Perpetual Learners

11 things we have learned in the past few weeks.

1. Honda Odysseys are pretty awesome.

 Daniel said a tearful goodbye to his beloved Explorer.

 I love all the space. And that it has a DVD player. I think Daniel is enjoying driving a car (our Sonata) that has A/C and functioning seat-belts.

2. Your mouth is an efficient way to carry things whilst crawling.

Even if she acts like a dog she's still really cute. And she loves cheese

3. Play dates are much more fun when you don't fight with your friends.

 It is absolutely glorious to have Sadie and her friends go in the basement by themselves without having to be supervised/refereed. Sadie & Anna Gaines played downstairs for a good 2 hours one day

4. Tapes are amazing, but useless.

 The Explorer had a tape player and these tapes have been floating around in Daniel's car for the past 10 years. When we cleaned out the Explorer I couldn't part with them, but a few days later I realized a picture on the blog and then tossing them would suffice. Tapes pictured above (l-r)- good mix, most romantic songs ever mix, Ace of Base, Meredith's relax mix '98. and Bette Midler. Pure gold. I miss them.

5. Elise's hair is long enough for a ponytail.

6. Baby powder is really fun to make a mess with, but not that fun to clean up.

7. Willy the Wolverine is both exciting and fear-inducing

 

8. Kids don't really care about Mother's Day.

 

 Sadie refused to take a picture with me and Elise refused to take a good picture with me.  

9.  Elise is allergic to penicillin.

This is actually before the rash spread over her entire body (including her earlobes). She had a rough few weeks between the double ear infection, being allergic to the medicine for the infections, and then the traumatic nebulizer treatment from the cough that just won't go away.

10. Plastic pools don't really cushion the hard ground underneath

 Sadie whined a little after running and jumping into the pool

11. Wearing sunglasses makes it hard to see movies in the car

New Englanders

Meredith got a bunch of cute pictures when she and my mom (the New Englanders) were visiting. 

Here are some a lot, of my favorites. 

Sadie was so cute with Weston- so much sweeter with him than she has ever been with Elise.

Elise was just her crazy self. I love that she looks like she is about to pounce on Weston's face. 

Sadie really liked baby Weston.

She wanted him with her everywhere, including the ball pit. RIP ball pit thing- the top got a hole in it and no longer stays inflated. It's times like this we really miss Paco. He'd find a way to fix it.

I include the following picture because it's a good illustration of Lou. She's happy, mostly because she is climbing and clinging to me.

On Sunday night the kids were all playing with balloons we had from various places. Have I mentioned how much both my girls loves balloons? Well, it's a whole lot. But again, with Sadie giving lots of love to Weston.

In this picture I have no idea what she was doing, but Meredith caught her on camera rolling back with her feet in the air. It looks like she fell flat on her back and it makes me laugh every time.

And probably my favorite picture of all:

Louie snuggling up to Nana. My mom had to take her outside while I finished dinner because she was whining so much for me. Once they took her out of my sight she was fine.

John Girls

A few weeks ago we had our first ever John girls + babies weekend. We went up to my cousins' cabin and pretty much just talked for 2 1/2 days straight. The cabin was perfect because it has all the nice modern conveniences, but it's away from the world.

The babes under age 1 were invited (Elise barely made it). 

No showers. No work. No leaving the cabin. 

Sounds awesome to me.

We had actually hoped to do some easy hikes but there was a big snowstorm the night we got there that left 6 inches of snow. My mom and Alicia had to drive up the canyon in the storm in the pitch black. They couldn't find the turn off for the cabin because snow was covering all the signs. I had to drive out to the canyon road to show them the way and I was terrified.

 

We drove up earlier in the day. This was Hillary's view until the kids fell asleep. 

They both had some great scowls going. 

Side story- my uncle had told us that a window had just been replaced that broke. Everything looked great when we got there and we went about our business. While I was changing Elise into her pjs for bed the first night my knuckle scraped across something sharp and starting bleeding. When we realized it was a little piece of glass we started hunting around to make sure there wasn't more glass. We found glass all over the place that we hadn't noticed! This is a collection of the bigger pieces of glass on the coffee table. To give you an idea of the size (we should have put something else in the picture so you could tell!) that piece at the top of the picture was about 8 inches long. 

The babies were great for the most part. One night Elise was up for a couple hours right when we wanted to go to bed. So that was not fun, but she made up for it in cuteness. And now that I know she had 2 ear infections maybe there was good reason for the crying.

 

One day Carrie and Anthony came up with their 2 kiddos since they were in town for Carrie's sister's wedding. We were so happy that Carrie could join in the John girls weekend, even if she totally violated the no husband and no kids over 1 rules. :)

2011 John grandbabies unite! I had to include this one because of Elise's awesome face. The kids don't look too different in size here, but they actually are quite different in person. Elise was born in May, Lauren in October, and Weston in November. We can't wait for them to be running around together wreaking havoc at family reunions in the future.

Hopefully this will turn into an annual or every-other-year event. 

I really do love the women in my family. I am lucky to have 1 awesome mom (just realized she's not in any pictures- more on the next post), 3 super cool sisters, and 1 amazing sister-in-law.

Meredith blogged about the trip over here if you want to see more pictures.  

Month Twelve

This may be the best product ever to come out of these monthly photos. The double wave with crazy eyes.

So here we are at 12 months. My baby girl will become a toddler soon. Each year of my life just keeps going by faster- but Elise's first year was an especially rapid one. When Elise was first born I didn't feel like I had a good handle on being a mother of 2 kids and, unfortunately, most of the time I don't feel like I have made much progress.  Being a good mom is hard work.

Assorted facts on Elise "Louie" Lynn Nielson:

-has 4 teeth- one of them just barely starting to poke out on top. 

-60th percentile in height, 40th in weight. 

-stands for 45+ seconds at a time and then just sits down in a controlled movement. I know she has the balance and leg strength to walk, she just needs to do it. Judging by how long it took her to switch from army crawling to just plain baby crawling, she may be at the "standing freely but not walking" stage for months. 

-loves being outside and crawling on grass, concrete, wood chips, you name it. She's got the calloused legs to prove it. She also won't stop eating wood chips when we go to the park. It's a problem.

-has a mega sweet-tooth

-wants to play with whatever Sadie has

-says "dad"; at least, she consistently makes a sound like "dad" when she sees Daniel. I get really annoyed when people exaggerate the abilities of their kids, so I hesitate to declare it her first official word. 

-still got a huge head- 80th percentile, baby!

-not interested in movies or shows

-loves wrestling/snuggling with the huge bear Papa bought Sadie

-thinks playing in the basement toy room is the best thing ever

-hates being buckled into a stroller. She prefers to ride standing up holding onto the sunshade. Crazy girl

Oh, and she's been kinda fussy that past few weeks with 2 different colds and teething, but that could be explained by the double ear infection her doctor found at her 1 year appointment today. Oops.

Here's a look back at Lou each month in her first year

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

She's pretty cool.

Easter

Easter was fun. I am a sucker for how excited Sadie gets about holidays. We went to UVU's Easter party, just like last year, but UVU scaled way back this year so there weren't many activities. We did the egg hunt and went home. Sadie picked up purple and pink eggs exclusively. She is such a girl. I told her there was candy in all the eggs, no matter what color, but she didn't care. She handed Elise a few blue and green eggs.

Elise was very excited for the egg hunt

The day before Easter we had a mini egg hunt in our square of concrete behind our townhouse. Sadie insisted on wearing her nightgown. 

By the way, if it seems to you that Sadie is wearing nightgowns in all the pictures we put on the blog, it's because she is. If it was her choice she would never wear clothes. The line we have drawn is that she can't go outside in her 'jamas', but she can wear them at home. I gave in this time for special and she has mentioned several times recently that she got to go outside to find eggs in her Tinkerbell 'jamas.

Hillary helped Sadie dye eggs. I realized that I don't care much about dying eggs. It's just messy and hard for Sadie to do. I think we'll skip that in the future. Daniel and Sadie do really enjoy hard boiled eggs so maybe we'll just decorate eggs with crayons and stickers?

I spoiled the girls with their Easter baskets and I am somewhat embarrassed about it.  I am only putting this picture up to remind myself in the future that a $25 limit per kid gives them way too much stuff, especially when Elise's birthday is a few weeks later. Next year the limit will be $10.

Now for some not so materialistic Easter thoughts...

I spent a lot of time on Easter thinking about the reality of the Resurrection and what it means for me. How much the meaning of it has probably shifted for some of my loved ones. In high school and early college Christ and the Atonement mostly meant forgiveness of sins to me. How grateful I was my mistakes were overcome by Him. Not to downplay that, because that is a big deal, but in the past year extraordinarily difficult things have happened in the lives of people I love and that is all I could think about. Jesus Christ's act covers all of those things, despite how different each of the situations are. All of us will be resurrected and we will all see our families again. I often take for granted the hope that that brings me. Christ's Atonement covers those who have been hurt in the worst way by other people. His Atonement heals those whose mortal bodies fail them. I don't understand how Christ could have survived feeling all of the worst pain, frustration and sorrow anyone in the world would ever experience, but I do believe that He did. One of the hardest things about it all is that we, as humans, still have to go through the pain of these things- it won't be completely taken away during our lives just because of a belief in Him. And I don't understand why some have to go through these incredibly heart-wrenching trials, while others just plain don't have to, except that difficult things are a part of God's plan for what life on Earth would be. 

MimiPaco Take 2

Mimi and Paco left us to return to the great state of Texas. They had been considering going back and then Tom's father passed away at the end of March so they packed up and headed back to Austin for the funeral. Daniel was able to fly down to Austin for a few days and see his Nielson family- some of whom he hadn't seen in 10+ years. I was disappointed we couldn't go and meet some of them.

 We miss Tom and Carolyn a lot. Sadie misses them so much that she randomly calls out "Paco!" and then smiles at me. 

Having grandparents close by is just great. A few weeks before they left Paco made the girls a life-size Lightning McQueen out of a diaper box. Sadie is still playing with it regularly 2 months later, so I'd call it a smashing success.

 Elise loved it when she got a chance to play in the car for a while without Sadie.

The day before they left we hung out at the park for a little while. You can see that Tom and Carolyn actually took care of the girls while Daniel texted and I took pictures.

This is the best goodbye picture that I got. 

We miss you guys so much!! We hope we get to see you soon.

Leesie Lou Turns the Big 1

Today our Lou is 1 year old. We love her a lot. I'll probably do another post expounding on the first year of her life, but for now, enjoy these pictures of her demolishing her cake. 

My mom, sister Meredith, and nephew Weston were in town at the end of April so we celebrated a little early last week. Sadie only ate about 5 bites of her cake on her first birthday (and none at her second birthday) so I figured Elise would do the same. Nope. She ate more than half of it and spread the rest around her high chair tray. 

 When I put Elise in the bathtub she tried to lick up the chunks of cake that were floating around. I ended up rinsing her off, draining the tub, and then re-filling it so she wasn't bathing in cake water. 

And a cute one of the cousins enjoying their treats next to one another.