He Brought Me Flowers

I am loved.

Last evening Daniel went out to mow the yard a bit.  I was giving Susannah a bath and it had been a trying day.  I walked into the kitchen and didn't even notice right away.  But then I saw them.  This beautiful, simple bouquet of blooms from our yard.  He told me this morning that he picked the very first rose-bud for me.  How sweet is that?!

Sylvia is 6 Weeks!

My sweet Sylvia girl is growing and growing, and changing right along with the growing!

Happy in the bathtub on her 1 month birthday.
I don't think she has cried for one bath yet!

This past Monday she turned 6 weeks old. Six whole weeks! With her 6 week birthday, she decided to give herself and her mama the gift of SLEEP. :-) Yes, she is sleeping through the nights! I feed her between 10 and 10:30pm and then she wakes up usually between 6:30 and 7:00am. I was wondering if she was gearing up for sleeping all night, but I wasn't counting on it being this soon in her life. We are all enjoying it, though. Now if I could get myself in bed before midnight so I could actually sleep more hours...

My oldest sister, Gail, and her 2 boys, Bobby and Sam,
came to visit this past Saturday.

She is much more alert during her wake times lately, and more quick to return a smile. She still takes about 45 min. to eat and sometimes it's a struggle to keep her awake enough to remember to eat. She also rarely eats all that there is to eat, and it's not unusual for her to only nurse from 1 side and be finished. I guess I would rather have too much than not enough! :-)

I haven't weighed her lately, but my guess is that she is around 11 lbs. She doesn't always like going to sleep in her bed. Sometimes she has to fuss a little, and occasionally she needs a pacifier to go to sleep. Most of the time, though, she is NOT a pacifier baby! So different from Susannah who had such a large need to suck and suck! It is pretty easy for her to go to sleep if she's being held, but sometimes she won't go to sleep and will just be awake to see what all is going on.

6 weeks and 2 days

She is overall a VERY content baby. Many people predicted that our 2nd baby would not be another laid back, easy going, happy baby. So far she is proving them wrong. :-)

Easter 2012

Every year, for me the highlight of Easter is the services at church. The Palm Sunday service, the Good Friday service, and the Easter/Resurrection Morning service.

In the past we have not done anything for Susannah at Easter. This year since she was older and I knew she would love getting a present (again), I wanted to make her an Easter Basket. I didn't really want to do candy or chocolate, or even marshmallow peeps. For some reason I don't want Easter to be all about the "Easter Bunny" or to be another "get lots of candy" day. (Heh, we don't do any other "get lots of candy" days either!) So into her Easter Basket went some fun things, and a few things that she needed.

She has been keeping her crayons in a big yogurt tub and often it would get dumped out as she tried to dig for a certain crayon. I decided that something like a pencil box would be great for her crayons, and instead of just buying it for her, I saved it for in her Easter Basket. We also gave her a new bathing suit (or "baybeen shoot"), new tights and some super cute, new hair-bows.

I put her basket together Saturday night after she went to bed...


...and put it beside her bed for her to find when she woke up Sunday morning :)


She did find it! When I went in to get her up, the tights were open and across the bed, and she had opened the crayon box. She was pretty happy about her find!

After church, we drove a couple hours to my parents house to visit for the afternoon and for a few more family members to meet Sylvia.

Susannah found my parents' piano and it made a perfect opportunity to get some very nice pictures of her in her cute dress (which is a hand-me-down from somewhere). Sadly, the camera had a weird blip right after I took the cutest and best picture, and that one didn't get saved to the card :-( This one is still pretty cute, though. And she's wearing a new hair-bow!
Here is my mom with Susannah and Sylvia:


My Grandma (my Dad's mom) and Susannah.
My Grandma meeting Sylvia.

Grandma has lived a long life having turned 91 years old this past February. I am so glad that the Lord has given her life long enough to see our children, her great grandchildren. Her memory is not very sharp anymore and she couldn't remember their names very well at all, but she seemed to get joy out of watching them and holding them briefly.

After an afternoon of visiting and then leftovers for supper, we headed back home. It was a wonderful day celebrating the Risen Lord and also being able to see family.

Susannah's 2nd Birthday

This is exactly 1 month and 1 day late, but better late than never!

Susannah turned 2 years old six days after her little sister, Sylvia, was born. As I knew their birthdays were going to be close, more than ever I wanted to do something significant to celebrate Susannah in the midst of someone else getting so much attention from everyone. Plus birthdays are special anyway!!

Susannah - 1 week after her 2nd birthday

I knew that most likely I would not have the energy to make her a special birthday cake at the time of her birthday, and I really did want her to have a special cake. Early February I put my brain in gear and decided to make her a bear birthday cake.

Wanting even the cake and icing to be special - and having an aversion to buttercream frosting, and having pregnancy cravings for peanut butter & chocolate! - I decided to make a chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting. The next problem was I wanted a dark brown bear and not a "peanut butter brown" bear. So I mixed up the frosting, kept a little bit out for the contrast areas and added cocoa powder and chocolate syrup to the rest to get it the chocolate-brown color I was looking for. After I had the cake finished, I covered it well with plastic wrap and froze it.

The afternoon of Susannah's birthday Daniel got the cake out of the freezer and I added the peanut M&M eyes and candles.


Then a little impromptu-like, we called Daniel's parents - who live all of 4 miles away - and asked if they wanted to join the party. They said "sure!" and we said "Great! Can we bring it there?" Haha! Our house was rather disheveled, but we had a meal (that someone brought us), cake and presents! They graciously let us crash their place with the party.

After supper, it was time for cake and presents!! Knowing that her birthday was coming up, I had purposely been reading a Richard Scary story to Susannah that is about Sniff's surprise birthday, and singing the Happy Birthday song to her. She was so very excited when we sang Happy Birthday to HER!!

Right after we finished singing "Happy Birthday."

She didn't have any previous experience with birthday candles, but she blew both of hers out just fine. :-) Then we ate cake... (which was SO good!!)


...and opened presents!! Or, "paysets!" as she says it. :-) I had gotten some "big sister" presents to give her at the hospital if we had the chance, but the morning she had come to visit Sylvia and me, it was rather busy and we didn't get to give them to her. So she had some extra birthday gifts!


For memories' sake, we gave her: Alphabet magnets, number magnets, 2 new pink pacis, miniature animal crackers, and the original birthday gift was a vintage Fisher Price barn, silo and some animals, people, etc. (My sister snatched it up at a thrift store for a steal and then offered it to me if I wanted it. Yes!!)


A note about the "new pacis" that we gave her. She was so very excited when she opened them up! She wanted the package opened right away, and then she had to taste them. She put one in her mouth for a few seconds, then took it out and tried the other one. It was fun to watch. :-)

Sylvia spent most of the evening taking a nap on one of their chairs (6 days old):
After the party was over, Susannah spent some time playing with her Papa:

And that was the day Susannah turned 2!! The days after her birthday as we ate more of her birthday cake, we often lit the candles and sang Happy Birthday to her again, just for fun. She loved our singing "Happy Day" (as she calls it) and getting to blow out the candles again.

A New Month to Renew Routines... hopefully?

Tomorrow marks my sweet daughter's 4-week birthday. Oh my, how those 4 weeks have gone by in a blur!! She no longer looks like a newborn. *sniff* Daniel commented yesterday that she looks like a little girl instead of a little baby. Well, she is certainly still very much a little baby, but I know what he means!


This past week started off great and ended with me floundering to get the basics of housework done. Laundry had piled up (clean and dirty), and I was starting the washing machine right before going to bed late last night so I would have a clean skirt to wear to church today. I felt like I was floundering. I know that it's ok... it really has only been 4 weeks since my life was turned upside down by childbirth and a new baby. :-) When I look over this past week and compare it to the week Sylvia was born, or even the week after she was born, we are much more back to "normal" now than we were then, so I know we ARE finding the new normal.

Yesterday and today I thought it might help if I went ahead and made up to-do lists for each day of this coming week. I think it will also help if I go back to an old "rule" I had that if I didn't get such-and-such accomplished on the day I had it down for, I let it go until the next week.

I have them all printed off and ready to go in the morning. They are very, very basic. Stuff like laundry, dishes and sweeping the floors. I'm a little excited to see how it goes! And on that note, I must go take advantage of the night and get some sleep.