Happy Happy 1st Birthday Baby Will!!!!

I just canNOT believe that our little baby Will is ONE YEAR OLD today! To say the last year went by fast would be far too much of an understatement. It LITERALLY FLEW by. Isn't it amazing how many things a tiny baby learns to do in just one year? This little guy has been SO much fun and we just cannot imagine life without him in it. He is so funny and so smart. He knows exactly what he wants and usually figures out how to get it. He just loves his big brothers and I'm pretty sure he thinks he is just as old as they are. He is a Daddy's Boy through and through, but he does love to snuggle with Mommy occasionally too. He can sign the words: milk, bye-bye, night-night, and thank you. He LOVES monkeys and says the "ahh, ahh" part of the monkey sound, he hasn't gotten the beginning "ooh, ooh" part down quite yet. He also loves dogs and tries to make a doggy sound when he sees them. When we ask him what a "car" says he says "voom, voom" and it sounds pretty much just like that! It is so cute. He also blows kisses, which melts me EVERY single time. For his birthday today we all went into his room first thing singing "happy birthday to you!" He smiled when he first saw us, but then our singing freaked him out a little and he started to cry. We didn't know what was scarier, all of us coming toward him in his crib or our incredibly off-pitch singing - I'm sure it was a mixture of both. :) Poor little guy. He seemed to really love digging into his own little chocolate cake. Mark and I loved his look right at first, almost like he was saying "seriously guys, are you sure about this?" After his cake and a bath we let him play with his birthday presents which were a little dog stuffed animal that plays music from an mp3 player...which meant he kind of needed an mp3 player to go with it ... lucky for us, we already HAD a little mp3 player that I got on a great sale a few months ago kicking around so we threw that in - though I did ask myself more than once what kind of parent gives their one year old an mp3 player. Oh well, he LOVED it and I should have gotten video of him dancing. There are SOOOOOO many videos I need to take of this baby before he grows out of all of these adorable things he does. That is going on my priority list for the week. ANYWAY, he also got a "busy ball popper" which he just loved too - As a matter of fact ALL the boys loved it and played with it for a lot longer than should be normal for their ages since it was a baby toy and all. The ball popper was partly from Grandma Reading too because she sent him a darling birthday card and some birthday money a few weeks ago, she even called him today to wish him a happy birthday so she officially gets the prize for sending him his first birthday card and giving him his first telephone birthday greeting. After presents we all watched "America's Funniest Home Videos" and Will had fun fake laughing every time he heard one of us laugh. He topped off the night by shoving one of the ball popper balls in mom or dad's mouth and laughing hysterically when we blew them out at him. I guess for a one year old, the busy ball popper is fun but the human ball popper is even better! All in all, we had a great day with our little one year old. We are just so thankful for him, he couldn't be sweeter, or cuter in our opinion....though we could probably do without the high pitched scream he's been fancying lately. If our eardrums make it through this new little phase it will be a miracle. OUCH!!

We love you beautiful baby brother!

Birthday Fun!

I love our spring and summer birthdays. When we had Joshua in June it made our birthdays all in the summer. June, July and August. I really wanted my next baby in May and was so excited when Sam was due on May 5th. Well, he had other ideas and decided to come a week early on April 28th. SO CLOSE! Then when we found out that Gabriel was due May 25th I was elated! This would be perfect - April, May, June, July and August!! I thought even if he was 2 full weeks early he'd still make his debut in May. I didn't plan on him being a MONTH early!! Little stinker! He decided he wanted the first birthday of the year and came a day before Sam on April 27th. So... though we skip May we do have all of our birthdays in the spring and summer which is so much fun. I posted about everyone's birthdays but never posted about the accompanying birthday parties that we had for their special day. Joshua wanted to take some of his friends to Wall-E on opening day so we had to wait for that to come out on June 27th. He took 7 friends and with Sam, Gabe, Mark and I we took up an ENTIRE row in the theatre. Every seat! Will chose to stay home and nap with our babysitter Jessica, which worked out SO nice for us. :) We bought 3 giant tubs of popcorn and every party goer got their own little drink. Then, when we turned in our tickets the guy gave all the kids a Wall-E watch! They were so excited! It was such a fun party, the boys all had a great time. We're so thankful that Joshua has such a cute and fun group of friends!

We also had a little family birthday party on his actual birthday. He requested brownies instead of cake and pizza (of course) for dinner. It was yummy!



We spent Mark's birthday at Ruby River for yummy steak with great friends and family. There wasn't really a movie playing that Mark was dying to see so we thought we'd play games or go bowling instead - we ended up just going home and playing RockBand for a little while and calling it a night since most everyone had a long drive home. For the record, Jeff TOTALLY rocked the microphone and got 98% on his first try! Shar and Dave were brave and sang too. I still haven't tried it, I'm too afraid I'd break the TV! :) Good job guys!


We had so much fun at Sam's birthday party too! He ended up inviting all the boys in his class and all his friends in the neighborhood and all in all there were over 15 kids (I can't remember the exact count but there were A LOT!) He wanted a Ben10 party and we played "Ben, Ben, TEN" (like Duck, Duck, Goose) and played pin the watch on Ben10. Everyone played outside for awhile and we had cake and ice cream. We bought Sam a new Ben10 watch and put it on his cake. He was SOOOO excited when he saw it. The highlight for the boys I think though was painting Ben10 shirts. We've had so much fun lately painting shirts (I'll post more details about that later) and the boys did SUCH a great job painting theirs. I went to take something to Sam at school the next school day and 3 of the boys in his class were proudly wearing their shirts. I was really nervous to attempt painting shirts with 15 six year olds but Mark came home to help and it went surprisingly well! We had such a fun day celebrating the new Mr. Six in our family!!

This is the video of Sam when he saw his cake and watch for the first time. We had to take it all inside to sing and blow out candles because the wind kept blowing the candles out for us!


I was excited to give Gabe his first real party this year and he was so excited too! He had a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse party and invited all of his cute little friends. It was only an hour and a half, but WHEW, that was long enough for nine 3 year olds. I made a mental note to myself that 3 is perhaps just a titch too little for a birthday party. I have some priceless pictures though of the little ones crying their eyes out when they had to surrender their presents to the birthday boy. Poor little guys! We had fun Mickey Mouse Clubhouse cupcakes and played some cute games. For the gift bags we did fun little buckets with shovels and treats inside.

Here is a video of us singing Happy Birthday to Gabe (please ignore the completely off-key singing on my part...I usually try to get out of singing when I'm taping, but since I was practically the only one there that knew all the words I had no choice.)

I think that about wraps up the birthdays so far. Will hasn't had a single birthday yet, but that will change on Aug. 24th when he will be ONE - holy cow, I really can't believe he's almost one, WHERE DID THAT YEAR GO?!!

Happy Birthday Daddy!!

Today our best friend, husband and daddy turned 34! We are so thankful to have him in our lives! He had to work today which stinks but we celebrated when he got home with a yummy dinner, chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and 34 melting candles (I had to change the batteries in my camera at the last minute – which didn’t help the melting candles much), and mint chocolate chip ice cream, some of his favorite things. We bought him a new watch - which he really needed - and the big boys made him a card and Sam gave him a dollar from his bank, they also got him “Rockband” for the Wii. I say got “him” but they pretty much used the excuse of his birthday to beg for Rockband for us - and I couldn’t help it…I caved. We’ve had lots of fun lately with Guitar Hero so we thought this would be a fun way for the whole family to join in on the fun. The boys just loved singing Happy Birthday and eating Daddy’s yummy cake. Will ESPECIALLY loved eating the chocolate cake and was BEGGING for more more more! He was covered in chocolate - it was so cute. We are so lucky to have such a wonderful husband and father, we thank our Heavenly Father for him every single day. Happy Happy Birthday Sweetheart!! We LOVE you!!

The story of Sam...

It was about 11:30 pm, I was laying in bed and super uncomfortable. Mark and I started timing contractions about 1am and realized they were close so we decided to go to the hospital. We called Grandma and told her we were on our way. We woke up a sleeping little Joshua and headed to Grandma's house. We got to the hospital at about 2:30 am. My baby had been breech the entire pregnancy but miraculously had changed to the head down position just days before....or so we thought. When we got to the hospital the nurse checked to see how far along I was and said....I'm just going to get the ultrasound machine to see how this baby is positioned. I just don't think that's a head I'm feeling. The ultrasound machine confirmed my WORST fear. He was still breech and because I was in labor there was nothing they could do to turn him. They tried to stop my labor twice to no avail so at 7am we delivered our baby boy via cesarean. I was SO not happy about this. I'd been watching "A Baby Story" religiously every day and they always seemed to cry and have a really hard time when the doctors said they needed to do a c-section. It was my worst fear, though I really wasn't sure why...I just knew it must not be a good thing if it made everyone so unhappy. I was SO excited when the doctor told me he had turned and SOOOO upset when they said he either turned back, or never turned at all. Grr. Add to that the fact that we had been up since about 6am the day before (Mark and I had awoke early the day before and couldn't go back to sleep so we spent the day getting things done) and I was not in good shape. Either was Mark. I remember looking at him at one point and he looked green, really truly green and now I completely understand that expression whereas I hadn't before. We had an AMAZING anesthesiologist that was the saving grace of this whole experience. I remember bawling my eyes out and him wheeling me into the operating room and telling me how brave I was being. Although I wanted to SCREAM at him that this ISN'T WHAT BRAVERY LOOKS LIKE it did make me feel so much better. Also, as they strapped my arms down to the bars on the table I was crying that Mark could only hold one of my hands and the anesthesiologist happily said, "I'll hold your other hand for you!" and he did...through the WHOLE thing. Mark and I were so pleased with him, and we were lucky enough to get him again when we had Will, he was so funny and had a little photo shoot with Mark, the baby and I while they were stitching me up. ....sorry, I got carried away... ANYWAY, it was a really really yucky morning but the best part about the experience was the birth of this amazing little man that we call Sam. He was 7 pounds 1 ounce and 18 1/2 inches long. We noticed the little dimple in his chin before we noticed anything else! We also thought he had a TON of hair...until we had Gabriel and realized what a ton of hair really looks like. :) He made it all worth it and I'd do it all again right this very second if I needed to. I just LOVE this boy. Love love LOVE him. He is without doubt the smartest and wittiest little 6 year old I've ever met. We've been able to see his mind at work from the minute he was born. He's ALWAYS been such a thinker, he really has such a brilliant little mind. He's also VERY competitive...and absolutely COMMANDS fairness in every sense of the word around this house. He has always been a favorite with his teachers, I remember asking his preschool teacher how he was one day and she said "Oh...OH, he is so good... he is JUST SO good!" and I said "Really?, because he can be a challenge at home sometimes" and she didn't believe me AT ALL. Then, during Sam's first official parent teacher conference for Kindergarten at the beginning of the year his teacher said "I just wish I had 30 Samuel's" it was so funny. He is always so good about following the rules and trying to be a good boy. He is also absolutely strikingly beautiful, people stop us all the time at the places we go to tell us how beautiful he is. We love him SO much and don't know what we'd do without him in our family. We love you Mr. SIX!!!


When I was One,
I had just begun.

When I was Two,
I was nearly new.

When I was Three,
I was hardly Me.

When I was Four,
I was not much more.

When I was Five,
I was just alive.

But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever.
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.

-- A.A. Milne

This poem is perfectly Sam. He IS clever as ever, and he says he already "feels bigger" now that he is six"

Sorry about the billions of pictures...when I pulled out the CD for 2002 I couldn't decide which pictures to post so I posted them all....and now I'm going to go cry for a bit. Seriously, how can they grow up SO STINKING FAST!!!!
Everytime Mark would see this picture he'd say "there's my crooked head boys!" That's all I think about when I look at this picture now. :)



For all my family out there reading this, this is a picture of our cousin Shanel giving Sam his first haircut. I LOVE the expression on his face here!!

Oh! He also lost his FIRST TOOTH today!! What a day of milestones for this wonderful little man. He was SO excited and had to call daddy at work and call and wake up Grandma (she's an hour behind us so it was like 7am..YIKES) So fun!!

Happy Birthday, Mr. Three!

3 years ago today I was on my way to a routine Dr.'s appointment. It was a Wednesday and the previous weekend had been a little hairy.... Friday morning I went to the hospital after having contractions right on top of each other all night long. I wouldn't let Mark go with me because I insisted that I would be coming back home WITHOUT a baby so there would really be no point to him coming along. I got there and they hooked me up to some machines to monitor the contractions. I remember the nurse coming in at one point to look at the paper spitting out of the machine and having a conversation with her that went something like this:

me: they seem to be a lot more mild now, I knew as soon as I came in things would stop.

Nurse: Well, it's always good to come in if your contractions are between 5-10 minutes apart and are at least a minute long and it looks like you are still contracting at least every 3-5 minutes.

me: Oh...but they're not even CLOSE to a minute long, right?...

Nurse: actually, your last one was 90 seconds.

me: oh. er. so what do we do now?

Nurse: Well, I'm just going to go and call Dr. Nichols and see if he wants you to deliver your baby or try to stop the labor.

me: WHAT?!!! I'm 5 weeks early, isn't that TOO early, isn't it automatic that you would at least TRY to stop my labor?

Nurse: Well, sometimes it's better at this stage to let nature take it's course, but I won't know anything until I see what he wants us to do.

me: Urgh. Okay, but if you think it would help could you please tell him that I really really CAN'T have this baby today!

Nurse: I will let him know.

I really said that, and I really meant it. I was absolutely NOT ready or prepared for this baby to come. We had no car seat for one thing. I'm not quite sure why, as we did have two other children and obviously had a car seat for them, but I think it may have gotten misplaced in our move. Also, it was coming up on Sam's birthday in less than a week and I had not bought a THING for him or made any other birthday-ish preperations. And, let's not forget the fact that my due date was OVER a month away!!! The thought that I could actually be having this baby right away absolutely overwhelmed me. Lucky for me, my wonderful doctor. sided with me and had the nurses give me a shot to try to stop the labor, and it WORKED! Happy HAPPY DAY! They sent me home with strict instructions to go straight home and take it easy. Yeah, right. I rushed home, picked up Sam from the neighbors house and took off to find a car seat, get a hospital bag ready, pick up some birthday presents and help Sam pick out a cake. Then had a yucky weekend of more contractions and a general feeling of total discomfort.

Okay, back to my routine Dr. Appointment on Wednesday - as I said before, it had been a rough week. I was ready to go in and have my doctor announce that all was well and to keep on keeping on. Not so. For starters I had lost weight, which apparently isn't a good thing when you're in your last stage of pregnancy. Then, when he measured me around the belly I was exactly the same as what I had measured two weeks before. I guess this isn't good. He sent me down for an ultrasound, just to make sure the baby was growing okay. It was really great to see him moving and sloshing around on the ultrasound and I was convinced everything was fine. I went back up to the office where Dr. Nichols looked at the baby's measurements and became more concerned. He said his head was measuring at 39 weeks and his little belly was only measuring at 33. This was FAR too big a difference for my doctor to handle and he said he thought I should come in the next day to deliver the baby. His main concern was that my placenta had given up and the baby wasn't getting the proper nutrients to sustain him and what he WAS getting was going to his brain so the rest of his little body was compensating. He said he was a little worried that this could have caused some damage to his brain. His other option was that I may have contracted some sort of virus along the way that didn't affect me but went straight to the baby and this could have caused some potential damage to his brain. "OR, we might deliver him and everything will be just fine, but no matter what I think he's better off out than in at this point", he said. This translated to me like this:

Option 1: Brain Damage
Option 2: Brain Damage
Option 3: Just fine

Those weren't good odds and I was TOTALLY freaked out. The doctor again said that he felt it would be best to deliver the baby the next day. I explained to him that tomorrow was my other child's birthday and is there ANY way we could do it before or after tomorrow. He immediately consented to deliver him that evening. I called Mark in tears and he tried to console me by saying "well, I have a big head...did you tell the doctor that?" I told him I did, but that it didn't matter. He said he'd leave right away. I met him at home to grab the hospital bag and head back. Mark had arranged for a friend of ours to meet us at the house to assist in a priesthood blessing after which I felt MUCH better, but still so, so scared. We called Lisa and asked if the boys could stay there until the next day when we could figure something out (thank you Lisa!) and off we went. My amazing doctor stayed there all day/evening for us and did such a wonderful job. We ended up delivering our little Gabriel via c-section at 10:01 pm and he was 5 pounds 12 oz and 18 1/2 inches long. He was absolutely perfect and so so beautiful. I remember Mark going back and forth between me and the baby and saying to me over and over "he has SO much hair, you should see his hair, he just has SOOOO much hair". He had a little trouble breathing and had to be in the level 2 nursery for a few days. I didn't even get to hold him until about 2pm the next day and they wouldn't let him come into our room until he was eating on his own and breathing without any help from the oxygen. We finally got him in our room 2 days later where we had a big (as big as it could be in a hospital room) birthday bash for little Sam and enjoyed our brand-new baby. As it turns out...he really did just have a big head like his daddy, and boy is it BIG. It's actually the same size if not a teensy bit bigger at three years old than Joshua's and Joshua is 9.

We just LOVE this kid. I can't believe it's been 3 years already. He has been such a joy to raise. I remember when he was about a month old telling Mark almost every day how "good" he had been that day, and then we finally realized that he was just a GOOD good baby. He really was angelic. He hardly ever cried, always smiled and was SO SO smart. He found ways to communicate with us SO early. I remember taking him to the Dr. when he was 10 months old and sitting in the waiting room playing with him and he kept saying "Doctor" over and over. It was surprisingly clear and I was convinced I had a genius on my hands. :) He became two almost overnight and brought all the fun "terrible two" stuff with it, but has always been just so cute and funny and wonderful. We are so lucky to have him in our family. Yesterday when I was frosting the cake for Sam's birthday party he kept saying "wow! Zyou (yes, that z is there on purpose. All his Y's have a z sound in front of them for some reason, he says the y sound...just not until after the z sound)Anyway, he kept saying "zyou do-een a DOOD job MOM!! (you're doing a good job, mom) and then last night as he was getting ready for bed he said "mom, zyou did such a dood job on Sammy's cake today". What a sweetheart. He really owns my heart, he says nearly every day "zyou my best friend mom!" I am so so lucky. And I really can't believe he's 3! We LOVE you Mr. Three!!



And sorry once again, for the novel. I thought I should document the experience since other than in Gabriel's journal, I don't think it's written down. Stay tuned tomorrow for "the story of Sam". :)