beautiful quotes

Probably my favorite part of Elder Holland's April 2016 LDS General Conference talk (which I've listened to a few times including yesterday) was:

If we give our heart to God, if we love the Lord Jesus Christ, if we do the best we can to live the gospel, then tomorrow—and every other day—is ultimately going to be magnificent, even if we don’t always recognize it as such. Why? Because our Heavenly Father wants it to be! He wants to bless us. A rewarding, abundant, and eternal life is the very object of His merciful plan for His children! It is a plan predicated on the truth “that all things work together for good to them that love God.”

Then this morning before 1:00 church, I listened for the third time to Sister Neill F. Marriott's talk from the General Women's Session that was part of the same conference. Actually, I had searched on the Gospel Library app for the word "baby" and found the talk.

Let me interrupt myself.  

About those New Year's Resolutions . . . I am trying to improve with them. #5 and #7 are already done. But the one about getting up by 7 a.m. has been hard. Why? Because I'm pregnant! I could have just over two weeks left (that's when my guess date is). I love pregnancy and I feel like once she's born -- a fourth girl! -- I might miss having her inside moving around. We're all really excited to meet her, though!

January 2, a few days before my expected period (but I knew that I was pregnant)

So that's why I want to keep hearing or reading positive thoughts and stories about pregnancy, birth, and newborns.

Here's what Sister Marriott said:

Mothers literally make room in their bodies to nurture an unborn baby—and hopefully a place in their hearts as they raise them—but nurturing is not limited to bearing children. Eve was called a “mother” before she had children. I believe that “to mother” means “to give life.” Think of the many ways you give life. It could mean giving emotional life to the hopeless or spiritual life to the doubter. With the help of the Holy Ghost, we can create an emotionally healing place for the discriminated against, the rejected, and the stranger. In these tender yet powerful ways, we build the kingdom of God.

a Throwback Thursday collage

I have been doing some pondering today, and I have felt joy. I have been thinking about new friendships, friendship in general, and ways to serve. Those thoughts and those things make me happy. I overheard two smiling mothers as they passed each other outside of First Girl's school: "How are you?" "I don't even know." "Yeah, seriously." For some reason hearing that made me happy, too. I ate garlicky brussels sprouts before eating the rest of my breakfast. I did some laundry (the kitchen still needs some work). I ran two miles in twenty one minutes while our younger daughters played near me in the fitness center. I've been praying more lately and feeling more hope. And the book I'm reading, The Gift of Giving Life, has given me a better "big picture" perspective about life. When I was looking at twitter, where I don't have a photo across the top (I dislike their new look), I thought maybe I would make a collage for that. I love how it turned out but actually decided on something simpler for my twitter page. It was really fun to look at some of our older photos and to be grateful for those memories. So this is a #tbt -- Throwback Thursday. The sheet music in the background is for the song we danced to at our wedding reception in 2004, but I started to learn how to play the piano when I was seven. (I love Jerome Kern and the sweet lyrics, and loved having Roger play the piano!) I still treasure the feeling of being in the Los Angeles temple with my husband in 2006 when I was pregnant; that was a wonderful night. The top middle photo of the collage is from 2008 when I ran a 10k. The bottom left was taken in 2011, and the others are a little more recent. C is here twice simply because the newborn picture reminds me of when each of our children were newborns, and the beauty of each new life. I always wanted to be a mom. The collage represents some of me, my life, and what is special to me.

C's fourteenth month

C turned fourteen months old a little over a month ago (February). At this point she was standing and furniture-walking a lot more, but she was kind of between being a baby and being a toddler. No teeth, which is fine with me. She usually nursed four times a day.  Maybe once a day I help her drink a few sips of water or non-dairy milk from a regular cup. She couldn't figure out how to make anything come out of a sippy cup.

During her fourteenth month she tasted these new foods: oranges, ground flax seeds, purple cabbage, edamame (she had had soy products before, though), Enfagrow (just twice -- I think it was the cause of a diaper rash, and rather than this dairy/oil/sugar drink to help her gain weight, I increased the amount of avocado, nuts and seeds I fed her), almond butter, chicken (she rarely has it), celery, and beets.

Oh, speaking of Enfagrow, that is what the pediatrician gave me during the (expensive) weight and height check on February 8th. This was almost six weeks after the twelve month appointment when C was 1st percentile for weight. On February 8th she had gained some weight, but not as much as they would have liked her to. I plan to look at our kids' charts from the doctor to compare our girls to each other, but more importantly I want to see where they are and have been on the WHO charts for breastfed children.

We love it when C will do tricks for us, like putting her arms up. She likes to use her finger to make my lower lip make noise, and she blows to flap her own lips (what do you call that?). Shboogoo helps me out by playing with her, getting a cloth wipe wet in the bathroom sink, or carrying her into another room. It's so fun when our laughing or saying "that's funny" makes her do a little almost fake-sounding "ha ha ha" laugh. One thing I do to play with her is move my forehead from side to side on her belly. She laughs pretty hard at that. Her babbling is fun -- often it's "bob bob." With each of my kids I have joked that she's talking about her boyfriend Bob, not that we even know anyone with that name.

My last post has a few Valentine's Day photos of C, and here are a few others from her fourteenth month.

Sometimes she voluntarily folds her arms for prayers. This was February 18 -- not the first time she did it. It's cuter than the photo can show.

A cute girly outfit. And she randomly puts her hands over her eyes and says a loud "baw!" (her version of "boo!")

Enjoying one of her sisters' Pillow Pet Dream Lites

I don't care that this is upside down. In February I used Swagbucks to help me buy a printed diaper cover (shown below), and I also bought C her first FuzziBunz, to wear at night. RLR is a treatment I used to strip all our cloth diapers of ammonia build up.

Here's the cutie on her 14-month day (as you can see, when she was lying down she was not interested in keeping her legs down):

BYU Spirit shirt ($1.74 at Old Navy!)

C's twelfth month

We have had a one-year-old since before Christmas. What a fast year! 

On C's first birthday I took some pictures of her at home. We had to go in and tell her "Happy birthday!" as soon as she woke up in the morning. Her hair usually doesn't stick out like this, but I think she had gotten a little sweaty or gone to bed with her hair not totally dry.
 

She got to have her first strawberries, and, after touching them a lot, loved the taste of them!

 

In the evening we went over to Grandma's house, where she played with an aquarium app.

I also took the monthday photos of her with the pink bear. (I thought they didn't turn out as well as others have -- this was in a basement, she was not real cooperative, and her hairdo was not the best.) 

trying to comb her hair with a toy pony comb

This is the most expensive baby clothing item I've bought. I loved all my girls in it! (Shboogoo 13.5 months old, L and C both exactly 12 months)

I think we hadn't seen this grandma in a while but we also had another special reason for going over that night. Hmmm, I don't think my husband needed a haircut from her at that time, so what was it? Well, speaking of haircuts, on November 28th C had her first haircut Grandma just trimmed a little off the front of C's hair. I made a video, too. 

 

At this age she got around mostly by sitting and scooting. She does her own style of crawl -- pretty much on her knees but only her right foot is behind her -- for a second or two sometimes before going back to the bum scoot. 

Her new foods in her 12th month were tofu, ground sunflower seeds, spinach, cauliflower, green cabbage, Goldfish and Ritz crackers from a babysitter without my permission, grapes (just a tiny bit), and honeydew melon (then strawberries on the birthday, like I showed above). 

C saw the pediatrician on January 2nd and weighed 16 pounds 4 ounces --1st percentile like L was at 12 months. The percentile was a little higher for her height, and her head was 99th again. The doctor said it's fine if C doesn't do a regular crawl, and we should just try to get her walking. She said I should stand her up holding onto the couch or whatever and put a toy far away so she'll want to step sideways to reach it.

C's eleventh month

Our sweet baby turned eleven months old in November. During this month she experienced the first snow of the season, her first Halloween and her first Thanksgiving. There's more about those in my last post. 

Around November 10th she started having discharge coming from her right eye. I took her to the pediatrician, who said she would call in a prescription. I asked something like, "So it isn't pinkeye?" And she said it was. (Kind of weird but similar to what she did in February, when the bronchiolitis diagnosis was on paper but she didn't say it out loud.) The white of her eye wasn't pink; the only problem was the discharge and it was only one eye. When we were almost back to our pharmacy I decided to pull over and call a friend of mine. She has four and a half kids and is into natural stuff like herbs and I was curious about what she would say. Sure enough, they had had pinkeye before. She actually had a homeopathic treatment (tiny things that dissolve on the tongue) in her purse still and drove it right to my home, saving me the pharmacy copay. I gave C one dissolvable thing three times a day, I think, and I used a dropper to put some of my breast milk in her eye because that's supposed to help, too. She was probably all better within three days.

Some of the things C likes at this age:

• being outside and look at everything there is to see, including snow
• taking her sock off (or both of them) and holding it and looking proud of herself
• sucking her thumb and sometimes touching her hair with the other hand
• sitting up in the crib when she wakes up
• scooting her bum/legs to get around
• watching and especially getting playtime with her sisters -- First Girl makes her laugh so hard sometimes!

The foods I introduced C to in her 11th month were millet, kiwi, black beans, rolled oats, ground almonds, asparagus, and cherries.

I said in the 9th month and 10th month posts that her growth had slowed down. Well, when we were at First Girl's 6-year well check on November 28th I put Third Girl on the scale and saw that she weighed over 16 pounds. That means she gained over half a pound in a month. Yay!

She has at least two naps a day. Unfortunately for Mom and Dad, some time probably after she turned nine months old, she began waking up during the night some nights, which means she ends up in our bed for a few hours and we don't sleep as well. I don't know what it is -- why she wakes up. She's not pulling herself all the way up to standing yet, so she isn't waking up and doing that and then feeling stuck, ya know? It's really not too bad, though. She falls asleep once she has me.


The photos we took during her 11th month and on the monthday are {HERE}. Enjoy!

C's tenth month

I'm going to try to play catch up on my blog this week . . . 

Our baby turned ten months old in October. Click {HERE} for some of the photos from her 10th month. We love the professional ones that my in-laws paid for! The photographer took plenty of their whole family plus some of only our little family, and the photo shoot was just a little bit before C's 10th monthday.

I mentioned that her hemoglobin was low. At the follow-up appointment at ten months old it had improved to 9, which was good. She also had the flu shot booster on that day. We were surprised that she had lost a few ounces in the previous month instead of gaining weight. But I was not worried. She eats and pees and poops. Her sisters were the same way: probably above 20th percentile for height and weight when they were two months old and for a while after that, and then they went below their own growth curve. They are now around 5th percentile for weight (which C has been) and slightly higher for height. If you know me, you know that I am small. Growing up I was almost always the shortest kid in the class, and normal weight for my height. Anyway, the pediatrician (who I started taking our kids to six years ago) told me to start adding some butter to C's food, which I am absolutely not going to do. Nobody needs butter.

Animal fats are composed of saturated fats, which are the most dangerous types of fat.  Consumption of saturated fats raises cholesterol levels and elevates the risk of heart disease and cancer. [from THIS blog post by Dr. Fuhrman's daughter]

I did increase the amount of good fat, to make sure she has a good amount of ground nuts and/or avocado each day.

Her new foods during this month were whole wheat cereal (oops: I read later in my Disease-Proof Your Child book that wheat is on the list of foods that Dr. Fuhrman recommends waiting until at least the first birthday to introduce), ground walnuts, red potato, mango, tomato, and bok choy.

Have I talked about how she moves herself around in a circle? She does it a lot; I have it on video. She sits with her legs in front of her. scoots one to the right and then the other to the right, and rotates usually all the way around -- or just enough to be able to see her sisters or whatever. Later, the day after Thanksgiving, my dad asked if she always goes clockwise. I realized that it is always that direction. :) 

It's fun when she claps or gives me five. She touches my face and gently plays with or pulls on my hair while breastfeeding. I love that she wants me to pull her up to stand, with her facing me and her hands holding my thumbs. When I put her in font of something the right height and make her hold onto it, she stands there for a long time and even lets go with one hand for a second if she wants a toy. She gets basically in crawling or push-up position but stretches out her hand for an object instead of crawling.

She's pretty attached to me, but is fine with just Daddy or her grandparents. Our neighbor Paula babysat all our kids and C cried almost the whole time even though she had been around her without me before! I think she was tired that evening, too, though.

C's ninth month

C's 9-month-day was in September. Photos of her on that day, plus other favorite photos from her ninth month, are here.

The new foods she tried during this month were: yams, zucchini, steel cut oats, blueberries, broccoli, and papaya. She loves to nurse, and she started to move her body to let me know that she wanted me to let her nurse. I guess it usually happens when I'm holding her and sit down. I feel her trying to lie down to be in the nursing position. By her ninth monthday I noticed that her smile is sometimes a cute squinty smile, probably mimicking me. You can kind of see it in one of the photos of her in the white floral dress.

At her 9-month appointment she weighed 15 lbs 10 oz -- barely less than Second Girl was at 9 months -- and this makes Third Girl in the 5%. She was 26 1/2 inches tall (16%) and her head was 99% again. The nurse tested C's hemoglobin level and found that it was pretty low. I haven't taken the time to find out what the numbers mean, but she was 6ish and should have been 11ish. So the pediatrician wrote a prescription for Tri-Vi-Sol, since the supplement I'd been giving C, called D-Vi-Sol, didn't have iron in it. I also started feeding C infant cereal twice a day, more often than I had been.

The only other information I can think of right now is that she can pick up small objects and transfer an object from one hand to the other. Her development is good. No crawling or pulling herself up, but she does somehow get from one place on the floor to another. She's a sweetie!

C's eighth month

I found this Carter's outfit at Kid to Kid, and our friend Vanessa made the hair clip.

During C's eighth month she had an obsession for a little while with saying "Mama." She said it for the first time on July 24th in the swimming pool. Then after maybe a week of lots of mamama chatting -- mostly before I grabbed the video camera, of course -- she wouldn't do it at all. When she was probably almost eight months old she started to say it again, less frequently. Anyway, everything she does is adorable. I'm glad she loves me even if she doesn't know yet what "Mama" and "Dada" represent.

7 and a half months

Her most common "word" is a funny grunt. She blows raspberries, squeals, and sometimes mimics what she hears her sisters do as they play (these are sort of screams, if I remember right, but not unpleasant when they come from the baby). She's still extremely happy but cries a little more than she used to. Now as I'm writing this I wonder if I wasn't responding quickly enough when she just fussed.

(7 1/2 months old) In front of a leasing office where preschool friends Natalie and Rachel used to live. We played at the playground.

During this month she ate these foods for the first time: pears (from Nana's tree), peas, butternut squash, corn, plums (from Nana's tree), sweet potatoes, peaches (locally grown), and yellow squash (locally grown). I would guess that she usually nurses 5 or 6 times a day -- never at night because she sleeps about 10-11 hours.

She is not trying to crawl or pull herself up, so she will do those things later than our other two kids did. She's good at rolling over and/or rotating herself, whether we put her down on her tummy or her back. I don't think she rotates all the way around, but halfway sometimes. Often when I go to her crib I find her with her legs sticking out between the bars. I looked back at the blog, and I mentioned some of this in her sixth month post. However, back then she was still in the center area where I had laid her down on her back. Now she may end up near a corner, on her tummy, and with her head on the left when it was on the right.

Here's a random list of other things C does: 

• She loves to hold onto her foot with both hands and put it in her mouth (but I'm not going to take the time to add a photo). 
• When she's lying down and really happy to see me, she throws her legs down a few times.
• She loves looking in mirrors -- probably because I smile and say, "Look at us! You and Mommy!"
• She is a thumb sucker, and I think it's always the right thumb. When I give her a pacifier she holds it and chews the nipple.
• When she sits with Daddy she likes to touch his arm, and she touches my face and hair a lot.
• She's good at clapping -- we just have to hold her wrists and do it for her. It makes her laugh. She also laughs when someone plays peek-a-boo with her.
• When I change her diaper she twists and tries to find something to get and play with.
• For her baths, I sit her up now, and lay her back to rinse her hair. She loves water and usually does not like it when I take her out (I'm sure she feels cold before she's dried off). As soon as she's in the tub she splashes. At least half of the time I put her in at the beginning of the other girls' bath, and it's fun watching all three have fun in there.
• I always turn on our musical soother at night, and she turns toward it and touches it.

I love this photo as much as the four at the top of this post.

You can click {here} to see her sister L at this age. 

C's seventh month

Our baby turned seven months old in July (over two weeks ago). 

The biggest change for her in her seventh month was food. A few days after turning six months old she had "solid" food for the first time. I fed it to her and Daddy took pictures. It's fun to watch how foreign it is for a baby to eat from a spoon. Her outfit was pink, by the way -- the only girly looking thing here besides her face.

She has loved everything she has tasted. I love Dr. Joel Fuhrman's book, Disease-Proof Your Child: Feeding Kids Right, and all of his books. Nutritarian eating has felt right and true to me since I started reading Eat to Live in October 2010. I am considering starting a separate blog about the cost of healthy meals. I brought this up because the first food C had was banana with my milk in it, following the DPYC book. He suggests to have your baby's first food be either banana or organic brown rice cereal for babies, and then to mix in some avocado a few days later, and to alternate vegetable and fruit feedings. After the avocado I introduced her to brown rice cereal, green beans, apples, and carrots. I smashed the raw banana and avocado with a fork, but for the other fruits and veggies I just steamed and pureed fresh or frozen ones (and she has had no-sugar-added bottled applesauce). Our other kids ate mostly homemade baby food also. It's so much cheaper than commercial baby food and, in my opinion, better.

During her seventh month she attended her first family reunion and experienced her first 4th of July (hearing fireworks only from a distance). I mentioned those things {here}.

She became an even better sitter, and she likes to sit and play with our musical LeapFrog toy that grandparents gave to Shboogoo for her first birthday. I realized I didn't even know the name of the toy, so I did an online search today. It's the LeapFrog Learn-Around Playground Activity Center. It turns out that it was recalled because "a child's arm can become caught in the activity center's plastic tube" -- and I never knew! I don't think I've seen our kids put their arm in the tube, but I will supervise better when they use it. 

She loves music. Besides touching and listening to that toy, she enjoys it when I sing, and often when I play the piano I sit her on my lap and she plays, too. She's dancing more -- bouncing as she sits -- when there is a good rhythm, I think even when I just chant something. She likes to move her arm up and down and pat stuff with her palm. She also loves hearing rhymes such as Pat-a-Cake.

On July 19th the kids and I all went to see a family doctor because the oldest and the youngest each had a runny nose and the oldest also was coughing a little. More importantly, I made the appointment because my throat was hurting pretty badly the day before and I hoped I didn't have strep throat. None of us had strep throat -- yay! The symptoms only lasted for about two days. Anyway, we're glad C didn't get another infection like the one in February. At this appointment, when she was almost seven months old, she weighed barely under 15 pounds. She is so big in her car seat now compared to when I took this photo! Now her heels come past the word Graco.

Shboogoo and I like to say (I said it first), "How were we ever happy without her?"

C's sixth month

C, also known as Third Girl, turned six months old in June. Anne did her photo shoot in the park on June 22nd and gave me the CD of both girls' photos on July 4th. More of the photos are at the end of this post. 


During C's sixth month . . .

• I painted her toenails for the first time -- glittery pale pink.
• It was her first Memorial Day. (Daddy had to study and my brother took this picture. At 3:00 I read this to remind us of the reason for the day, and we had a little moment of silence.)

 

• She fell on June 7th (the first day of Daddy's 3-week annual training with the Army). My mom was holding her and accidentally tripped down our apartment stairs, stumbled forward, and fell. I didn't see it happen. I had gone back in to get my phone, and then I heard my mom cry out and C cry. In those few seconds I think I heard some barking, too, so at first I thought something crazy was happening with a dog. Of course I instinctively ran out, and of course my mom felt really bad. The baby only cried for a few minutes, and once we got to the van I nursed her to comfort her. She stopped and cried briefly when she heard my voice interrupt the quiet. I called our pediatrician's office to be sure we should go straight to the ER. We went there and did a CT scan. Thankfully, C's head and body were just fine. She didn't actually bleed. The scrape looked worse than it was because she and my mom had landed on an oily parking spot, so her head was dirty (as well as their clothes). Besides the CT scan and looking at C's body and behavior, the hospital staff just cleaned her head, put on ointment and gave her Tylenol. C had a goose egg on the right side of the top of her head for a couple of hours and my mom was sore for a few days. I'm so glad it wasn't worse!

the owie a day or so after she fell

• Her hair grew long enough that it can all lay down when she is sitting up or someone is holding her. We don't do the faux-hawk anymore.
• For a while she did a lot of experimenting with making noises with her tongue (blowing raspberries all the time, etc.), and then she stopped. She started making da-da sounds, some of them starting with a slightly different consonant (but no M) and happy squeals.
• She could sit for a few minutes without any support, try to scoot backwards when lying on my lap or the Boppy, and rotate herself in the crib so her legs went between the bars.
• At the six-month well check she was a little over 14 and a half pounds -- about 25th percentile -- and 2 foot 2 inches tall.

Here are a few other photos of her during her sixth month. None of her lying next to the teddy bear this month (unless they are stuck on my non-smart phone; I haven't taken the time to look through them all).

nursing

 

 

 

More from the June 22nd photo shoot. There are other good ones, too, but this is plenty to share here. I noticed that L only had two photos in her six month post. . . .

I got this idea, and two or three others that we used, from pinterest.