July 9, 2010

Hyrum is 6 months

Filed under: Uncategorized — kseeg @ 7:09 pm

I know it’s been a while since I blogged and I have many pictures I want to post,  but I didn’t want to miss Hyrum’s 6 month post, so I am doing that one first.

Hyrum turned 6 months on June 29th. We didn’t really do a whole lot to celebrate, but it is weird to see him so big. He started sitting up at 5 1/2 months, and that makes him look a lot older. He also feels a lot heavier all of the sudden. He has his well check up next Monday, and we are excited to find out just how much he weighs. We are guessing somewhere between 18 and 19 pounds.

Some fun memories of Hyrum at 6 months:

  • Started sitting up at 5 ½ months
  • Loves to eat and gets antsy when we put him in his chair
  • Laughs a lot
  • Loves to play on his belly and pivot. It probably won’t be long until he learns to kick or pull himself along.
  • Loves to nurse and dislikes bottles.
  • Smiles at anyone and everyone
  • Still has blue eyes (I don’t know why, but I really hope they stay blue!)
  • Loves to take baths. Is always splashing and wanting to get on his belly.
  • Everything goes to his mouth.
  • Likes to babble (I love it!)
  • Will not put any weight on his legs
  • Doesn’t yet know his name, but will turn to find you if you say “Peekaboo!”
  • Loves to roll from back to front. Doesn’t often roll from front to back, although he has done it a few times. (Mainly while being asleep.)
  • Is starting to sleep on his side/belly.
  • Likes bananas, avocado, peaches, sweet potato, green beans, and rice cereal.
  • Enjoys watching our new kitty (and getting a fistful of hair if he can).
  • Is very ticklish
  • Is finally having longer naps and longer awake times. He is now eating every 3-4 hours instead of every 2-3 in the day time.
  • Is sleeping from about 8:00-6:30, waking once to eat in the night.

I don’t have many concerns about Hyrum, but I do hope he is getting enough milk. He doesn’t seem to have as many wet diapers as other kids his age. His diapers are usually a little wet, but he rarely fills them to capacity. I stopped producing enough milk with Alisa at 6 months, so this adds to my worry. I am excited to find out how much he weighs so I can stop worrying. The fact that he is still large for his age is comforting to me.

And now for some pictures of our “little” boy.

I really liked this picture. I love how well pictures take when we are outside.

An off-centered close-up that turned out kind of cute. (I didn’t mean for it to be off-centered, but I got careless as I was trying to get him to smile.

Hyrum playing with the baby afghan on the rocking chair.

sitting on our couches

I am not sure what prompted this facial expression, but it was hilarious.

showing off his pivoting skills

showing off his knee and back rolls

May 24, 2010

Hyrum gets rice cereal

Filed under: Uncategorized — kseeg @ 6:09 pm

Hyrum has started waking up more at night, so we thought we would introduce solids. He is a week shy of 5 months. I think you can tell from the pictures that he loved it. He was enthralled with the spoon and even ate most of what I had prepared for him (the rest was on his bib and face.)

Hyrum loves to sit up. He can’t do it 100% by himself, but he had no problem in Alisa’s chair.

He was very interested in the spoon. It only took him about 5 times to understand that he was supposed to open his mouth to get food.

We gave him a spoon for himself.

All smiles.

Hyrum stole both spoons.

May 21, 2010

My best coupon shopping trip

Filed under: Uncategorized — kseeg @ 9:21 pm

Smiths in Utah recently had a great promotion where they treated any coupon less than a dollar as if it were worth $1.00. I was excited to hopefully get a bunch of good deals. Although they were out some things I wanted (the sale started on Sunday and I don’t shop then) I still ended up finding a lot of freebies. Smith’s system is pretty smart; they adjust the coupons so that you don’t end up with overage. My total before coupons was a little over $60.00 and I was really surprised when my total was  -$.79. (I had a few loadable coupons from Smith’s site I had forgotten about). The cashier didn’t quite know how to handle it, so I just ask him to ring me up a gallon of milk. So for a grand total of 93 cents, I walked away with the following:

The next day I went back and bought 2 Old spice body wash, 2 Old spice deoderant, 3 Satin Care shave gel, a package of Cover Girl foundation applicator sponges, 2 boxes Fiber One granola bars, 2 boxes Nature Valley granola bars, 2 Nature Valley Nut Clusters, and 2 boxes Fruit by the Foot all for $7.22 and got a $8.00 off my next shopping order at Smiths. So it’s kind of like they paid my another 78 cents. What fun!

It’s too bad deals like this don’t happen more often. I like getting paid to shop.

My 2 Cute Kids

Filed under: Uncategorized — kseeg @ 9:00 pm

I love how much better my pictures turn out in my new house. Probably because of the 182 sq ft of windows, lighter carpet, and lighter walls. I went on a picture taking spree the other day and got some cute ones of Alisa and Hyrum together.

I love this grin of Hyrum’s. I also think it’s funny that Hyrum doesn’t look very much smaller in this photo.

I think they enjoy being siblings.

Alisa loves to have “tummy time” with Hyrum. She will even then go to her back and exclaim “I rolled over!”

I usually don’t take pictures of Hyrum without clothes, but I like to see his chubby legs.

Have you noticed that Hyrum is all smiles?

Learning how to sit up. He did fairly well with Alisa and the wall holding him up.

Hyrum really likes to drool.

He has accidentally rolled over once about a month ago. He sure looks like he might do it on purpose soon.

And now for some more random pictures …

Hyrum’s first experience with grass. He wasn’t quite sure how to handle the excitement.

Having tummy time on the grass. Alisa is in the process of “squishing” baby. This picture really makes me laugh.

Alisa is getting better at running. She loves to push her baby on our sidewalks.

She also enjoys riding her bike. (What a great DI find!)

Having fun (and being silly) with Daddy.

New House Adventures

Filed under: Uncategorized — kseeg @ 3:24 am

I wrote this post about a week ago and finally uploaded my pictures. Enjoy.

I feel like I have been very busy lately. Trying to move into a new home with two young kids is challenging. Alisa is loving our new home and is always wanting to help me by doing whatever I am doing. So unpacking or doing any sort of heavy duty cleaning while Alisa is awake is hard to do. Because we ripped out the old carpet and spread dust everywhere (and the previous owners didn’t clean when they left) I have had to do some pretty major cleaning. My hands and arms get very tired from scrubbing walls. I am probably half-way done scrubbing walls. (The walls I have cleaned look great!)

Alisa loves to be in our backyard. She wishes she could play more in our garden. My garden is another reason that cleaning the house is going slowly. My garden spot is 13′ by 35 ‘ and I am having a lot of fun planting it. We have really nice neighbors who lent us their tiller, so we were able to break up the soil. I didn’t do much to see what type of soil it is, I just figured I would plant it this year and see how it goes. I have so far  planted peas, carrots, onion sets, potatoes, corn, beans, zucchini, and crookneck squash. I want to still plant tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and maybe some herbs. It has been really fun to finally have a garden of my own. Hopefully we will be able to harvest yummy veggies from our garden. I keep going out to check on them, but other than the onion sets, I can only see a lot of weeds. :)

I think the picture makes my garden look bigger. The plot is 13′x35′.

I don’t have any pictures yet of my house, mainly because I am not moved in. I wanted to finish deep cleaning before I unpack my boxes, so give me another few weeks. However, we did take some before/after pictures of our house with the new carpet and vinyl. Wow, we sure love the change. I also took some of the outside of the house.

The carpet in the front room appears to be original-30 years old. We didn’t like how dark it was.

The new entryway and living room.

Our fireplace going into the dining room. We switched out carpet for vinyl in the dining room.

Yuck!

So much better. (Well, it will feel even better when we get new counter tops, but that’s a few years down the road.)

Our common bathroom previously.

Updated.

Our master bathroom previously.

Updated. (Do you like the yellow countertop?)

The old carpet in Hyrum’s room.

The new look. (sorry the angle is different)

The old master bedroom carpet–yellow shag. (and some nice cords coming out of the vent)

The new carpet.

A broken water softener that has previously flooded the house.

We got rid of it.

Our utility room before.

After

And now for the pictures of the outside of the house…

From the front.

Our front door (I can’t get the “Utah Jazz” sticker to come off. Good thing it’s Joe’s team.)

The shed in our backyard. I love it.

Our woodpile (probably spider infested).

Alisa likes our dandelions.

We have lots of them.

The back of our house and yard.

Some fun memories of our first two weeks in our house:

I was cleaning the master shower (we have two bathrooms now!) and began to clean the shower head. I picked it up (it was one of those handheld ones that has a long cord) and the shower head popped right off. It was pretty surprising. Joe and I laughed and we took the shower head from our common bath and put it in our shower. We threw the old shower head away.

Both our shower and the common bathroom’s bathtub have drainage problems. Ours backs up after about 5 minutes while the bathtub drains with a slow drip. I think we need a plumber. I would normally try to do something myself, but this tubs drain is really weird. We will first try Drano.


We have two exterior doors each with a deadbolt, and there were 4 different keys to unlock the house. What a pain to remember what key goes where. Joe bought new locks for our doors and didn’t realize that different locks might require different sized holes. It turns out that the set of locks and deadbolts he bought need a slightly bigger hole for the deadbolt. So Joe’s next project is to borrow a drill (he already bought a drill bit) and make the hole bigger.

We have two bathrooms and one room that used to be a half-bath. So 3 interior doors had locks on them (actually, our master bedroom has a lock rather than the master bath). Of those 3, only 1 actually locks and that’s the old half-bath (which is now our laundry room). Since Joe was in the process of changing doorknobs on our exterior doors, he replaced the common bathroom’s doorknob with our family room’s doorknob. So now our common bathroom can lock (and we taped the key to the top front of the door, just in case).

Joe went to open the door from our family room to the laundry room and the doorknob came off into his hands. So the old bathroom door that doesn’t lock replaced it. Joe is now a pro at changing door knobs.

Joe and I replaced our hall light fixture with a new one that is much nicer looking. It looks much better and no one got hurt (although my arms were really sore from holding it up for so long). Now we feel better prepared to take out that hideous chandelier I mentioned earlier.

We hope to someday change out the brown doors for white ones, but we first have to learn how to hang them.

Joe bought a Honda lawn mower and is in 7th heaven. He loves it and it makes our lawn look great. He also bought a much less expensive trimmer and attacked the 2-foot grass that was growing alongside the fences. Our yard looks a lot better.


We tore out the old wooden back step as it was rotting and beyond help. Our inexpensive step stool will have to do until we get around to building a deck.

The old deck … which was way past it’s prime.

We found this little/big guy when we destroyed the old “deck.”

Our current “deck” or step-stool.

I  am sure there are more, but that’s all I can think of right now. We are enjoying our new house adventure, but hope to finish moving in soon. I will have a bit more time each day to do unpacking after our awesome new dishwasher is installed tomorrow. I am way excited!

April 16, 2010

Post 100: We are buying a House!

Filed under: Uncategorized — kseeg @ 9:30 pm

I have something really exciting to blog about to celebrate my 100th post. We are buying our first home! Joe and I are very excited and everyday we find something else to look forward to. It was fun to look at houses, although we saw some pretty terrible ones due to our price range.We finally decided on a 3 bed 2 bath starter home.

I love the location, the yard, the garden plot, and the large shed outside. I love the large new windows and sliding glass door as well. This house was built in the 1970’s and some of the interior furnishings show it. I  look forward to switching out my burnt orange kitchen counter-tops for something a little bit more modern (maybe in a few years or so, depending on how long I can stand it). Let’s not forget the hideous chandelier in the dining room either. We feel like we can make some  cosmetic changes to the house so that it feels more homey and hopefully sells well when we outgrow it. Our first change will be replacing most of the carpet and vinyl. One of our conditions to buying the house was for them to put money towards new flooring. (In the 3 bed 2 bed home, there were 6 different carpets and 3 different vinyl.) The flooring allowance has given us quite an adventure. (But that’s for another post.)

It didn’t take long for Alisa to get the home-buying process down. She would follow us from room to room saying “This looks nice.” or  “I like that.” She especially loved playing in all the different yards and kitchen cabinets. I often hear her saying “Someday, after dinner, we’ll look at more houses.” or “Someday, we’ll look at more carpet.”

We close a week from today, so here’s to hoping that things run smoothly!

April 12, 2010

Washing the Dishes

Filed under: Uncategorized — kseeg @ 2:38 am

Washing the dishes has become Alisa’s new favorite activity. When she thinks that I am going to start washing them, she lights up, runs over to me, and exclaims “Mommy’s washing the dishes!” Then she runs to move a chair over to the sink. “My shirt might get wet. Be OK.” And then we proceed to do the dishes. I wash all the plastic stuff first and let Alisa play with them in her sink (and sometimes she even rinses them off and puts them in the drainer). I can tell that she has been watching me because she asks for the cleaning toothbrush to clean out her sippie cup stoppers. I then wash the glasses, knives, etc. and put them in the drainer. It sometimes takes a lot of patience as Alisa often puts clean dishes from the drainer back into the soapy water. Nevertheless, I enjoy that I am teaching her to work. I don’t look forward to washing the dishes with her because it takes so long, but I do enjoy seeing her have fun (and the dishes get done twice a day). Alisa enjoys washing the dishes so much that she picked it as our activity last Monday for Family Home Evening. And throughout the day, I often hear her say as she is playing “After dinner, we will do the dishes!” If only I always had the enthusiasm that she has for doing the dishes . . .

April 8, 2010

Random pictures from the past month …

Filed under: Uncategorized — kseeg @ 8:26 pm

Alisa and Hyrum playing on the recliner.

Joe and I played a game of scrabble a few weeks ago. Joe creamed me as he got 3 Scrabbles (using all 7 tiles at the same time)! Here is a picture of Joe and his victorious board.

Joe made us dinner for Easter. He made us Stuffed Chicken Valentino and Oma’s Fabulous Matzo Ball Soup (he first had to make Matzo crackers, which was fairly easy). It was really yummy and Joe thought it was picture-worthy. I would be fine if it became a tradition. :)

I think Alisa had too much fun with her fettuccine. You can see from the picture that they had become snakes on the table.

Alisa playing at a park near our apartment.

Alisa thought it was fun to sit on the edge of the slide and then stand up. She was so proud to be “sliding” all by herself.

Alisa found my scarf as we were boxing up the winter stuff.  It was pretty cute. She also reminds me a lot of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music with the way her hair looks.

Alisa is going through a phase of sleeping by the door. She has been in a toddler bed for over 9 months, but just recently decided the floor was more comfortable (or something). She also sticks her fingers under the door, so this photo is what we see walking down our hall every night and napttime. We used to go in and help her get into bed at 10 when we retired for the night, but one time she ended up crying for 2 hours if we left her side. We now just leave her on the floor and are hoping the phase will pass.

April 5, 2010

Hyrum’s 3 Month

Filed under: Uncategorized — kseeg @ 8:10 pm

Hyrum reached his 3 month mark on the 29th of March. He continues to make us smile on a daily basis. He is so much fun to love. He also continues to grow. People in the ward often remark about how big he is. He is now wearing 6 month clothing on a daily basis. Joe and I estimate that he weighs around 16 pounds (we weighed ourselves holding him on our home scale and subtracted out our weights).

Hyrum had a very busy month. He saw three different doctors at PCMC and did great it the car traveling to each. In addition to his ear and kidney appointments, he also had an eye appointment with an ophthalmologist. Dr. L. only had great news for us; he did not think there was anything wrong with Hyrum’s left eye, nor does he currently have any problems with his vision. We were so grateful for the news. Hyrum only has one more ear appointment this year (sometime in October) so I am glad to be done with traveling to SLC for a while.

Hyrum has discovered his hands and love to suck on them. He started out sucking on his whole fist (it doesn’t matter which one) but has since taken a liking to just one or two fingers at a time. He loves to smile, especially in the morning and right after his naps. He loves it when Alisa plays with him. Hyrum really likes our homemade PVC pipe jungle-gym. We hang different toys over him and he loves to grab them and try to eat them. His favorite toy is the tag-toy that his Aunt Daralee gave him.

Alisa has started to get jealous of Hyrum’s toys. When I give Hyrum anything to play with, Alisa immediately wants it. So she often goes and gets another toy for Hyrum to play with so she can have his toy. It’s quite comical. The other day she brought him his toy dog so that she could play with his jungle-gym. Then she lay down under the jungle-gym and batted at the hanging toys. What a hoot!

Hyrum’s routine hasn’t changed as much as I thought it would have, but that’s ok. I know he is growing fine, so I don’t stress about it for the most part. Here is a rough outline of his current eat-play-sleep schedule (as he always eats, then plays, and then sleeps, I will focus mainly on the eating times):

7 am: wake up for the morning and eat (naps 8-9)

9 am: eats (naps 10-11:30)

11:30 am: eats (naps 12:30-3)

3 pm: eats (naps 4-5)

5 pm: eats (naps 6-7)

7 pm: eats, takes a bath, and goes down for the night around 8 or 8:30, usually waking once in the night for a feeding.

Hyrum’s long nap in the afternoon is a recent development. He often wakes crying 30 minutes into it, but will go back to sleep for another 90 minutes if I hold him for 10. I ‘m not sure why, but if I feed him and try to get him up, he is cranky, so I currently just rock him back to sleep.

Hyrum had two nights at the end of March where he slept from 9pm-6am. It was lovely. I knew it was too good to last, but I really appreciated the extra sleep.

Hyrum is a champion at going to sleep by himself. This month he really latched on to the pacifier and loves to suck on it. He would be content to suck on it all day long, but we try to reserve it just for sleeping. So putting Hyrum to bed is really easy. We just give him his pacifier and wait for him to begin sucking on it, then lay him down in his crib and wrap him up is his blanket. We can then leave the room and he is usually asleep within a matter of minutes.

I can’t think of anything else at the time, so that’s it besides pictures.

A very cute picture of Hyrum sitting on the recliner.

Alisa holding Hyrum on the recliner.

Hyrum eating his middle finger and smiling at me.

Hyrum playing with his teddy bear blanket (and eating his fist and the same time).

Hyrum underneath sandbags during his X-rays.

March 28, 2010

A Night to Remember

Filed under: Uncategorized — kseeg @ 8:49 pm

We recently we up to Idaho to visit my parents. We enjoyed spending time with them and celebrating my mom’s birthday. We only stayed with them one night, but it was quite a night to remember …

It is 4:00 am. My mom is finally sleeping somewhat peacefully after staying up for my two teenage brothers. She is sleeping with the covers over her head to block out the blinking lights from cell phones and other technical devices. Suddenly she feels a consistent light tapping on her shoulder. She finally realizes that it is not going to go away and peeks out of the covers expecting to find my youngest sister, Brittany. Instead, she finds Alisa. Alisa was expecting to find me, so both were fairly surprised. So my mom did the easiest thing she could think of “Alisa, let’s go find your mom.” She reaches down to pick her up and touches only skin; Alisa is stark naked.

Finding Alisa without clothes on confirmed my mother’s desire to find me. I somewhat groggily got up soon afterward as my mom came to explain the predicament. I was certain she was exaggerating about being stark naked, but no, she was not. After a brief search, we found her footed pajamas still attached to one leg (being dragged behind her as she walked) and her diaper in her bed. (Alisa usually is in a cloth diaper secured by pins where such a thing would be fairly impossible, but as we were traveling, she was in a disposable and so taking it off was fairly easy.) Luckily for us (and my mom’s house) Alisa  found my mom soon after disposing of the diaper and there were no accidents to clean up.

I knew Alisa would have a hard time going back to bed, so I brought my pillow and blanket into the room with Alisa to spend the rest of the night. Fortunately for us, we both fell back to sleep. And she woke up with her clothes still on.

I think this is going to be one of those stories that is always told at reunions …