January

It is so crazy how quickly time is flying by.  Baby Grace is almost 3 weeks and we have been all adjusting to the new family of 7 and a nursing newborn which in my opinion deserves a title all of its own.  It’s insane how much time it takes to keep a little baby fed and happy. 

I’ve been having trouble sleeping because I have had so much worry going through my mind about all my kids in their different responsibilities with school, church, extra curricular activities and just plain being a good person with honesty, respect, good manners and that sort of stuff that moms are supposed to be teaching.  I haven’t been very good about praying about these concerns and turning them to the Lord which I realize is why I am losing sleep with worry.   I need to bed better.

Ella has been attending a community acting class which she has loved and she got a speaking part in the play and she has just been so happy and excited about it.  It makes my heart happy to see her happy.  She is still trying to take piano lessons and has quit doing gymnastics this month.  She got dropped out of honor society last trimester for just a few points below the required GPA and as such has lost interest in keeping up her grades.  It is making her dad and I worry a lot.  Again I need to pray hard for instructions on how to be a mom!  She attended her very first area church dance this past weekend and had so much fun.  I was thankful yet again for such good friends she can leave and go with and I can feel good about the influence they are on each other. She’s a good girl!  Dad made her take a selfie with him before she left. 

 

She also got to go with her young womens group to go see the LaBelle Ice Castles one night.  She's such a cutie!  Life is getting fun for her, that's for sure.

Lincoln started attending preschool in January and has been walking around with a pen or marker in his hand pretty regularly the past week.  He doodles and draws and pretends to write and this makes me so happy!!  I have been waiting and hoping this would happen at some point and now hopefully he will catch onto writing letters and such on his own very soon.  These are a few pictures his teacher shared.

 He has been such a good sport with Grace being born.  He loves her and kisses her and any time she squeaks he runs for the “pinky” and forces it into her crying mouth.  He tells me almost every day about how cute she is and that he loves her.  He has been very bored though.  We haven’t left the house much at all so he asks me every day what we are going to do because there is only so much playing cards, play dough, toys and such before you feel like you may have lost your mind.  We have watched lots of TV.

I took Ella and Lincoln to Home Depot to make a Saturday morning craft. They had fun painting and hammering together. Lincoln had his hiding from Ella because he was making it for her.

We are loving every second of a fresh new baby in our home.  She is pure sweetness and joy.  She is so tiny and such a precious daughter of God.  We love her so much! 

It's so weird to me to see my big baby holding my little baby.  I love them both so much my heart could burst!  So grateful for Ella's experience in having 4 younger siblings and now 5 so she can help me all the time!!  She will be a good mama!

Why does he now seem so huge!?

Alissa is a sweet heart and always looks for the better need of Grace.  If she thinks she shouldn't be held she gets upset at all who are holding her.  If she thinks she needs everyone to be quiet then she gets upset at all making noise.  She is a good sister.  She is soft and sweet with Grace.

Molly has probably been the most crazy about holding baby Grace.  She absolutely can’t get enough of her.  She wants to sit and take Snapchat filtered pictures of her cute face and just sits and admires her tiny little baby sister.

Dustin took the girls out and got them going on a snowman.  I LOVE, LOVE when he does this.  I don't remember finishing a snowman when I was a kid and I love that he will take them outside and do it with them.  He can do it quickly and so they enjoy it so much.  And I love the friendly face in the yard for a week or two.

One afternoon while trying to keep kids off the electronics they had a wrapping session and wrapped Lincoln and Molly in wrapping paper.  They make my life happy!  I'm so blessed to have so much excitement in 5 children!

Alissa's Birthday

Alissa had her 10th birthday on the 18th.  It was a pretty uneventful day because dad was at work and again I’m not leaving much with just having had a baby.  She took ice cream cups to her school class and we ordered Olive Garden for dinner and watched Christopher Robin that she and dad picked up from the Redbox.  


The next day she invited 5 friends to meet at our house and we took them sledding for a few hours then back here for some cake and ice cream.  They had such an awesome time sledding together they could have continued to play for hours I’m sure.  Her amazing daddy drove them up the hill over and over so they didn’t have to use much energy climbing back up after sledding down.



She invited her friends Emma Crane, Ashlynn Morgan, Hadlie Daniel, Lia Hendrix and Taylor Rigby. Taylor is Molly's age so she hung out with Molly and Ella invited her friend Kailee Daniel as well.

Grace and I enjoyed her first time sledding in the headed vehicle.  :)

 

Alissa has continued to do gymnastics this year and changed to a gym in Rigby called "Flips".  She has done well with it.  

She goes to the GATE (Gifted And Talented Education) program this year so she does a few extra projects throughout the year.  She got into this program from having high test scores.

She has become known this year as SLOW!  When I pick her up from school it's pretty known that I'm the last vehicle to leave the school because I am waiting on her to come mosey out the doors.  We have lectured and threatened and she has done extra dishes but still seems to be slow.   She is slow in pretty much every area of her life right now.

She is an excellent skier.  Her dad has told me the only real thing that scares him about her skiing is that she is going to get herself on a lift bigger than she can handle cause she is just that brave and confident in her abilities.  Hopefully she doesn't do that, but I am proud of her for being so good at it.

She is the cleanest child in our house.  When she cleans she is thorough and does a great job.  She prefers her room stay clean which gets frustrating when sharing a room with Molly, but I suppose again we are learning to accept differences.

She is not into electronics.  When all the kids are zoned out watching TV or playing a game, she just wants to do a craft or see if a friend can play Barbies.  She is really not into zoning out to electronics which I love about her.

She is a great girl with such determination and so many talents.  I am so thankful to have her as my daughter and in our family to teach us and love us and help us all return to Heavenly Father as an eternal family one day.

Come Follow Me

Last October at General Conference, the prophet President Russell M. Nelson opened the conference with these words,

"The long-standing objective of the Church is to assist all members to increase their faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and in His Atonement, to assist them in making and keeping their covenants with God, and to strengthen and seal their families. In this complex world today, this is not easy. The adversary is increasing his attacks on faith and upon us and our families at an exponential rate. To survive spiritually, we need counterstrategies and proactive plans. Accordingly, we now want to put in place organizational adjustments that will further fortify our members and their families.

For many years, Church leaders have been working on an integrated curriculum to strengthen families and individuals through a home-centered and Church-supported plan to learn doctrine, strengthen faith, and foster greater personal worship. Our efforts over these recent years to hallow the Sabbath—to make it a delight and a personal sign to God of our love for Him—will be augmented by the adjustments we will now introduce.

This morning we will announce a new balance and connection between gospel instruction in the home and in the Church. We are each responsible for our individual spiritual growth. And scriptures make it clear that parents have the primary responsibility to teach the doctrine to their children.² It is the responsibility of the Church to assist each member in the divinely defined goal of increasing his or her gospel knowledge."

As such, we were each given a book called "Come Follow Me" with outlined lessons to study with our families each week.  It's most certainly an inspired plan.  I can't help but notice the words I bolded and underlined about the church's objective to assist and strengthen and our RESPONSIBILITY to teach the doctrine to our children.  This is a shift for us as we have done some teaching at home but relied upon the primary teachers and Sunday school teachers to really teach them the doctrine I suppose.

So one of our first lessons was on being responsible for our own learning and we talked about the story of the 10 virgins and made our own oil lamps out of clay.  It was a fun time for all.  We even filled them with oil and a string to light to see how long they would stay burning.

I love the gospel, I love the church of Jesus Christ and the direction it gives us.  I appreciate so much the joy and peace we feel when we are trying to follow the Prophet and the Savior Jesus Christ.  So thankful for this new inspired program and I pray our family can be obedient to the council and avoid the fiery darts of the adversary.

Baby Grace

Grace was due January 10, 2019.  Through the last 8 weeks of the pregnancy I have been doing twice a week visits to the doctor to do an ultrasound one day and a non stress test on the other to make sure the baby was ok.  The primary reason for this is because I am 35 years old which puts me at a higher risk for complications.  They called me "maternal age of maturity".  Made me feel old!

Through my ultra sounds the tech confirmed week after week that the baby was actually due on January 1st and was in the 70% for size.  She confirmed the baby would likely be close to 9 pounds by the due date so I was getting a little worried about how I was going to get this baby out.  I had only had 7 pound babies.  We scheduled an induction date for January 3rd.

The evening on the 1st, Alissa started to feel crummy.  The next morning she was feeling horrible and had a fever so I called the doctor and they had no available appointments.  I took her in anyway and asked them to swab her for strep, which was negative.  They suggested we swab again for influenza and sure enough, it came back positive.  I had no idea what we were going to do considering I was supposed to be induced the next day.  They prescribed everybody Tamaflu and suggested we all start it today.  I called Dr. Leavitt, my OB and he suggested we wait until Monday to have baby.  Everybody felt better until Sunday when Ella started to feel sick.  She was the only one I hadn't started on the medication so I started her on it and got super worried I was not doing the right thing by having the baby on Monday.  I called up to the Womens Center and they told me they thought it would be ok since I would stay in the hospital until Wednesday.

My parents kept the kids and because they had all been sick they stayed home from school.  We headed to the hospital about 7 and got started.  They poked me 5 times to get my IV in and used about an hour and a half of time trying to check me in and get started with everything.  Finally we got some pitosin started and the epidural was in by 11:45ih.  Doctor came and broke my water about 1:00.

We watched the monitor for contractions and as soon as the epidural was in we got pretty sleepy and things slowed down so we dosed out and in of sleep.  Boone came to visit for a few minutes so I sat the bed upright to visit with him and I suppose some gravity of sitting helped encourage things along because I started to feel some pressure while visiting.  He left about 4:30 and I asked the nurse if she would check me and sure enough I had gone from 3 to 8 in dilation in about 45 minutes so she called the doctor.

5:15 our incredibly, sweet, absolutely perfect baby girl was born.  I couldn't get over how tiny she was that I completely forgot to check her gender until the nurse lifted her leg and showed me it was a girl!!  Dustin got to help deliver again which is always special.  I love him and am thankful he could do it.

She only cried for a quick second but was comforted by being against my skin.  I cannot even describe the intense and immediate love I feel for these babies when I get to hold them in my arms.  They are such a beautiful blessing from Heavenly Father and I am so thankful to be their mommy.

They let me hold her for a good long while before even weighing her and then, completely against what the ultra sound tech said she was 7lb 0oz and 19 3/4".  So perfect!

We were pretty sure she was going to be named Grace and funny that Dustin would have a dream the night before she was born that he was holding a baby girl named Grace.  He's pretty inspired like that.

I could not wait to call the girls and tell them IT'S A GIRL!  So probably 10 minutes after she was actually born we called to share.  Lincoln had to be reminded he got to have a toy if he didn't get a brother but then he was ok again.

Seriously.. so absolutely perfect!

The girls, my mom and dad, Grandma Carol and Grandma Bateman all came to visit as well as Aunt Johnna and Aunt Kylie and Mike and Farrah.  I made the girls wear the masks just in case they were still sick.  

Oh what a blessing this baby girl is already!!  We love her so much!!