One month

Here's our pretty girl at one month. Matthew wanted to help with the sign. And she likes to wiggle and stretch which is no surprise to me after having her move around so much in utero.

Matthew needed in on the action too.

A few things about Rachel-
She is a very good eater; she weighed 8 lbs at six weeks.
Since she is such a good eater her "output" is very good too. :)
She likes to wiggle and sometimes gets mad when we swaddle her.
This look Matthew refers to as "the hot dog"
She wiggles so much she wakes herself up when she is laying down so most of the time she sleeps in her car seat. This also helps with her "output" issues.
She likes to be bounced and moved around. This sometimes causes a problem when other people hold her because her squirming is misinterpreted.
She puts herself to sleep pretty well which I appreciate much more thanks to Matthew as an infant.
She does a good job in the car, but she cries when we stop at lights.
I can't tell what color her eyes will be yet. They look like they are leaning towards blue, but so did Matthew's and his are brown now.

She is super cute when she "talks". Here she is talking, but it's her sad voice and at the end Matthew decides he needs to be the center of attention :)

Week with Grandma and Banky

Grandmas are the best! And aunts are pretty fabulous too :) My mom and Becky came out to visit and we stayed busy.

Here is Grandma and her first grand daughter

Matthew and Grandma painting Rachel's dresser
(I know Matthew's face is crazy, but the other one I took isn't any better).

So this pile of blankets is my sister sleeping; isn't she cute!?

My mom totally surprised me and said she wanted to go to a Rockies game. I would have guessed my dad to say something like that, but I was excited and we made it happen. We went to buy tickets at the game, just whatever was cheapest. Waiting in line a worker told us a section was discounted at the window-$4 a seat. So I get to the window, point to where we want and make sure that deal is correct. He turns to his computer then back to me and says through the window that I have a hard time hearing through, "I'll give these to you for $4." I nod yes because I figure he means $4 a seat, but no, he meant $4 total. So the four of us went to a Rockies game and parked for less than $10. And Coors field totally rocks because you can bring your own food in. The only downer as that we lost on a grand slam in the 10th inning, but we still had fun.
Go Rockies!

Baby girl slept for the first little while . . .

. . . but she came out to see the excitement.

A view of the city from our seats.

My mom is just a busy little bee and offered to help us decorate a room in our house. I think she felt bad since we have lived here for 3 1/2 years and hadn't painted anything . . .
Here they are working hard.

We also painted Rachel's dresser. Here's before-and after pictures are below.

Before

After
Matthew chose the dinosaur curtains, grandma sewed them and daddy installed them.
The green ended up being slightly brighter than I envisioned, but I still like it. The only problem now is the brown furniture looks strange, but maybe someday we'll get around to it.

This after photo was taken by Matthew. I will be devoting another post to his adventures with the camera so stay tuned!

Thank you Grandma and Becky. We loved having you come!

We love our family

My mom and sister (one of the many cuties) came to visit/rescue me while Brian was in New Orleans for "camp" as Matthew called it (the Microsoft Tech Ed Conference). The timing worked out really well because my cousin blessed his baby who was born a week before Little Miss and my cousin-in-law was back visiting.

Here are my two cuties all ready for church although she doesn't seem too happy about it.

Three generations of girls (I'm hoping that some day I look back at this picture and can appreciate it despite the frizzy hair and other stuff . . . )

Here are the three of us with our girls. Hopefully someday the little
ones will catch up with Mabel.

The three girlies which were quite difficult to get a photo of all together.

Now we are counting down the days til we get to see some more family in a few weeks for Rachel's blessing :)

Babycation

Not really any pictures for this post sorry :(, but there are plenty in the other ones. Brian was able to take ten days off after Rachel was born and it was heavenly! The boys had so much fun together and it was so wonderful to have our little family all together to enjoy Rachel in her first few weeks here.
We got so many things done (well, mostly the boys; I was busy with other things like feeding baby and healing from baby). Brian did a lot of spot cleaning on our carpet, cleaned the fish tank, cleaned the car, put away the "winter village" (don't ask :( ), took Matthew to preschool on the bike, went to multiple parks, had a man play date, finally went to the pediatrician's office, did hair cuts, installed the swamp cooler, along with all the other miscellaneous cleaning.
I think his office was pretty excited to have him back though. I stopped by the office a couple of weeks ago and one of his coworkers knew exactly how old Rachel was because of how many weeks Brian had been back to work. It's good to be missed!
I'm so glad he was able to take that time off; it's great having an extra week of vacation!

Songs and graduation

Matthew loves this primary song and sings it every night at bedtime. We have it on a cd in the car and when it comes on he shouts out "it's my song!" He giggles a little bit in the video, but you get the idea :)


Matthew had his preschool graduation where he was too shy to walk up and get his award, but he did great. He can write his name all by himself now and he does really well tracing the other letters now too.

At the temple

I am so behind on blogging and now that I've passed my ham radio test :) and don't have to spend all my free evening time studying I hope to get caught up in the next few days.

Matthew was in the group that helped pick up pine cones. I love him to pieces, but sometimes he is just crazy. He spent most of the time sitting and crying because he didn't want to pick them up, "they were too pokey." We eventually got him up and helping so I had to take pictures pretty quick to prove it.

Miss Rachel at the temple, 8 days old.

Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield

While my sister was here we went to the Botanic Gardens. Two days after we were there a little boy was bitten by a rattlesnake so that kind of freaked me out. The worst thing that happened to us was I got eaten by mosquitoes.
I thought it was very pretty and I even got a few good photos if I do say so myself.

Playing in the children's area. The sad thing was the sprinklers were on so he couldn't go on everything. We'll try again another day.

I had to include this picture because I totally caught him in action. This little dude loves to run!

The beehive place

The silo-which makes me think of that quote from the Simpsons-
"It sounds like a silo tipping over!"

Checking out the inside of the silo that was full of pigeons.

And this is how Miss Rachel spent her time at the garden :)