We survived the first week of Tim being back at work! The hardest is running low on sleep. Most of the time Owen feeds every 3 hours throughout the day. Between 1 to 3 times a week he will have a 5- or 6-hour stretch at night which is a gift. Hopefully he will learn to sleep better than his siblings did, but we'll see. I've come off of wheat, soy, and dairy, which seems to have helped him with digestive issues thus far. Otherwise, as pictured below, we captured his first smile! Smiling doesn't happen very often, but he is starting to show different facial expressions, coo occasionally, and stay awake (intentionally and happily) a little more often.
2-year-old (2 1/2 actually) has switched to his baser instincts at this stage of development and prefers to communicate his emotions with hitting, kicking, and the occasional biting. It can be frustrating, but it is unfair to expect him to be skip being a 2-year-old. He loves being outside and playing with dirt, buckets, shovels, sticks and secondarily his scooter and balance bike. He has made a little progress on his balance bike, but his "normal" rate of progression just shows us that Lila mastered the balance bike crazy fast in just a few days. Tim always comments on how athletic things seem to come more naturally for her.
Speaking of Lila (and less athletic things), she got a new pair of church shoes (see below) and is in love. She has been wearing them around the house constantly and is pretty good at running in them. She more than anyone has enjoyed Owen being awake more as she likes playing with him and has already mastered her soothing "mommy voice."
Hyrum finished his end-of-year assessment last week, and we got his scores back. He did very well, and his lowest category was listening (old news...). We are fortunate that he really enjoys learning. He continues to spend a little time working on Spanish every day and soaks things up like a sponge. We got about 30 books from the library this week in preparation for General Conference (more on that later), some of which were Garfield (the cat who loves lasagna) comics, and it is fun to be around him while he reads them because he thinks they are hilarious. Normally, you can see him smile often and laugh occasionally when reading other books, but not with Garfield; it's laugh-out-loud fun constantly for him! Hyrum still wants to spend as much time outside as possible with friends. He convinced the 2 kids to the left in the picture below to run some races with him and then gathered them together so he could take photos with his competitors. Subsequently, every child within 30 yards came running so as to not be left out, and the full gang is pictured below.
General Conference--it's wonderful in a different way these days. We prep 100 different things to try to occupy the kids but still walk away from every session looking forward to watching it again or reading it later. Sometimes the still small voice struggles to compete with not still bodies and certainly not small voices of the kids, but the Lord always excepts our effort of simply trying, and we walk away with some of the renewal and edification we all need. As for the kids, I think they hear more than we typically realize. We also did something a little different this year and made a list of topics--names of Heavenly Father, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost; Easter; atonement; resurrection; temple; etc--and we had the kids make a tally mark every time they heard one of the topics, and then they used their combined points to "buy" a certain number of scoops of ice cream and a few different toppings, and they all of course used some points to get their coveted Gatorades. Some talks they were have 50-100 tally marks, and others they would ignore, assuming they already had enough points. In the end, when they realized they needed some more points, Hyrum told Lila they should switch off and who listened while the other read a book, which ended up being Lila doing all the work for that talk, and then they both switched to just playing.
That's it for us this week!
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