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