All Those Little Teeth!

Well, several weeks ago Sam was our little two-toofer tooter. Yes, she toots, and she's not even embarrassed about it! Now she has five teeth we can see and I think three more that are working on breaking through! That seems like so many for a 9-month-old. This is Sam today:

She has been rolling all around the house. It's time to get serious about baby-proofing. We've put up a few small appliances that we used to keep in a cupboard below the counter. I'm also trying to figure out what to do with the heating vent covers. They are not screwed down and she loves to pull them up. She does it repeatedly despite the fact that she usually ends up rolling over the cover. She hates that part. It's time also to get the cords out of reach, too. Fortunately, in Grandma and Grandpa's house a lot of the outlets are in the middle of the wall and not as many are where she can reach them. That's good news.

This post is rather a bit ramble-y because this last week went by so fast and I just realized that it's Thursday and time for me to report in. As make up for the unorganized state of the post, I'll give you some pictures, Easter and others, to enjoy!



Next week will be more thoughtful (on my part), I promise.

Murphy Found US!

Well, this post is off the general topic of this blog, but I just couldn't let it slip by without comment. I think we have become the target of Murphy's attention. In fact, he wrote a new law just for us! It goes something like "If Brent stays up late to water the yard then it will rain the next day, regardless of the weather forecast." The first time Brent watered the yard and then it rained the next day we laughed. The second time it happened we chuckled through gritted teeth. The third time we thought about watering the yard I checked the weather forecast. There wasn't more than a 10% chance of rain. We thought we were safe. We were out watering at 10:30 Saturday night. Then, after church on Sunday, it started to drizzle. And it drizzled all afternoon and evening. I am pretty sure all the fertilizer I put down on Saturday has now been successfully watered into the ground. Grow roses grow!

Scheduling Nightmares

What a crazy beginning to a week! On Monday Sam and I went to her 9 month checkup with her doctor. My guess what that she weighed close to 30 pounds and was 28 inches long. Wrong on both counts! She is 29.5 inches long (what a tall baby!) and only weighs 24 lbs 2.5 oz. Her napping schedule for the day didn't go quite as I'd hoped and she was ready to sleep again about half way through her visit. She's such a pleasant baby, though, and didn't fuss at all, except a little when she got her Heb B immunization. Poor thing now has a little lump on her leg.

Then on Tuesday we went early to visit a friend in our neighborhood. Sam went down for her nap and then we had to wake her up to take her to get her pictures taken. I gave her a bottle before we left, but I didn't think to take any food with me. They were running a bit behind at the portrait studio (big surprise, huh?) and by the time it was our turn she was hungry and getting tired. But, even for all that, she had some adorable pictures. Brent came with us. He help her smile big for the camera. They rolled the ball back and forth and Daddy even helped her stand for a couple shots. They were very cute together. She fell quite asleep on the ride home and wasn't interested in waking up to eat once we arrived. So she didn't get "lunch" until 4:45 that day. Because the picture stuff took so long, Brent was about 25 minutes late for his class. Oops. Then I was off to go with some women in our ward to the Museum of Art at BYU. They have an awesome exhibit entitled "Beholding Salvation: Images of Christ" We had a gided tour through the exhibit and it was simply spiritual. I was going to bring Sam, but at the last minute my friend's husband said he'd watch her as his sister was over to help him with their brand new baby. So all in all, Sam did a lot of visiting on Tuesday.

The nightmare of it all comes from my personal beliefs about what I owe Samantha as her mother. I feel that I owe it to her that she gets the appropriate amount of sleep each day and that she is properly fed. When Sam first joined our family my life kind of went on hold. Everything revolved around getting to know Sammi and learning to take care of her. I couldn't really manage much more than that because it was all so new and took so much of my attention to do it as right as I could, that there wasn't much energy left over for other things. Now that Sam is older, she loves to play by herself and can content herself for quite some time. This has opened up some of my resources and energies to pursue other projects (housecleaning, cooking, blogging, podcasting, creating my website, and hopefully, eventually, exercising). But, with this added freedom comes quite a bit of headache in trying to coordinate Sam's schedule with the outside world. So, when we have days like Tuesday where her schedule was completely thrown off, I'm a little bit at odds with myself over the whole things. All I can say is that Wednesday she seemed to have recovered fine, although her nap schedule was a bit late. And today one would hardly notice that her schedule was so out of whack on Tuesday. Even now she's playing contentedly in the other room. I'm listening to sweet coos and occasional squeals as she engages her toys in her play world.

Things may not go perfectly, even if they go as planned, but the blessing of children is the wiggle room they provide for us adults as we figure out what works and what doesn't.

Course Completed...maybe

As a naive young college student I chose to major in Marriage, Family, and Human Development. This choice was based on two main factors. 1: I was an only child of a single-parent family and 2:I was intrigued by how babies developed into grownups, learning language, motor skills, and how to develop relationships. I thoroughly enjoyed my coursework and looked forward to the time I would be a wife and mother.

I finally made it! I have a beautiful 9 month old girl. She's the bright spot of my day. I have learned, though, that all that coursework didn't prepare me for how I would feel the first time she got shots or for her first cold or for how thin my patience could get with no sleep and a teething baby in my arms. These are lessons only learned through experience.

I also wasn't prepared for how much I would love my girl when she didn't even do anything, and then how much that love grew with the first smile and the first babbled "ma, ma, ma!" But I definitely wasn't prepared for my eyes to well up with tears when I watch her and her daddy play.

While motherhood is wonderful, I have been missing being involved in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). After my bachelor's degree, I completed a master's in Applied Linguistics and taught English for a few years before entering motherhood. My current project to stay involved can be found at ESLReadingMaterials.com