Utah!

WARNING: Super long post (mostly due to overabundance of pictures) below.

Earlier this month we flew to Utah because Brady had some job interviews (fingers crossed!). The interviews were pretty intense, all-day ordeals. He had to do some teaching, present research, meet with university big-wigs, etc. He was pretty spent after all of it. I also discovered that vacationing as a mom is much less restful than it used to be.
Ellie, on the other hand, had a blast (she's wearing an outfit that is way too big for her, but it was the only chance she would have to wear it since it is already turning summer here, so by time she is that size it will be too hot outside to wear it). We actually had fun too, just got pretty worn out and needed several days of recovery time. Turns out, though, that Ellie is a pretty good traveler. We were anticipating horrific moments on airplanes, but she was actually pretty good about eating and sleeping during travel. Huge relief. No one explained time zones to her, though.

We haven't heard back about the jobs yet, though we did hear from one school that their search would be delayed until at least next week due to the volcano in Iceland. (?!) I don't get it either. Maybe it's like how about 12 years ago we all blamed everything on El Nino.

Anyway, we had a lot of fun seeing family and friends while we were in town.

We just had one night with all of Brady's family in town. This is his mom holding Ellie. Somehow we didn't get any pictures with his dad this time. I guess he was taking pictures too.

Grandma trying to hold all the new grand babies born since last April. You can see Ellie is mostly interested in eating her cousin's head.

Which she did.

Then we got all the cousins together. This is of course after about 2 dozen shots of kids rolling/crawling/walking out of the frame or crying or something, which are pretty funny to scroll through, but I won't make you all look at them all now.

Then just the three newest who couldn't get away.

Ages in this photo are 3 mos., 5 mos., and almost 8 weeks. Ellie is a giant.

Uncle Sam is having a hard time adjusting to not being the baby of the family anymore.

My parents also came in town to see (let's be honest) Ellie. She was thrilled to have such constant attention.
They had some pretty serious conversations.

Ellie is learning how to give kisses (read: slobber on your cheek) after you give her a kiss.

Grandma had the magic touch.

Meeting her good friend Marian. There is about an 8-month age gap here, though you wouldn't know it from this picture. It was very exciting for Ellie to finally meet this friend. Every time we read the stories she sent us, I remind Ellie that they are from her "good friend Marian." She also loaned us quite a few baby essentials while we were in town--thanks again, Marian (and her wonderful parents).
Showing Grandma her favorite dress.

Showing Mindy her tippy toes.

Laughing with Grandpa.

And finally we had to go home again. Passing some time in the Denver airport on a long layover.

All in all, the trip was a success (other than not hearing back on jobs yet . . .). Thanks to everyone who traveled to come see us, and big thanks to Mindy for turning her house into quite the bed and breakfast while we were there. We'll keep you all posted on what we hear--barring any drops in barometric pressure over Fiji or any inclement weather in Siberia.

All Our Ducks in a Row

We finally found a good reason to put Ellie in this duck outfit we got at a baby shower. Since we didn't have regular church meetings on Easter, we didn't bother with the big frilly Easter dress.
Sorry, I couldn't pick just one picture. Ellie is a pretty good sport. We had a really nice, quiet conference weekend. Brady was around a lot and got to spend a lot of time with Ellie.

Quality time. As you can see, they will both be reviewing the Saturday afternoon session together when next month's Ensign comes out. I think it's also worth noting who has most of the space on that beanbag. Not hard to see who's really in charge around here.

Also, Ellie turned 5 months old on Saturday. She's trying to be helpful here.

Very excited to be getting older (not sure why some of the pics are sideways, I fixed them before uploading them). We are very excited about this too. We hate to rush her, but we are excited for her to hopefully outgrow her reflux soon. I had heard about babies having reflux before, but I never knew how demanding it could be. I think we may be on the downhill slope of the battle, though. Ellie seems to be more comfortable and hasn't been fighting her feedings quite as much over the past few days. I'd read that reflux symptoms peak at 4 months, and several people have told us that by 6-9 months it clears up quite a bit. Fingers crossed.
For all the trouble that the reflux has been, though, we realize that it could be much worse. This is something she will likely outgrow soon, and in the meantime she does have so many happy times. She seems to be enjoying her life so far and is pretty playful most of the time. She loves being outside, sometimes even just going out on the balcony (as long as all the neighbors aren't outside smoking--ugh, that's a different post). She's been experimenting with her voice a lot lately, finding she can get our attention without crying (though that still seems to be the preferred method at times). Fake coughing and fake laughing are some of her favorites. She loves music, particularly They Might Be Giants' Here Come the 123s album. We got the DVD from Netflix and I don't know if we'll ever give it back (This is one of her favorites that we sing to her a lot). All in all, things seem to be going pretty well* for Ellie.
*Ask me again in a couple weeks after we've spent long hours in a few airports, flown across the country a couple times, and switched time zones back and forth to see if I feel the same way. More on that later.
A couple leftover pictures. This one is St. Patrick's Day.

This is a frilly dress that she loved wearing because she could play with the top layer and put it in her mouth. I guess you have to set priorities and standards in fashion somewhere.

Blessing Day

I have been meaning to post these pictures for a while now. We had Ellie's blessing on March 7. We waited so long because we had hoped to be traveling back to Utah this spring for Brady's dissertation defense and thought we would do the blessing there where friends and family could more easily come. But things have gotten a little delayed with the dissertation, so we don't know exactly when we will be traveling. We thought we better get it done before Ellie could walk up to the front of the chapel with Brady or talk through the blessing or anything. So we did it while Mindy was in town. We were glad to have someone there from our families with us. We are starting to build some good relationships in our ward here, and people were very kind and happy for us, but it was nice to have a little bit of home with us that day. So Mindy represented our families and took some nice pictures right before the meeting.

This first one is the only one that is really posed. The rest are trying to get Ellie to stay calm and look at the camera. Brady's mom gave us the dress before Ellie was born. I should have gotten more detailed pictures of it, it is so pretty. Ellie looked like a little Victorian baby in it.



Ellie had a cousin on each side of the family blessed that day as well. It was a lovely day.

Mindy came!

Last weekend my sister Mindy came all the way from Utah to visit us. We have been bragging about all the cool stuff we've done since we moved out here. Turns out, most of what we know to do around here is eat. We ate and we ate. So many fun restaurants, so little time. I think whatever baby weight I may have lost is back now, with interest. Totally worth it, though.

Mindy has a nice new camera, so she ended up documenting most of the weekend and didn't end up in many pictures. I had to get at least a few pictures with her and Ellie with my inferior camera and photography skills. The following is a looooong photo spread of our weekend. Mindy had around 80 pictures--I only put a fraction up here. For those of you who follow her blog as well, you'll probably get to see some of these twice. It was nice getting some really good pictures of Ellie for a change, though.

This is an outfit Mindy got for Ellie.

These are the shoes.

Reading stories.

Bath time.

A walk in the park by our house. See the shadow? Mindy was there.

Dead trees in the park.

Ellie fell asleep.

Then we came home and Mindy did a little photo shoot with Ellie. The sweater and hat were a gift from my aunt Kaye. She and my uncle are on a mission in Hungary. She knitted the set while they were on the road driving to speaking assignments and then sent it all the way around the world to Ellie. We love it. The sweater is still a bit big, but we had to get some pictures before the hat was too small.


One of the many eating stops over the weekend. We've found that some places around here are more dog-friendly than baby-friendly. One place they seemed pretty annoyed with us. Ellie seemed to feel the same about them, so we packed the food up and left.

This little cafe was fun, though. Ellie is trying a tiny taste of mashed up sweet potato fry.

We dropped Brady off to work on research and tried to find some touristy things to do. We toured a Southern plantation house.

Ellie was unimpressed, and we had to stop to feed her on the steps before we left.

Then we went to the Sunsphere. This was built when the world's fair was held here in 1982. Think of this as Tennessee's Eiffel Tower, so to speak. Not nearly as glamorous.

Ellie was a bit more excited about this.

But probably more excited to be home. My grandma always says that babies are home toys.

We did some other things, mostly food related. But this is a good smattering of our weekend. We were really glad to have family come visit. Mindy is a good food buddy. I don't think Ellie misses being dragged around all over the place, but I know she misses having her aunt around. Babies sure are a lot easier with three adults in the house and I think Ellie loved having a constant playmate. We wouldn't say no to another visit . . . or a visit from anyone else interested. Who's next?

4 Months

Ellie turned 4 months old last week.
I had a pretty hard time getting a good shot (hence the blurry hand). She was having a rough day that day, but Brady was able to coax a smile out of her. She has been having a lot of pretty rough days lately. Her reflux was getting really bad a couple weeks ago, to the point where she was just screaming at every feeding. I would have to wait until she wore herself out and fell asleep and then feed her in her sleep. We called the doctor's office and ended up getting a different prescription. They said she had developed esophagitis along with the reflux, which means that the acid that had come up had cause sores to develop along her esophagus, so it wasn't just hurting when stomach acid would rise up, but when milk would go down. Poor kid. They also told us to keep her upright for an hour after each feeding. Since she was usually asleep during the feedings, that meant she couldn't go in her chair or the swing as easily. So I decided to not get anything done besides feeding and holding this baby and we made it through the first few days, usually feeding for an hour and then sitting and holding her for an hour while she slept. But she was starting to improve. Then I started to get a cold. Then Brady had to go out of town. It was a rough few days. Thanks goodness for the Relief Society. There was someone over here every day for a couple hours to spell me off so I could get caught up on the bare essentials, like eating and making sure Ellie had clean clothes and bottles.

Needless to say, though, we were both so glad when Daddy came home.
We're starting to get back into some semblance of a routine, but it has been pretty rough going for a while. It's a good thing babies come so cute. Ellie is usually pretty happy, as long as I'm not trying to make her eat . . .

This is her just completely enamored with Brady when he got back from his conference. He went through withdrawals being gone just a few days.

This is me trying to keep her upright. She isn't old enough for this yet, but seems interested. Mostly she just picks her feet up and sort of spins. I tried her in it when she was 2 months old and her head barely cleared the top.

Other highlights of this month: Ellie started solids. The doctor told us to start her early to help with the reflux (sorry, we're a little obsessed with eating and reflux right now). I hadn't planned on taking any pictures or video because I figured if we made a big deal about first time eating food with Ellie, we'd have to do it with any other kid we have. But then we couldn't resist. Here is the result.


We're both getting better at solids now. Ellie prefers the blander things like bananas and rice cereal to apple sauce and pears. Brady is concerned about refining her palate.


Other activities this month include bubbles (well, at least we caught a smile on camera--and quite a cheesy one at that).

And kicking. She loves this. I think she is going to be an Irish river dancer. It has made diaper changing lots of fun (she usually kicks even harder on the changing table). Bath time too. We need to start wearing rain coats to bathe this kid.



Sorry the videos are a little long. I didn't have time to really edit them down. Also, the good pictures (the last two) were from Mindy's camera. She came to visit. I will have to blog about that and Ellie's blessing really soon. Lots to catch up on. Sorry for those readers who might be getting a little Ellied-out. Since we are so far away from family, this is how everyone gets to know her. I think it makes me just a little less homesick knowing that everyone gets to see her still, even if it is only on a blog.

Olympic Fever

It's an interesting phenomenon to me that every four years sports suddenly become very interesting to me. Normally, if I were flipping channels and came across, say, women's biathlon, I probably wouldn't linger more than a few seconds. Just long enough to get the gist; ski, ski, ski, stop, whip out a rifle, shoot at some small targets really far away, get penalized for each one you miss, then ski, ski ski some more. According to one of the commentators, men's biathlon in the Netherlands is the equivalent to the Super Bowl here. The weirdos.

Somehow, though, if it's for the Olympics, I find it all mesmerizing. I think it's the drama of it all. Every single one seems to either be the first to do something, be making some kind of record, or have some sort of huge travesty they've overcome. It's the only kind of reality TV I indulge in, and this year we are hooked.

I also find the commentators rather amusing. After awhile it seems like they run out of things to say about the event and even the athletes, but they seem conscious of the whole world tuning in and somehow have to fill the dead air. Poor guys. How much is there really to say about the ski jump? My favorite so far was during one of the qualifying ski jump events. During a lull one of the commentators spoke up, "You know, it's actually a pretty easy sport . . ." I'm sure that was pretty comforting to the guys who didn't qualify.

Brady has been teaching Ellie all kinds of important life lessons while we watch. Like how disappointed silver-medalists' parents really are in them, or that we don't cheer for Russian skater Evgeni Plushenko because "he wants to kill Harrison Ford in the movies."

He's also begun her training. We tried a little with ice skating her on the living room floor, and she shows some promise with trying to ski jump off my lap. Below is their prep for the luge. We've since added the boppy pillow as sled. On a good day of training, they get those floors pretty clean.