Grace's 4th Birthday Parties :)

Our big 4 year-old was spoiled enough to get 2 birthday parties this year. A few weekends before her real birthday we went to Bend for the weekend and had a party with Papa Craig and Memaw Mary. My mom made Grace a beautiful Strawberry Shortcake cake to celebrate. Grace had a fun-filled pre-birthday weekend which included a visit to the High Desert Museum with Papa, Daddy and Weston.

The weekend before Grace's birthday we celebrated at our home with Papa John and Memaw Shirley. I made a sad attempt at a pink heart cake with sprinkles. I'm sure it was cute enough but when you're raised with birthday cakes like my mom's the bar is set high :) We had a wonderful visit with John and Shirley and they took Grace to the Build a Bear store for her special present. Grace picked out a dog with a hot pink and red heart dress :) She also talked them into a baby dog and a hot pink dog bed with fur trim to go with it. These grandparents sure are pushovers!

We have enjoyed these past 4 years with Grace Hannah so much! She brings us joy everyday. Grace loves to sing, dance, run, play with dolls, and pretend. She seems to be very musical and loves for us to play the music LOUD. Her latest artwork has been clown faces colored in pink, red, white, and purple. Grace is so loving with Noah and will sit and hold him for long periods of time. She definitely has a soft spot for babies. So far Grace has been the most difficult to parent but we know there will be great rewards if we remain consistent with loving discipline. We are working with her on being a peacemaker (as opposed to causing fights with Weston and Elsie) and also on being a hard worker (she'd rather move slowly and let Weston pick up all the toys by himself). Grace loves to go shopping with me and is very friendly towards people. She also loves to cuddle and melts when we give her lots of hugs and kisses. She also recently learned how to write her name in all capital letters and moved into the top bunk bed when Weston moved into the "boy" room.

Grace wanted to wear pink tights under her swimming suit for some reason. She loves to dress up and pick out her own clothes now. I usually let her pick out her outfits as long as we aren't going anywhere that day :)

My beautiful pink heart cake!
Time with Papa John and Memaw Shirley! You'll notice Grace has her birthday dog with the pink dress!

Brothers

I decided to post a few photos of Weston and Noah at about 4 months. Here are a few from their first baby food feeding.
Noah's first rice cereal. He was upset that we would put such nasty stuff in his mouth!

Rice cereal face!Weston's first rice cereal.

Weston wasn't as upset about it, but I remember that he didn't like it much either. :)

Weston at about 4 months. I think they look similar except for the coloring.

Noah's Ready For the SuperBowl!

Here's Noah at almost 4 and a half months. You can tell he's all ready for the big game! Just for fun I added a photo of Weston in the same pose when he was about 2 months old.

Happy Baby!

Noah is now 4 months old and is turning out to be a very happy baby. For awhile he was sleeping through the night fairly consistently but has now reverted to waking up every night between 4:30 and 5:30 a.m. to be fed. I don't mind too much as he goes back to sleep and doesn't wake up again until after 8 a.m. Noah is just learning to grasp toys and has been sitting in his Johnny Jump-up lately. He hasn't figured out how to jump in it yet, but I think it won't be long!
We had a doctor's appt. for both Elsie and Noah last Friday. Noah was 16 lbs, 11 ounces which put him in the 85 percentile for weight! He was in the 75th percentile for length, so I guess he's a big boy all the way around!
Elsie was only in the 25th percentile for both! It's a good thing she's small since she likes to be carried around so much :)

Four little munchkins all in a row!

Elsie is 2!

Happy birthday to our big 2 year-old girl! Elsie's birthday was the 15th of January. We celebrated by have a little party on Saturday with my parents and the Rasmussens from next door. My mom made a "Hello Kitty" cake and we bought a few balloons and decorations from the dollar store (2 year-olds are easy to please!). We had a great time and Elsie seemed pleased with all the activities. You can see her pictured above and below with her new "Hello Kitty" bee-bee (this is how she says "baby"). Our gift for her birthday was to go to the Build-A-Bear store at the mall and let her pick out a stuffed animal. Once she had her baby safely in the cardboard box house she insisted on carrying it out to the car herself. This was quite humorous as the box was as big as her and she had to drag it along the floor. We've found 2 year-olds can be quite determined! How these past 2 years have flown by!
Mike's 31st birthday was on Sunday, the 18th. To celebrate, Mike and I went out on a date night, I made him his favorite chocolate cake (his mom's recipe), and then my parents treated us to Flying Pie pizza on Sunday. We were sad that Mike's parents couldn't make it down from Spokane for all the birthday festivities. Shirley dislocated her shoulder shortly after Noah was born and has been dealing with severe pain ever since. They are missing their grandchildren and looking forward to the day life gets back to normal. We're praying the doctors will be able to figure out what's wrong very soon.
Update on Elsie's potty-training: she seems to have lost interest for now and has only been going on her potty about once a day. We're feeling relaxed about it and must admit I'm relieved not to be starting the intense training for awhile.
Elsie and "Hello" bee-bee.

Elsie even blew out her candles all by herself after several tries!

My mom said this cake was the easiest she's ever decorated. I thought it turned out so cute!

Random Photos From the Past Few Months

Below I've posted a bunch of photos from the past few months. I haven't been great about blogging lately, so I'm playing a bit of catch-up here.
Here's Elsie all ready to play in the snow. Mike took just her outside to play one night. She felt so big holding Daddy's hand and throwing snowballs at the rest of us who were watching from the window.

We rigged up a little sled. It didn't work that great and kept tipping over.

Elsie watching her siblings from the comfort of home. Most days it was too deep and cold for her to go outside.

Enjoying our Christmas dinner. It was just our little family for Christmas this year.

Noah sitting in his Bumbo seat (thank you Aunt Elaine and Uncle Jack)! I like this photo because he looks like he's flirting.

A tree shot. Don't you love that cheesy five year-old smile?

Mike and I were pretty impressed with our snowman. The kids got tired of building him after about 2 minutes and wandered off to do other things. We also had a great snowball fight on this day. I won, of course ;) If Mike says I white-washed my own children, do NOT believe him. He's lying.

Christmas cookie time! We made and frosted our annual Christmas cookies on Christmas-Eve this year.

The finished product!

Elsie is crying because I told her no more cookies. In the photo it looks like no one is having fun but me, but we all had a great time (for the most part).

Grace just woke up in this one. You can see how chubby Noah has become in 3 and 1/2 months!

Mike had the kids dress up as silly as they could and this is what Grace came up with.

Elsie loves to hold Noah. He's almost as big as her now!

Potty-Training?

The big news this week was that Elsie decided she wanted to do some potty-training! After I got her out of the shower one day she insisted I put her on the toilet. I put her on the toilet and then was busy for awhile with Grace. When I came back in to the bathroom Elsie had done a "#2" on the toilet and was so proud! I got down her little potty chair and she's been practicing on it every day. I'm not sure she's ready to fully potty-train yet (or maybe I'm not ready to go for it yet) but it's fun to practice and let her have some positive experiences. I told myself I wouldn't potty-train Elsie until she's 2 1/2 yrs as we didn't have the best experiences with potty-training Weston and Grace. I guess if she's into it though we won't hold her back :)

Brother and sister are excited for her also!

Apparently I didn't do the best wiping job, I left a little behind! ;)

Wedding Slideshow

Here's the link to a slideshow of wedding photos. All of these photos were taken by Haley's friend, Allison. I think they're great! There are a few of Weston and Grace towards the middle.
http://www.photobiz.com/slideshowbiz/slideshow.cfm?slideshowID=43849&photographerID=6874

Kyle's Photos

My brother blessed us with a photo session over Thanksgiving. Here are some of the shots I like.

Elsie's hand is a bit fuzzy, but I can't believe we're all looking at the camera!

This was another good one. My eyes were closed for this shot so Kyle took some eyes from one of the other shots and moved them onto this picture.

This is one of my favorites!
Pure delight!

So Far Behind!

I have a ton of wonderful photos to post from Thanksgiving, Christmas and my brother's wedding...just no time! Here are a few photos to get us started :)
My brother's wedding was awesome! It was such a wonderful day and I couldn't ask for a better sister-in-law. I was a bridesmaid, Grace was the flower girl, and Weston was the ring-bearer. All these photos were taken by Kyle's friend, Levi, who is also a photographer. These photos were taken off Levi's MySpace page. I'm sure I'll have a lot more photos to come as there were two photographers there and they haven't gotten very far on editing the hundreds of photos taken.
Kyle and Haley are currently making their cross-country trip to their new home in Georgia. They've got all Haley's belongings in a little U-haul behind their SUV. Kyle's planning a surprise honeymoon sometime in the future as a road trip with a U-haul is not much of a honeymoon :)
Grace and Uncle Kyle
The beautiful bride, Haley.

I thought this was a really cute photo. You can tell they're having fun.

The happy couple.