10 Months

My sweet little girl.

This face cracks me up, so I try to encourage this behavior as much as possible. It has taken me weeks to finally capture it on camera. That little trill she did with her voice is a common occurrence too, especially when she sees something she really wants (usually food). Sydney is pulling herself up to standing and starting to cruise a little bit on furniture, but when we hold her hands and try to get her to walk, she either starts jumping or sits down. She will now go to Spencer willingly when he holds out his hands, and she usually follows him around the house when he first gets home from school.

She doesn't like her car seat, and frequently arches her back when she's buckled in. I'm looking forward to the day when she can use a forward facing one, although it will probably be a while since she's such a light weight. She's very chatty, and frequently has "conversations" with people. She's getting pretty good at turn taking and using the intonation of normal speech. She finally cut her top right central incisor. She has been sleeping really well, typically going to bed around 8:30pm and waking up around 7:30am.

While running errands over the last few days, I've had a handful of people come up to me to tell me how beautiful she is. I know I'm a biased Mom, but I agree. We sure love her sweet face.

One of My Favorites

My dining room is pretty much finished. Now that the blue has been on the walls for a while, I've grown to like it quite a bit.

I had fun figuring out what I wanted to do for decor too, but at the same time I find that I kind of obsess over stuff like this until it's done. And then when it is done, I try to think of what else I can do in other rooms of my house... it's a vicious cycle.

I got this shelf when I was a little girl, probably somewhere around 10 years old. Once upon a time it held 40+ trolls. Lucky for me my Mom saved it, and it became my first ever spray-painting project.

Here's a view from the window wall showing off my "art project."

Can you tell it spells HOME?

I got the idea for it when I was in Marietta with my family. We went to a shop downtown that had cute pictures of "letters" that you could sequence to spell your last name, the name of a city, etc. I thought it would be fun to spell "home" and have all of the pictures be of things we found around our home. So, the "h" and "m" are from Wade Chapel and the Garfield Memorial in Lakeview Cemetary, the "o" is a marigold from my garden, and the "e" is an awning that's over a store in Legacy Village.

Jon's Wedding

We went to Dallas a little over a week ago for Jon (Spencer's cousin) and Jennifer's wedding. I think Spencer was kind of surprised that I insisted on going, but Jon became a good friend when Spencer and I were dating, and an even better friend during our first year of marriage when he'd come over for Sunday dinners and we'd play speed games of Settlers of Catan.

We had a mini reunion with the fam at the car rental place in the airport, then we all went out to lunch.

At the groom's dinner that evening.

The happy couple: August 14, 2009.

It was flaming hot outside when we took pictures after the ceremony.

I love Sydney's cute little face in this picture. She was blowing bubbles with her mouth.

More pics by these cool trees.

The Dallas Temple was gigantic! This side shot certainly didn't do it justice.

About a month before the wedding, I realized that Jennifer and I had a few mutual friends from BYU: my freshman roommate Alicia Spjute (above) was one of her bridesmaids, and I worked with her brother-in-law Dan as a Physical Science TA for several years.

We had a great time dancing and hanging out at the reception.

Sydney sure loved her Grandma B!

Not too bad for a self portrait.

Tuckered out in Grandpa's arms. The live band put her right to sleep!

One of the highlights of the reception for me was doing the cha-cha with Jared. He's a sweet ballroom dancer, and he was whipping me all around the dance floor and making me do all these fancy schmancy moves. It was awesome. We're so glad we got to be part of this celebration. Congrats to Jon and Jen!

Lunch

I think my baby might be allergic to cottage cheese. I gave her a little bit of it for lunch yesterday, and here's what happened:

She started rubbing her right eye, and it got all irritated.

She got weird pink, puffy splotches all over her face.

This was her 2nd time eating cottage cheese; the first time she was fine. I called the Dr. to see if we needed to come in, but since she wasn't having any serious reactions they told me to wait and see if it got worse. Luckily, her sweet little face was back to normal within an hour.

Out With the Old, In With the New

Our oven has been a little crazy ever since we've lived here. For the past 2 year, we've been adjusting cooking temperatures to 25 degrees less and cooking times to 5-10 minutes less than what recipes specify.

Last Tuesday night, Spencer turned on the oven to bake something. There was a "pop" sound accompanied by a flash, and then the oven turned off. It tripped the breaker, so Spencer turned off all the dials, then went downstairs to reset it. When he flipped the switch, the oven light came on even though all the dials were still off. No matter what we did (besides unplugging it) we couldn't get that light to turn off. Spencer just went ahead and cooked his food, and when he turned everything off afterward, the light turned off too. We thought the problem was solved, but the light was on again when he went into the kitchen the next morning. We still figured it wasn't a very big deal because the oven didn't actually heat up unless we turned the dials on, but we emailed our landlords anyway so they could check it out when we were in Dallas.

The culprit.

Much to our surprise, we got an email saying they ordered us a new oven! They said we could continue to use the old oven until we got the new one, but to just unplug it after each time we cooked. Well, yesterday I really wanted to make a German chocolate cake, so I plugged in the oven, threw everything together, and started cooking it. About 10 minutes later my house smelled like burning, and after I opened the oven door to assess the damage my kitchen quickly filled with smoke. It was totally scorched.

Blast. I was really looking forward to a good piece of cake.

Guess the issue was more than just that little red light after all. Needless to say, I was ecstatic to get the new one this morning! It's got a timer and everything!

Now we are 2 for 3 of major appliance replacements in our kitchen. The last one standing is the fridge, which makes a machine gun-like noise every hour or so, but still works fine. We're used to it, but it takes visitors a while to get used to. Now it doesn't match the stove or the dishwasher, but I'm still hoping it will hold out until we're gone.

The Tiny: 9 Months

I feel like I say this every month, but Sydney is becoming more and more fun every day! It is fun to see her little personality come out a bit more each day. At 9 months, Sydney:

• is hard to control during the 3rd hour of church! I pretty much spend Relief Society in the mother's room and just let her crawl around and play with her toys. She never naps during church anymore, there's just too much going on.
• makes lots of funny noises with her mouth.
• prefers me, much to Spencer's dismay. When I'm putting her to bed I always bring her out to give Spencer kisses, and she always starts to cry when I lean her toward him because she thinks I'm going to give her to him.
• crawls all around the house, and follows us from room to room. She's getting to be a pretty fast crawler.
• takes small sips from an adult cup, and still hasn't really figured out her baby cup. She pretty much just uses it as a teether.
• has several upper teeth that are just about to cut their way through her gums.
• squirms all around when I try to change her diaper. She can usually be distracted with a toy or non-toy (her favorite is the Vaseline lid).
• eats real food, and loves to feed herself. She also protests when we have food and she doesn't. This month she's been introduced to some sugary treats like sno-cones and ice cream.
• likes to be outside. If we lay a blanket and some toys on the grass, she'll usually stay on the blanket.
• wakes up more frequently during the night than I would like. I blame it on our recent travels where we put her to bed too late too many times in a row.
• has a really good pincher grasp. She can pick us some pretty small stuff with that little index finger and thumb.
• hates getting her hands and face wiped after meals. She usually protests when I try to hold her hand for any reason.
• weighs 15 lbs 11.6 oz (5th percentile)
• is 28 inches long (63rd percentile)
• has a head circumference of 44.5 cm (I don't remember the percentile, but it was around 50).
  

Just a funny story to add: A few weeks after the nine month mark, we were getting Sydney ready for a bath (those little feet get really dirty when she crawls around). Spencer is usually in charge of stripping her down while I get the tub ready. When he carried her in to me, she was completely nakey. Then I saw his shirt start to get wet, and I was like, "She's peeing on you!" I grabbed the bottom of his shirt to try to make sure it didn't get on anything else, but he was trying to hand her over to me. I reasoned with him to let her finish so it wouldn't get all over the floor too. He was totally grossed out that he just had to stand there while she peed on him- I believe his exact words were, "Sick. It's really warm." It gave me a pretty good laugh, but not so much for him :)

Vacation

We've loved having Spencer home for the past 3 weeks! Today is his last day of summer break. It will be sad to have him start school again on Monday. We spent most of the time hanging out at home, but also hit the road and did a little traveling.

We went to Pittsburgh, PA and Parkersburg, WV with the Barnum's. Funny that Pittsburgh is so close to where I grew up, but I'd never been. I think our biggest motivator for going was IKEA, but we had fun doing some historical and kid friendly stuff too.

Getting ready to head up Mt. Washington on the Duquesne Incline. Stuff like this makes Spencer nervous- he's not a huge fan of heights, and the fact that the cable car and track were over 100 years old didn't help much.

Trying to not look down :)

This is the view of the city from the observation deck at the top of the hill. I guess I never realized Pittsburgh was pretty much surrounded by rivers, but I thought it was so beautiful. We really liked all of the cool bridges too.

We went to Bessemer Court at Station Square to see the fountain show. It was set to music (kind of like the Belagio show but on a much much smaller scale), and we had fun dancing around and singing along.

We like to take turns holding Sydney when there's an opportunity to dance- like somehow we look less stupid with her in our arms because we're really just trying to make her smile.

Oblivious to the grand finale. She just really loved that wrapper.

This is the one and only picture I took at the Pittsburgh Children's Museum. It was fun, but we were glad to only have to pay admission for one of us since Sydney didn't really care about any of it.

We went to Parkersburg for Spencer to do free dental work for the Mission of Mercy. Becky and I shopped, hung out at the hotel, and visited Wendy's family while our husbands had 12 hour days of dentistry. I didn't take any pictures while we were there, but to give you an idea of my first impression of West Virginia, I think I counted like 3 adult book stores off the freeway when we were only 12 miles into the state. Then our hotel was about 1/4 mile from a Show Bar. Classy.

On the way home, Spencer was so excited to tell me about all the extractions he got to do. I've never heard anyone talk about using muscle to yank out adult teeth with such enthusiasm. Looks like he picked the right field!

This week we took a little trip to Lakeview Cemetary to visit the memorial of President James Garfield. It was a really beautiful place, I'm glad we made time to check it out.

From the outside.

On the inside. The crypt was downstairs, and we got to go down and see his casket with the flag over it.

This was the view from the balcony. It was such a clear day, and it was so pretty to see downtown and Lake Erie.

We've enjoyed this break and look forward to going to Dallas later this week for Jon's wedding!