in my crib time, I will stay awake FOREVER!!! For very long YEARS!!!"

We had breakfast at the farm (amazing) then played with the goats. After standing around them talking for awhile, she said, "Mom they are not understanding me!!"

At the first week of Joy School, all the kids learned the rules, which included a song that goes, "We never hit or kick or push our friends at nursery school..."

When I asked Mariah how Joy School went another day she said, "We never hit or kick or push...unless Lucy pinches and then you push her...."

When she was drumming with her fork on the table I reminded her that forks are for eating and if she wasn't going to eat I would need to take her fork. She said, "Mom, younember we don't take things from people."

She is extremely principled. She knows what the rules in the house are and (despite the fact that she seems to willfully/gleefully test the boundaries often) she makes sure we are all in line. all the time.

If I do anything that she interprets as being abnormal she asks me questions like, "Mama why you do this with your eyes??" [then does a dramatically long blink] or "Why did you look fast over there? like this?" [and mimics the way that I looked out the car window] or if I hum under my breath, I get, "Why you make a sound like this? DOOO DOO DOOOOO?"

So, that's been Mariah the last few months! Entertaining, exhausting, challenging, but, as always, full of life and teaching me constantly.

Sunshine

I'll catch up on blogging one day, but in the meantime, there's this. Mom life is good today. 

Eden's Birth Story

Our sweet little Eden Katherine started getting ready to come right on her due date. We didn't do child birthing classes this time, I just re-read the classics (Hypnobirthing: the Mongan Method, Childbirth Without Fear, and Ina May Gaskin's Guide to Childbirth) and listened to the Hypnobirth recordings every night for several months. The last month or so had been pretty uncomfortable, I feel like my chiropractor saved my life after dealing with some super painful SPD. I was in early labor for most of the day on Feb 4, and by the late afternoon I told Matt not to come home early, but to get ready because I was pretty sure it was baby day. After he got home, he took Mariah out on their weekly Chipotle dinner date to give me a break, then I labored at home for awhile. After Mariah was asleep, I took a bath and went through several hypnobirthing scripts. 

I told Matt to get some rest before we left for the hospital, so he went to sleep a little before 10. I called my midwife around 11pm when contractions were about 5 minutes apart, she said she would call back in an hour and check in. An hour later after pacing around the living room and walking circles around the kitchen island, contractions were 3-4 minutes apart. Looking back, this is one of my favorite memories. Just being alone in the dark living room, preparing to meet my baby, physically feeling everything fall in to place just like I hoped it would. After my midwife called back to check on the progress, we started getting ready to go to the hospital.

My friend Christina came over to stay the night and be with Mariah when she woke up. (Mariah was REALLY excited about this, we told her when she went to sleep that we were probably going to get baby sister tonight, and she had been talking excitedly for weeks about getting to play with her friends while we go to the hospital). It was starting to freezing rain as we left that night, but we were grateful this was in between major snowstorms. In the weeks before, the storms had been so bad there were travel bans and roads were closed- yikes.

We got to Hartford Hospital and checked in around 1 am, and I was relieved that my midwife Laura was there waiting for us. I was trying my best to stay calm focused on breathing, but in my mind I was worried I was totally being a wimp because it was feeling really HARD really soon! I was up pacing and walking around for a bit, until I felt like I just wanted to sit in the rocking chair. Matt was being fantastic, dutifully following the list I printed out for him of his jobs during labor (that probably sounds/is really controlling but best thing ever= I got everything I needed, expectations were set, and he didn't have to read my mind or ask me every few minutes what I wanted). Around 3 am after listening to the deep groans that barely sounded like they were coming from me, my water released, and soon after I felt like pushing. My midwife was truly amazing and skilled. She intuitively knew when to grab a cool wash cloth, when to feed me ice chips, when to ask what I needed and when to give me some space. On Feb 5 at 4:16 am, out came our beautiful Eden, fully posterior, face up ready to see the world, just like Mariah. The delivery couldn't have gone more smoothly, especially for a posterior baby.

Matt and I both went to Eden's first bath, then spent the day resting and getting to know our sleepy little infant. Mariah was happily playing at Christina's house, but I felt like it would be best for Matt to pick her up and take her home so she could spend the night in her own bed. I stayed alone in the hospital with Eden for the night, and I was surprisingly not lonely at all. It felt like the best vacation ever (minus the childbirth recovery part haha) being alone, with food being brought to me, a whole hospital staff to bring me anything I needed, peace and quiet and soaking up the newborn sweetness. This was the reward I had waited so long for! I totally felt the blissed-out smile move across my face every time I looked down at Eden in my arms.

In the morning, Matt came back and brought Mariah with him. I missed her and was so excited to see her meet her new sister. We took a few videos and a lot of pictures. I couldn't stop laughing at how messy her hair was, a leftover disheveled braid from the day before with a couple random hair bows stuck in. I guess she does need a mom ;) When I was nursing Eden, Mariah looked at me curiously, then without saying anything she crawled on the hospital bed and started munching on my bare shoulder. Then she stopped and said, "I eat mommy too." Bahahah.  It felt so GOOD to have my whole family all together!

Even now, almost 3 months later, Eden is just sweet as can be. I feel SO overwhelmingly grateful for her every day. She started smiling when she was like two weeks old, and now we are starting to get little giggles and gurgles out of her. Mariah tells her in a sing-song voice, "Oh widdle Eden we wuv you so so so much! You are so wery cute!"

My heart is so full.