Lilly's First Birthday!!

I can not believe that it has been a year since sweet Lilly joined our family.  (I think I say that every time they turn 1 but I really do mean it!)
 

Here is a bit about Lilly:

She loves to play with her siblings.

She walks a little bit sideways, and she's not that great at walking still probably because there are enough people to carry her around when she wants...and when she doesn't want to also.

She is still very cautious on the stairs, I don't mind, however she can go up and down them on her own now.  

She has two teeth on the bottom and two coming soon on the top.
She says Momma, Dadda, Bye-Bye and she shakes her head yes and no and I think she knows what they mean.
She loves, loves, loves baby dolls.  She sleeps with one, carries one around, kisses them, hugs them...you get the idea.
The only thing she likes as much as dolls is balls and cell phones and if they are pink then she loves them even more!  :) 

 

Lilly

Lilly is 10 months old, oh how time flies!
She is crawling and climbing all over.  She walks around the furniture and holds hands while walking, I'm sure she will take off and run any day now.  She has one tooth on the bottom.  Her hair is just barely long enough to put a little ponytail right on top; it's cute.  She is happy and likes to smile at everyone.  She says momma, dadda and bye-bye.  She loves it when her siblings play with her, especially Michael, she gets VERY excited to see him and play with him.  She's chubby and so cute.  We love her so much!

Here are some more pictures.

Guest Room Transformation

Now that we have four kids we no longer have a guest room and it was time for a makeover on James and Katie's Room.  I forgot to take the before picture.  But it was a...humm...perhaps you could call it a mint greenish pastel  (it was a great oops paint find)  But I found another oops paint, a nice grey color.  Then on the wall it looked purple.  So after some mixing of other random colors we came to have this color:  (more of a bluish grey)

Shopping!!

Saturday I found my $10 off a $20 Kohls purchase coupon and promptly packed up the kids...all FOUR kids!  As a general rule I try to avoid taking all the kids shopping because it never ends well for me or them.  I'm happy to say this time was different!

We had pure bliss because of this:

Family

My family came for a visit this last week.  It was great to see them and spend time with them.  We decided our last extended family pictures were pretty out dated (we've had two kids since they were taken) so we needed some new ones.  Here they are:

So there you have it.  They turned out pretty good. 

Some Pictures From April

 It's been awhile so here are some pictures of us.


Katie chose to sleep in a bucket, silly girl.

 Great Grandma and Great Grandpa Biggs came for a visit,  The kids don't look excited in the picture but really they were thrilled they came!  It worked out to go to breakfast with them the next morning too, we had a great time!

Katie's hair is long enough to do french braids! She now requests braids all the time.

Lilly is VERY affectionate to everyone.  On this day she had a strong hold on James' ears so she could get a good slobbery kiss in. 

 That's all for now. 

A quick update...

Michael just had his first ever Track and Field Day at school.  Robert was able to go and help with it.  Michael had tons of fun!  He's had a few rough days with school but overall he really enjoys it.  He is reading now and I enjoy listening to him read new books everyday.  It's amazing how much he is learning in school!

The Battle with Eczema

We have had a tough battle with eczema with James, a little with Katelyn and a lot with Lilly.  If you have ever had to deal with this you know how frustrating it can be.  With James we took the traditional route of going to our Dr, getting a prescription for a steroid cream and months of applying the stuff and hoping for it to go away.  Eventually I stopped using the cream with him because of my concerns over using a steroid on such a little baby and we continued to battle it with OTC lotions and creams.  Eventually it went away.

A New Adventure

So I had this (crazy) idea that we should switch to cloth diapers! So I did some research and let me say this, these are not your mother's cloth diapers!

No pins! No plastics! No folding!

Lilly's Blessing

Well, it is official, Lilly Marie Bond is her name.

For months we, okay mostly me. have been trying to figure out if that was really her name or it was supposed to be the originally planned Lilly Ann.  And finally Robert said what ever he said during the blessing was what it was and I said okay.  In the beautiful blessing he gave her, Lilly Marie was made official.

Thank you to all of you who could come and share the special day with us.  It was a great day!

Surprise!

For 9 months now we have been calling this sweet baby a boy... Robert and I were sure that it was a boy.  Michael and James said it's a girl...well, Robert and I were definitely WRONG!!

IT'S A GIRL!!

After my water breaking at around 10:30 PM and going into labor within about 30 minutes our sweet little baby came on November 17th at 1:17 AM.


Everything went great, no problems, nothing unexpected (...except for the fact that she's a girl, not a boy!) and baby and I are doing great! 

Robert and two of the three Midwives weighing her:
8 lbs 6 oz (our second smallest baby so far)
20 inches long with quite a bit brown hair

Around 2 AM all three kids were up celebrating with cookies and juice

Katelyn and our new baby

Michael and our new baby

James and our new baby

It was the perfect day for her to come!  Before she arrived:
we all went for a walk to the park
droped Michael off at school
dropped James and Katelyn off at Aunt Nicole's house
Robert and I went to the Temple
we picked up the kids, came home and went for a longer walk
went to On The Border for some spicy salsa and good food
stopped at Cold Stone for some free ice cream cake
put the kids in bed and relaxed and enjoyed some TV (Castle and Lie to Me if you were wondering)
...then my water broke  :)  and the rest is history...

We were so ready to hold our beautiful baby, you could say we were trying to convince her to come, I think we were successful!

As for a name, we were going with Nathan but now that she's here, we just aren't feeling it...We'll let everyone know as soon as we figure it out. 

And to clarify, yes we had this baby at home.  It was great, I wouldn't have changed a thing.  They were all so patient and relaxed but made sure the baby and I were safe and healthy at the same time. If there are more babies in our future, a midwife at home will be the way to go again. 

This is a good post!

Do you ever have great news that you just don't feel like sharing right away?  You just want to be selfish for a time and keep all the joy to yourself?  Well, I do.

Sometimes I just don't want to share things because sometimes people just aren't as excited as I am about my joy or they say, "I knew it!" instead of the "That's so wonderful!" that I hope to hear.  And other times I just don't want to tell because of all the work it takes to tell everyone that must be told...all the phone calls to parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, friends...and the list goes on! (Not that I don't LOVE talking to all of you but sometimes knowing that I must call all of you in a short amount of time while taking care of my children too can be a bit overwhelming-I know you have all heard them screaming for my attention in the background!  So please don't be offended that we didn't call.)

So, I am telling how I want, when I want and if you are reading this congratulations, you may be one of the first to know.  To those of you who wanted to know sooner but didn't check our blog, you should check our blog more often because there are some really fun pictures of our kids (that some of you have probably requested to see) and fun movies of, what else, our kids!!

Speaking of movies of our kids, here's a great one, they are SO SILLY! Enjoy!



Come back again soon to check out more fun stuff about our kids on our blog!!