Infant Pancakes?

Speaking of pancakes, my husband shot these photos of the 4-year-old enjoying his--especially the powdered sugar on top.

I took my baby in for his 2-months-old appointment a few days ago.  His 2- and 4-year-old brothers accompanied us.  Both big brothers were thrilled about a trip to the doctor's office and wanted in on the action.  When the pediatrician came into the room, they practically accosted him, each showing off their owies and boo-boos for his inspection. "Wow, they're talkative today," the doctor observed. "Lots of energy!" "Yes," I agreed. "Or are they always like this?" "Yes," I agreed again. As he started the baby's exam, the doctor asked the big brothers, who had both climbed up onto the exam table as well, what the baby eats. "Milk," said the 4-year-old. "Pancakes," said the 2-year-old. The pediatrician was amused by my 2-year-old's answer.  The 4-year-old was not.  He tried to rectify this misinformation: "The baby does not eat pancakes," he refuted.  "He just eats milk.  It is special baby milk that comes out of Mommy's tummy."

Preschool Spotlight Time

Summer Photos

Fall has arrived.  I glanced at Facebook yesterday and saw that everyone but me was uploading pictures of fall color.  Facebook was unusually pretty.  My neighborhood is getting pretty, too, but I don't have any fall photos yet.  Instead, here are some summer ones:

Tracy Aviary:  When did they remodel?  It is much nicer than I rememberer it from the last time I was there.

Here we are fishing at Hyrum Lake.  My husband, son and daughter each caught a yummy trout!  We have never had so much fishing success before.

My husband participated in a bike-athon in Logan.  While we were there, I wanted to show my kids where I went to college.  I limited the tour to the most kid-friendly parts.  I drove though campus to First Dam, a mountain park just a few minutes away from campus, and then came back to campus for some Aggie Icecream.

Here, the kids enjoy the Salt Lake City International Peace Gardens, which have gardens themed after many parts of the world.  I think they are in the Norwegian garden here... or maybe Finnish?

We used the "Pass of All Passes" to frequent Seven Peaks, Trafalga, and a bunch of Salt Lake Bees baseball games.  Here is my nephew and son at a Bees game.  This photo is unusual because one of my kids is actually watching the game.  They all love the ballpark, but mostly for the bouncy house, the playground, the train rides,  and the hot dogs.  I am not sure they have noticed that baseball happens there.

The Nursery

We recently added some finishing touches to our nursery.  It's much cuter than the boring ceiling we painted, and I posted that, so I thought I would show off the nursery, too.  A lot of the same stuff has been here (or rather, in our previous nurseries) since the nursery belonged to our first child, but we've added to it with each baby. 

We have so many beautiful baby blankets that it seems like a shame to hide them in the closet, so we hang them on the wall.  Many of them are gifts.

I was nervous about hanging anything above the crib that could fall down and hurt the baby, so I made these picture frames  from fabric for our four babies' photos.

I painted this when I was expecting my first baby.  We were living in an apartment then, and I wanted a mural in the nursery, so I painted it on fabric so I could take it with me when we moved.

This was my husband's dresser in college.  Of course, it was less colorful then.  It was so beaten up and ugly that my sister borrowed it once for a prop in a play she was in that required a starving student kind of set.   I painted it when we moved out of the apartment to a condo and got our furniture out of storage.  My oldest was still the baby then.  The rocking chair behind it was from a thrift store.  It was ugly, too, before we fixed it up.  As you can tell, we don't have a big furniture budget.

We found this shelf, with peeling paint and most of the hooks missing, in the garage of the condo we bought.  I fixed it up and put it to use, displaying my babies' and my blessing clothes, a "Where the Wild Things Are" clock (made from a free medicine ad clock that I got from a sales rep) , and various handmade gifts my babies received.  Most of the gifts came from my sister, who is a gift giver extraordinaire.

Baby toys hang behind the door.

We found fan blade covers to make the fan look painted at Lowe's.    Later, my mom gave me a rug with the same colors.

Here is the more utilitarian part of the room.  We use cloth diapers at home and disposables when we go out and we can't convince our toddler to potty train, so we have two kids in two kinds of diapers.  So there is a lot of stuff over here.

Hair

I was born with long, dark hair, so before I had my first baby, I imagined that my kids would have the same:

Um, no.  My first child looked like this:

She did have a tiny bit of hair, but it was blonde, thin and nearly invisible. By the time she was two, she only had grown this much hair:

These ringlets, that took so long to grow in, did not last long.  A week before her third birthday, she cut almost all of them off right along her head and dropped them one at a time into a bowl.  It was a premeditated crime.  Sometime earlier that week, she had stolen a pair of scissors from a high cupboard and hidden them in her room in preparation for the haircut.  So she was practically bald again, just like her younger brother, who was born with just as little hair:

Same goes for #3, but at least he had a different face than my first two clone babies:

By the time my newest arrival came, I had grown accustomed to blonde, nearly bald babies, so I wasn't expecting this:

Not only does he have hair, but it appears to be brown!  (My first three were all blonde.  The first and third still are, but my second child's curly blonde hair recently turned into straight, light brown hair.)

Ceiling Makeover (Yawn)

I like to report on the exciting progress I am making in my house, but sometimes, I have to admit that I can't make it exciting.  This past weekend, we finally got around to painting over the kitchen ceiling, which was a mess:

The patch in the photo is from when my brother-in-law fell through the ceiling while helping us with some work in the attic.  We fixed it, and then my brother fell through the same place.  We need to put up some sort of caution sign in the attic, I guess.  The ceiling also had scars from where we had removed walls to expand the kitchen, and an imprint from where we moved a cabinet.  Apparently, the paint had faded to a slightly different color under the cabinet.

So now, after all that work, we have a normal-looking ceiling.  I won't even bother to post an "after" photo, because it is just a typical, white ceiling.  There's nothing to photograph.  If you hadn't seen it before the paint job, you would never have guessed we did any work at all.  The best thing I can say about this project is that now, no one will notice our ceiling any more.  Yippee.  So rewarding.

The Giraffe Blanket

I have some friends who have a lovely tradition of honoring new arrivals with giraffe blankets.  My newborn loves his.