Lacey's First Christmas!

In pictures:

We spent the night before Christmas Eve at Grandmother and Grandpa Bobo's house. We had a wonderful little Bobo Christmas

She got lots of cool stuff. And here you can see that it makes a nice bed. (Yes, she is lying on her gifts and playing with a cardboard box.)

Christmas morning we were at Grandma and Grandpa Welker's house. More cool stuff for Lacey (and everybody else). Doesn't she make such a cute present?

One of my favorite--Lacey and I got matching aprons, made by Grandma Welker.

Lacey got a tanooki suit to keep her warm this winter (though I think she'll be growing out of it before the weather warms up).

Lacey LOVES her Auntie Sarah.

And her Uncle BenBen.

And Grandpa was corrupting her with football. She seemed to enjoy it.

We had a wonderful Christmas with both of our families. It was wonderful to have all of my siblings home for Christmas this year--it was quite possibly my best Christmas ever!

And So It Begins

My cute little wiggle worm:



Soon nothing will be safe.

The Spoils of Babyhood

Everyone knows that it's a grandmother's job to spoil her grandchildren. Look how Lacey has been spoiled lately.

Grandma Welker made her this beautiful Christmas dress. She tries to chew on the bow (the one on the dress, not the one on her head) but she can't quite get it in her mouth.

And Grandmother Bobo sent her this delightfully pink snow suit so that Lacey will stay nice and warm for winter. It's about three times her size, but that means that it will last all winter.


Thanks, Lacey's Grandmas!

What a Week!

I know that it's gonna be a crazy week when there's an entry on every day on my calendar. Well, not every day has been packed, but with a 6-month-old baby, things are never quiet! We made the hour-long drive to Salt Lake City twice (and if you count Thanksgiving last Thursday, it was three times in a week, which is intense for us who usually don't go further than the grocery store across the street).

Monday we made our way up to SLC to visit Phil's brother Will and his family, who were visiting from Colorado. Lacey was amazing and stayed happy until about 7:30, when she fell asleep while Grandmother was holding her. That's really good for my little one who usually gets grumpy at about 4:30 in the evening. We played had chili, played games, and basically acted like a bunch of Bobos, which really is as fun as it sounds.

Lacey with cousin Cyrus
(actually, this was Thursday morning,
but I forgot to take my camera Monday night, so let's pretend).

With Uncle Will. So happy!

Wednesday I took Lacey to get weighed--and she had gained 5 ounces! When she hadn't gained any weight the week before, the doctor told me to start supplement, force feeding if I had to, since she won't take a bottle from me. Luckily, I've gotten her to drink from a medicine spoon, and sometimes a cup if she's in the mood for it. Between that and measure to increase my own supply, she's gaining her weight back and much of the fussiness that was driving us both bonkers has gone. She just smiles and laughs all day! I guess that's why we have these well baby checkups. Now if I could only get her to willingly take a morning nap...

See how happy she is (when I can get her to take naps)!

Thursday we made our way back up to SLC to Phil's work Christmas party at the Grand America Hotel. Very fancy, and very yummy. Afterwards we headed back over to Grandmother's house and watched the new Star Trek movie (rough day, I know). And we left just in time for Phil to be late for his calculus class.

And Friday was supposed to be a quiet stay at home day, but it was a Christmas shopping day instead! I didn't buy any gifts, but thanks to Phil's bosses and a very kind giftcard to Target for me, we got some Christmas decorations, including a little tree and a wreath and a garland and whatnot.



But what I was really excited about was the curtains that I was FINALLY able to purchase.

Lacey's First Thanksgiving

And what a delightful one it was! Besides the fact that she woke up an hour earlier than usual (I guess she was anxious to get the party started) and had a diaper blow-out mid-morning, we had a very pleasant day.

We enjoyed our Thanksgiving dinner with some of Phil's family in Salt Lake. I was assigned dessert for our Thanksgiving feast. I decided on an apple pie,



a pecan pie (and yes, there's a little slice missing because I had to make sure it was good before i served it to my family),



and a pumpkin dessert cake (like a pumpkin pie with a yellow cake mix cookie crust instead of a pastry crust, and a streusel topping, yumm).


I don't bake very often, but I think they turned out nicely.

Before heading up to Phil's parents' place, we stopped for a quick visit at my uncle Scott's home for a quick hello. Great grandma Simmons was very excited to see Lacey and wanted pictures so that Grandma Welker would be jealous. And she was.


Our Thanksgiving feast was fantastic, with everything that makes Thanksgiving a day to look forward to: lots of good food, and lots of good company (and, of course, pie). Lacey had fun playing with her grandparents, aunts, uncle(s) and cousins. She was even pleasant most of the time, until it got to be past her bedtime and she was just done.

Lacey with her Aunt Em:

Lacey playing on the floor with cousin Johnnie, who is off camera. He was so sweet and gave Lacey the truck and trailer he was playing with so she could play with them:


Thanks to everyone who made Lacey's first Thanksgiving a wonderful day for all of us!

What have those BoBos been up to?

Honestly, not much. Maybe that's why I haven't bothered to put anything up here.

Phil goes to work and then goes to school. He's taking a calculus and a music class this semester, getting those GEs out of the way before he starts the real work. He still hasn't gotten a calling in our new ward, and we've been here since August. They tried to put him in Scouts, but he has class in the evenings so he could would never be able to make it to their meetings. Maybe they're holding him in reserve for something really special.... That's a scary thought.

I've been hanging around home all day with Lacey--the cutest little baby in the world. We go for walks and sing songs and listen to fun music, and if I'm lucky she'll take a couple naps during the day. If I'm lucky, Lacey will let me indulge in a hobby or two during the day, mostly in the way of trying a new recipe. Saturday morning I made some delicious pumpkin pancakes (recipe here) and it may be the best pancake recipe I've ever tried (best topped with fried apples for the perfect fall breakfast). I've also been doodling around with designing our Christmas card. I've found that it's something that I really enjoy doing.

And now, what everyone REALLY wants to know about--


Lacey! She turned 6 months old a couple weeks ago, and it's taken me this long to post a picture of her because our all the pictures have been stuck on our dead camera while I kept forgetting to buy replacement batteries. But, there she is, all happy and smiley. She started eating more solids besides just cereals--we started with green beans, which she loved, or at least tolerated well enough to eat everything that I gave her. Peas were not such a hit, but she ate them when I mixed them up in her cereal. She also loved the prunes I fed her... (which, by the way, did their job so well that I had to bathe the baby, do a load of laundry, and disinfect a bathtub). She reaches for and grabs anything that gets her attention, and more often than not it's not something that she should be playing with. She sits up all by herself and would stay that way all day if she could. She thinks that lying on the floor is old fashioned, I guess.

At her 6 month appointment, I was rather concerned that she hadn't gained weight as she should have. And sure enough, she'd actually lost some weight. I promise, I'm not starving my baby, and she actually eats very well (at least, I thought so!). On Thursday she weighed 11 pounds 4 oz, which is a pound lighter than she weight at 4 months, and just exactly what she weighed at 2 months (granted, she was a chubby 2 months). It's not worrisome, because she's exactly where she should be developmentally and doing everything that a 6 month old should be doing, but I do have to take her in to have her weighed every week to make sure that she starts gaining again, and in the meantime take every opportunity to get extra calories in her. I believe that she's stolen the title of Smallest Bobo Baby!

And that's what those BoBos have been up to lately!

My Favorite Toys

Baby toys--who needs them when you have...

Koolaid bottles

egg separators

And pieces of paper. And who needs a paper shredder when you have a baby? Take that, identity thieves.

Okay, we don't really give her paper to play with for fear she'll really end up eating it, but it's probably her favorite thing to chew on. I have to be careful in church or she'll steal the program from me and eat it before I have a chance to look at it.

What I've been up to lately...

Recently I discovered that I have everything that I need to record my electric piano directly onto my computer. It's fun to play with, and doesn't sounds that bad, either. Here I've recorded the Theme from Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. It's a movie because I don't know how to do it another way. It's not really wonderful playing on my part--stage fright, I think--but it's fun to show what I've been dong. The long pauses are page turns.

A word on English spelling and pronunciation

Look--a post that's not about Lacey.

In college I majored in linguistics. Every once in a while, I have to vent about the misconceptions people have about English language and English grammar. My vent of the day: English spelling and pronunciation.

English spelling is NOT phonetic. It may be semi-phonetic, or wannabe phonetic, but the bottom line is that spelling of a word does not dictate its pronunciation. Dumb, I know, but that's how it is. In a perfect system, the pronunciation of a word would dictate its spelling, but, alas, we're stuck with what we got. The discrepancies between spelling and pronunciation stem from several sources. These are the ones that I've come across.

First, English pronunciation in general has changed since the language was codified in print after the invention of the printing press. All those silent gh's and g's and k's used to be pronounced. Also, when English was put into print, many of the words had different regional pronunciations, so printers opted for spellings of older pronunciations to be more consistent.

Second, English has borrowed heavily from other languages, including French, which is infamous for its silent letters.

Third, there are way more distinct sounds in English than we have letters to represent them. English has 15 distinct vowel sounds alone, to be represented by {a} {e} {i} {o} {u} and sometimes {y}. Doh!

Fourth, there is still wide regional variation in English pronunciation. No one region has a corner on "correct" pronunciation. The fact is, there is no "correct" pronunciation; there is only standard and non-standard. Bottom line, I can say it however the heck it comes naturally to me, regardless of how it is spelled, as long as I'm understood by the people that I need to be understood by. It is very useful to know and be able to use standard English pronunciation, but there's no law that says you have to use it or that it's more correct than other pronunciations.

My favorite illustration of the English spelling situation is this--

ghoti

How would you pronounce this word? Most people would say "goat-ee." However, it is a variant (made up) spelling of the word "fish." How can that be? Check it out:

enough
women
nation

English spelling is jacked. It's not gonna change, so you might as well get used to it.

First Book

Like a typical baby, Lacey can be surrounded by her toys, and only want whatever it is that I'm using at the moment. We were sitting together on the couch, Lacey in her little corner, me on the next cushion, Lacey surrounded by toys to play with, me reading a book, and all Lacey wanted was my book. No toy would do, even if I pretended I was playing with it first. So I got her a book to play with that she wouldn't destroy with her slobber. She was very interested in it, check it out:

But we all know the REAL purpose of board books:

I can do it myself!

Looking at the trend in my blog entries, you can maybe guess what it is my life revolves around. It's so much fun to watch that little monkey learn how to do things. She's just starting to want to grab things besides the toys that I shake in her face--things like my hair, my plate, my toast, the lid to the lotion tub, the spoon I feed her with, whatever she can get her hands on and stick in her mouth. I'm waiting for the day when she actually figures out that she can roll over to get to a different place and get her hands on so many different things. Another accomplishment of recent weeks is discovering how to get her binky into her mouth the right way. We were lucky enough to catch it on video--the end of the video is actually the camera shutting off because it ran out of batteries. It *only* took her two minutes to get it right!

Mostly this is for those few people who, like me, could sit and watch my baby all day. So don't expect an action-packed thriller

So Much to Do!

Lacey has, that is. She's been busy discovering new things and having new experiences, it's hard to keep up with it all! In the past month, she's eaten her first solids (she absolutely LOVES her rice cereal), she's learned how to roll over both ways (although she's still getting the hang of rolling from back to tummy, as you'll see if you watch the video), and she's learning how to use her hands, mostly to put things in her mouth. It takes me by surprise every time I find her in a position I didn't leave her in. She's such a little smarty pants, and it's so much fun to watch her discover the world!

First Solids!

Ok, maybe this is mundane to some people...but it's pretty exciting for me! Yesterday we introduced Lacey to rice cereal. It went better than I expected it to! I think she even swallowed more than she spit out.

I could tell she was swallowing because she sucks her lower lip in.

She learned pretty quick to open up for the spoon. What a smarty pants!

See--she likes it! Smiles!!

What a cutie we have!

A Crazy Weekend

It is unusual for my family to actually have plans. To have plans four days in a row is unheard of. But that's what happened this weekend! Or, rather, last weekend, since it's taken me a week to post about it. :) It was lots of fun, but kind of exhausting. The craziness started Friday night when we had some friends over for dinner. I had intended on having everything ready to eat and all the dinner dishes done before our friends arrived...then I fell asleep while I was trying to put Lacey down for a nap, and nothing got done. Regardless, we had a wonderful time eating with and visiting with our friends. We also had a delicious peach-strawberry pie. :) And a whole heap of dishes that didn't actually get done until Monday.

Our excitement Saturday was to go see the new Harry Potter movie, finally. We left Lacey with a babysitter, and she was just a little angel! It's so nice that she'll take a bottle--it gives me a lot more freedom to go out and about. And my little angel baby is good for babysitters, at least early in the day before she gets fussy. And how nice that she's such a pleasant baby for sitter, since most of our babysitters are couples who haven't had kids yet, and we certainly don't want to discourage them!

Sunday was delightful--we went to a Bobo bay blessing, then hung out with friends and family to celebrate. Lacey had lots of fun playing with a houseful of people. I always enjoy spending time with family, and it's even funner (any grammar purist out there who thinks that isn't a word can bite me) now that I have a cute little baby to show off. :)

Monday, which was a holiday, after I spent Labor Day laboring to get my home neat and clean, we went to a BBQ hosted by Phil's mission president. It was fun for Phil to see some of the missionaries that he served with, and fun for him to show off his little squirt. It was also fun to look around and see how many more dates were going on than when we went to this thing last year. We handed Lacey off to one of Phil's old companions and his girlfriend, and they got some looks from people who were arriving--"No, this isn't our baby!" It made us laugh.

It was so fun to see so many friends last weekend! Exhausting, but delightful.

Sleeping

For the first three months of life, Lacey, like a typical baby, was a really good sleeper. Not that she every really slept through then night, or anything, but when she was tired, she would just fall asleep. I didn't have to worry about whether or not she was getting enough sleep, and, occasionally, I would get a good stretch of sleep at night myself. Then she turned three months old and everything changed. Instead of falling asleep when she was tired, she got fussy, and then she got over tired, and then it was extremely difficult to get her to go to sleep and stay asleep, especially for naps during the day. I was going a little crazy from the sleepless nights and fussiness during the day. I read this book, and found it to be extremely helpful:


I had no idea that my baby had to mature into sleep, or that I needed to wait until she was 4 months old to really expect her to take regular long naps during the day. The first thing I did was start putting her to bed earlier. That was helpful, since she got up at the same time in the morning regardless of when she went to bed. So now she goes to bed at about 7:30.

One of the criticisms of Dr. Weissbluth's sleep method is that it does include some crying, even quite a bit of crying if you have a difficult baby. Before Lacey was born, I told myself that I would never let her "cry it out." It did seem like an extreme method to me and I didn't want my baby to cry when there were other ways. Then frustration and sleep deprivation set in and I realized that just letting her cry it out a couple of times would be easier on both of us in the long run than trying more soothing methods which would take longer (which I tried for a little while but were too frustrating for me). I knew that I would be able to be more consistent with Dr. Weissbluth's method, which was the most important thing for teaching her how to sleep. It's effective, and it's effective fast, and that meant that I wasn't nearly so frustrated and that I've been able to get more sleep sooner myself and retain my sanity.

So now, Lacey goes to bed as soon as I put her down for the night (which I also attribute to the fact that we've had a bedtime routine since almost the day she was born), she sleeps pretty well during night (last night she went to bed at 7:30, woke up at 2:30 to eat, then again at 5:30, though I didn't get her up, so she fell asleep until about 6:30, then she ate and slept again til 7:30). We're working on not waking up between 2:30 and 6:00. She's getting good at going down for a morning nap, too. This morning she went down with 0 fussing, which is amazing to me, and it really only took a couple days of "training" to get to this point. Yay!

I don't really mean to be all in praise of a particular method of sleep training, I'm just so glad that Lacey is sleeping better and is a much better-rested, happier baby since she's getting so much better sleep, and glad that I understand better what her sleep needs are. She's such a sweetie when she's rested and happy, it's all been worth it. :)

fun stuff

I found this cool little scrapbook maker thing and thought I'd try it out. It's free to post online or email, but if you want to print them you have to pay... It's fun anyway.

Make a Smilebox scrapbook

My life, as it is, right now

I have been blessed with the perfect life, I think. I say that knowing full well that things change in a heartbeat, but right at this very moment, I think I am quite content. I have a wonderful loving husband (who, by the way, made me breakfast this morning, how lucky am I), a beautiful baby girl, a nice place to live, my own car to drive, everything that I need, and most everything that I want. If someone were to ask me what would make my life better, I would probably tell them an unbroken night’s sleep (which I don’t think I’ve had for at least six months), and the magical disappearance of those extra baby pounds that are keeping me out of my favorite clothes.

I have the best, and most challenging, job in the world—that is, taking care of my 3 ½-month-old daughter 24/7. She cries so little that some people are under the impression that she never cries, which of course isn’t true, but as Phil commented the other day, I think it would be difficult to find a baby that cries less than ours does. My day usually includes changing diapers, extracting smiles and giggles, soothing to sleep, feeding the baby and the husband, and sometimes cleaning the kitchen and doing laundry. It may not sound like much, but it’s exhausting, especially since I’m on-call 24 hours a day, every day. Last night I put Lacey to bed at 8:00, then collapsed onto my own bed and slept for the “rest” of the night (as much as Lacey allowed).

Since we just moved, we have no callings in our current ward. It’s so nice to have Phil home on Thursday nights instead of at Scouts. We’ll see what kind of fun things are in store for us now. Right now we’re enjoying the calm between the craziness of summer vacations and the craziness of a new school year.

Yup, I have a good life.

A New Blog!

Welcome to our new blog! I’ve decided that I’ve reached the time of life when life just might be exciting enough to have one. I’m mostly doing this as a way of keeping a record of my family’s comings and goings—something for posterity, really, although I hope that my friends and family will use it as a way to keep in touch. Please, enjoy!