Visits from family

Megan is now more than 3 months old, but we've got a bit of catch up to do on the blog. Having 4 kids, including a baby that likes to be held is not very conducive to getting much done. I am managing to keep us all fed and clothed, and everything else mostly just gets left undone until by some miracle I have a little extra time. Or someone here to hold the baby. And thus, our blog has fallen by the wayside. We'll attempt a little catch up today...

For Labor Day weekend Jesse drove down to Mesa, and he and Cari drove down to Tucson to share a day with us. Of course we didn't take any pictures, but lucky for us Jesse did. We just hung out at home having fun. We're glad they came. It's always fun to have family visit.

Rachel

 Annie

I'm not sure on details of why, but Jesse drove back in Cari's car, which gave us a chance for another visit when Grandma and Grandpa Campbell drove Cari's car back down and took Jesse's car back to Utah. Those two are racking up the miles on the road this year. We're sure glad we've been able to have them visit so much.

Megan's got a great double chin going these days.

Ryan's music

Ryan likes his music. At bedtime he usually gets one or two songs sung to him to help him calm down and lay quietly. Often he'll request a favorite, but sometimes it's hard to know which song he is requesting. It took me 3 days to figure out that the "Red song" was the opening song to Little Einsteins. And a week or two to figure out that "The Rocket Song" is the Wise Man. You know, "The wise man built his house upon a ROCKET."
The other night he asked for the ponder song. I tried Search, Ponder and Pray. "No! Not that one! The beauty song." So I tried "There is beauty all around when there's love at home." "No! Not that one!" I couldn't figure out what he meant so I gave up trying and just sang Baptism (also known as the rainbow song) and he didn't protest. And a few lines into the song I realized that was the song he had wanted. "I like to look for rainbows whenever there is rain, and PONDER on the BEAUTY of an earth made clean again."
Ryan also likes making up his own songs lately and can be entertaining to listen to sometimes.

 He's also quite a jokester and loves to make us laugh.

 Oven mitts on hands and feet. Nice outfit, dude.

Family History, we are doing it

On Labor Day we had an extended family FHE for all of us that live here. We went to Grandma and Grandpa Knight's house and my mom had made a video with pictures of my grandparents, of my parents, and me and my siblings when we were babies and when we were grown and when we were married, along with the temple where each was married, and pictures of the grandkids all to the soundtrack of I Love to See the Temple and Families Can Be Together Forever. We all loved it.


In preparation Justin and I were supposed to think of a story from when we were growing up that we could share. The kids were kind of gone by then (any lesson that lasts more than 5-10 minutes is pushing it for Ryan, and he leads the rest astray), but when I was trying to think of a story to share I pulled out my photo album and looked through it. It was fun to see pictures of me as a baby (which Ryan saw and declared "There's Megan!") and growing up.

Annie got sucked in and enjoyed looking through the pictures with me.

 

Now we have some scanning to get done to get those pictures digitized. 

I'm looking forward to another Family History FHE soon. And I'm hoping to get pictures from Jacob's family and make a Campbell version of the video.

Baby comparisons

 

Me with my Grandma Jolley

Megan

Annie

 Me on my blessing day

 Megan on my blanket. I should have taken this picture a month ago when she looked even more like me.

I think there's definitely some family resemblance.

More catch up

Baby Megan likes to make life difficult. In other words she likes to be held. I learned early on when Rachel was a baby that you can reasonably only have one thing on your to do list each day that must get done. More than that just causes undue stress or failure to accomplish what you want to do. Unfortunately mopping actually is two things built into one: sweeping and cleaning up everything off the floor, and THEN mopping. So it doesn't get done often. But then you get to the point where it REALLY needs to get done. One day when I decided I really needed to get the floor mopped Megan was waking up every time I put her down and crying. So I decided to put on my baby backpack and just carry her around while I swept, cleaned, and mopped. I asked Annie to hold her while I got the backpack strapped on and she miraculously stopped crying and sat happily in Annie's arms.

I hurried to get stuff cleaned up and got about 5 minutes of picking up toys done before she got fussy again. So I strapped her on and got back to work. And realized that the humidity from monsoon season is killer when a baby is strapped on. By the time sweeping was done (having to pause at some point to feed Megan), she seemed asleep enough to lay her down to sleep while I mopped. I was wrong. She was awake withing 5 minutes of laying her down. I mopped as fast as I could and when I couldn't stand the screaming I picked her up and mopped the rest of the floor one handed, holding Megan in the other hand. And after an hour and 45 minutes and about 1000 calories burned the floor was finally mopped. I haven't attempted it again since, but it is getting to be that time again where I can't ignore it much longer....

Jacob's birthday was in August. We pulled out the b-day hats to celebrate and everyone became unicorns.

We had Sunday dinner at our house to celebrate his birthday and instead of cake Jake requested no-bake cookies, or as we call them in our house, Dinosaur Poops. The held a candle as good as any cake.

I think we also made Jake breakfast, which included bacon. And anytime Jake has bacon for breakfast, the vultures (Ryan and Annie) start circling. And after Ryan got his prized bacon this time, he went into Stevie Wonder mode and got the glasses and headed to the piano for this classic shot.

Yes, that is a bacon tongue.

Great bed head:

The horns started showing through a little too much. ;)

We love Jacob and are glad to have him around for another year. Happy late b-day and thanks for being a great dad and hubby!

Picture dump

We take a lot of pictures when there's a new baby around. And now Annie and Ryan are interested in the camera and when they can get their hands on it, they take lots of pictures. So if we're not blogging weekly we get behind. I started this post weeks ago, and am just now getting around to it, so now I'm even more behind.

Ryan likes to pretend like he's a baby sometimes. He does a really unconvincing fake cry: "Waaa. Waaa. I'm a baby. I waked up."

When Megan lays down on a blanket he likes to lay next to her, either to talk to her or to be a baby, too.

Annie is still as obsessed as ever with Megan and will run over any time she's awake. And Ryan likes to annoy Annie, so he tries to get where he thinks Annie wants to be. Here I think he actually got Megan to smile at him.

Sundays are rough when naptime is normally 12:30 and church starts at 12:00. I don't know what Jacob's excuse is, though.

Ryan and Annie love to take pictures when they find the camera. Here's a rare picture that actually got two faces in it.

More Ryan photography:

We got the first set of Bob books for Annie a little while ago and she can read them when she feels like it. Her limit is one and if you ask her to read more than that she shuts down. But she's getting very good at sounding out words and as long as they're short enough and follow the basic phonetic rules she can read pretty well for a 3-year-old. Which is to say she can read more than zero words. ;)

Some Annie photography:

Thank you, Annie, for that lovely portrait of Ryan. The setting is beautiful. Really, though, I'm always happy to see Ryan sitting there because he is in a stubborn 2-year-old phase and does not care most of the time where his poo and pee end up. If I remind him he does better, but then I have to remember to think about it. And half the time I have to force him to go sit on the potty to try. Inevitably 90% of the time when he has a #2 accident, it's when I'm feeding Megan, she's screaming because she's tired and I'm trying to get her to sleep, or even better, she just fell asleep in my arms. I realized yesterday how much easier it is to keep my cool about his accidents when I don't have a baby in my arms. Unfortunately that doesn't happen often.

Annie saw this Wonder Woman onesie and fell in love. After pestering me to put it on Megan for a week I gave in even though it was size 3-6 months (this was a month ago when Megan was 1 month old). It fit fine. We have a big girl, growing fast.

Ryan took a picture of his obsession: shoes.

Ryan spent a week walking around in pink flip flops, carrying two other pair of his sisters' flip flops in his hands, too. I then found some blue flip flops on clearance and he willingly relinquished the pink flip flops and wouldn't take the blue ones off for a week. He even slept with them on. The boy likes his shoes.

Ryan also loves bows. Any time we would put a bow on Megan's head he would confiscate it if he could and wear it as a bow tie. We ordered him an orange bow tie (his favorite color) and he can now more easily be persuaded to leave Megan's bows alone. Sometimes.

Megan started smiling shortly before she hit 4 weeks old. A baby smile makes everything better.

Happy boy:

Another happy baby pic:

Megan likes to see what's going on in the world. Her cheeks sure look pudgy in this position.

And she still looks a lot like Annie did when she was a baby.

More pictures to come...

Megan's blessing

On Sunday Megan was blessed at church. Cari came down to attend and helped Ryan get ready before church. 

 Grandpa pants are so in these days. ;)

We are lucky enough to have several family members close enough to come to the baby blessing. After church we got some pictures.

The girls:

It's so weird to think we're now a family of 6. How did that happen?

The whole group:

And our beautiful baby Megan, one day shy of 1 month when we took these photos:

 As you can see, Megan is smiling these days. She has also been cooing more and more. And so the fun part begins. I love when babies start "talking" to everyone. And the kids love that she's finally responding to them and isn't just a blob anymore. :)