Simon Louis is two weeks and one day old today. I am not going to say time has flown by because it hasn't . The newborn stage is absolutely the hardest stage for me, though this one is going better than the first two. I would like to attribute it to my abilities as a mother but most likely I am just lucky and got an easy baby (finally). Mom tells me that Billi (her third) was the perfect baby and she thought she had this mothering thing all figured out and then I came along and proved her wrong! I guess that is the way life goes.

It seems surreal to me that I have three children. I am not sure how I am going to function with more children than I have hands to hold onto.

The back seat of our Camry is crammed with three car seats. At first Simon was in the middle but Iris loves to tear the canopy off his car seat and that is too much for Scott to handle so I switched the car seats. Now Scott and Iris get to sit next to each other and fight! I did though walk to the grocery store today with Scott and Iris in the double stroller and Simon in the babybjorn. Both Scott and Iris were exceptional good and Simon slept the whole way, I couldn't ask for better.

Life goes on and I keep reminding myself that the only thing constant about life is change so I might as well embrace it.

A Fun October

First I must complain. I got the stomach bug five days ago and I am still not better. I couldn't keep down anything but water for two days and now if I eat anything but oatmeal my stomach feels uncomfortable and I get terrible indigestion. I feel totally exhausted and I have gone to bed every night thinking "tomorrow I am going to be all better", but I have yet to feel "all better".

Half of October was spent in Nevada with my family. Everyone in St. Louis tells me I missed two weeks of straight rain and boy am I grateful. The weather in Nevada was beautiful. We played outside every day. Grandpa bought the grandkids two large Tonka trucks and an all-terrain tricycle. Scott and Iris had fun racing the trucks up and down the driveway and filling them with gravel. If we weren't playing outside then we were watching SpongeBob inside! We had lots and lots of fun and wish Nevada wasn't so far away!

According to Scott, this gravel pile is about 20ft high! It is really more like 4ft high, but things seem a lot bigger when you are three.

This year for Halloween Iris was a ladybug (again) and Scott was a black Spiderman, thanks to a last minute loan from our friend April. I was going to have them both wear the same costumes as last year (Iris a ladybug and Scott a skeleton), and save some time and money. So on Halloween morning after telling Scott "Happy Halloween" he said "I want to be Spiderman!", I tried to convince him otherwise, but he insisted that he must be Spiderman. I quickly called April, who has three boys and asked her if she had any Spiderman costumes she wasn't going to use. Thank goodness she did and it saved our Halloween!

This is Spiderman Scott and his good friend butterfly Afton.

Halloween was strictly business for Scott. He would run up to a house, get candy and then take off to the next house, while we trailed along with Iris.

This is ladybug Iris (She didn't really like the idea of halloween until at the first house she got candy. She cried until we let her eat a piece!)

Another Baby

It's a boy!!

I had a feeling this was going to be a boy from the beginning. Though I was also sure Scott was going to be a girl and Iris was going to be a boy. One would think that as a pregnant mother your instincts would tell you if you were having a boy or girl, but this very often is not the case.

Jeff is in charge of naming this baby, as long as I also like the name.

I won't bother posting the ultrasound pictures, because all ultrasound pictures look the same to me. So if you've seen one, then you've seen them all. Now I start the countdown for the next 142 days!

Fun Stories

So much has happened since I last wrote that I wouldn’t even try to cover all of it. My favorite is to blog cute stories so here are a couple since I last wrote.




First the poop story! We were eating dinner, Jeff was gone so it was just the kids and me. Iris was in her high chair and she started to wiggle around and say “poop poop” so I got her down and told her to go run and play and I guess get her poop out. Scott then piped in and said, “she should use the potty!”. This didn’t seem like a bad idea at the time and so I took her diaper off and sat her on the little potty. I could tell she was trying to do something, but she kept standing up and then sitting down. Scott came in shortly after and I stopped paying attention to Iris for a moment. In the short moment she stood up and pooped next to the potty not in the potty and then stepped in it. I cleaned her feet and asked Scott to get me the wipes. Scott, like the good obedient boy he is, went and got the wipes and brought them in the bathroom where on the way out he also stepped in the poop. I put him in the tub and asked him to stay there until I could get all the other messes cleaned up and then I would clean him. While he waited he spread the poop that was on his foot all over the tub. Luckily none of the poop ever left the bathroom and for that I am grateful.

We have been trying to make up stories to tell Scott and Iris at night. We are horrible at it, but they don’t know the difference. Today in the car he was talking to Iris and he said “I am going to tell you a story about a train and a dog” and then he proceeded to tell a story to Iris. It was so adorable.

At our house if you are grouchy then two things are wrong, either you are hungry, tired or a combination of both. So when I tell Scott I am going to take a little nap while he watches cartoons he always asks me “Are you grouchy Mom?”



Lately Iris has been trying really hard to mimic what her big brother is doing. She will try to sit the same way he does and play the same way he does. She just learned how to stack duplo blocks and she loves just to sit there and stack blocks just like her big brother. She is also picking up his bad habits. Scott has started to wipe his mouth on the inside of this shirt. He did this today and Iris saw, she then grabbed her dress and started wiping her mouth with her dress!

This is another bad habit Iris has "picked" up from Scott!

It's Summer Time

I kept telling myself and Jeff that as soon as we got fast Internet that I would blog and keep it touch with every one so much better than when we had dial-up. Well I can’t blame having a slow Internet connection for my laziness any more.

We are getting close to Scott’s birthday. Time has gone by so fast and it seemed to go double fast forward after Iris was born.

Scott I call my cautious child. He won’t go anywhere near a street with out holding my hand and if I forget to hold his hand he screams at me until I remember. He is also very cautious on the playground, it took him until the age of two to go down the slide by himself and about the same age to cross the sagging bridge on the little playground. Iris is not cautious, I don’t know if it is her age or her personality, only time will tell. Since she walked early (11 month) her first slide experience was not with my help but by herself walking down the slide. Luckily I caught her before it became a real accident. A few minutes later, to my surprise, she had climbed up the steps again and was going to walk down the slide again. A short time later she learned not to walk down the slide but to go on her belly face first. She has finally learned to sit on her bottom and go down the slide, but every once in awhile she goes head first just to mix it up. She does the same thing with steps, she walks down them and falls, and even though I tell her and show her to sit on her bottom and go down them she continues to just step off them and fall. Oh and Iris would love to walk in the middle of street if we let her.



Scott loves to force his cautious nature onto Iris. If Scott sees Iris come near a step that he knows she should go down or any other dangerous situation (going outside while the lawn mower is mowing the grass is included as dangerous), he starts to scream “NO IRIS” and runs over and grabs her usually around the head or neck and ultimately pushes her down and she always ends up crying. I am still trying to figure out if I praise him for trying to protect his sister or send him to time out for pushing her over.



A good friend from college came to visit me this last week. She was in my ward and lived across the hall from me when I was in the first floor of the dorms. She came for about five days and we were busy the whole time. We went to see the sites in Nauvoo for the weekend and also to run a race in Quincy, IL. I had so much fun having her visit.



Scott has started do imaginative play a lot. He sits at the dinner table while I am cooking dinner and grabs a couple of utensils and pretends. I always try to listen but not let him notice that I am listening. He is also become a thinker. Lately I have caught him sitting still, usually wrapped up in his blanket, thinking. When I find him like this I usually smile and ask him what he is thinking about. So far he has responded with trains, the Mississippi, and “I want mommy to be a princess”. “Trains” is the usual reply and the “I want mommy to be a princess” has only happened once, after he told me that I “dressed up” by tying his favorite blanket around my waste and we danced.

In the morning Jeff usually stays just to wake the kids and eat part of breakfast with them before he takes off for work. Yesterday he helped Scott get breakfast and I helped Iris. I asked Iris to say Mama, and instead she said Dada. I asked her a couple more times and she would say Dada instead of Mama, so then I asked her to say Mommy and she replied by saying Daddy. What a little stinker!




It is summer time. The pool has official opened. We went on Monday in between rain clouds and we all got in and swam in the cold pool water. Scott is now a swimmer, of course with three different floatation devices holding him up. Iris loved the water. I was sure she would be scared of the pool just like Scott was at that age, but she didn’t even let out a cry when we put her in the cold water.