Shelly and the Curly Hair Monster

It took a while for Shelly's hair to grow in. She was practically bald (or had fine baby hair) for at least the first year. Once it finally started to grow in more it would curl a tiny bit around her ears and her 'mullet' started to show signs of a curl. Now that's she's 3 it's quite past that point - almost to the out-of-control stage! Most people [us included] don't look at her and think her hair is all that long, but we are often shocked at bath time when we take the time to look at how long her hair really is! I decided to share the excitement that only parents can feel (meaning: you won't get much out of this, but hopefully it's still semi-entertaining)

Freshly washed and brushed, all the way down to the bottom of her ribs - a bit longer if I could have gotten those bottom few curls to stay put! In the bath when she tilts her hair back for rinsing it's almost to her bum

A few seconds later - after I stopped trying to make it straight (I also scrunched it a tiny bit, but really, only a very little - more ran my hands through it than anything)

Dried and several hours later (I forgot to get one sooner)

She found some sticks on our walk and decided they would be fun to have in her hair... She didn't get that from me. ;)

It's about time.... Or sleeping - one of the two

I figure it's about time for my daily update [read: every-other-monthly] :-)

I've been exhausted being pregnant and was so grateful to finally have the blood-work to prove it! I try to tell the doctors that I've been super tired lately, and they just say 'pregnancy will do that to you!' Not the most helpful answer when at times I'm so weak I can't even make it up the stairs and several times a day I don't have enough energy to lift my hand to my mouth to feed myself (I'm not kidding here. I could make it to the table, barely, with help from Mark - but then I couldn't do anything more than stare at the plate - that is if I could even continue sitting up) This didn't happen all the time. Mostly I was fairly normal (just generally tired) but about 3-4 times a day I would 'crash' and couldn't do a thing. Sometimes sitting was too hard for me and I'd literally fall down to laying on the couch and couldn't do a thing to stop myself or even get comfortable. I'd just .. fall. These episodes would last for about 1/2 hour to 45 minutes and then I would be fine again... So, thankfully my blood-work showed that I was low on my thyroid dose and they upped it enough that now I'm just tired and I only 'crash' about 1-2 times a week instead of about 3-4 times a day! Much better!! And that's even getting better! I was also a bit anemic so I take an iron pill (along with my thyroid pill and my prenatal vitamin. All three have to be taken a few hours apart - I swear I don't think of myself as quite the old and decrepit person that I normally think of when I picture people taking tons of pills at various intervals during the day). Life is good now that I can function again!! So, back to updating (don't expect too much though - I'm still the lazy bum who's always been here, now I just have more energy to be lazy)

For a while now I've been wanting to do a 'Shelly's funny sleeping places' post, but she's decided to only sleep in one place now. She must have gone through every possible spot she could think of and found her favorite and now she's done experimenting. She would sleep on her bed, in the crib (before we moved Jason in there), on the window seat, on the floor, on the other side of the floor, on the chair and similar type places in the office where she would nap so we could have her and Jason nap in separate rooms (they sleep better during the day when they're apart, and better at night when they're together - strange...). Shelly settled on sleeping mostly on the chair at about the same time I realized I should be taking pictures of her asleep in all these funny places. Oh well. I did manage to get a few fun ones anyways.

In the famous chair

Yes, she's under the bed

Again in the chair

If you can't tell that's the floor - I'm not sure how to help you...

Ok, I know Shelly isn't the one asleep - but it's close enough. This is Mark's way of trying to put the kids down for a nap - by falling asleep (I know Jason looks asleep too, but he's not, he's just blinking)

Another victim of our 'Sleep Documentary'

Here's Jason's first night on a big bed - it happened on accident. I didn't think he's really fall asleep there! He's back to the crib again - this was a one time thing...

It is almost impossible to keep soft sleep-on-able things organized in that room! Blankets, pillows, clothes, stuffed animals... It's all fair game!

Reading by osmosis :-)

Jason with his feet through the bars and his belly on the pillow - not his head...

I just took this one a few minutes ago, but I had the computer on my lap and couldn't get a good angle. Yes, that's a sucker in her mouth - I'm a slacker of a Mom. I didn't even know she was asleep in here. Don't worry - Mark finished the project that banished us to the playroom and came upstairs and took the sucker out of her mouth - me? I was too busy trying to get this blog updated - I do have priorities!

Nate's News

For those of you who don't know - Mark and I have started a bit of a tradition with my side of the family. It started with Shelly. We knew we were pregnant and I'm not the type who likes to announce my own news to everyone I know (not sure why that is, it's just hard for me) so we decided that it would be fun for the missionary to be the first to know (they're never the first to know anything!) and also let them be the ones to figure out how/when to announce it. It seemed like a perfect win-win! About the only downfall with Shelly was that she happened to be born while my folks were off in Paraguay picking William up from his mission. We thought it had been so much fun that we did the same thing when we found out about Jason (turned out it was closer to the exact same thing than we thought - he was born the night before my folks left to pick up Matt from his mission). Well when Nate left he made it quite well known he had pretty high expectations. There was going to be more than 2 years between the kids if we had to wait all the way until he got home though! I didn't think I wanted to wait that long. I was thinking that maybe we could have 2 by then (yeah, right!). Well the week before Christmas Nate got his wish (even mostly as good as his expectations). We e-mailed him to tell him we were expecting out third and let him decide when/how to tell everyone. He decided to wait until the phone call home the next week and it was almost the last thing he said before he got off the phone. It was quite shocking. I was in the family room listening on mute over the speaker with most of the family while my mom was in her bedroom doing the actual talking to Nate. I'm not certain that everyone in the room believed him when he first said 'Oh, by the way, Rachel's pregnant!' Then add to it that I was due around the time he was supposed to be coming home... We really didn't plan to have it work out quite that well - I promise! We'd been off birth control for over 6 months, it just happened to work out... It's kind of fun to have a running tally of how long everyone's been home though... Just figure out how old one of our kids are, and you've got it. The only exception is Robby who got home before I was even married, so that doesn't count - but he got married pretty much one year after he got home, so he should be able to do that math all on his own... :-)

Well, here's some pictures from my first doctors appointment. They've decided my due date is July 9th or 10th (which about 2 weeks before Nate will likely be released - so it's close but not quite). I had thought it might be later since I have a history of going over (any my mother went 2 weeks over with all of her kids) but it seems I might not have to suffer quite so long. I still might tell everyone it's not due until late July or even August just so they'll leave me alone about not having a kid yet! ;-)


If you can tell what these are of, I'm impressed! I can mostly make out the second one, but the first might as well be a child drawing with black and white chalk... :-) We've decided to not deal with the stress of telling the kids yet (they won't get it, or if they do get it they won't understand being patient, and they have other things to worry about), but Shelly and Jason were there when they took these pictures and Shelly looks at those and says 'those are pictures of Mommy's belly!' It's kind of cute...

I figured it out!

I've been feeling like a slacker because I haven't put anything up here in forever, so I decided I'd take the time today to at least get organized and see what pictures I needed to put up and if there were any good stories to go along with them. Once I opened my photo program I realized another way in which I've been a huge slacker. All of the photos are still on my camera and I'm not even sure I know where it is. I'm too lazy to go find it and download them right now, so I'll get to that later... I have a few fun stories instead.

While we were up in Utah (yes, this was almost 2 months ago) Shelly was closing the kitchen door of G-ma and G-pa Schofield's house while Mark and I and G-ma were in the living room and Jason was in the kitchen. Normally closed doors aren't a huge problem for Shelly - she's been able to open doors for so long I've forgotten there was ever a time when she couldn't - but this particular kitchen door has a tendency to get stuck. Easy enough for an adult with some leg power to open, but for a three year old with almost no leverage - it's stuck. She had been asked several times to leave the door open and kept closing it anyways. Mark decided to be the awesome father that he is and took over discipline for me (thanks honey!!). He eventually needed to put Shelly on time out (when asking nicely and explaining didn't work). After the time out they were having their talk about what went wrong and what to do in the future when Shelly comes out and says 'it's not assetable [acceptable] for the door to be open!' So, she said the word all wrong, but her usage was quite good for a three-year-old-for-two-weeks kid (at least I like to think so). Apparently my using large words with her hasn't been as horrible for her as it seems sometimes...

It's 2009!

Who knew it would come so fast? 2008 has been a good year. Nothing major went wrong and the kids are growing like weeds. I'm not sure what else we could ask for. I'm sure if I dwelt on it I could come up with things that didn't go the way we thought they should have - but mostly I only have good memories of the last year. It's probably better to have the good things come to mind first and only remember the bad with effort... That 'memory' of mine has served me well over the years... :-) I look forward to being able to enjoy the new year and am excited to see all that is has to offer. Every new year promises to be filled with surprises, both good and bad, and I look forward to the joy of the good surprises and the challenge of the bad ones. I only hope I'm actually up to the task of those pesky bad surprises! :-)

Happy New Year!

Trip to Aquarium and Wild Animal Park

We had a trip to the Aquarium yesterday! It was lots of fun! One of the best parts were all the touch pools they had. It took Shelly a while to get used to the idea of putting your hand in water to touch animals, but once she got the hang of it we had a hard time pulling her away!

Yea, she's a little wet. Katie took off her sweater and gave it to Shelly to wear while her shirt pretended to dry off... Shelly got tired of the way too big sweater before her shirt was very dry though...

Jason obviously heard some music from somewhere and started dancing his heart out! I missed some of the best of it, but he and Shelly sure loved that touch pool!Mark and I took advantage of some left over tickets from Matt and Sabrina's honeymoon [oh yea, they got married on the 20th! Welcome to the family Sabrina!] and went to the Wild Animal Park. Mark doesn't quite measure up to a gorilla...

My belly helps me out a little, but I think it's mostly the scowl that did it for me! :-)

Let it Snow!

We finally got to enjoy the snow! We got to go up and visit the Schofields in Utah. There was supposed to be a storm on the Saturday we were going to be driving up, so we drove up Friday instead to miss the adventure. Turns out we wouldn't have gotten hit too bad. The big storms waited until later in the week to hit! It was so fun to get to be able to enjoy the snow and make snow angels and watch Ethan and Mark sledding with the 4 wheeler. I'm sure G-ma S got some good pictures, but I didn't remember to pull out my camera in time... Oh well. Here's what I did get!Here's Aunt JB helping get the kids ready for the snow storm that didn't really come! It did fall for about an hour, but it didn't stick where we were. I was quite disappointed! No worries! More came later!

Jason on the swing in the snow...
Shelly walked quite a ways from the house, then sat down [she was wearing thin sweat-like pants!] and dug out the snow with her shoes. I didn't notice until quite a bit later that she had pulled her hands inside her coat to keep them warm. She sure was walking funny!

Jason's favorite things was to go see the 'Moo!'s. He got sick while we were up there and it was about the only thing that calmed him down. Those cows sure thought he was weird! :-)