Enjoying the Show!

WOW... I really needed a day like today. I've been going super-speed for like a month straight. Today I finally let go of worrying about school for one day and it's been great. Plus, I took a nap and we spent a couple of hours with my whole family, which we haven't done in awhile. It was my niece's blessing today, so Holly and her family were in from Vernal. It was the first time since T&J had cac that we've had all of my parents' grandchildren together. So we took a few minutes to get some pictures taken. It was fun, but it made us miss Steve too (my brother who's in Uruguay.) We're glad he's where he is, but miss him too. We also got the 4 mothers with their 4 new babies. It's so nice to be able to be with family. As we prepare for my attending graduate school, this is one thing we've (well, not atec as much as me) had a bit of a hard time with. We want to be able to have the experience of living away from home to teach us to really depend on each other, but we don't want to be so far away that we only see family once or twice a year. That's why I think I want to go to Utah State, or maybe UC Davis. I think I'd like to stay in the west at least.
Atec also got to go back to Lagoon yesterday with a couple of her siblings. She said it was lots of fun. She came home in time to watch the General Relief Society Meeting, while I went to the Utah football game. I was able to get quite a bit of organizing and homework done while she was gone all day yesterday. That was just what I needed, cause now I feel very much 'on-top-of-things'.
The latest with cpc is that he's an absolute joy to be with, unless it's time for him to sleep. Of course, out of the blue he slept for 12 hours last night (with a few eating stops, after which he went right back to sleep.) He's a funny boy to figure out, but we have a theory. From the first day he was born, he's always been very alert. He always wants to be looking around and figuring things out. We think that he has trouble falling into a deep sleep because his mind is trying to process all that "stuff" he's trying to cram inside it each day. It's not that tough to get him to fall asleep in our arms when he's tired... it's moving him into his cradle that wakes him up because he just never gets asleep deeply enough.
He does a great job of mimicking sounds, and trying to talk back. atec got a video of that this week:
Other than that, there's not much new to add. Atec has another new violin student, so she now has 5 students - 2 viola and 3 violin. I'm anxious for the baseball playoffs (the Red Sox made it via the wild card), and Utah football is as good as ever. (Keep in mind, I missed the 2004 season when they went undefeated, so this is new to me!) It's hard for me to not get too wrapped up in these things, but at least I'm not a die-hard Jazz fan... only a casual fan, so there is an off-season coming up where sports don't dominate things. I really try hard to keep it all under control, but it's just me. I have a very deep-rooted love of watching baseball and football.
As for this week's song, hopefully we're getting it on here before you hear it a thousand times and hate it. It's a good message... we should be enjoying life. that's what God sent us here for: JOY! And for me, it's when I take a step back, slow down, and breath; that's when I feel the joy of life, and enjoy the show.

Hello Friends

How is it that I had no idea how many people read our blog? Okay, maybe you don't read it, I don't blame you.....but people I didn't even know knew we had a blog have us linked on their blogs! Hello! If you're going to be our friends, you could at least comment and say hello? Like Megan, Jessica, Heather......who else? Hello? If you're going to read our blog, at least give us the common courtesy of letting us know you have a blog. REALLY! PSHAW! Thanks to Piper and Andrea for informing me of the blogs I now know about! That's all.

Pmc just told me that I ought to make sure you know I'm not being totally serious. My tone of voice is a joking tone of voice. I'm not mad at anyone really!

Our Little Cowboy

How did we get a child with such enthusiasm for life? Does it come from my genes....the ones that have this relentless desire to learn new information all the time? Or does it come from pmc's genes.....the ones that love to learn about people and why they do what they do? Maybe the combination?

Seriously, this kid does not stop. He has so much to learn. His eyes are WIDE open if he's awake, and he CANNOT fall asleep unless we cover his eyes. In fact, he's taken a liking to blankets. He can now fall asleep and take long naps if his face is covered with a blanket. At first when I showed this to pmc, he was worried about him smothering himself. However, he never takes naps during the day unless I'm right there with him.

He must have been in a growth spurt this past week. He suddenly wasn't sleeping through the night, and wanted to eat every 2 hours during the day. At night, he just could not go to sleep without nursing. He screamed some of the worst screams we've heard yet, but give him a little bit of mommy and he was out in 1 minute flat! But I think we reached the end of it. Last night, it took him an hour and a half of whimpering in his bed, but he did finally fall asleep. And he slept, only got up once to eat (I was not enjoying three times a night!). Well, he did wake up a couple times whimpering again, but a little rocking put him back to sleep eventually!

Needless to say, pmc and I barely made it through the week....thanks to a late movie at the theater while Grams watched him, and an evening at the temple thanks to Andrea's babysitting skills. But now we're back! I'm not sure whether it was due to the lack of sleep or not, but I especially enjoyed "Get Smart." There were parts where I laughed when nobody else did, and everybody else in the theater laughed at me! My favorite was when a guy commented on how we look to the celebrities in our country as political advisers. I mean, really, it's true.....and it's not like they're the brightest people! I hope I didn't offend anyone.

Not much else happened this week, and cpc is waking up from his nice long nap. So I'm going to enjoy him a little before I teach some group lessons....enjoy his cuteness for the week and we'll get back to you later!

Awkward Stages

So you know how everyone goes through awkward stages? Like in junior high when your legs grow faster than everything else, and your coordination goes, and you break out with pimples. Well, I didn't realize how many awkward stages babies have.

First there was cpc's "serious baby acne" stage. I just felt so bad for him with his face all covered in miniature pimples. He is a cute baby, but they just detracted from his cute face so much!

Next there was the "bald man" stage. He started out with a good head of hair, including my Grandpa Hooper's sideburns (nearly to the bottom of his ears). But when he went through the typical hair loss that babies tend to go through, it all fell out on top first. Seriously, he had a shiny bald head with hair growing on ALL sides! (This was just as the front started to grow back in.)

Well, now he's at a new awkward stage. He is just too big for 0-3 month clothes. Mainly he's too long for them. But he's just not quite big enough to fill up the 3-6 month clothes.
We attended the Utah vs. UNLV football game last week, and his dad decked him out! He enjoyed watching all the people, and then slept through the second half cheers and the fireworks. We also went to Lagoon last week and took cpc on the carousel.

Cpc has also started talking up a storm. It's our favorite thing to just listen to him talk and talk and talk!

Note on the left a slideshow of the pictures my cousin Shawni took for us of pregnancy, and some baby/family pictures. She is a fabulous photographer and she is so sweet to spoil us with some of her works!

Last, I just thought this was entertaining....I love to make bread from scratch. I think that the bread tastes 10,000 times better than store-bought. I also LOVE kneading bread. It totally relaxes me. However, being a mom and making bread can be challenging time-wise. I have definitely had a learning curve with this. Just so you know, when you mix half of the flour in with the yeast mixture and then let it sit for 10-15 minutes.....it's not okay to let it sit 25 minutes so you can finish nursing the baby! I punched the middle of this back down before I thought to take a picture, but it was a big bubble and was leaking down the sides. However, I saved it and the bread turned out just fine!

Rambling Thoughts

I wrote a post a while ago that I never posted....until today. I wrote it shortly after getting super frustrated at other parents telling me what I should be doing with my child. I didn't post it because I wanted to finish writing some more things at the end about cpc's individual personality. I never did, and forgot about it. However, if you'd like to read it.....click here. I'd love comments from other parents about what they think of it.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I read it today to see whether I could finish it, or whether to just delete it. I loved reading my own thoughts about motherhood when my son was 1 month old. Now he's 2 1/2 months and I still feel the same way. But I have so many thoughts throughout the day, and I often doubt my own abilities. It's hard to stay confident when cpc does his mad scream that sounds like he is telling me I've got everything wrong. He usually gives his mad scream about 30 seconds before he falls asleep. He does it because he doesn't like sleeping during the day, he wants to see the world.

I also realized when reading it that my experience of motherhood is already flying away before my eyes, and I want to record some of my feelings before I forget. It was hard for me to do this at first because I was almost overwhelmed by all the different feelings, but I think now that my hormones have calmed down a bit that I can do it!

The marriage relationship is the foundation to build motherhood on. Much of what I remember growing up is my parent's bad relationship. My parents were and are excellent parents, but sometimes they were very distracted by their struggles. So I didn't learn this principle very well growing up. I had a hard time with dating and I just always looked forward to being a mom, I didn't think much about my future role as a wife. When pmc and I started dating, my outlook changed. Suddenly I realized that my marriage was most important, and that motherhood was to be built on that. Pmc taught me this by the way he treated me. I'd always had idealistic romantic thoughts about boy-girl relationships....but pmc went above and beyond this. And now he continues this better than I'd ever imagined possible. This was especially manifest to me when we went to Lagoon on Saturday with pmc's parents. Pmc's parents took cpc so we could go on some rides, and it was just like when we went to Disneyland right before we got married. He was like a teenager dating me, every time we sat down on a ride, or at the end of a ride he'd look around to see if anyone was looking and then kiss me.

Motherhood is exhausting. Seriously. And sometimes it's my own fault. Everyone tells you "sleep when baby sleeps." Well, really you expect me to sleep during the day when I can watch my beautiful baby (that is developing too fast for me to keep up) sleep? And then at night I'm really lucky because he doesn't generally try to play or stay awake, but when my sleep is interrupted twice every night for 2 1/2 months....I get tired. Then there's the part where there was a baby growing in between my muscles for 10 months, and then the doctors moved the muscles around to get him out, and then tried to push them all back into place, and then I wasn't allowed to use them for 6 weeks, and then I'm just suddenly supposed to carry around a 12 pound baby all the time, and start exercising, and keeping the house clean, and work. I know that was a run-on sentence. And remember how I told you the doctors said that I had ripped abs? How do moms who don't have ripped abs do it?

Motherhood is joyful. I know I already did a post about this....but the joy changes almost daily. My favorite things lately are: watching him sleep, listening to the sounds he makes in his sleep, listening to the sounds he makes when he's awake, his growl, his laugh, his imitations of our sounds, his wide-mouthed smile, the way he eats his fists, the way he acts all happy when he's tired to see if he can convince you that he's not tired, and then suddenly starts screaming, the way his tummy and cheeks are the only chubby parts he has, the way he opens his eyes so big to see if he can see more, the way his hair finally grew back so he doesn't look like an old man, the wisps of hair that he has now as opposed to the thick wavy hair he had when he was born, the way his back is so ticklish, the way he has crinkles on his forehead just like me, the way he stretches just like me when he wakes up, how he kicks his legs all over in the bathtub, how he never wants to get out of the water, how he screams bloody murder to tell me he does NOT want to go to sleep, how he will watch his dad no matter who else is in the room, how he loves to do the "I love you" cuddle (see the end of the video in the previous post), how he can fall asleep all by himself at night as long as we are in the room, how he finally slept till 5:30am last night, how I have to hold his feet against his bottom and his tummy to mine and his face to my chest with a sucker (Binky) in his mouth and bounce to get him to fall asleep during the day, how he loves tummy time, how he needs to hear "Give Said the Little Stream" in the car so that he knows we're still there when he can't see us, how he loves to watch his mobile in his cradle......did I miss anything? OH yes, how he melts my heart and makes his daddy think he needs to be jealous.

I am more and more in love with PMC every moment. I'm not going to list the details of all of the things I love about pmc. Pmc can look in our special journal for that, because that is what I'm going to do next. I guess I just consider that to be a little more personal and sacred. Our special journal contains our more personal, sacred, spiritual experiences and thoughts. We highly recommend such a thing to others. It has proved to strengthen and uplift us! But I do feel that it is important for me to let others know that I absolutely adore him, that he is my best friend, and that marrying him was the best decision I've ever made.....even better than my decision to have children! At our institute class this morning we talked about the three things that Patriarchs are responsible for: provide, protect, and preside. Pmc fulfills these responsibilities so well. He sometimes feels like he's not doing a very good job of it, and sometimes it's because of the way I treat him.......but honey, you really are doing a fantastic job!

Be honest about life. I feel so good. I just wrote a very honest post. Much of my life I pretended I was happy and thrilled with life, when I wasn't. I didn't want others to be downtrodden because of the struggles I was dealing with. I didn't want people to avoid me or say that I was always depressed or that I only ever talked about my problems. So I kept it in. I even convinced myself that I was happy most of the time. Occasionally I'd let someone in, and they would get scared of it and run away. So this just led to me keeping it in more. Eventually it hit the fan, while I was a missionary. Suddenly I couldn't pretend to be happy anymore. It took me over a year after I returned from the mission to let out all of the feelings I had kept in. I learned my lesson, but sometimes I still have a hard time applying it. I generally only write happy posts. I only tell our audience the happy things in life. We have a hard time too though. Life is not only about happiness, it's about overcoming trials and finding the good amongst the bad. I know this very well. I am happy now, but I'm not afraid to let you know when I'm not, because I know it's normal. Anyone who says differently is selling something! And now I feel so good that I was completely honest!

Cpc just woke up so I'm going to go enjoy him. If you made it this far, thanks, I appreciate you caring to read my rambling thoughts!

Tricks

Cpc pulled a few tricks on us this week. We're not quite sure we want him developing these skills quite yet, but hey, it's him that's learning so we don't really have a choice. Maybe we're lucky to have such a smart, aware child!

The first trick he pulled was actually while I was doing the blog post last week. I set him down on his tummy, and came to the computer and clicked "publish post." When I walked back over to him he was on his back. I was so shocked because he wasn't even mad about having tummy time. Just to make sure I hadn't dreamt that I'd put him on his tummy, I put him back on his tummy. Sure enough, he rolled over. I don't think he was really trying to, he was just kicking hard....but really, I'm not ready for that kind of mobility in my child! He's done it three or four times since. Unfortunately we have been unable to catch it on video thus far.

The second trick was holding his bottle. Pmc and I have worked out a schedule that really works for us. Cpc usually eats twice during the night: once around 3am....I just get up and feed him, and then again around 6am and pmc gets up and feeds him some pumped milk. Well, one morning pmc came and woke me up and said I needed to come look. At first I was a little bothered that he was waking me up, but when I saw this:I decided it was definitely worth me being awake. He was REALLY holding the bottle all by himself. Again, I don't think he was trying to, but he was surprisingly good at it.

The final trick he pulled was actually his own version of one we wanted him to do. There's this funny thing that my dad always did to me and my siblings when we were babies. He holds both feet in one hand and the baby naturally stands and balances on his hand. Well, cpc just wouldn't do it.....he flails his arms and bends his knees. But he will do it genie style! Sorry about the bad quality video, it just wouldn't upload until I made it extra small!


Anyway, we had a great Labor Day weekend. We were planning to go to Bear Lake so that I could finally water ski this season, but alas finances and the knowledge that there would be a big storm changed our plans. So we watched the Ute game and went to the Cundick cabin, and thoroughly enjoyed the beauty of a huge rainstorm. We finally got cpc together with his cousin cac, who was born about a month ago....Grams was doing a great job holding both of them!The past few weeks have brought some new changes for us as well. We are of course stressed about finances due to rising costs, as well as hospital bills. So we looked for extra sources of income, and ways to cut our expenses. I'm learning to enjoy teaching violin a bit more, and am about to start a new job teaching at Gymboree Play & Music. Pmc is back in school, and has a pretty big load (therefore he doesn't have as much time to find things he wants to buy online!)....but it's nice to know that the end is in sight for his Bachelor's.

Last night we had a great FHE with the Eyre family, where the Sister Missionaries came and taught us a lesson. Cpc and his cousin LucyMae got some more time to get to know each other. Maybe you're tired of pictures of the two of them....but since LucyMae will be moving to South Dakota in January, we've got to live up their time together.