The End of Kindergarten

First and last day of Kindergarten. I was sad that last day of Kindergarten was pajama day! It makes my pictures look silly. Oh well. :) 

Sometimes I think I take too many pictures. Other times I can't believe I don't pull out my camera more often. I want to catch so many things on film. Miriam's little voice and cute pronunciations. Eliza's random questions. Holland's little whines and grunts. It's adorable. These children are such a treasure, and they change so quickly.

I know I have written about this before, but I just have to talk more about how much I loved Ellie's Kindergarten experience. I was so, so nervous about this and agonized about this decision, and it turned out much better than I could have imagined. 

Ellie's teacher, Mrs. Taylor, is such a gem. She only had six kids in her class, but I bet she would have been just as great with any number of kids. She was so laid back and went above and beyond with the kids. 

In fact, Eliza just received a letter from her this summer. It was so nice. She included a painting from her little boy for Ellie. She loved little Miriam too. She would always be sure to give hugs and high fives to Miriam and even pinned up pictures from Miriam on her classroom wall too. Miriam was pretty sure that she was part of the class. 

The thing I couldn't believe though, was that when I had Holland, Ellie's Kindergarten teacher bought my three girls matching shirts (see below) as a baby gift, and gave us food for two different meals!!! Who does that?! Not even my visiting teachers. I still can't believe that my daughters school teacher did all that!!

Missing one of the little boys. Three girls and three boys, so fun!

Fortunately I was able to go see Eliza's end of Kindergarten celebration before I had Holland. They did an adorable program that Ellie practiced in her room in secret ahead of time. It was so cute. 

This woman should get best teacher of the year award!

Such a cool family!

They sang songs and gave awards. The class voted by secret ballot to assign different awards to different members of the class. Ellie received the award "Sweet Tarts Award." Apparently she was the only one who received an unanimous vote.

Love these little girlies! I love that they were all such good kids that came from good families. It was really a great thing to be able to get to know all of the kids in the class and all of their parents.

Nearly everyday we (the parents) would sit on these benches at pick up and chat while kids would play. We normally stayed for at least a half an hour and often longer. On Tuesdays we would often go to Ikea and eat lunch together (kids eat free on Tuesdays at the Ikea Restaurant). It was really fun to get to know these parents. They have probably been some of my closer friends this past year. We are all pretty religious, and it was a good experience to try to do a little bit of missionary work.

Check out these cute shirts that Ellie's teacher gave them. Of course we have to do a little photo shoot with them.

Check out Holland's cute little double chin. Mama makes some creamy milk! It is probably chocolate flavored due to the copious amount of chocolate I consume.

 They got to hold Holly without the boppy! They were so excited!

They seriously adore Holland, but they are very concerned that they get equal opportunities to do things with her. Ellie held her head, so Miriam has to take a turn holding her head for the photos.

I still can't quite believe that I have three girls!! I never imagined my future children being three girls in a row. We have been honestly surprised that each one of them wasn't a boy. If there is a next time, we will probably expect a girl, and then it will be a boy.

Holland's sweet little chubby cheeks receive a ton of kisses.

Unfortunately her biggest danger is also her sweet big sisters. One time Miriam showed me how she could push so hard on the soft spot on top of Holland's head. That seriously scared me. Then there was the time I overheard her from another room saying to Holland, "Baby, do you want a pillow on your face?" I ran in the room and stopped her from pressing a pillow over Holland's face. Yikes!! Bless her heart, she adores her baby sister, but I am so nervous that she is going to seriously injure Holland someday.

Holland is growing and doing well despite the danger. She is about 2 months old in these pictures.

She has always really loved tummy time. She is holding up her head better and better and has started to pivot a little on her tummy because of the wiggling and squirming.

I love it when she arches her back and the only thing touching the floor is the her tummy and chest. What a sweetie!

I can't believe the summer is almost over. Back to school night is this Thursday and we are meeting Eliza's first grade teacher. I am not expecting to love the first grade experience like I did the Kindergarten, but I hope it is at least a good experience. I can't believe she is going to be gone the full day. I am jealous of her teacher. Ellie's teacher gets her most of the day! I sure hope I have given Ellie the tools she needs to do well away from home that much! I am pretty sure that I will miss Kindergarten though!

Holland's One Week Photos

I am still in newborn love! It is funny to me to get so baby hungry when I still have a new baby. I think it is because I know how fleeting this time is. Can time just slow down for a little while?

Because I feel this way, it shows what a sweet baby Holland is. She is so smiley these days (at 2.5 months old). We kind of compete to get her smiles, and I can tell she is right on the verge of laughing. John and I are definitely competing to see who gets her first laugh. It will probably be Eliza or Miriam because the parents are fighting about it. :) Miriam likes to defend me though. She yells, "Mommy gets the smiles!" That's right, kiddo. :)

John's parents gave us this sweet blanket and toy bunny. I wanted to take her picture with it every month the first year to see how she grows.

 Love my new baby!

Newborn Baby Holland

Two days old! Love, love this photo!

How does life go so quickly? Baby Holly is almost 2 months old!! In some ways I feel like it seems like a really long time ago that she was born, but it also feels like she just got here. I have been meaning and meaning to write down what is going on right now, but I feel like I can never get a chance to. If I do get a chance to, I normally pick to have a nap instead. :)

Sleepy newborn smiles!

Holland is the sweetest baby! She hardly ever loudly cries. Although, the other two girls have expressed their concern and sympathy that she cries so loud and so often. (This is so not reality.) For the first couple of weeks her main personality trait was that she liked to save her poo until her diaper was off. She also is a fabulous sleeper. One of the first nights home she slept 6 hours in a row at night! Awesome! I have become a lot more relaxed about my parenting since we had Eliza, and don't wake her up at night. It is wonderful! Right now (at 2 months) she sleeps about 6 hours in a row most nights, which isn't too bad considering we are coming from baby Miriam, who just didn't sleep very well for us.

Love the big grin!

I was pretty stressed about breastfeeding for a while in the beginning. I started using the nipple shield, which I did with the other two girls. I was never able to get rid of it while breastfeeding Ellie (although I wonder if she would have if I had tried harder), but with Miriam she was much more interested in eating and I was able to stop using it within the first week. Holland was in the middle. She was more interested in eating than Ellie but not as much as Miriam. So I stressed about how when I tried to get her to nurse without it, she wouldn't eat as much. So I felt like I was starving her. I was really motivated to work on it because I knew how much nicer it is to not have to worry about it. Well, eventually it worked out. Although for the first week or so after I stopped using the shield, I couldn't believe how much it hurt to breastfeed. I swear it felt like liquid fire coming out of me. Holy cow, that was painful! So grateful that was short lived!

The girls are so sweet with their baby sister!! They love holding her and adoring her. They fight about who gets to be closer to her face. Especially Miriam just loves on that baby all day long. Unfortunately despite being so loving, she doesn't have the common sense to always be soft with Holland. She has been in serious trouble a few times because she hurt the baby.

Holland almost always has baby gloves on, a onesie or a dress, and no pants (it is too hot). She has started giving us the sweetest smiles, which we fought for, for a while. It is funny that I always worry when I am pregnant that I won't love the baby as much as the other kiddos, but if anything I feel like I love the new baby more. 

Adorable Miriam with baby Holland's newborn hat from the hospital.

Actually that became kind of a problem. My emotions were kind of a roller coaster there for a while and I found myself getting seriously annoyed with the older girls! My mom was here almost for a month and one of the consequences was that the kids were much more whiny and obnoxious than usual. I was glad my mom could come though. It helped me be able to take a nap during the day for sure. The girls love her so much!

This is not chronological, but I wanted to write this down before it wasn't fresh anymore. I feel like I have been so blessed the last two months. I have been able to recover well. Holland is such a good baby. I love her so much, sometimes it shocks me. I feel like I haven't had too many problems with the older girls. (Although there are definitely some days that I am 1000% confident that we aren't going to have any more kids because I can't even handle the ones that we do have.) We found our first scorpion (scary!), but no one got stung, and we haven't found another. We have been wanting to start the process of buying a house, but affording a house in the neighborhood that we wanted to seemed impossible--until John got a promotion out of the blue. It was a miracle! Now we are starting on the process and even found a house we feel like we should put an offer on. Today at church, I really felt the Spirit speak peace to my heart about buying a house. It has been a very stressful thing for me! So much money! So much responsibility and liability! What if it has a scorpion problem?! Needless to say that having peace about this decision is a huge blessing moving forward. The Lord is truly blessing us!

Sucking on fingers makes her feel better! She took to that binkie on the very first try! Maybe that is just part of being the third kiddo!

I have been having fun with my new camera and some editing software. In this post are some of the photos I have been working on.

Newborn baby fuzz!

When I think of this time in our life I have an image of playing board games in the evening with John and drinking some kind of icy cold drink/shake. Between the heat and nursing, I am always thirsty! My water bottle goes everywhere with me. So needless to say an icy cold, thirst quenching drink is just what the doctor ordered. :) We have been playing a lot of games, but our favorite is Dominion. I love being able to hang out with my best friend every night! The girls really like games a lot too, especially the game "Deer in the Headlights," that my aunt gave us for Christmas last year.

So alert! I swear she already acts older than she is! Stay little!

Starting the buying the house process is crazy! We are really not risk takers and have always lived in an apartment, where we just call someone to fix anything that is really wrong. We don't know anything about taking care of a house!! Good thing there is YouTube! Anyway, this has been quite stressful to move forward with this. However we really feel like it is the right choice right now. Feeling peace about this is such a blessing! One thing that was kind of funny was that our mortgage broker said that we had the best credit scores he had ever seen except a 90 year old woman who had never been late on anything! That was good news!

Teeny tiny toes!

One of the must-have's on our list of house requirements is not having a scorpion problem. We found one a couple of weeks ago and it was pretty traumatizing. The weather went from being pretty moderate to a week of 115°. A lot of bugs were showing up in our apartment, and at least one scorpion followed them. The bad news was that it was one of the most poisonous kind of scorpions, but the good news was that it didn't live very long. I was brushing my teeth and glanced down at my feet and saw it on the baseboard near my feet. I was useless and climbed up on the vanity and called for John. Thank goodness this happened while he was home! We have been very vigilant about checking our home with a black light every night since then and closing our drains at night. So creepy!

Nekker baby!

We have been doing swimming lessons religiously this summer. It is our one activity outside of our house. It has been pretty fun except that weeks that week which was a constant 115°. I did learn that using a spray bottle on your legs and arms helps a lot. I spray my hand and rub water on the baby to help keep her cool too. The girls are hopefully better swimmers than they were at the beginning of the year considering the time and money we have put into these lessons. I think they are, but maybe just not as much as of a difference as I would hope for. They love it though, so it is fun activity!

Diaper's off...

We also still try to do school time every day. Miriam is making a ton of progress with her reading, which is so fun. I love the smile that she gets when she is reading a book to herself. She is still just reading the most basic of stories, but it is fun to see her make such progress.

So sweet!

Ellie and I have still been reading the Narnia books, which have become even more treasured since I have started stopping at the end of every page to discuss with the girls what happened on that page: what we liked, didn't like; what we think will happen next; what new fun words to look up; what painted a picture in our heads; what questions we have for the author; who is making good/bad choices, etc. It is a really cherished time of the day!

Such a precious baby!

John and I had one fun outing while my mom was still here. We drove to the other side of Phoenix to a drive in movie with our two week old baby. We saw the latest Avengers. It was such a good time! I love date night!  The main problem (which is pretty funny in retrospect) was that it was 108° that day. We just thought that after dark it wouldn't be that bad. Well, it still was sweltering, and the kicker was that we couldn't figure out how to turn on the car to run the A/C without the headlights coming on. We still don't know how to do it. We just sat there pouring sweat the whole movie. It was still a great time though!

I am so in love!