Still Alive

I just really haven't felt like blogging lately....maybe it's the pressure for a good blog post that comes with a wedding anniversary (5 years for us on August 12th)....but I just have not felt like blogging lately. So I haven't. People are getting antsy for some more Sadie updates so I'll oblige.

Here's what Sadie's been up to lately:

1. Still walking like a madwoman. In some of the pictures you can see the cut and huge bruises on her forehead (happened on separate occasions). You may also notice she is wearing her dress backwards. Daniel gets her dressed in the morning while I am at work.

2. Playing in the pantry.

3. Closing the pantry. She thinks she is such a big girl when she opens and closes doors.

4. Playing the music on her teapot. Here she is pressing the button to make it play. Just to give you an idea of how often we hear this song, Sadie received this teapot as a present on August 7th and the batteries ran out August 18th. The song goes like this {sung with a British accent} "One pretty teapot ready for some tea. Two little cups- one for you and me. Three tasty treats- just enough to share! Shaped like a circle, triangle, and square."

5. Dragging her blanket around. She stayed with the Dunns last week while we were in Park City for our anniversary and she picked up some great ideas from Ella. One of them being that she should carry a blanket around everywhere. She doesn't seem to be too attached. I can usually take it away without her putting up a huge fight.

6. Talking/signing. Sadie has started to say and sign words. She says baby, dog/doggie, sippy ("bippy"), Dora ("doa/doda"). She signs baby, more, and all done. She signs "more" pretty much whenever she wants something, regardless of if she has had any yet. I haven't actually taught her any signs. She has learned all of these from watching her Baby Signing Times DVD. I doubted that Sadie would be able to learn any signs without a lot of effort from me, but now I am a believer!

What I've been up to:

1. Crafting. Had my most serious crafting injury last night while hot gluing lima beans onto a styrafoam wreath.

That's a big huge bubble where my skin was burned. It really hurt but now it just feels crazy.

2. Cooking. I am really trying to cook at least 3 good dinners a week. So far it is going alright.

Wow, crafting and cooking, I am so domestic!

What Daniel's been up to:

1. P90X. For those of you living under a rock, that's an intense workout program. I have joined Daniel for a few of the workouts and they are terrible! Especially the yoga- I am not used to yoga at all. I really liked some of the poses but I was really bored and antsy during a lot of it.

2. Reading every article possible on BYU's possible move to independence and updating me even though I am not that interested.

Sadie's Day (s)

On her actual birthday Sadie got some special treats. First, she got a Costa Vida pork quesadilla for lunch. She loved it. Ate the whole thing. That's my girl!

But she still tried to share most of her bites with me.

We went home, watched some Baby Signing Time, took a good nap, and got Coldstone. Being the amazing mother that I am, I ordered what I always get, which includes a lot of peanut butter mixed into my ice cream. I gave Sadie some and then realized it. At least we now know she is not allergic to peanuts!


At Sadie's 12 month doctor's appointment we found out she is tallish (73rd percentile) and average weightish (37th percentile). Sadie endured 5 horrible shots and slept most of the day. It was funny, with the first shot she looked confused. Once the second shot went in she was in full screaming-like-she's-dying mode, but she quit crying pretty quickly after the 5th shot.

Oh, and in case you didn't know, Sadie is walking. She still face plants quite often, but she walks about half the time, Mowgli crawls 20% of the time, and crawls the rest.


Finally, we had a real birthday party for Sadie on Saturday. Really, it was just a BBQ where we sang her Happy Birthday and gave her a cake. Probably more a party for us than for Sadie. Besides the propane going out just as the party was starting, and a few mishaps with the chocolate fountain, everything was great. Yes, I just said chocolate fountain. The Waddells (our old next-door neighbors) brought their delicious chocolate fountain. We were so happy that so many of our friends and family showed up! It was our first get together in our new place and it was so nice to be able to have more than 2 people over (unlike our old apartment).

Sadie blowing out her candle:



I made an individual cake for Sadie. I think she liked it.

Again, with the sharing. She offers her food to anyone standing nearby.
Everything was going well with the cake eating until I showed Sadie the present Alicia and Bryce had gotten her- another little plastic Dora doll. Sadie had a meltdown when I wouldn't let her play with Dora while she was eating cake so we gave her a quick bath and let her open presents.

At first, she just wanted to hold onto Dora.

But then she started getting excited about all the new gifts.

Here she is with most of her gifts. Thank you everyone! Not pictured: the Dora doll, bubbles, and a phone that plays music Sadie dances to.

Sadie happened to receive a birthday package from her BCF Will on Saturday also. It contained a sweet Washington DC shirt so they can be matching BCF's and a photo of Will holding a birthday sign. Sadie loves the picture so much that it is a little destroyed now from Sadie dragging it around with her.

Arizona

At the end of July Daniel was supposed to be gone for a week and I wanted to do something fun with Sadie- what's better than Arizona in late July, right? Well I argue not much is better when you are going to visit the Proffitt family. They generously hosted us with only 2 weeks notice (and only a few days after they got back from vacation).

The flight to AZ was rough. So many nightmares occurred- Sadie came down with a horrible cold right before we left, no AC on the plane, giant back-arching-arm-flailing tantrums, drink dumped on my neighbor, etc. But this is why I chose a short flight- after an hour and a half the nightmares were all over.

To say Sadie loved Booker & Ike might be the understatement of the year. She loved playing with Booker, but she insisted on kissing Ike every time she saw him. Margaret caught it on camera (above). Sadie gives open-mouthed kisses exclusively.

I have never seen Sadie act like this. She would wrestle with the boys whenever she could. She took Ike's feet out pretty hard one time.


We had so much fun together. I think our main activities were swimming and eating delicious food, but we tried to make it out for a little while each day, even with the sweltering heat. Sadie loved the Tucson Children's Museum. I thought she would be a little young to enjoy it, but she had a great time (as you can see from the overabundance of pictures).

One of Sadie's favorite rooms was the hospital room with baby dolls.

Sadie did this all by herself. I looked over and she was on her tiptoes, trying to pull down the doll.

Then she dragged the baby around for a while. I mean literally dragged. The doll was about as big as her.

Sadie & Booker rode the police motorcycle together.

The firefighting display had real uniforms to try on. Sadie wasn't very happy when she tried them on.

I'm not sure exactly how many germs Sadie picked up at the museum, but I am guessing somewhere in the millions. After the first few rooms I gave up on trying to keep stuff out of her mouth.

We also headed over to Traildust Town one evening. We went on a train ride, panned for gold, and saw a stunt show with lots of shooting.

This reminds me of a picture I have of me with my sister Meredith and cousin Janessa in the stroller.

Before the stunt show started Sadie sat on Booker's lap for a photo op. Booker is in an awesome-smile stage of life. I was nervous about Sadie being scared of the loud gunshots, but she was completely unaffected and found the show boring. Ike was scared. Booker loved it. In fact, halfway through the show he loudly proclaimed "I love this show!"

As you can see, the trip was wonderful. It was great to see Margaret & Clark's beautiful house and cute kids. I have committed myself to traveling to see my loved ones more!
(Especially before Sadie turns 2 and we have to pay for her plane ticket)

Go shorty it's your birfday

Happy Birthday Sadebomber!


It's Sadie's birthday and she wants to give you a present! Not. Last week Sadie developed the habit of "giving" everything to us. Really, she just holds it out for us to acknowledge it. If we take it she gets mad.

I'll do a longer post all about Sadie's first year another time, but I wanted to acknowledge the awesomeness that is Sadie today, on her actual birthday.

One year ago at this time we were sitting in our hospital room in shock that Sadie had a) come so early (3 weeks exactly) and b) come so quickly (7 hours after I woke up to my water breaking). Now we have got one crazy daughter who makes us incredibly happy.

One Year Thoughts

7/29/09- Sadie at 5 minutes old

Now that I have been a mother for one whole year I wanted to record some thoughts on motherhood. I thought about the things I wanted to write and realized "hey, I think I wrote something like this after Sadie was first born". Sure enough, pretty much everything I had planned on writing I already wrote in this post.

I do want to add one thing. Before I had Sadie I worried a whole lot about not being a natural mother. I see lots of mothers who just seem to be naturals. I felt like I was not a nurturer. Whenever I expressed this concern to others they told me I was crazy. Well, I was half right and they were half right. The act of mothering has often been difficult. I don't enjoy the exhausting nature of caring for a child. I don't always know the best way to take care of Sadie or teach her things; my caregiving is mostly one big experiment. Sometimes I miss the freedom of no kids. (Especially on the amazing Utah summer nights when we used to go on long walks). On the other hand, the pure and unconditional love I feel for Sadie was immediate and natural upon her birth. I have decided that perhaps the fact that I constantly worry and think about the best way to raise my child indicates that I am indeed a nurturer.

So I guess I will sum up the past year by saying it was the craziest, most life-changing/frustrating/joyous, and overall, best year of my life.

First Date

Last week Daniel and I went on our first real date since Sadie was born. We have gone out to eat without her before, but that was the extent of it. I think it's probably because I feel bad for taking her to a babysitter while I work so I don't want to leave her again at night. Anyway, we went up to Park City for an outdoor concert with Ben Folds and the Utah Symphony. The Utah Symphony accompanied Ben singing and playing the piano. The setting was awesome.

Ben Folds was definitely on my top 10 list of music artists I wanted to see in concert so my hopes were high. We were a little nervous about how the symphony would mesh with Ben Folds, but it was amazing. Some people have said the acoustics were terrible, and there were definitely some places where the symphony sounded slightly off, but we loved it. Maybe we are just easy to please since we don't get out much.

They were very intent on the crowd not taking pictures with a flash, so here was my lame camera's attempt to take a picture without flash at night. One of our favorite songs was about Levi Johnson. Yes, as in Levi Johnson the father of Sarah Palin's grandson. It will be on Ben Folds' next album. The chorus is a little curse-heavy but it is taken word for word from Levi's myspace page. We laughed really hard.

Overall it was a great date night. It took us over an hour to get out of the parking lot so we weren't home until almost midnight and we had plenty of time to talk with just the two of us. We discovered we do like each other a little bit and we are going to stick with this marriage thing.

Alicia & Bryce- thanks for watching Sadie!

Brizzy Boo

Lexie and Briz (Sadie's BFF) came out for a Cottle family reunion and we got to see them a couple times. First, we took the girls swimming.

It was really fun because they interacted with each other a lot. Briz just loved to give Sadie kisses. They also enjoyed eating dried fruits together at the pool. Briz showed Sadie that it is much more efficient to eat handfuls of food at a time rather than Sadie's one tiny piece per hand approach.


Does Sadie look a little pink in these pictures from the pool?


Well that's because she was. Milestone alert! First sunburn. Even though I applied sunscreen twice in the 2 hours we were at the pool, I somehow missed all the skin close to her hairline and all around her left eye.

Great parent alert! First I let Sadie eat and choke on a leaf, then I get her sunburned. All in the same day.