Katie Grace is 9 Months Old!

This baby. I love her. We have had a special bond from the beginning. With my other two girls, the newborn stage was kind of hard. Mastitis and not enough milk was stressful and hard. And they slept 5 and 6 hour chunks right from the start. But with Grace, breastfeeding was awesome for the first three months before supply problems started. I wasn't miserable, she latched great, I didn't get mastitis. It was perfect. And I spent a lot of time with her because she was up every hour and a half all night long for the first month. I also knew how fast babies grow, so I just took the time to really, really enjoy those snuggles and the sweet smell of new baby. I just loved it. Every second. And she wasn't an immediate daddy's girl like my other two. And even now, nine months later, she still occasionally picks me :)

Grace is mellow yellow. She doesn't let much bother her. She hardly cries. And I mean hardly. When she has a rough day she maybe cries a combined 20 minutes all day long. She's very patient. I almost have to set a timer to remember to feed her! She took the longest of my kids to roll and crawl. She just likes watching and tinkering with her hands. But once she took off, she took off! Yesterday she pushed a chair across the room, walking along behind it. She's very opinionated. She doesn't like formula now that she's started food! She just wants to eat anything and everything! And she does. Today I fed her a banana by just holding it and she would bite off chunks and gum them up. She LOVES cookies! And she's not one for lone veggies. If I just puree carrots, she'll tolerate it, but if I smash up our food she eats more than Addy most days! 

She is a weird teether. She got one bottom middle tooth and then one outside, and then a couple days ago I realized she has the two top outside teeth! So she'll have a little Jack-o-Lantern smile. 

I asked Scott what he would say about Grace and he said, "Oh, she's the sunshine of our lives. While the other two are busy teaching us patience one way, she's teaching us patience another." What a wise comment. :) Addy and Ellie teach me patience by demanding it. Grace exemplifies it. If you can't tell, this girl is seriously loved and adored. 

Her stats:

Height 28 inches

Weight 18 pounds 10 ounces

Head Circumference 15 3/4 inches

Overall Assessment: Perfect.

We love you Katie Grace and I will forever be grateful that we have you. Oh my goodness, I love you.

Catch-Up!

I took a pitiful number of pictures on my camera the last couple months. But here are some memories I want to record and remember! We played in the brief snow we had. It was so warm that the snow kept melting just enough and then freezing to make a solid, icy layer. Addy's comment? "Mom! I'm walking on the snow like Jesus walked on the water!" She wasn't very pleased about the fact that snow angels weren't working.

Ellie Belle was not the hugest fan. She doesn't like cold hands. And she hates mittens and snow pants and the impossibility of helping herself back up after falling. So between those two things, I consider myself lucky to have caught her smiling lol.

Gracie, in her hat her Grandma Carter made her. I love, love, love it!

The girls had a really fun time playing together. Addy enjoyed stomping through the icy surface and making "holes in my deep, deep, deep snow!" I seriously cannot get enough of them playing together. It makes my day every time.

Lately Addy and Ellie have really been excited about making Grace laugh. I thought this video was pretty cute, despite the horrific cinematography
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This is the very best we could do. It's becoming a recurring theme in our lives. Pictures of all 3 kids are just destined to be sub-par.

Oh, look! More pictures where we couldn't for our lives get a smile from all three at the same time. Or at all. Ellie is quite the stubborn child. But I got these dresses for a combined total of .... are you ready .... TEN dollars. In July. Bam.

Ellie's smile in this one just makes me happy. And Addy's. And Grace's. They all just show their personalities so well!

Squishes! Ellie is constantly saying that she wants to hold Grace. Gracie doesn't love it but she tolerates it for a second, by which time Ellie is usually ready to move on anyway :)

I love my baby girls. I love having all 3 girls. When we found out Grace was a girl I was kind of taken aback. I was so sure she was a boy! But now that they're all here and together, I love being able to say that "my girls and I" are going to go do something. It makes me feel super cool. Plus, look at them. They're gonna be best friends. In fact, just the other day Addy said, "Ellie is my best friend mom. And my best sister!" I'm not sure if Grace was offended, but if she was, she forgot about it real quick :)

What I'll Teach My Children II

Work. Learn to work. Love to work. Work.

Something my parents did a pretty excellent job of emphasizing was work as an eternal principle. They taught us how to work. We have a whole list of numbered lectures my father gave to us while growing up. They range from "We don't do things where if we have an accident someone gets hurt or dies" to "If you were coming you would be here." But mixed in there somewhere in the middle are several about work. Among the most memorable:

"Start in a corner and work until it's done."
"Start at the top and work to the bottom."
"Don't take an hour to do a ten minute job."
"That ______ is not even pretending to be clean!"
"Wake up and get your jobs done. Then you can play for the rest of the day."
"Work hard. Play hard."
"Learn to love work."

It sounds like I had a pretty rough childhood, huh? :) But I didn't. That's the thing. Because I was taught to work efficiently and honestly. I was taught the value of an honest day's work. And it's served me very well in my role in the work place and now as a wife and mother. I haven't once, not a single time, cleaned the toilet without hearing "Start at the top and work to the bottom." These lectures, however much we griped, apparently did the trick!

I am SO thankful to my parents for these lessons. For their examples of work and the expectations they held for us. And if my siblings don't now, they will. Did you know that in college, of my 10 roommates there were at least 4 who literally did not know how to clean a toilet. As in, had never done it before. The apartment complexes had a "clean check checklist" that literally explained step by step how to clean a bathroom. It's for real guys!

And now that my husband has the great opportunity to work with student employees, I have the great opportunity of being thankful for my work ethic and the great desire to instill in my children the same honesty and efficiency. So here's what I'll teach my kids about work.

• When you're at work, work. You are being paid to provide a service. You are being paid for your time. So work. The whole time. Do not stop. 
• When you have a job, show up. On time. Every time.
• Every place of work has some kind of dress code or uniform. Wear it. Always. And don't complain. It's a job. If you don't like it work somewhere else.
• Do not give excuses. Ever. Take ownership for your successes, but also for your mistakes.
• Treat everyone you work with professionally. When you write an email to your boss, use spell check, for goodness sake.
• Work. The whole time. Do not stop. Did I already say that? But it's so important. I would die if my boss walked in and I was sitting around doing nothing. I would be so embarrassed. And I hope my children would as well. I try not to get into the whole work thing because, hello, this is a public blog and word gets out. And let me tell you, word gets out. But I'll share this one experience because, well, I can't help it. We go to campus to pick up Scott's laptop after work one day because he had forgotten it. We walk into the auditorium where students are getting ready for a concert and one of them is full on laying down, on the floor, on the stage, playing on their phone. I was blown away. I mean, if you're ready for the concert and there's nothing else you can do, at the very least sit your butt in one of the hundreds of chairs and look professional while you wait! Work. The whole time. Do not stop. 
• Find your own solutions. Use your brain. If you come upon a problem you don't know the answer to or run into a snag, use your resources and figure it out. A worker who has to be told every little thing to do it more annoying than useful.
• Enjoy it. I don't think that work has to be awful and dreaded. I think you can learn to love it. Not by slacking and getting away with doing to least you can do, but by learning to find satisfaction in a job well done.   

I pray every day that I will be able to teach my children the value of work. Because it's something we have to do our entire lives. And it's something we'll do in the eternities. 

I Love/Hate My iPhone

My husband loves technology. He watches Apple's new product announcements, spends his free time researching all the great things new audio consoles can do, and has an amazing ability to fix anything that involves wires and screens and capacitors and soldering. He's also kind of an Apple snob. He just admires things that work well and abhors things that are subpar (which makes the fact that he picked me rather an anomaly).

I, on the other hand, love money. In the bank. Not being spent. :) So I'm rather impressed by laptops that only work for 2 years but only cost $150. And my reason? I could buy nine, NINE, of those before paying for one macbook. Just sayin'.

So we're on this great corporate phone plan with the university where our combined phone bill is less than $60 and we have unlimited everything on our smart phones. But a year and a half ago, when our windows phones came up for replacement and there was a free upgrade option of an iPhone, I got pretty irritable. To me, the iPhone represented everything I hate. It was trendy. Like leggings, refusing immunizations, and naming kids normal names with crazy spellings, or names that were just plain made up. And I hate trendy. It was powerful. You can use it for everything. Including wasting a great deal of time. It didn't have a keyboard. It was touch everything. And I hated touch texting. And, again, it was trendy. Shudder. I just wasn't jiving with it. Plus, if I'm being honest, I was scared I would like it and then when my kid dropped it in the toilet, I'd want to pay to replace it, which, as aforementioned, I refuse to do. And then I'd have to go back to my sad and sorry windows phone.

However, I realized that marriage is about compromise. And since I'm pretty sucky at that, I decided that phones wasn't a battle I'd pick. Ya know, if I compromise on phones, then I don't have to bend on anything else simply because I can remind Scott that at least he has the phone he wanted :P

So we got iPhones. Not the newest version, mind you. Because, after all, it was a compromise!

And guess what? I was wrong. I love it. I mean seriously. I have, in my pocket, the ability to google anything from how many licks to the center of a tootsie pop to how to make my kids some rockin' dresses for my brother's wedding. I have every conference talk ever given, every ensign ever printed, and every verse of every book of scripture. In my pocket. Not to mention the GPS. And for a girl who turned on the wrong street to get to the doctor's office every time for the 2 years they were in that office, this was a lifesaver. I can go anywhere I want to go! And I never have to be lost! And I got over the whole "touch" thing. I'm pretty fast. :)

But I was right too. I hate it sometimes. I hate that just because we all have cell phones now, we expect immediate responses and attention. Like, when we text someone and then get annoyed because it's been ten minutes and, hello, I asked you a question!  I hate that it's so easy to pick it up and check Facebook. I hate that I'm always using this dumb phone camera (which is rather impressive for a phone) instead of using my camera that takes AMAZING pictures. I hate how "connected" I feel all. the. time. (Which I realize is a "me" problem, but that iPhone makes it too easy!) I hate how little I blog because the ease of the iPhone makes it seem like such a pain to actually take nice pictures, import and edit them, and then repost them. Which I have to do on a computer instead of the thing in my pocket. *gasp*

So I'm repenting. I'm gonna blog. Because my brothers on their missions can read it. And I don't want them to miss out on a thing!