Two Months

I know that time flies and before you know it your infant is a baby and soon he will be a toddler.  Well, we are now into baby stage and I must admit that I love it!  Hyrum is now full of life!  He looks at you, smiles at you and if you are lucky he will laugh when you tickle him!  The boys are thrilled that Hyrum will now interact with them.  Jacob even played little pigs with Hyrum's toes.  It was super cute!

We did go in for our 2 month checkup this week.  Hyrum is now just under 10 lbs, so he is still pretty light, but he is 24 inches long.  Yea!  He is now 2 feet tall/long.  This explains why he needs to wear 3-6 month clothes, but that they are still a little baggy on him.

We are into a pretty regular schedule.  He still sleeps between every feeding which is great for getting things done.  He also normally takes one longer nap (about 3 hours) in the afternoon which is perfect for me!  In general he just sleeps a lot which explains how he fits in all of that growing.  He normally sleeps anywhere from 8 - 10 hours in the night.  Last night he went to bed around 7:30 or 8 and didn't get up until 4:30 in the morning.  Now we just need to push that time back an hour and it would be perfect!  But I really can't complain because he went back to bed and didn't get up again until 8 AM.  As I said before . . . he sleeps a lot!

Each of the boys has their favorite activity with Hyrum.  Michael likes to hold, calm and soothe him.  He also likes it when Hyrum will 'hug' him.  He is my go to guy for help when I need to make dinner or other fun mommy activities that need to be done.  Michael has also learned to change his wet diapers.  Having an older helper is fabulous!

Joshua's favorite activity is getting Hyrum to smile and/or laugh at him when possible.  Joshua loves energy and happiness and loves it even more when it comes from Hyrum.

Jacob has taken to reading to Hyrum every chance he gets.  Jacob is really into nursery rhymes right now, so it is quite cute to listen to him read nursery rhymes to Hyrum.  Jacob likes them so much that he has started memorizing his favorites.

Life with Hyrum is different but we all love him and cannot imagine life without him.

Garden

Even though we have been enjoying a lovely drought, with lots of watering, our garden is doing quite well.  We tried a few new things this year including tomatillos, kohlrabi, beets and much more.  The tomatillos and beets are just now ripening, so we will have to wait and see if we like them or not.  The kohlrabi was great in salads and will definitely be back next year.  Our tomatoes are on fire, so we have  enjoyed tomato sandwiches almost every day.  We have also had fun making and canning salsas.  I tried to make tomato jam but I don't think I did it correctly.  In the end it just tastes like ketchup, so at least I know the boys will like it.

We also have a praying mantis living with our tomatoes that a friend brought over.  Now we have fun trying to find him-its like Where's Waldo but better!

But our pride and joy is the sunflower.  There are three of them but this one is the best and is by far the biggest thing in our garden.  We love it!



Gardening is great and we love doing it every year.  Happy gardening to all!

Happy Anniversary!

We celebrated our 12th Anniversary on Friday!  Wow, I can't believe we have being married for twelve whole years.  After twelve years we are happier than we have ever been.  We felt like our anniversary was a celebration of our marriage but a celebration of the family we have created as well, so we spent Friday night celebrating together and Saturday night celebrating as a family.

Friday night we went to our favorite restaurant in town, Landmark, and enjoyed savory crepes for dinner and a sweet crepe for desert.  We split an amazing Banana Foster crepe and let me just say that it was amazing!!  Mmmmm. . .   Afterward James took me to Target to pick out a bike!  We have always talked about how fun it would be to go on family bike rides, but I have never had a bike.  No more!  What a great present!  On Saturday we had fun figuring out how to take Hyrum on our bike rides.  I think the pictures show our best solution.  I must admit that I felt like an Asian woman riding a bike with my baby.  





My gift is one that he will have to wait for, but I am making arrangements with the owner of Landmark (the restaurant mentioned above) for James to go in and work for a night in the kitchen.  He will get to be apart of the prep and evening work in the kitchen with the chef and others.  As you know, James loves to cook and has wondered if he would like owning a restaurant.  So, this is an opportunity to see what it would really be like.  Hopefully we will find a time soon and I am sure he will gladly blog the experience.

On Saturday we took the boys out for dinner and shopping.   It was amazing to see just how much food they could really eat.  Fortunately, we went out to Mexican, so we could feed them plenty and not pay a fortune.  It was a fun evening together as a family celebrating our anniversary.  The weekend was a great celebration of twelve amazing years with many more to come.

Babies are much smarter than mothers

I have learned that you forget a lot about babies after a 5 year break, but I am learning quickly and remembering that babies are pretty smart.  So, what makes babies smarter than mothers?

1.  Babies sleep when they are tired.  

Mommies try to get way too much done even when they are tired.  

2.  Babies eat when they are hungry.  

Mommies eat too much because they are tired (refer to #1)

3.  Babies don't eat when they are not hungry.  

I have seen many mothers latch their babies on every time their baby cries whether they are hungry, have a little gas pain or are just tired.  Now that I am able to nurse long term I can see why.  Just the other day we went to a play because several of the boys' friends were in it.  Well, Hyrum was tired and just wanted to sleep but would not fall asleep in my arms and cried to show his displeasure.  But I wanted to see the play, so hey, why not 'feed' him because then he will be quiet and I can enjoy the play, right?  I have recently learned that babies will nurse but not eat, so yes, I can latch him on anytime I want him to be quiet but he knows not to eat when he is not hungry and just enjoys the comfort that comes from suckling.  If you put food in my mouth I would eat it!  This makes babies much smarter than most of us.    

4.  Babies are not fooled by our attempts to control them.  

Hyrum usually sleeps at night for about 8 hours.  Not bad for his age, but if he wants to start that long sleep at 5 or 6 then I am not too thrilled.  So, I woke him up the other night around 9 and tried to feed him (refer to #3) and put him back to bed.  It was as if I had never woken him up.  He got up to eat 8 hours after the initial meal that he had initiated.  Darn!  

Hopefully I can learn lessons from my baby and if nothing else I can learn to trust him and quit trying to get him to do things the way I want them done.  :)

Hard Work

James tried an experiment with the boys on Monday of this week.  Here is how it was to work:  mom and dad were to try not to ask the boys to do anything (within reason) and that the boys were supposed to try to watch for things that needed to be done and just do it without being asked.  It started out nicely with the boys trying to watch for things to do and just do them.  By lunch things deteriorated a little but were still ok.  Then, dinner hit and dinner cleanup was a nightmare.  It took an entire hour for dinner to get cleaned up.  So, for family home evening we discussed the experiment.  James asked if they preferred being asked to do this and that all day or if they liked just trying to do it on their own.  They, of course, preferred not being asked over and over to do things.  Fortunately, we liked it better, too.  I mean really, what parent likes to ask their kids to clean up this and clean up that all day long.

But then we had to discuss how things didn't really get done well all day long without mom and dad asking them to do things.  But we talked about how this would take practice and hard work.  In particular we discussed how they had wasted so much time during dinner cleanup because they didn't just work hard and get it done.  In the end because they had taken so long we ran out of time before bedtime to get a family home evening treat.  So, they went to bed without one.  Now this is not such a big deal to you or me, but this was devastating to them.  Family home evening treat is something they look forward to all day long.

So, Tuesday was a new day and we started over.  It is really hard for me not to ask them to do things that I see need to be done, but I did pretty good.  During breakfast cleanup someone actually took the garbage out.  I even heard that person ask someone else to put a new bag in.  Impressive!  Lunch and school cleanup went well, but they were motivated by a trip to the pool with their friends.  I did have to tell them what needed to be done before they could go, so it wasn't a true test.  But after dinner it only took them 15 minutes to clean up (and it was a bigger cleanup than on Monday).  This was obviously a marked improvement over the 60 minute cleanup the night before.  They then asked me if they could watch something on Netflix and because they had time (because they worked hard) I said yes.

So, have they mastered hard work, not yet, but they are seeing the effects of hard work, watching for things that need to be done, and enjoying not being asked to do the basic things they are expected to do every day.  It is a win-win for all and will hopefully continue to improve with time.