Mother's Day Weekend

Mother's day weekend was awesome! My mom came early to visit on Wednesday and we partied (went to Provo and American Fork DIs) and went to early garage sales on Friday. My dad arrived that evening and had a great time at Pizza Pie Cafe as well as just hanging out together. Then garaged sale'd all Saturday morning! Then had a fun Mother's day with Perry cooking these wonderful almond chocolate chip waffles and he also sweetly made me some chocolate covered strawberries and chocolate almond pretzal mounds! He did this all because I couldn't have the treat that the ward passed out for mother's day (my lactaid no longer works to battle the lactose intolerant symptoms and I still get the allergic reaction to milk so its all for the best). Oh and he also let me sleep in. It was glorious. He is making sure I get extra pampered today. I decided with all the extra time on my hands to paint my nails and get especially dolled up for church and loved wearing my like new outfit to church that I found at garage sales the day before. The whole outfit was probably 2 dollars.
    Also speaking of mothers, we have a new mother bird nesting in the tree right next to my family room window. So I saw her build her nest within a couple days. Then I saw her and a male robin flitting around all twitter pated. Then the next day there was a beautiful blue egg in her nest. Now there are 4 and she is finally incubating them. I suppose they will hatch around May 21st from what I researched. I'm excited to see it all. It is also a great direct teaching experience for Grant to see the whole process. I love watching his inquisitive mind work and process everything! He is so smart and wonderful.

Gardening and New Toy

We are excited to garden this year and try some new greens like kale and other leafy greens. Mainly because with the money from the garage sale and from returning our blendtec we bought a Vitamix. We liked the blendtec but it didn't seem as durable as the vita-mix and the jar seal broke both times we tried to do dry grains. We even used the grain jar. So that was disappointing. And the jar would hop around when we did any kind of blending. My mom has had a Vita-mix for a while and I have used it several times and know how it feels when used and so far we are very pleased with our purchase. So anyway, we want to grow some things that we will be putting in our smoothies that we usually buy at the store, this way there will be optimum chance of nutrients in the smoothie if it is freshly picked. So next weekend maybe we will work on getting our garden started. I'm so excited! It is so fun watching new plants grow!

9 Month Stats for Carly

Carly is now 9 months old. She is so close to crawling but not quite there yet. Her pediatrician says not to worry until about a year old. I'm in no rush for her to crawl but it is so fun to see your own children grow and develop and reach another milestone. She is very bubbly and loud and giggly. She loves life and makes me appreciate life more everyday. She is no where near standing either. Her little jello legs don't enjoy standing but she will bounce if I try to stand her up. She says, baba, dada, mama, fe fe, ge, nana, and aaaaaaah! Her stats at her well-baby visit were as follows: Weight- 14 lb 8 oz which is the 1st percentile, Height- 27 inches which is the 32nd percentile, and Head Circumference- 42.8 cm which is 18th percentile. Although she is small she is following her own curve so that is all that really matters. However, I no longer nurse her because I wasn't producing enough milk. I never thought I produced much because when I missed a feeding and pumped I produced 3 oz on one side and 1-2 oz on the other side which seemed so small. Then I stopped feeding her at night because she was sleeping all night and that made my milk supply really plummet. Then I thought maybe I probably wasn't producing enough because she nursed for only 3 minutes, even when it had been a while and decided to feed her a bottle after she indicated that she was done nursing and she drank 4-6 oz whenever we did that so that really showed me that she definitely wasn't getting much from me. So since I'm inadequate and she is almost a year old I thought we would just formula feed her until a year and then see what the pediatrician recommends after that. So anyway, it makes things really convenient as far as my independence and Carly doesn't seem to mind.  I feed her about every other day from myself and will slowly reduce the rest of my milk supply.  She has been mostly formula fed for a whole week and I feel like just in that short time she has chunked up a ton. I'm so happy we made that decision because I don't think she was starving because she ate a ton of solid food, but she might have been getting a little dehydrated and not receiving enough nutrients from me or from just the solids she's been having.

Check out all these cute facial expressions!

Bikes

Every time we go to Wal-mart Grant wants to ride the little bikes with training wheels. I gave him 5 minutes each time. Eventually he seemed to get the hang of it so I was convinced that he was ready for a bike. Also it helped that he would say, "Mommy I want a bike". I know little kids sometimes think parents can produce toys and such out of thin air. So I explained to him that we didn't have enough money so we needed to make some money to get a bike. Fortunately  a person from freecycle gave us a girly purple bike for free. Now all we needed was training wheels and we were set! So I super spring cleaned our house kind of like how this spring has been, (a really long winter and all of a sudden we are snapping into the 80s? degrees that is after only 2 weeks straight with out snow!), and went through everything we owned! I mean everything in 2 days. Had a great garage sale on Saturday and convinced Grant to sell some of his toys so that we could earn money to buy training wheels. I thought it would be good for him to learn that we have to work for the money to buy things. Also I got all that expendable income to be a thrifty shopper. I'm so grateful my mom instilled in me a sense of frugality and not needing the newest everything and finding really great quality and like new items at garage sales and thrift stores. It is so gratifying finding awesome deals.