Monday, July 28, 2008

Home Sweet Home

It feels good to be home. I love our house and I missed our friends and although we loved being on vacation, it's nice to be back on our own turf. Here's what we've been up to.

My latest fad
Wh
en we were visiting with my parents, they took us out to the most random restaurant called Hollow Moon Cafe. It is smack dab in the middle of nowhere. You're probably picturing some hole-in-the-wall grubby place that happens to have decent food, right? That's what I'd envisioned. But it was great. Very cute, sophisticated, and best of all...delicious! Anyway, my parents said we had to try the raspberry lemonade.

So we did.
(Nice dirty look, Daneen. Love you too!)

It was just regular lemonade, but they put real raspberries in the top and they diffuse throughout the drink and by the end they have disintegrated and you're slurping up little bits of raspberry goodness through your straw. LOVED it. I totally thought, "I could do this at home." And I did. Except my local Walmart was out of frozen raspberries. What's up with that??? So I bought blackberries instead and they work well, too. So I'm all into experimenting with drinks now. (All non-alcoholic, of course!)

Last night, the kids and I had cherry
limeades. Yum! It's fun to look forward
to the drink as well as the food at dinner time.

The kids tried cherry kool-aid mixed with orange juice tonight (their own creation) and seemed to enjoy that, too. Who knows what we'll come up with next.

Another Sunday down
Only 64 Sundays left until Caroline starts nursery. Ha! Can you tell Sundays can be a little stressful for me??? But, seriously, yesterday went really well. HUGE thanks to Jeremy and Glenda for helping me out with Caroline and to Dee for helping me with B and W. I think I only held C for one of the three hours of church. Sweet! She was a really good girl. And for a few minutes, I was sitting by myself and actually LISTENING to Andrew give his talk in sacrament meeting. That NEVER happens.

The older kids experienced a first after church:
They got to feed Caroline a bottle.
It was SOOOO super cute to see how excited
they were to help feed her. They rock!
Today they kept asking for another turn.
Kind of hard to explain that bottles aren't
readily available when you're nursing.

Caroline at two months
Our sweet baby girl turned two months old today. She spent almost half of her life up to this point on vacation. Lucky. At her two month check up, she weighed 10 lbs 1 oz. She's in the 25th percentile in both height and weight. What a tiny little thing! Whit started out tiny, too, and made big jumps between 2 and 3 yrs old, so we'll see what happens with C.

She is a good baby. We had a few rough weeks with her colicky spells, but she is over the worst of that and cries less often now, though she still has lungs when she does cry. Wow. B and W plug their ears. She still sleeps a lot during the day, but when she's awake, she loves attention. If you get close to her face and talk to her, it's pretty easy to get rewarded with big smiles.

She melts our hearts.

I think she looks like Brandon. Lots of people told me that when she was first born and I didn't see it, but now I do. Something about the shape of her face. And they both have those thick, dark eyebrows. Wonder where they got that? (I'm looking in your direction, Andrew.)

She is a mover. Most of the time when she is awake, she is moving her arms or legs or both. She was really active inside of me and that has continued. She is also pretty tense. A lot of times, her little hands are balled up into tight fists, even when she's not crying.
And she usually keeps her toes curled up like this.
Hopefully she'll learn to relax soon.

She likes to be held facing out.
She loves looking at ceiling fans.
She enjoys warm baths.
And the binky is her friend.
It took a couple of weeks to convince
her, but they get along great now.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Love those pictures! Caroline really does look like she has grown just in the week she has been gone. I'm so glad her colic has ceased! Miss you guys! Gigi

Anonymous said...

Thanks so much for the pictures - Happy birthday Caroline - we had Grandma Ranquist's birthday party tonight at Aunt karla's and wished you a happy 2 month old birthday as well. Love the cute photo of the kids feeding her a bottle and the one of Caroline smiling - what a doll.
Much love and missing you all!
Grandma Sweat

Natalie said...

Aw Caroline is so precious! And that raspberry lemonade sounds delicious!

Sandy said...

Caroline is already changing so much! wow! What a smile!

Your drinks look good! Jake is a flavored-lemonade-maker -- you can do the opposite (put lemons or limes in fruit juice rather than putting fruit in the lemonade), too and its really good! Try making it with some crushed ice and a little 7up:)

Greg and Nicolle said...

Cute! I love the photo of Caroline smiling. And the photo with her of the binky is funny... those paci's look so huge on their face when they are that small.

Erika said...

I'm glad you guys are back! Thanks for the practice you gave Jeremy on Sunday:) He REALLY enjoyed it! We can wait to hold our little Mia in our arms in 2 MONTHS!!!

The Normal Mormon Husband said...

To everybody who helped watch the kids in sacrament - THANK YOU! It is so hard for me to sit on the stand knowing Andrea needs help every once in a while.

Andrea - Nice imagination with the creative drinks. Mmmmm...