I'm Wesley! (And pregnancy stuff.)

It's official! Emmaline loves Princess Bride now. It was on the other night, and Royce told her that Buttercup was the princess, and Wesley was going to go save her, and she was completely mesmerized, and wants to watch that movie all the time now, and last night she popped out from behind the couch like this and said, "I'm Wesley!" Now she's making Wesley masks for everyone to wear at Christmas, so watch out family, get ready to wear some masks. She specifically mentioned Grandma first, and said she wanted to get a picture with her (she?) and Grandma wearing their masks. She's also made all of us adventure books for when we go to the zoo. :)

At my last check-up they tested me for gestational diabetes as is routine at that visit, and a normal glucose level is 140 or below, and mine was 215, so they started me on the gestational diabetic diet, and I had to do the 3hr fasting test. Surprisingly, it wasn't as bad as the doctor thought it would be. They draw your blood 4 times, and if you get 190 or higher on at least 2 of the tests you're considered to have gestational diabetes, and two of mine were normal, and one was 194, and one was 188, so my doctor said I have borderline gestational diabetes, which means I don't have to go to the endocrinologist, but they have started me on some medicine and I stick with the diet, and I'll do a fasting blood test with every appointment from here on out. But all things considering I thought that was a pretty good outcome, because the doctor thought for sure I'd have it pretty bad, and this is much more manageable. And the medicine I started I take gradually because it takes your body a while to adjust to it, and it's supposed to give me horrible diarrhea, but even that can't stop my constipated colon. Muhahahahha. So that's nice that that's not happening. The diet has been a bit of a struggle; I'm realizing that I'm such an emotional eater, and I seem to need that occasional binge on sweet stuff to handle stress or worry, but I can't, so I've noticed that I'll start crying over the dumbest things, but I think it's just because my emotions are all bottled up. Hmmm...I might have to work on that. Anyway, I guess that's all. The baby is doing well and looks healthy, so that's the point of all of this craziness anyway! Unfortunately I think I've decided I'm done being pregnant now, though. It's good Christmas is coming because I think I'm going to need some major distractions for the next couple of months.

Here are some belly pictures...this one is like 4 or 5 months? I don't remember when I took it. Oops. :)

This one I took this morning, so about 7 1/2ish months? I'm not sure why I didn't put my face in...I didn't think about that until after I put them on the computer. Oh well!

Sunday Afternoon Naps

I was sitting working on Royce's laptop and Royce fell asleep on my shoulder first, then Emmaline crawled up and fell asleep on my chest, and I thought, man, someone should take a picture of this! And then I remembered, I have the lap top, I can! I love my sweet sweet babies!

Merry Christmas to us!

We decided that since we have insanely hard, asbestos filled tile floor all throughout our apartment, before the new baby comes we should get a bigger rug to go in the living room, so she can have tummy time and all crawl and what not without giving herself a concussion. (Royce said the thought of the baby's head hitting this floor when she's laying on the ground in tummy time makes him sick to his stomach. :)) So my parents were awesome enough to buy us a rug for Christmas, and even generous enough to let us get it early, so here is our cool new rug for our apartment. Emmaline loves it. When we got home from Church today, she walked through the door, took her shoes off, and went and started rolling around on the carpet. It is really nice, and Royce even decided to do a little manic re-arranging of furniture in our apartment last night after we got it home, so we've got a nice new living space!

We barely got the carpet rolled out and Emmaline had to give it a try.
This was right before we went out to get our carpet, and we also took Emmaline to the dollar store so she could spend the money that Grammy Cookie gave her for her birthday. It finally started getting a little colder out here, and we realized that she only has one pair of pants left that fit her, so we went and got her a few new things, and this is one of her new outfits.

I forgot, Emmaline also had her 5yr check-up last week. She's in the 90% for her height, and the 20% for her weight. But the doctor says that she's really healthy, and is doing really well. She was even able to get the flu-mist so she didn't have to have any shots, which she was really excited about, but we still went and got ice cream after her check-up anyway. I took a really cute picture of her eating her ice cream on my phone, but since I'm retarded and don't know how to get the pictures from my phone to my computer, they will just have to stay there for a while. That would make for a pretty fun post when I actually get them off, and then we can see the progression. :)

Halloween!

Emmaline was a princess this year for Halloween. Her costume is actually one of her dress-up clothes that she got for her birthday, and she said she wanted to wear it for Halloween, so I thought, hey, that's awesome. So all we had to buy for halloween was the crown, and she was set. We just made the ward trunk-or-treat our official Halloween day since real Halloween was on a Sunday, and it was a lot of fun, and she got a ton of candy. She also rations it really well. She says, okay, I'm going to eat this candy, and then no more for today. She also decided that her candy needed to be sorted by colors, so each color is in its own bag, but she kept leaving the bags out all over the floor, and Royce and I don't have as much self control, so we finally had to tell her that if she didn't want Mommy and Daddy eating all of her candy, she can't leave it out all the time, so now she puts it away in her room. But she's still really good about sharing, and give us candy whenever we ask her for some. :)

Royce's Reunion

These are a couple of pictures from Royce's 10yr high school reunion. But I forgot my camera in the car, so one is in the car right after dinner, and the others are at Royce's parent's house.

(This picture is the cute little kiddos that are in Emmaline's "school." I'll have school at our house for the next 3wks. But just once a week...that sounds scary when you say it like that. :))

Emmaline's Birthday!!!

Our sweet little Emmaline turned 5!! Her birthday was on Thursday, and it turned out to be a pretty good day. We started out by taking her out to breakfast; she picked McDonald's. Then we dropped Daddy off at work and she and I went to the playground for playgroup for a couple of hours. Then we rented her a movie from RedBox, came home and watched cartoons together, got ready, picked Daddy up from work, at Macaroni and Cheese for dinner, then got ready for her party. This is the first year that we had a party for her with friends and not just family, and it was really fun. We went out to the little playground by the apartment complex, and we ate cake and ice cream, and the kids played with bubbles and played on the playground, and it was just a nice quiet little evening. Then we came home and she opened presents and she and I watched her movie while Daddy did homework, then the power went out so we went to bed. :) But it was still really fun, and we only missed a little bit of the end of the movie. All in all she had a really good birthday, and is such a happy, sweet little girl!

Right after she blew out her candles.

Blowing out her candles. Haha...you can see a little bit of my belly bump in the pic. I just noticed that.

Hanging out with Daddy waiting for Mommy to finish wrapping presents. (I know, I didn't get them wrapped until after her party. It was a crazy week. :) )

Playing at the playground with some of her friends. It was hard to get a good picture; the sun was almost set and they were not holding still. :) But I think they had lots of fun together.

This is the cake that she decorated for her birthday. She had a lot of fun and did everything by herself.

This is her Rapunzel cake for this year. It definitely took some time, but surprisingly it didn't take as much time/effort as her Monsters Inc cake last year. But she liked it, and I was happy with how it turned out, so all in all it went well. My purple fondant did dry out so the ruffles in the front are cracked a little, but at that point I didn't really care too much. The colors are backwards too for the Rapunzel dress, but Emmaline wanted it pink instead of purple, so there ya go.

Aunty Lea got her some princess Uno cards, and Mazy colored her a picture, and both were great. It surprised me how cute Emmaline thought it was that Mazy colored her the picture, and Uno was perfect because she just learned how to play Uno the other day at "school" and has loved it ever since, so it was really great.

This is her new dress-up dress that Royce and I got her. As an added bonus she said she wanted to wear it for Halloween, so that's cool. I've been going a little crazy trying to find her a good costume, and here this one came out of the blue. We also got her some playdough and spongebob games.

My parents spoiled her like crazy again this year, and I actually video taped it this time, and I uploaded it to youtube because it was too big for blogger, so if you want to watch her open her gifts you can go to the link. (Sorry Aunty Lea, I didn't think about recording it until after she had already opened your gift.) And next weekend we're going to Nana and Papa's and she'll get to have another little party there, so she's a lucky little girl!

Okay, here's the link for the video, assuming that I uploaded it right, and didn't mess something else up. But you know what assumptions do. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgCDQIHyKdA

Get ready for matching dresses come Easter...

...because it's a girl!! Emmaline has gotten her wish, and we will be having another little girl in February. We're all really excited! The baby is healthy and doing well, and according to her measurements she's exactly on for the due date of the 26th. I'm still feeling pretty awful, but the doctor gave me some new things to try, so hopefully that will help. Other than that things are just going pretty well, and the doctor even told me to start looking at my schedule to see when a good day would be for us to have the baby. (One good thing about a c-section.) He said they would do the c-section about a week before the due date, so pretty cool! I really do want to start feeling better so I can actually enjoy the pregnancy a little bit instead of just holding on one week at a time and not being able to wait until I'm done being pregnant. :) But, the baby's healthy, and things are going really well so far, so I'll try not to complain too much. Poor Royce has to hear the brunt of it anyway.

The second thing I wanted to post about was Emmaline's new bed. When my parents came out in August, they bought Emmaline a new bed (they didn't seem to like their first grandchild sleeping on food storage cans :)) but they ordered it online so it didn't come until after they left, and they've been waiting and waiting for me to put a picture up on the blog, but I wanted to get some cute material to go around the bottom to cover up all of the storage that I have underneath, but it's half way through September and I still haven't bought the material, let alone put it up, so this will have to do for now. But Emmaline loves her new bed and it's really nice to have so much storage space underneath. I've got all of the baby stuff under there, and some food storage stuff, and even some of Emmaline's toys. It's awesome.


I put this second picture in because she was so funny. I wasn't looking at her face, but after I took the picture she was like, oh wait, I forgot to smile! So we took another one. :)

Royce made this!

This is a picture that Royce made last night (he seriously only worked on it for 2 hours, and it was done) for an educational game that he's been helping with for a couple of years, and I thought it was so incredible! Part of it is that it looks fantastic, but also I watched him through some of the stages of this process, and he started with a stone texture from on-line and a circle, and this is how the picture ended up. It's so cool.

Parenting: Touching the Hearts of Our Youth

Parenting: Touching the Hearts of Our Youth

Stake Relief Society Blog

For once I actually checked my yahoo account for the relief society information for our ward, and they said that the web-site is up from the last stake Relief Society conference, which I thought was pretty cool that they put everything up on a blog. (Including recipes from the luncheon.) So here's the link if you haven't seen it yet.

http://austinoakhillsrs.blogspot.com/

We've Almost Made It!

So we've almost made it through the first trimester! My progesterone level was low and so I had to take some replacement hormones, and that was awful. I was so sick all the time. All I did was go to Church, buy groceries, and sort the laundry and Royce and Emmaline did all of the rest. Royce was amazing. He did all of the cooking, the cleaning, washing the laundry, and he waited on me hand and foot, and was just always so happy to help, and tried to help me feel better. (On top of working 30hrs a week and going to school and all of the projects his professors have him doing.) He made Edward look like an insensitive jerk. :) And Emmaline picked up a lot more responsibilities, and did really well and enjoyed helping so now she's got her own little chore chart, with stickers, and ice cream rewards.
Anyway, this last week I've been able to slowly taper off my medicine, and my doctor called today and said that my levels look good, so I can stop taking the medicine! It's awesome. I'm already feeling so much better just being on less medicine. I'm still feeling a little sick, but it's totally manageable. So yeah! And I'll be 11 weeks tomorrow, so we're about to say goodbye (and good riddance) to the first trimester, and I'm starting to feel happy and excited about being pregnant again. And a special thanks to everyone who helped watch Emmaline too, and get her out of the house, and thanks for all of the offers too. Even if we didn't take you up on it, we really appreciate it, and are so glad that we have such a great support system here, and some great friends!

And these pictures don't really have much to do with the post, but I thought they were pretty cute. I'm still undecided about how I feel about her playing video games, but Royce is careful with what she plays, and it's a fun thing for them to do together, and they're just so cute!

Free Piano Music Download

I found a really neat blog where you can download some hymns that this guy plays on the piano, or he has sheet music available for some of the songs, and they're really pretty, and everything is free. Check it out!
http://www.hymnarrangements.blogspot.com

Chicken Little

My mom got us these hair towels for Christmas, but Emmaline's bath towel is an elephant with a hood, so she hasn't used it much, but last night she did a horrible job getting all of the shampoo rinsed out of her hair, so I had to help her rinse it out in the bathroom sink, and we used Emmaline's turbie, and she looked pretty cute. Silly little goof ball. (And it's a monkey wrapped around her neck.)

Oregon Trip

So we went to Oregon in June, and I'm just now getting a post up about it. I brought my camera, I really did, but this is the only picture that we got from Oregon. Emmaline took it of the living room from the upstairs balcony, but I was so paranoid about her dropping the camera off the edge I made her hurry really fast so it's all blurry. Luckily my sister brought her camera, and actually took pictures, so I stole the rest of the pictures from her blog. She also has a couple of cute videos from our trip too, one of Emmaline feeding a calf. Here's here blog if you would like to see them: Mike and Lea


This is almost all of the family. My mom is taking the picture, and obviously Royce isn't there, but this is the rest of us. This was the day that we decided to go hiking. My mom has a spot that she likes to hike to a lot, but it was still snowed in too much for us to get on the trail, so this is just a little trail that started off behind a rest stop off 140. (Meadow Lake)Blah, that's so annoying. I don't know why it's blue and underlined. Anyway, this is Uncle Will and Aunt Marissa with Emmaline. You have to admit, it's some beautiful scenery!

This is my Aunt Gabbie helping Emmaline feed one of the calves on their ranch. It's where I learned how to ride horses when I was little, and everything else that goes with that. This was a box that my mom had saved for the grandkids for 6 months waiting for them to come. I think it was probably worth the effort.
Little stinker. We were nearing the end of our hike (I guess it was kind of a long hike for little legs) and Emmaline wanted a little ride, and Mazy was done being carried, so Lea decided it would be easiest if she put Emmaline in Mazy's pack. Silly girl.
This is Aunty Lea and Uncle Mike and Mazy.
Uncle Mike and Mazy!

Mazy "trying" to ride my mom's Great Pyrenees Dali.
Mazy was not shy around the horses. We had to be careful because Gabbie said that some of them might want to bite little fingers. We couldn't even get Emmaline to touch a horse. (Before Gabbie even said anything about biting horses.) Poor little thing gets pretty nervous around some things. But that's okay. Baby steps to the bus.

It's a baby!

So after all of our thoughts and planning and decisions regarding adoption our minds have totally turned around, and we've decided to have a baby instead! We were watching conference in April, and just really felt like this was something we needed to try, and we found out a few weeks ago that we're pregnant! It's going to be a really high risk pregnancy, so we're going to be carefully watched by our doctor (2 ultrasounds and 3 blood draws by 6wks!), but he's a really good OB that specializes in my kind of high risk pregnancies, and is really optimistic about everything, so we're pretty excited! I'm 6wks 4days, and today we were able to see the little baby's heartbeat on the ultrasound. It was pretty cute. I'm due on Feb 26, and we're really happy. (Feeling pretty awful, but still happy.)

The picture's not great, but I can't really tell what things are anyway. It turns out the round circle on the left is just he yolk sack, but I thought it was the head at first. The little bean on the right is the baby, and it's little heart is beating strong in there!

Emmaline

I just told Emmaline that the people upstairs moved out and they didn't live there any more, and she got sad for a second, and then really concerned, and asked, "Did Jarom move out too?"

Lol...it's so funny and so cute. I swear I'm being good and not encouraging it, or let her know how stinking cute I think it is. In case you didn't notice Jarom is one of her cute little friends that she's been fond of for quite some time. Any time anyone talks about marriage she informs us that she and Jarom are getting married. She also says that Hannah is going to marry Ben. So cute. Anyway, that's all. I just thought that was pretty funny.

Updates

It's been a really long time since I've put any pictures up. I haven't been taking a lot of pictures lately. I'm kind of in a phase that I want to live in the moment, and not have to mess with a camera, and just enjoy those family times. Maybe that's not the right attitude, but that's where I'm at right now. That being said, I went through my camera a little bit and got some pictures that have been there forever. This is the first one. I work with the Young Women at Church (12-14yr old girls) and we work on a program called Personal Progress which gives the girls goals, and helps them learn new skills and improve themselves, and part of that is basic homemaking skills and as leaders we work on that with the girls too, and one project is to learn a new skill and make an item for your home, so I learned how to applique and sewed a blanket for Emmaline's room. The project is supposed to take at least 10hrs, and after I'd worked on it for 14hrs, I stopped counting and just finished it.

These are some super cute pictures of little cousins when we went to see Rocky and Carol's brand new beautiful house! We went to dinner, and the girls were playing int he back of Nana and Papa's truck.

This is Emmaline and one of our little neighbor boys from South Korea.
This is when we went to Corpus Christi. This is the aquarium.
Emmaline reading stories to her babies.
This is from Easter at Nana and Papa's house. It's been a really long time since I've put up picures.


This is a little sugar egg we made for Nana for Easter. She found a Wilton cake book from 1971 and let me borrow it for a while, and it showed how to make these sugar eggs, and I thought they were pretty cute so we tried it out.