A Week of Firsts

This was my first week of work, and my first time to leave Sydney with babysitters for pretty much the entire day. Thankfully, it was a success! My friends Becky and Jenny are watching Sydney, and I was so relieved to hear them say she was doing fine when I called during my lunch breaks and on my drives home. As for the work end of things, I have a lot on my plate. I feel like I should be doing therapy, but it seems like there's SO much to do (i.e. make a schedule, familiarize myself with IEPs, organize my room, go through materials, etc.) before I can actually do anything meaningful. But I guess I should be patient with myself since I've really only been there for 2 days.

Another first for this week: Sydney's first baseball game. We bought cheap tickets for Friday's Indians vs. Orioles game from the dental school. It was the perfect weather for an evening game.

When we first sat down, Sydney just clapped and clapped while she looked around at all of the bright lights. It was really cute to see her along with the rest of the crowd when something good happened.

Lookin' cute on Daddy's lap.

Trying to get her to wear Spencer's hat... it didn't last long.

She just hung out like this in my lap for about five innings and kept me nice and warm.

My sweet little family :)

Spencer, Chuck, and Braden were distracted by these Bean Boozled jelly beans that our neighbor gave to us. They're like Berti Bott's Every Flavored Beans in Harry Potter, so the little blue bean your were about to eat could be raspberry flavored or toothpaste flavored. The best reactions came after they ate vomit and moldy cheese. Ha!

The Indians came out with a win, ending their 12 game losing streak. Overall, it was a great end to a crazy week!

What A Day

I got a job today (3 days a week, starts next Tuesday).

Then I came home and cried for about an hour as I thought about leaving my baby with someone else for 20 hours a week. I'm gonna miss having that Tiny around 24/7.

Spencer tells me I need her more than she needs me. I know it's true, but it's still hard.

Blasted CFY.

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.