On a roll

Dear Jyzelle,

You got to go camping for the first time this past weekend! After we woke up from our nap on Saturday Momma decided she wanted to go camping. So we made a quick lunch and started packing up the Jeep to head out on our adventure. Well, a while ago we lost our sleeping bags, and so for Momma's and Dada's birthday Grammi and Papa helped us get some new ones :)

We were going to go to Willow Creek but when we got there all of the camp sites were full, so we decided to keep on driving for a bit and see what we could find. Your dad had remembered seeing a meadow type area when him and your uncles had gone fishing so we were going to try and find that. Well before we got that far we found a spot that looked like it had a flat area to put up a tent and looked like it had some rocks around to make a fire pit.

We pulled over, I strapped you to me with the Moby Wrap and began finding rocks to put together a pit while Dad started chopping wood. After we got that all put together and the tin foils dinner cooking we started setting up the tent and the rest of camp.

There wasn't much else exciting going on besides a normal camping trip. You slept in my sleeping bag with me, and slept better than me too. haha.

After we got up (early, as it seems when camping it's impossible to sleep in) we had breakfast, got the jeep packed up then went on a little hike! (Sadly I don't have those pics, they're on Dada's phone). You fell asleep but it was still a lot of fun and a BEAUTIFUL view!

We made it back in time to get to church, but as Sacrament meeting went on I realized I did not pack your diaper bag right. Had a bottle but no formula, had 1 diaper but no wipes, had baby food but not spoon!! So we had to cut it short and head home.

On Monday we went SWIMMING!! I know I've said this before but you just love the water SOO much! We went with your Aunt Kimberly, cousins Abbigail and Brooklyn, and your friend from next door Lily! After about 1 1/2 hours of swimming you got tired so just laid your head down on Momma's arm and relaxed. It was so sweet to get to cuddle with you. Lily asked if you would cuddle with  her and I said we could try, and you did for a minute or two!!

For dinner we had the missionaries over and served them Elk steaks, corn on the cob, and french fries. It's always fun to have the missionaries over :)

WELL, last night at about 3:45 you woke up fussing a bit but before I ever even got out of bed you had stopped and gone back to sleep. Then at about 6 you did the same thing. Well a little after 9 you finally woke up for good! While I was feeding you breakfast I remember thinking those 2 times you had woken up that you were probably teething, so I decided to check! And sure enough there on the bottom you have 2 teeth!! I'm so excited for you!! I love watching you grow and every new thing just makes me so excited for you!!!

I love you baby girl! My sweet Princess!

Love, Momma

                                                     Daddy putting you to sleep :)

                                                       Had your first ice cream cone!

                                                            And you discovered dirt...

                                                So Happy to play with momma and Dada

   Fell asleep drinking your bottle, but I wasn't quick enough to get a pic of it. Dada has some don't worry :)

                                              First time in a tent you had to go exploring

                                              Having some breakfast at the camp site :)

  

                                                               Ready to go on a hike!

                     So much fun swimming!! Whenever your feet are in the water you just kick and kick                                                               and kick!!

                          You always fall asleep holding on to your toys in the car seat. haha

                                                          Just a relaxing evening at home :)

Weekends are fun

Dear Jyzelle,

We had a good relaxing weekend! We got up early on Saturday, dad made Mama and him French toast, then went to go grocery shopping hoping to beat the crowds! When we went to get you out of bed you were holding all your binks as well as had one in your mouth! I hadn't even realized that many binks were in your crib! haha. Well, while we were at the store, we forgot it was the 1st of the month, and I think no matter what Wal-Mart will ALWAYS have hoards of crowds on the first of the month. 2 hours later we finally got home though!

We then came home and had a great 3 hour nap! I'm so glad you're such a good sleeper so when Mama and Dada want to have some down time you give us ample time to enjoy our own naps! After that your Mama worked hard making more baby food for you. I'm not sure why, but I just love making your food! I thought when I first started to do it back in April that it would just be a huge pain! I found however that knowing what I'm feeding you is what I picked out and got for you instead of just getting it all off the baby shelf makes me happy. I then finally put pictures of you up around the house and in our photo album!, Later PaPa and Uncle Richard came and installed our ceiling fan for us :)

SUNDAY was a GREAT day!  You are now 7 months old!! You also decided to show off for Mama and Dada. You showed us that you can army crawl to get to whatever you want that's out of reach!(In fact I'm watching you do it right now for your tweety bird teether as I'm writing this :) ) You also showed us you can stay sitting up while reaching for a toy! You still can't sit up for long periods of time but you're getting better and better at the balance of it! Dada had a church meeting to go to so while he was gone we turned on some disney music and danced! You giggle and smile and just enjoy being tossed around and twirled. :)

At church you showed us that you can hold yourself in a standing position at the back of the bench. Especially when the lady behind us had a fun toy you wanted to play with. :) She was nice and let you take it from her. It was one of those ball toys that had all the, gosh I'm not even sure what to call them, strings? that are really stretchy when you pull them? You would go to grab it then pull your hand away unsure what to do with it. It's so fun to see you exploring new touches!

During Sunday School you were getting restless so I took you outside. You were SO fascinated by the trees and bushes. I picked you up so you could reach the tree and you loved touching the leaves. We then looked at the flowers and I helped you touch a petal. It was so soft! You pulled off one petal and kept looking at it in your hand and rubbing it between your fingers. If anyone ever forgets how beautiful this world is, all they need to do is watch a baby explore it and I don't know how they couldn't realize how amazing it is!

After we got home and had dinner we went to the park. Have I told you how much you LOVE the swings? You are so fun to watch. You laugh and smile and have yet to complain about how high or low you are going! One of our favorite games is to catch the swing when it comes up, count 1, 2, 3, and before we even let go you are laughing! It's all about the excitement of what is to come I suppose. :)

This morning I finally got out of bed a little after 9 and decided to go check on you before starting my workout. Well, you were awake, just holding your hand in front of you opening and closing it. Never heard a peep from you to know you were awake :) I just love what a good baby you are! I hope you continue to always be so sweet and fun to be around! I have no doubt that you won't be, but no matter what I will always love you!!

Here's to another great day together! :)

Love, Mama

 This is a baby picture of me, and you've been making somewhat the same face so I was trying to see how similar they really were :)

                                                            You LOVE water/bathtime!

                                                       Playing in your saucer :)

                                               A work project Liz and I did for Relay for Life :)

                You do NOT like to sleep on your back, so you found a way to get on your side, even while strapped in! I then of course had to cover you with a blanket so you didn't get cold :)

                                                        Playing under the bench at church

                                                   7 months old! Having fun at the park :)

 Showing us how well you can stand while holding on to something :) (A few moments after taking the pic you did fall.)

                              Wouldn't even let go of your binks after Dada picked you up!

You are very good at reaching for things! After you got the spoon out I helped you get bites before you made a big mess :) 

Memorial Day weekend

Dear Jyzelle,

You had your first Memorial Day Weekend! Because your momma works Thursday's and Friday's this didn't really start until Saturday. Your dada had left Thursday morning to spend the long weekend with his parents in Rexburg. This did not quite go as expected so he came home Saturday night! For us our Saturday was spent getting up about 7 to go watch your cousins' Cadance, Olivia, and Averielle while your Uncle Richard did one job before they left for Utah. We went to a few yard sales in their neighborhood and your cousins' loved it! They each found an item to get and just loved looking at everyone's stuff they were trying to sell. We didn't really find anything for you though.
We then went to spend some time with Grammi. She was helping your Aunt Kimberly and cousins Abbigail and Brooklyn get ready to go camping! You were asleep when we got to their house and momma left you in your car seat while you slept. Aunt Kim walked by and saw you were awake a little while later and Grammi and I joked that you need to learn to make some kind of noise to alert us to you waking up! You always get so excited when you see your extended family with lots of smiles and feet kicks :)
We didn't do much else Saturday, we went home and cleaned up a bit then took a nice long about 3 hour nap while we waited for your dada to finish his drive home. We then bought Jack Reacher to watch, put you to bed and that was that.
On Sunday we decided we needed to go do something adventurous! So we packed some hot links and snacks for a trip to Bald Mountain and headed out! It was about a 2 hour drive. Once we got to the mountain it was only 10 miles in, but driving those roads that takes about 30 to 45 minutes! At one point we were worried we weren't going to find it, but we did! You had so much fun seeing the outdoors, it was your first long outing with that type of environment. After we finished eating we heard thunder and saw some lightning. It was REALLY loud, but you did good and just looked around trying to figure out where the sound was coming from! After we felt the first raindrop we packed up the jeep and sat in there and watched as it HAILED! It was so loud! And in just a few moments the ground looked like it was covered in an inch or more of snow!
We made our way back down the mountain and about halfway down ran into your dad's friend Dean. We chatted with him for a bit and he just thought you were the cutest little thing! He held you for a bit but you kept kicking his radio equipment on his belt so I had to take you back.
Eventually we made it back home and just had a relaxing evening finishing our movie then going to bed.
On Monday you woke up and started playing with your rattle. I later joked to mom that it's a good thing you always have a rattle in bed with you so I know when you wake up, otherwise I might not ever know! We went to IHOP and met your Grammi, PaPa, and cousins and Aunt Kimberly there. You got to eat some eggs and pancake. You then tried a "Gogurt" for the first time and LOVED it! PaPa ordered you one of your very own and you gobbled it right up! Your dada then went to help PaPa tear out a wall in Grammi's and his house to open up the upstairs a lot more. We'll have to show you pictures of what it used to look like since you won't ever remember seeing it the way your momma grew up there! We then came home had a nap then went back for a BBQ later that evening.
It was a good fun full weekend and I enjoyed getting to spend all of it with you and your dada and family!
I love you princess, you're in bed sleeping peacefully now and we'll spend more time together tomorrow.

Love, Momma :)

Oh yes, you also discovered stuffed animals this weekend. You were a big fan :)

Going to try something new

Well, I think I'm going to try a new way to write my blog. I'm going to do it in letter format, as in letters to my dear sweet princess. I want to document as much as I can about her life, and have been keeping her baby book updated, but there just isn't enough room in it for everything! So I shall try this. I will start it soon, but FIRST I want to put down all the dates of "firsts" or as close as I can get so I don't forget!

1st smile, not sure, but it started around December 18th.

1st laugh January 6th

1st time rolling from tummy to back: February 28th (for dad) Feb 29 (for Grammi and PaPa) and Mon March 4th for me!

1st time rolling from back to tummy March 29th for Grammi, March 30th for me

1st held bottle on her own March 18th

1st taste of "food" (rice cereal) about a week before 4 months (did not go well) and then about 3/20 you got the eating solid foods things down and LOVED it

Sleeping through the night: from the beginning slept a good 4 hours between feedings. At about 4 weeks slept 7 hours a night. at about 8 weeks was sleeping 8 hours a night, by 12 weeks was up to 10 hours, sometime before 4 months were consistent at 10-12 hours a night and still going strong with that. Usually goes to bed between 9 and 9:30 and wakes up anytime between 8 and 10 a.m.

Still working on sitting up on your own but on May 24 and May 25 able to sit on own for longest periods of times as to date.

First road trip to Rexburg 12/20

Road trip to Rexburg again 5/5/13

Road trip to Richfield 5/16/13

Does great in car

First time swimming to Given Hot Springs on Feb 25, 2013 (you LOVE the water)

First sign "milk" started week of 5/20/13, getting more consistent.
5/7/13 Said Momma, on 5/15/13 said momma more, started saying dadda right after that and is the word you say the most besides blah blah and bah bah

Hmmm, that's all I can think of right now. I'll try to start writing more frequently so I can remember all of your precious moments better!!

SOOO Many Updates

** Warning, details about labor below, and I am not shy! **

SOOO We did get into our house and then have our sweet little baby the next day!
It ended up being 11/1/12 at 5 pm that we signed closing paperwork, we moved our bed and bathroom stuff into the house that night (we had already moved what was in our storage unit into the garage thanks to Hubble letting us do that early!) and went to bed around 11 p.m. At 3 a.m. I started having contractions about 3:20 or so Josh woke me up telling me I've been having contractions every 5 minutes for the past 20 minutes so I need to wake up and pay attention so we know if we need to go to the hospital or not! Not that I wasn't waking up for each contraction I just kept going back to sleep not realizing how far apart they were.
I told him I didn't think they were real and they would go away so we got up, packed up a few things just in case, had some cereal and the contractions started coming about every 3 minutes! So we left for the hospital at about 4 a.m. and were there by 4:30. (We were going from Caldwell to Boise). I was scheduled to be induced at 7 a.m. anyway so the nurses let me get checked in w/o seeing how far dialated I was.
First thing I did was have a warm bath drawn up and I soaked in that for probably about an hour. Around 8 or so the doctor came in and checked me and I was only 1 cm more than I had been at my appt the previous day! At 9 they checked me again and I had gone maybe another 1/2 cm. At that point she broke my water to try and get things going a bit faster. Well this made the contractions WAY more intense and I broke down and got the epidural. I think about an hour after that they checked me again and still not much progress so they started the petocin (sp?). By this point the epidural was working it's magic so I slept pretty much all day waking up to have some water now and then. At 1 they checked me again and I was at 7 cm or so. YAY progress finally, I was thinking I'd have the baby by 5. Well sometime between 5 and 6 they checked me and I was fully dialated but wanted me to labor down for a while. (For those that don't know, this is where they told me they were going to let the contractions do the work of pushing the baby down the birth canal to make it easier when it came time for me to push.) At About 8 pm. I told the nurse I was feeling a lot of pressure down there and they told me if I wanted to I could start pushing but that it'd probably still be a while.
The nurses had mentioned earlier as well as the doctor that since I was a first time mom pushing could take 2-4 hours!!
WELL I started pushing and w/in 25 min or so they told me to stop until the Dr got there! And can I just say how UNCOMFORTABLE that was! They did say I could do little pushes, but those didn't help the pain much. haha. While we were waiting they were commenting on my babies dark hair and how much of it there was and pulling on it to show how long it was to each other! haha WEIRD or what?? Well finally the Dr showed up, got scrubbed in, and w/in about 10-15 minutes our sweet little princess, Jyzelle Aurora, mader her apperance into the world!!! It was absolutely amazing!!

Well, I think that's a good update for now... even if it is 6 months after the fact! haha. I'll try to post again soon-ish but based on my history that could be a while.

:)

as you can see she was 8 lb 4 oz and 21 inches long :)

House Update

Well, permits for the house came back a week later so we were pretty excited that they hadn't taken the full 3 weeks. This was supposed to mean they break ground on 7/2/12. Well they didn't actually break ground until the following Monday 7/9/12. We went out every week and took pictures and at the end of July got an update from Hubble saying the house was to be completed on 9/24/12. This was a bit past the 65 days the builder had said it will take from the time they broke ground but I was just happy to have an end date in sight!

Well, we continued to just work and live our life with nothing too exciting going on and going to see our house every chance we got and the progress being made. Well on Labor Day my mom sister and I made invited for my baby shower with the address being my new address. On Tuesday I asked for an update from the builder to make sure the expected closing date was to be 9/24/12. This is when we found out there had been some type of delay (they said due to HVAC installers) and that estimated completion date was middle of October.

The next week consisted of fighting with the builder and trying to figure out what they were thinking, how this happened, and that was too late. All we wanted was to get us into our house. Well after a lot of phone calls and meetings they agreed to a date of Oct 8th. (Yes I had to redo all the baby shower invites, luckily my sister in law who was throwing the shower for me had just bought some so we used those.)

Well as it got closer to the 8th the builder called again saying the cabinets were on back order and was going to be another 3 week delay. Our realtor let them know that of COURSE this was not ok, that would put us at my due date and we needed in the house before the baby comes! They allowed us to upgrade our cabinets, and it was also with a different company. Josh went and picked them out and we continued on. Well then they said there was a delay with those cabients! Luckily it was only a couple days. Soooo after all was said and done the house was completed and we had our final walkthrough on 10/12/12 and were supposed to be able to close with the bank on that day as well.

Unfortunately at this point we ran into ANOTHER hiccup, this time with the bank. To make a long story (and more than our fair share of phone calls and e-mails) the Processor at the bank hadn't been doing her job, none of our paperwork had been sent to underwriting, she finally walked out on her job, and someone new took over. (this was after about a week of phone calls and e-mails trying to get a hold of her to get a real story, and then another week of phone calls to the bank to get the story about why we weren't closing on our house) so now it seems progress is finally getting made on the underwriting and we're in a race to see which comes first... moving into our house or the baby coming. We're hopeful that it'll be, we sign closing paperwork, then that day or the next we get to have our baby!

Needless to say because of all this work with our house it has been hard to be excited just about the baby. Next post I'll give an update on how the pregnancy has been, since we're now finally up to date on the "living" situation of our lives. HAHA

Big News

SOOO on to the next update in our life, which happened on February 27,2012, we found out I was pregnant!! As excited as we were, this meant we really needed to consider what our next step in life was going to be to help take care of this little bump! And so we decided to buy a house!

Well, we have tried this once before, last summer, and we did not have much luck! It was frustrating, but luckily I think we stopped looking before we decided to never try that process again. So, with this new goal in mind, we went back to our bank and applied for another loan just as we had before.

After getting out loan approved about the middle of March we began looking again. Between Josh's and my schedule there wasn't many days we could go together, so he went with our realtor most of the time to see what we could find.Well the pickings were not near the same as they had been the year before and we weren't having much luck yet again. So we decided to look into just building a home.

After looking around we decided to go forward with building ourselves a cute little starter home, and signed papers for this on 4/28/12. The gentleman with the company told me "I can only move as fast as you can move" and so on 5/2/12 we went to the designer show house to pick all our colors, for cabinets, counter tops, and flooring. It only took about an hour and we were so excited when we left!

Well after a week we still hadn't heard anything from the builders. After numerous unreturned phone calls and e-mails we finally went down to the office again. There was another gentleman working and he was with other clients. We told him we didn't mind and we'd wait until he was free since leaving "messages" never got us any results. Once he was finished we informed him what we were waiting on and he told us to pick the colors and stone for our exterior. Josh and I drove around their subdivisions for a while looking at what we wanted then went back to the office with our selection.

This 2nd gentleman found our file, put everything together, confirmed our final selections and said we'd hear from them soon to confirm the blue prints.

Well it took unil 6/22/12 to finally approve the blue prints. We found out the reason for this delay later was they "lost our paperwork" which believe me we were calling and looking for updates at least twice a week, so I have NO idea how this was possible.

Well once again I wasn't able to be there so Josh went to the meeting with the builder to approve blue prints. Everything looked good so we gave the go ahead. We were told it takes about3 weeks to get permits back and from the time we get permits back it's 65 days until the house is complete. we were SO excited to have things finally moving, and this meant that we would be in our house middle of September!

(Also, in May we found someone to take over the lease for our apt and so moved in with the parents so that we didn't have to worry about paying rent on an apt and a mortgage.)

In other news during this time frame, on 6/13/12 we found out we are having a girl!!

We also went to St George June 8th or so for my cousin Lasca's wedding and to see family. This was a lot of fun and we enjoyed our weekend away and seeing family! There are pictures of this on my facebook page.

Will post more updates soon... hopefully sooner than 3 months apart. I hope to have this blog caught up to real time in the next couple weeks!