Ross

Cut the phrase, "I'll do it in a minute" from my life. I should know by now that it won't get done that way. As I walk by the scuff marked trim by my kitchen, I will stop, go get the magic eraser, and have it done. Life will be easier this way.

Finally, after much jealously...

And there you have it! The first picture of our whole family all together, taken quickly after church because Brett said he wanted to. It works.

I look forward to opening my blinds every morning.

I would love everything about my house if it weren't for the gigantic driveway on mornings like this.

Last weekend Brett and I had the opportunity to go and watch our niece Kennedy get baptised. Sadly I didn't get a single picture of her beautiful dress, but I snapped these while we were waiting for things to start.
If I get that emotional watching my niece take that step, I'm afraid I'm just going to be a complete mess when it's this guy's turn in a little over a year. I can't believe it's coming so soon. And I know Ty looks a bit weird here, but he was falling asleep.

Then this guy just makes me melt every time he does this. He was putting on a show for my Aunt Joyce and I finally got a picture of his cute smile.

Everyone should be so lucky.

Okay, if you remember me in this very dress, you must have known me in grade school. Yup, 3rd grade, I really did used to wear this to school. (hangs head in shame)
"The Poodle" is making it's cameo apperance after being lost for the last 15 or so years. But I can't blame my parents, I'd lose stuff too if I had a 17,000 square foot school full of stuff.
Ah, the poodle skirt. I get to see it every day now.

As an added trivia bonus, this is the one and only outfit that my dad personally bought for me. It was my favorite, so don't diss it, yo.

Can anyone guess what 215 stands for? Anyone?

This is the number of pounds I've gained over the last 7 years with my pregnancies. Obviously some of this was due to baby/placenta/blood/other crap, but a large portion of it was just fat I packed on.

Now 205 is the number of pounds I've lost cumulatively after all the gainage. I include the freshman ten pounds I lost after I had Lily on here, even though it had nothing to do with having a baby and everything to do with drinking way too much Pepsi before I got married.

And then 23 is the number of fat pounds I now have to lose that are directly related to getting pregnant and having a baby.

Impossible comes to mind every time I think about losing them.

But anyway, my friend Emily decided to do sparkpeople.com to help motivate her and it got me all excited about working harder at watching my calorie intake. As always I am giving myself a year to lose it: however, 121 feels awfully far away.

To remedy that I've decided to once again hold myself accountable on my blog. I've been doing Taebo and P90 with Brett, along with watching my serving sizes and trying my best to ignore the Mountain Dews in my Father-in-laws fridge. Brett and I went out and got a few more hand weights and a snazzy new pair of weight lifting gloves for me. Yay! I love my new gloves!

So according to my calculations I need to lose about half a pound each week until Tyler turns one to reach my goal. Sounds easy when it's put that way, right?

Oy, guess it's time to put my gloves on. I'm tired already of being insanely jealous of anyone in possession of my dream BMI.

Ethan is doing well in 1st grade and is a student teacher in his class. He's in charge of helping Elizabeth with her reading I think. And like every little kid he's so excited about this that he's going over board with it. I'm both entertained and annoyed about his over enthusiasm. Last night he sat at the table and made "Elizabeth's chart."

It looks like she got 13 of her sight words right yesterday. I wonder how she'll do today.

Lily had her 2 year old well baby check up last week. Here are her stats:

Weight: 25.4 pounds (31%)
Height: 32.75(23%)
Head: 19 inches(72%)

We may or may not have called her "Big Head" on occasion before this appointment, and now it's even more funny to us.
But really she just has this huge head! It's like a watermelon on a toothpick. My poor little girl, if she wasn't so adorably cute I might worry about her self confidence with parents like us. Her saving grace is that her body is so sweetly plump all around that her head doesn't look too much out of proportion. Now if she were as super thin as her sister was at that age...

She gave us a look like, "This is a joke,right? What the heck am I supposed to do with all the clown poop?"

Yum, clown poop good... Cake bad.


Every last piece must come off!

This is the Jack in the Box my mom searched high and low for that Lily has slept with for the last 3 nights straight. This picture kind of shows he huge head. It's a virtual planatoid!

Et le piece de resistance: Scooby Doo, Lily's obsession.
If you're wondering what that brown streak in the middle is, it's the fascinating squirrelus-acornus-scurrious, a new species discovered 6 years ago on death row at the pound. He's such a spazz, it looks like he's twisting his body in five different directions there.

Here are the kids participating in the same activity their daddy and uncles did as children in the exact same back yard. They got quite a pile built up.
Laurens outfit she picked out. Why not, we weren't going to see anyone but family, right?
Tyler looking almost edible in his Sunday outfit. One month old stats: 23 inches(90%), 10 1/2 pounds(60%), Head is 40%, so he's got a tiny noggin just like his dad.
Ratatouille; like everything else French, I'm sorry to say it sounds better than it actually is. Though the flavor on the chicken was worth repeating.

And look, Brett brought out the big guns and served it with my china. What a guy.

First, happy 3 week birthday little Tyler! I have been having issues with post-partum healing and my milk suppy has not been what it always has before, so he hasn't been gaining weight how I would like. However after nursing for about 5 days straight, non-stop, my milk is finally picking up and he's at about 10 pounds now. Yay! And he's beautiful, let's not forget that.

The above picture is of him in his new outfit Grandma Audrey and Grandpa Dave brought last night. It's a 3 month outfit, but fits him surprisingly well.
Smiling for Daddy. Of course.
And he's adored by women.

Second, Ethan, you rock! We had parent/teacher conferences last night.

• 3 A+
• 1 A
• 1 A-
• 1 B+
• 2 B
• 1 B-
• 6 A's for his "Characteristics of a Successful Student"(how he uses his time and acts)

And his teacher said he has the best handwritting in the class! Yay! I was just telling him the other day how ironic it is that he's Brett's son. Let's just say that his handwritting is much better than his fathers, haha. Mr. Schaffer says he's exactly where he needs to be so the only thing I could be working on is just having him practice reading. I'm always so relieved after I go to these meetings. It makes me feel better hearing first hand that he's doing well. Especially math, I always had a hard time with math until I was older so that's something I really want him to avoid from the start. He got an A in math though, so I guess I had better focus more on reading now.

So I don't forget, Ethan told me about a boy in his class pushing him down when they were standing in line. I asked why he didn't tell his teacher about it right away and told him that bullying or physically hurting someone will not be tolerated in any way so we told his teacher about it to fix the issue. Mr. Schaffer was very surprised and said he couldn't think of anything Ethan would do to make another kid mad like that. He says Ethan is a very nice friend and gets along with everyone. In the end I really didn't find out what the kids issue was, but I guess Ethan hadn't done anything, the boy was just having a mean moment I guess. I will continue trying to stiffle the urge to beat anyone(more their parents) who hurts a child of mine. But I won't deny that a white hot flame of anger sparks up in me anytime I find out about it.

Third, me! I've now lost 50% of my pregnancy weight. Thank goodness. Twenty-four pounds to go still, 121 feels like it's a very long way off. I guarentee it will be about 11 more months until it's all gone, or more. I'm feeling pretty discouraged about it as I'm still stuck wearing my maternity pants since not even my biggest fat pants will squeeze on. My size 5-6 pants wouldn't even get past my thighs I'm sure. Haven't tried that yet, I'm trying to avoid depression.

And here are my girls after a morning of picking out their own clothes. Yes, we made another visit to the closet to fix things, but first we had to take a picture of course.

Tyler today at nearly 2 weeks old.
Meeting his great-grandma T.

Tyler is such an easy baby. Adding him to the family has been no big deal at all. He's nursing like a champ. The hardest part of my day is keeping his adoring big brother and sisters away from him when he's sleeping. Me on the other hand, well, it's a good thing he was our last baby. My body isn't handling the whole post-partum healing stuff quite as well as is has before. I'm crossing my fingers that I can start into a good workout program in a couple more weeks.

PS: I made a Creamy Carrot Soup recipe today for dinner. One word to describe it, disgusting. I couldn't even gag it down. It's pretty much like pumpkin soup, which is vile in my opinion as well. Brett and I had to promise the kids that we would never make it again. Gag.