For Melissa...

Because my sister likes to add things to my to-do list and because I just do as I am told. ;) Here are some pics of my kids you requested.

The blanket MW is lying on is Chad's nursery bedding from when he was a baby.

And no, she isn't the older bossy sister...she is a middle child. HA!

This is the stuff...

I heard this song the other day and man it was like she recorded my day. HA! But only I don't turn it around and see God's hand in my little mess I call life. :)

Enjoy. This is my new favorite song.

sorry it is cut off a bit...but I suppose it isn't the end of the world. ;)

I lost my keys in the great unknown
And call me please 'Cuz I can't find my phone

This is the stuff that drives me crazy
This is the stuff that's getting to me lately
In the middle of my little mess
I forget how big I'm blessed
This is the stuff that gets under my skin
But I gotta trust You know exactly what You're doing
It might not be what I would choose
But this is the stuff You use

45 in a 35
Sirens and fines while I'm running behind
Whoa

This is the stuff that drives me crazy
This is the stuff that's getting to me lately
In the middle of my little mess
I forget how big I'm blessed
This is the stuff that gets under my skin
But I gotta trust You know exactly what You're doing
It might not be what I would choose

But this is the stuff You use

So break me of impatience
Conquer my frustrations
I've got a new appreciation
It's not the end of the world
Oh Oh Oh

This is the stuff that drives me crazy
This is the stuff
Someone save me
In the middle of my little mess
I forget how big I'm blessed
This is the stuff that gets under my skin
And I've gotta trust You know exactly what You're doing
It might not be what I would choose
But this is the stuff You use

Oh Oh Oh Oh
This is the stuff You use

~~Francesca Battistelli

Easter Weekend 2011

My goal is to make this short and sweet, but it probably will be long and monotonous.

I am super tired {because some of us think it is fun to wake up every 2.5 hours...} and have no motivation to type this, but seeing as how this is my family's record book it must be done, and in a timely fashion. So my sweet darling children, here is a recap of Easter 2011.

Micah this was your FIRST Easter and "real" holiday. I don't count Valentine's Day or St. Patty's Day as "real" holidays. You really had so much fun...watching your sister tear into all your gift and steal your eggs. Don't worry you will get her next year. :)

Good Friday:


Lo and I made the Resurrection cookies Friday night since the whole Easter weekend was booked. She had a fairly good time, but I just couldn't engage her in the Easter story and she got really bored waiting for the egg whites to peak.


Easter with my side:
The run down is we got together with my extended family so there could be lots of kids there to hunt eggs and play with. I am still sad my sister's family couldn't be apart of it. A piece of us was missing. Plus, my cousin and her family are being deployed to Hawaii (how sad for them right?!) ;) in a few short months, so we are enjoying the little cousins playing as much as we can right now.

First up Egg Hunt:

It was cold and I am a bad mommy and forgot to dress him appropriately. :/

For a "cool down" the decided they should jump around in this awesome bounce house.
How cool is this thing? And of course my "little bounce house" loved it.

The awesome cake my cousin made. It was so sad to eat this little lamb.

Opening up their Easter gifts from Gammy and Papa.

We closed the evening with my cousin doing the resurrection eggs with the kids. She did a phenomenal job. This is where I seriously lack as a mother. I have zero teaching ability and would not have made this object lesson near as fun and interesting to them as she did. Lo seemed to actual understand the Easter message at the end. Wow! It was a beautiful {and hysterical, but you have to know my family} moment.


Easter Sunday:
The Easter bunny came!


Dressed in our finest. Ha! Why does every Easter have to be so cold here? I was glad my make-shift outfit for Lo to keep her warm still looked cute.

My Little Boy

Off to church for an amazing Easter service, of course I spent most of church in the children's cry room with Micah, but it was still a good message.

Then we headed over to Grammy Rachel and Tom's house for Easter lunch.

Lo had her egg hunt and opened up her Easter goodies from them.
My MIL loves these ginormous eggs. She just cracks me up!


My MIL bought this fun decorating kit to decorate eggs with...I may or may not have been having more fun than Lo.


Micah you napped...forever...finally I just woke you up so you could open up your gifts. Little did we realize Lo felt it necessary to open up your stuff for you. Oh well, you needed the help. :)

Clearly thrilled.

We had a great and blessed weekend. This year I was really struck by the sacrifice our Savior made for us. Sometimes I just take it for granted what He did on that cross and how painful that sacrifice was. He could have stopped it at any time, but He didn't because He loves us that much. Having kids gives you this teeny tiny glimpse at that kind of love, but we can never fully understand what that kind of love is. Amazing love is right.

Things Lo Says...

I love our church if for no other reason than one of their reasons for being is kid ministry.
This is the exchange that occurred last Saturday night while leaving the 2 year old room.

Teacher: Leighton, who wants to be your best friend?
Lo: Esus {Jesus}
Teacher: That is right, Jesus wants to be your very best friend.
Lo: ::shakes head yes:: YES!

Mommy: smiling that my daughter is learning about Jesus and the teachers take the time to reinforce it with her.

May you all have a blessed Easter.

He is RISEN!

Digi Scrapbooking

I have had several questions over the last month or so about my digi scapbooking endeavors. And I promised a blog post about it, but have yet to get around to it. Can having a newborn be my excuse for slacking?

I have been digi scrapbooking for 2 years now and love it. I always love looking through others scrapbooks and really wanted to make some of my own, however, I just lacked the motivation and let's face it, I am cheap and didn't really want to invest a ton of money in all the papers and embellishments to really make it look neat.

But that is the beauty of digi scraping once you have the right tools it is all FREE. The only cost involved is printing the pages which is roughly $1.99/pg and when you compare that to the old school scrapping that is a steal of a deal.

So what tools do you need? Basically your photos and a photo editing program. I use Photoshop Elements {PSE} which cost me around $100 for both the Photoshop and Video Editing software programs. I know there are other sites and programs out there that are more or less fancy depending on your needs. But I really like PSE and completely recommend it for the price.

However, it was my friend Erin (I am linking you directly to one of her scrapbooking posts to check out her awesome work!) who introduced me to the world of free digi scrapbooking downloads. She and I joke about how much "junk" we download. It is ridiculous and if she didn't live so far we could share better. :) Regardless, we never buy anything we get all our papers, templates, embellishments etc all for FREE!

Here are most of the sites she and I use: {I hope the links work, if not just copy and paste.}
http://www.digitalscrapbookexperts.com/ This is a "collect a kit" site where each day in your inbox you get a piece of a large kit and by month's in you have the entire kit.

http://www.freedigitalscrapbooking.com/

http://shabbyprincess.com/ --lots of cool stuff and tutorials on how to do things!

http://www.scrapgirls.com/index.htm--this one if you sign up for their newsletter you get a free element everyday. I also get a lot of layout and tip ideas from their letter.

http://www.computerscrapbook.com/free-digital-scrapbooking.html

http://www.scrappingsimply.com/--this site has some templates that are ready to go to use if you want to start there. This is also a good site to print the pages from b/c I think (last I knew) their shipping is $5 flat, other sites are mega expensive to ship.

http://www.deliciousscraps.com/

http://www.simplytiffanystudios.com/ --this one has several tutorials on how to do "cool" editing tricks.

Blogs I use:
http://scrappycocoa.blogspot.com/ --She occasionally will have free stuff and she hosts lots of giveaways (I won one just the other day!). But I get a lot of ideas from her and if you click on her blog roll you will find MORE blogs and other freebie stuff.

http://midnightscrapping.blogspot.com/ --this one has a bunch of free templates.

http://mydreamfulfilled.blogspot.com/ --everything on her blog is free to download. Just go through her old stuff.

http://digitallyinspired.wordpress.com/ --she will find daily freebies for you from other blogs (which you may find you want to follow so you can get their stuff) and post them on her blog.

It really is a treasure hunt of sorts some days and you can really get caught up in downloading stuff rather than scrapping. ;)

Once you have stuff downloaded your next step is to organize, organize, organize. Then you can go crazy scrapping! I highly recommend taking advantage of all those free templates you find because this can cut your scrapbooking time in half.

What do you do with your pages? I save them in both PSD and Hi res JPEG files on my computer. Then once a year I print them all off and put them in scrapbook albums that you can easily find in any store.


Sites to Print from:
All of these sites you can print 12x12 pages for around $1.99 each and the first two sites have a flat $5 shipping rate! But I recommend using the persnickety prints site. I received my pages in 2 days and the quality is beyond amazing compared to the last set I printed from Scrapbooksplease. Still great quality, but just more impressed with the other company.

http://www.persnicketyprints.com/
http://www.scrappingsimply.com/
http://www.scrapbooksplease.com/ (but I thought their shipping was high, but I got nice pages from them).

Well, I hope this helps some of you get started in digi scrapbooking. I am more than willing to answer any questions you have, so ask away and will gladly post answers to the questions for all to learn. But keep in mind-- I don't know everything, I probably don't even know half of all there is to know, but I love learning about it and will do my best to direct you.

I may post some quick tutorials on digi scrapbooking in the future if I can get more than 2 minutes of free time someday. :) Ah the joys of two littles.

Have Fun!

PS if you want to see my work just click on my "scrapbooking" link under the Search Me section. You will see I have come a long way from my first page and learn something new every time I sit down to scrap.

My First Trike

Leighton got her first trike last Friday.
I finally cashed in all those "Gifts To Grow" Pampers diaper points--3,850 to be exact--2 years worth of collecting. Wow! That is a lot of money spent on diapers to get a $30 trike. Ha!

I wanted to use my points on something really great and Lo was so excited to ride it. She is still figuring out the mechanics behind riding a trike, but she should be zooming around the neighborhood kitchen in no time.



I told her this was her present for being such a big girl: being fully {daytime} potty trained, being so good with her brother etc. She didn't care, just wanted to drive her trike...although this is what she would rather be driving:


My car. Wow! While I can not wait for her to drive me around some day let's just slow it down a bit shall we?!

Miscellany Monday

1. Well this weekend we had another open house. 4 couples/people came. I am so over trying to sell our house. It needs to happen at some point, but I am tired of the "lifestyle" that comes with it. Keeping your house magazine perfect, with two littles. Not easy people.


Not having any of your personal pictures and items around that make your home YOUR home for months on end.

Being able to vacate your home in 3 hours once you receive that short notice call, only to get a call after you already left and almost to your 40 minute away destination to find out the clients are "sick." Ticked off barely describes it.

Finding houses you would kill for, but can't write a contract on because the are bank owned and don't accept contingencies. Bummer. :(

I realize it has only been 1.5 months on the market, but I am frustrated with the lifestyle.

2. I am really {once again} trying to get our food budget under control. {if you call it that--I don't budget, I just buy and have an idea in my head on a target allowance for food for the month} I have been trying to hit the couponing thing hard again. I get it, but I don't. I get how people get things for free or overage, but I don't see the point in buying 10 tubes of denture cream when I don't need it just to get overage? Ok that may be extreme, but you all have seen that TLC Extreme Couponing show right? Yeah, not what I am going for.

I did do really great at Target the other day I spent $60 on all of this:


And my total rang in at $90 before coupons! That is a 33% savings people! Yay me!

3. In other exciting news I finally printed off my year 2 of scrapbooking pages! Normally I print before Lo's birthday, but put it off since I was a little busy with a new baby. Every week it hit my "to-do" list. However, last weekend my friend and digi scrapbooker partner in crime :) Erin tipped me off to this website who was running a $1.49/pg special. Well needless to say that got my behind in gear and two days later I was looking at my beautiful pages in living color! Those of you who digi scrapbook, I 110% endorse this site to print from. They turned out amazing, even better than the last set I print {from a different company}.


4. As Micah gets older and more into a routine {I don't set a routine for my newborns, I let them lead the way, right or wrong that is how I roll} I want to get the rest of us back on a routine. I feel like we get up and just "make it" through the day, with no real goal or purpose. However, school is about to be out for the summer and Chad will be home and I can see my hopes for a routine going out the window until August. ::sigh::

5. Finally, Chad and I watch a lot of netflix tv seasons at night. And we recently discovered Rules of Engagement. Seriously this show is so funny to me, I think Chad and I see a lot of ourselves in the married couple. I think it is one of those shows no one thinks is good until they stumble upon an episode.


We are also catching up on Modern Family {which I know we are probably the only people who hadn't seen the show until two weeks ago!} But yet another hysterical show.

Once again linking up with Miscellany Monday.

Micah 3 Months {Watch Me Grow}

Micah you are 3 months old today and I love it. I love that you are getting older, more interactive and fun. Yes, it is sad to see these baby days slip away one by one and since you are my last I am trying to take in each day, but I can't help but think of all the fun we will all have once you are older. I love you baby boy more than anyone thought I could love a boy. HA! It is no secret I wanted another little girl, but after bringing you into my life I can't even fathom another girl. You are so much fun, God definitely knew what He was doing when He gave me you!

So sweet son of mine this is what you are up to this month:


Milestones:
You found your hands and working on becoming a thumb sucker. I keep trying that paci, but like your sister you have an aversion to all things plastic. Big bummer for mommy.


You now enjoy bath time, especially when your sister climbs in there with you.


You love your swing now. Praise God. However, Mr. Muscles you are so strong we have to buckle you in everything or you will throw yourself out! We never had to buckle in your sister until she was 5/6 months and then it was time to give it up anyway. Nope, not you. Your strength at this age astounds me.

Starting to enjoy "tummy time" more and working on getting your roll over down pat.


You sit in your bumbo like a big boy and you love seeing the world from this perspective.


Mommy is also really figuring out your schedule. It is eat, "play" for ~40 minutes, sleep. Rinse and repeat as needed. :)


Language skills:
While you can't officially talk yet, you are starting to coo, giggle and smile more on command, if you will. The other day your papa was holding you and you just grinned and giggled at him. It made me flash back to when he did that with your sister.

12 weeks old today.

I also love watching lay on your play mat or boppy and just smile and giggle to yourself. I wish I knew what the joke was.

Eating:
You still nurse every 2 hours during the day, but generally the session only lasts for 3-5 minutes. Your poor little tummy is really struggling.

Chillin' with daddy.

You are on Zantac to help with the reflux, but it isn't stopping the insane amount of spitting up you do, just slowing it down some?! We are trying to get Miralax or prune juice down you to help with your bowels, because those aren't working too great either. However, you won't take a bottle. period. so that makes that task hard. You have taken the prune juice, but it usually comes right back 10-20minutes later, so ineffective in my book. Bottom line mommy feels so sorry for you. Click HERE for the whole story, in case you missed it.

Sleeping:
You rub your little eyes just like your sister did when you are sleepy. Oh it is so cute!

You are averaging 4-5 hours of sleep stretches at night. There have been a few longer ones in there, but don't like getting my hopes up that it will stay like that. But it is bliss when it happens for mommy.

You have the craziest sleep positions.

However, you have such tummy troubles that after that first long stretch you sometimes wake up "hurting" 2 hours later. It makes me sad for you.

I am also training you to sleep anywhere you land, this makes life so much better for everyone.

His shirt says: Daddy is Happy I'm a Boy

But truth be told Mommy may be happier! ;)

You still sleep with your sound machine on, not sure if it is even doing any good, but it makes mommy feel better about your sleeping.

You are also still a tummy sleeper and you can tell time. HA! If it is after 330a you MUST "crawl" in bed with me. You absolutely refuse to go back to the bassinet. So this should be a fun habit to break.

Favorite Toy(s)/Book(s):
At this point mommy is going to say your play gym and bumbo.

I mean look how much fun you are having in there... ;)

And of course Story Time with your big sister.


Anecdotes/Quirky things you do:
You aren't too quirky yet. :)
But you love to flirt with the ladies. :) Especially blondes. HA!
The other night we were out to dinner saying good-bye to a dear friend and you were just flirting away with the hot blonde sitting next to you. You were giving her the eyes and cooing at her, you even flashed her a few smiles. And I though having a girl would be bad. HA!

You have several nicknames already: Baby Bear, Micah Bear, Old Faithful/Mt. Vesuvius (due to your massive spitting up) and Biscuit. Pretty much every name I call you ends in Bear at this point. Who knows why I come up with these names, they just roll out of my mouth.

Sunbathing on a nice afternoon.

Temperament:
Your temperament is all over the map. You can be so chill and delightful to be around and then you can be so ticked and fussy. I realize that all your fussiness stems from the aforementioned tummy issues, but it doesn't make it any easier to deal with. I was really hoping to get a chill baby after what I endured with your sister and for 3-4 weeks I got that, but then all your digestive issues came to a head and I got knocked down. Bummer.

We see a lot of this, but it is giving way to a lot more smiles as of late!

You are also in that clingy phase where you must be snuggled and held all.the.time. I tried my wrap thing one day, because my back is killing me. That only lasted about 2 hours. I keep trying, but no luck. Why o why do I have such picky, willful children. I am sure this is no reflection on how I was as a child. I know I was an absolute delight. It must be your father. ;)

Remember this original Back to the Womb post?

Well, here is the newest version of Back to the Womb. I am currently 3 months along. ;)

Stats:
At 10 weeks {Mar 28} you were 11# and 22inches long. (You are just 9 short inches from catching your sister! HA!)

Diapers: size 1
Clothes: 0-3/ 3 months. Really depends on the brand.

Well MW that wraps up all I can remember about this month. We love you!

Happy THREE Months Baby Bear.