It’s been a warm November. Time to play outside!

We like our hot tub. Wes and Carissa love “swimming” in it. Carissa likes to walk on her tippy-toes, but we have to watch her closely because sometimes she gets too brave.

I made muffins, and Carissa was a fan.

Writing is a difficult skill for Wes. But we keep working on it, and he gets a lot of help at school. Lately he has been getting notably better at it. Here he is writing the letter “E.” I’m impressed.

The kids and I made a Grateful Tree to decorate with leaves that list things we’re thankful for. This is Wes and Carissa cutting out leaves. Or, you know, trying to. Their scissor skills are still on the early side.

Wes loves making Lego towers. He’s quite good.

Wes and Carissa discovered they could give each other rides in the kitchen.

My mom and dad sent me a fruit basket from Edible Arrangements. It’s because I’ve been miserably sick since November 1, which culminated in a sinus infection last weekend, and I hurt my lower back and have been in physical therapy for it. My SI joint is locked, and I have problems with my lumbar (L3, L4, and L5). My back hurts every day, and my movement is limited. But stretching helps manage the pain, and I return for more physical therapy next week. However, I can’t exercise and therefore can’t work and teach my fitness classes for a little while.

Chocolate covered pineapple. Brilliant.

Reading in a box.

Painting nails all by herself.

The girls.

Wes and Elizabeth. That purple toy is everyone’s favorite, even Elizabeth’s. We set timers to help people take turns.

Wesley loves puzzles. He is good at them. This is his current favorite, a floor puzzle from the Llama Llama book series that I picked up at the book fair. It was the best investment ever, except that he lost one piece on the first day and we haven’t found it (we did dig one out from under the stove, though). It’s a 2-sided puzzle, and he does it every day.

Silly snuggler. Sometimes when I can’t find Carissa I’ll go up to her room and find her snuggled in her bed with blankets.

Lto

Tonight our neighborhood grocery store was having a holiday open house, with lots of tables with free samples and activities like face painting and banana car racing.

I was going to take Carissa, because she loves riding in the grocery cart that looks like a car. But she fell asleep at 6 pm while watching “Star Wars,” so we plopped her in bed and I went with Wesley instead. He was a perfect companion, and we had so much fun.

He pulled his green trolley cart behind him as we walked. He figured out real quick that if you stopped at a table, they would give him something. So we roamed around the store trying sample after sample after sample. Some Wes would eat right away, and others he collected for later in his green cart. We got cereal bar treats, mango lemonade, chocolate kisses, apples and caramel dip, an orange slice, mini hot dogs, a mini Snickers bar, peppermint ice cream, egg nog, rolls with honey butter, birthday cake, doughnut holes, bread slices, Oreo cookies…and the list could go on. They seemed to have run out of balloons, but a young man in a suit passed by us and asked if Wes would like his balloon, so then Wes had his own. And he clutched it as a prized possession the rest of the evening.

There was a race station where kids could decorate a banana in Mr. Potato Head parts, stick it on wheels, and then send it down a sloped track for a race. Wes won! He earned a bottle of True Moo chocolate milk, delivered by the sweet Miss Utah.

This was a fun night. Wes clearly had a fun time, and since he got to stay up past his bedtime he came home and crashed right away without even brushing his teeth. Could life be any better?

Yesterday my baby turned one. Let me tell you all about Elizabeth.

Only a few days after Carissa was born I started to feel a desire to have another baby. Usually that’s the last thing you’d think about after giving birth, so I set the thought aside. Yet many times as my two kids grew up I’d look at them, and at our family, and feel like one was missing. Once I learned I was expecting in 2012 those feelings and thoughts disappeared.

Pregnancy challenges me. When I was seven months pregnant I received a new calling at church that was hard and felt overwhelming at first. I prayed that in exchange for my service, I would have help with my pregnancy and delivery of the baby. Wesley and Carissa’s births were very difficult in different ways.

I was due around mid-November but labor started around 11 pm on November 5th. It was Monday night and I was just getting ready for bed. I had stayed up too late watching a movie with John, and I felt so tired. Nonetheless, labor was happening. Around 1:30 or 2 am my visiting teacher came and slept on the couch while John and I went to the hospital. I had my first-ever epidural. Though the newness made me nervous, it was overall a wonderful, wonderful experience because for the first time I had a baby without the pain of labor. Wow.

When the doctor showed up I felt nervous again, remembering how difficult pushing had been in the past, but the doctor acted like it was no big deal, and it turns out it wasn’t. The water hadn’t broken yet, which may have made her birth easier and my recovery faster.

She was born around 6:30 am on Tuesday, November 6th, 2012 (Election Day). As soon as I held her and got a good look, the first thing I thought was how different she looked from Carissa when she was a baby. This baby was lighter, more fair, and with less hair. We named her the next day: Elizabeth Erin.

I enjoyed the quiet time I had with her at the hospital, and I thought she was very sweet. When we brought her home she was so quiet that sometimes we’d touch her chest to make sure she was breathing.

My mom and dad stayed with us a short while to help, and my mom spent much time holding baby Elizabeth in the rocking chair at night (she’s a softie like that). One morning she told me she felt like her mom and grandma (Elizabeth’s great- and great-great-grandmas) had come for a visit.

Elizabeth was very small until I started feeding her formula around her fourth month. Since then I think she’s become the biggest baby I’ve had. She seems to be growing up fast. She loves sippy cups. She is really good at imitating. If you make a sound with your mouth (such as blowing air or growling) she’ll imitate it. She also is quite vocal. Sometimes John and I joke about what it’ll be like having two chatty girls around. I feel like, for her age, she is good at communicating vocally. She is my only child who hasn’t used sign language. I use it sometimes with her, but for all her imitating, she’s just not interested in sign.

We’re getting more familiar with her personality as she gets older. Some words I’d use to describe her are playful, social, and explorer.

She seems to have a sense of humor and is very playful. She loves to play peek-a-boo by ducking behind a doorway and then popping back out, or holding a blanket over her head and pulling it off again. Now that she’s walking she thinks it’s great fun to walk away from you, even as you call her name, with a great big smile on her face.

She’s still sweet, but more spunky now. She seems to really enjoy being with other people. She’s aware of who’s in the room and whether she’s alone. She’s learning to play independently, though.

She started walking at 11 months, and now that she’s mobile she is quite the fearless explorer. She is quite good at going up and down stairs (she scoots down so fast that it’s like she’s sliding on ice). She clearly wants to be able to walk up and down stairs like the big people do, but she’s still too small. With her being so good on the stairs sometimes I’ll find her in unexpected parts of the house by herself. Just this morning I found her in a darkened bathroom with her hands in the toilet.

As far as sleeping goes, when she was younger she used to go to bed at night without so much as crying, but later she started to cry at bedtime and wake up after she had been sleeping through. After a few months I got up the courage to let her cry and now we know she can cry herself back to sleep with no problem. She goes to sleep around 6:30 or so and I don’t get her until after 7 am (my personal sanity-saving rule). She’s usually happy when she wakes up, and she likes to hang onto her blanket when I pull her out of the crib to go downstairs. She takes a morning nap and sometimes an afternoon nap.

She has about four teeth on top, two on the bottom, and her first molar coming in as well. Her hair is a beautiful auburn color, kind of golden/red/brown, and quite straight. She’s getting more of it, too. I think she is a beautiful little girl. We are glad to have her in our family.

Last night I took my kids to downtown Salt Lake City with my parents, who are visiting.

We started at City Creek Mall, which we haven’t seen since it’s been built. The kids liked the creek running through the middle with fish in it. But we had to stop Wes from throwing rocks in. The kids were ecstatic to hand out with their Grandpa.

We HAD to stop at Godiva. They were pretty busy, but we got a few chocolate bars and a dark chocolate milkshake to share (Wes drank most of it, no surprise there).

Then off to Temple Square.

Dinnertime was quick approaching, and we decided to eat on the 10th floor of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building at The Garden. We hadn’t been there before, but it was good food with a nice view. Elizabeth ate the menu.

There are fountains everywhere at Temple Square, even in the restaurant and lobby. The kids liked that.

After dinner we tried to get some photos but the kids were kind of done sitting still.

We went back to City Creek to return something at a store.

One last stop: Trader Joe’s, which is new to Salt Lake City. It sells products that are preservative-free and many are organic. I came specifically to get these:

And that was our adventure in Salt Lake City.

This week our baby Elizabeth Erin turned 11 months old. A quick recap:

She was born November 6, 2012 (election day) around 6:30 in the morning. I wrote about it here. It was remarkably easy. One of my first thoughts was how different she looks from her sister.

In December she was one month old. Her demeanor was calm and sweet. We felt lucky to have her.

When she was two months old John gave her a name and blessing in church.

At three months she started to notice other people and smile.

Wesley has always been very sweet and attentive towards his baby sister.

Bunny slippers!

In March was her first Easter. Maybe next year she can try some chocolate.

The start of supported sitting.

At five months she still used the pink binkie and slowly–s-l-o-w-l-y–was growing some hair. I have always loved the fair, reddish-brown color of her hair. In the sunlight it shines like copper.

Baby cousins. Elizabeth was small for her age. Around this time I started giving her more formula and in the next few months she fluffed out very nicely.

Grandma.

In May was Mother’s Day, and Elizabeth turned 6 months old.

In June Elizabeth turned 7 months old. By now she was transitioning from supported sitting to sitting up by herself. She was getting better at eating solid foods and holding her own bottle. And she started to perfect the art of the army crawl. Suddenly she’s mobile! Her mobility started to bring out her personality, and we noticed that she prefers to be around other people. She is a social baby.

In July we played a lot outside, and Elizabeth went swimming for the first time. She is interested in climbing the stairs. She’s eight months.

In August Elizabeth turned nine months old. She is still an army-crawling queen and starts getting better at regular crawling. She likes to climb up stairs and is starting to learn to go down them backwards. She is becoming more vocal and “talks” by making noise often.

In September Elizabeth was 10 months old and starting to take interest in standing and walking unassisted. She’s really good at pulling to stand and walking along furniture. As she neared 11 months she started taking a few wobbly steps by herself. She is very talkative, which worries John and me–having TWO girls who both are very chatty! She is also starting to get into everything, and putting everything into her mouth.

In October Elizabeth turned 11 months old. She is beautiful and joys in doing her own things. She teems with personality. Still sweet, I think, but spunky. She wants to walk by herself and move and do all the things her siblings do. She fits into 12-month clothing. She has two teeth on the bottom and almost four teeth on top. She can be silly and likes to play peek-a-boo by hiding around the corner and popping out to make us laugh. She is a happy baby and we’re glad she’s ours.

The kids like to play this matching game together.

Elizabeth apparently likes strawberries.

The kids play Legos together really well. Their specialty is tall towers.

Carissa just got bangs.

Today I took all three kids to the swimming pool. The next-door city has a new recreation center with this nifty indoor pool play area.

Carissa was timid to start and never went up the stairs or down the slides. But she had fun.

Wes was in heaven. From start to end and every second in between. He is at home in the water and as free as free can be.

Elizabeth, surprisingly, loved it and expressed her independence by wanting to walk everywhere in the shallow pool. I found she had the most fun when I stood her on the side and helped her jump in. She is very spunky in the water.

The pool provided life jackets for the kids if we wanted them.

Afterward we sat on the grass out front for a mini-picnic of pretzels, baby crackers, and milk. Does life get any better in October?