More pictures of the baby’s room…

I love how baby girl’s room turned out!  I wish we didn’t have cables and electrical stuff to hide in one corner but other than that I am completely satisfied with it.

 

Note the darling booties my friend, Clarrissa, crocheted!  Also, the little pearl bracelet from my Mother-in-law.  The two wooden hangers are from when my mom was little and they just so happened to match the room perfectly!

 

A panoramic picture….

Lately

For Christmas, my brother, Allen and sister-in-law, Courtney, gave us a Groupon for the Great Arizona Puppet Theater.  We reserved tickets for a Saturday morning.  My pregnant brain managed to get the time wrong so we arrived an hour after the show started.  The theater is in Phoenix and so we didn’t want to just go home.  They said the next show was at 2pm but that it was sold out.  I felt so bad because the boys were so excited.  The theater said that they often have room left even with a sold out show (some people don’t show up for will call tickets) so we should stick around and see if we could get in anyway.  That still left us with three hours to kill. 

We started out by playing at the park across the street from the theater.  The boys had a blast but after Scott found the drug paraphernalia on the playground equipment I wasn’t sure it was a great place to be.

 

 

We went to the mall for a while and found a sweatshirt for Stephen for a great deal and had a tasty snack of cinnamon sugar pretzels.  The boys were anxious to get back to the theater so we grabbed a quick lunch from Taco Bell and went to wait in line.  After at least an hour of waiting around we were in!  Woo hoo!!  The show was called Goldilocks and the Three Sharks and was so much fun for the boys.  The puppets were all painted in fluorescent paints that glowed in the black lights they used.  Scott and the boys were sitting in the front on the floor and Scott says that they had huge grins on their faces the whole time.

The theater was in an old LDS chapel that had been restored.  I love this stone…it says the building was erected in 1929.  How cool is that?  Even though I messed up on the time, everything worked out in the end. It was a gorgeous day and we had a lot of fun spending time together as a family.

 

The next day was Stake Conference.  I required assistance from my little hero to remove my boots and socks after we got home.

 

For a few weeks now, Scott has been reading Levin Thumps and the Gateway to Foo to the boys after they are in bed each night.  This has proven to be a great motivator for the boys to get ready for bed quickly.  They love this bonding time with Daddy and I love seeing Scott have time to spend with the boys instead of studying for school!  I feel like our lives are so blessed now that he has graduated.  We have all of Scott and he is so much happier – not tired and worn out.  Now to find a golden job!

I love that he uses a head lamp to read by…

My sweet boys:

The Quilt

Soon after I found out I was having a girl I came across some old embroidery squares and embroidery floss in a box.  I had “stolen” them from my mom a few years ago and she told me they belonged to either my Grandma or one of my Aunts.  I decided to start embroidering the squares, casually toying with the idea of making them into a quilt.  It turns out that I actually enjoyed the process of embroidering and found it to be very relaxing.  I started working on it back in October and at a rate of one square per week, I finished embroidering the squares in December. 

 

Then I came up with the design for the quilt, cut it out and pieced it together.  This was all the easy part.  Then came the tedious, horrific part where I quilted it on the sewing machine.  The squares came with a pre-printed design of where they should be quilted.  The design was made with the intention of being quilted by hand of course.  I was able to do it on the machine but it was extremely frustrating and time consuming.  Not to mention that I was a bit disappointed in the lack of perfection I had to settle for.  A lot of the stitches were uneven and crazy and so if you ever see it in person, don’t inspect too closely!  After two or three weeks of machine quilting (I drug it out because it was so frustrating) I finally finished that part of the process.

 

The binding was, thankfully, also the “easy part.”  I whipped that up in one day and finished the hand stitching it to the quilt a day or two later.  Scott documented the last few stitches of the process…

 

Only a bit more to go!

 

And here it is, the final stitch!!!

 

Done!

 

I am still amazed that I actually finished it.  I have no idea how many hours I spent on this quilt but I hope baby girl uses and treasures it.  I am prepared for it to be stained and abused (I made it big enough that she can sleep under it even when she is Stephen’s age).

Seriously, I am so proud of this thing!

Getting ready for baby

I spent countless hours sewing, sewing, and sewing some more in January! Here is the completed crib set:

Bumpers, sheets, and dust ruffle.

The curtains are fully lined with blackout fabric (a must for our family!) Unfortunately, this isn’t a good picture of them…

I pieced together the top of the quilt:

 

Things really started to come together for the baby. My good friend, Ashley, threw a baby shower for me (so sad I don’t have pictures since it was DARLING) and we received many adorable clothes and useful items. I do have pictures of some of the gifts as I reopened them to show Scott and the boys at home…

 

The boys were my little assistants and helped me unwrap everything again and disassemble the diaper cake.

The softest blanket ever…from my Mother-in-Law

 

I love the boys’ enthusiasm for all this girly stuff.  It makes me smile to see them excited about their sister.

Wonderful swaddling blankets!

 

Also from my Mother-in-Law is this darling pearl bracelet for baby girl to wear for her blessing:

 

I started washing her things and it is so strange to see all that pink stuff coming out of the wash!

 

I also was blessed to receive a lot of hand-me-downs which rounded out baby girl’s wardrobe. In fact, we have so many clothes that I am sure she will never get to wear them all before she grows out of them. I hope she is not giant like my boys… a nice 7 – 8 lbs would be lovely.