Our wonderful Christmas

Christmas this year was so wonderful.  I love spending holidays with family and friends but it was so nice to have a little quite time just the three of us.  We have been thinking a lot about traditions we had as kids and ones that we want to have with our kids during Christmas time so I'm sure we will try a few out before they become real "traditions".  This year was the best Christmas I've had since I was 8 years old and got a pogo stick (yes that was my favorite Christmas present of all time) just because it is so fun to watch your children get excited and experience the magic of Christmas.

  On Christmas eve we spent the day just hanging out before Joie took her nap.  We decided it would be fun to go to the movies every year on Christmas eve so this year we all went and watched "Tangled" which was absolutely darling!  Joie loved every minute of it.  After that we went to Andrew's Aunt Janet's house for a little get together with the siblings and cousins who didn't go out of town for Christmas.  We came home after that and put a pizza in the oven.  We always did Pizza on Christmas eve when I was a kid.  While the Pizza was cooking Joie and I made Reindeer food.  Reindeer food, for those of you who don't know already, is made with Oatmeal and glitter  and it is so the Reindeer and can eat something while Santa is in your house.  It also helps the Reindeer find the house because of the glitter.

After we spread the Reindeer food on the yard and ate our pizza we gave Joie a bath and read the Nativity story out of a couple of Joie's books and we took the little baby Jesus figurines from our Nativity sets and let Joie hold them to try to help her understand the real reason we celebrate Christmas.  After that it was time to open our "Christmas eve present".  When I was a little girl my grandma on my mom's side sent us a present every year that said "open christmas eve" and they were always pajamas.  My grandma actually still does this but now she sends two pairs.  One for me and one for her grandson in law.  So my mom has decided to continue on the tradition and sends jammies for Joie now.

This year they were Minnie Mouse jammies.  Needless to say she was thrilled.  After that we assembled a plate of cookies and a glass of milk for Santa.  I told Joie we should write Santa a note and I asked her what she thought we should say and she said "hmmm....Santa, here's is your cookie!" I asked if we should also thank him for the presents and she said ok.

She went to bed after that.  When she woke up in the morning I went to go get her and she was so excited that she started reciting her list of things she asked Santa for.  I took her out of bed and told her to run and go find her toys.  I think she was a little shocked at first.  We had been talking about Santa coming for so long and he finally came.  She then was so excited after that, especially when she realized she got everything she asked for.  This big difference between this year and last year is this year Joie was so excited to tear into the presents.  It was just so fun to see the magic of Christmas through my own Child's eyes again.  Christmas is definitely better as a parent than it was as a kid.

This picture was Joie's entire Santa list.  When people asked her what she asked Santa for for Christmas she would always say "Hanta bring a "weee" (which means slide).  Hanta bring a choo choo.  Hanta bring a kitchen."  She received all the things she asked for.

She got tons of other fun presents too.  My favorite of Joie's presents was Princess Potato Head.  I think its pretty cute!  It was such a wonderful Christmas.  

The Low Family also got a wonderful belated Christmas present.  Our newest little nephew Landon Jacob Low was born today and he is an absolute doll.  We went to go visit Landon and his mommy Erika and Joie loved him so much.  She kept kissing his head and saying "my Joie's baby" and she cried and cried when we left him.  It made me really happy because I have been really nervous that Joie won't like our new baby or will be jealous and mean but after seeing her today I think she is going to be a very overprotective wonderful big sister who will have to be watched very closely because she may smother the baby to death.

a sweet joie-ism

I think every mom is guilty of this.  Our kids say the cutest stuff and we think we will always remember and of course we don't.  Joie did the sweetest thing this morning and I want to remember it.

With this pregnancy I have spent the past 2 months waking up at 4 in the morning and about half the time I can't fall back asleep at all and the other half of the time I fall asleep about an hour before Joie wakes up.  I function alright on little sleep but after a while it still wares on me.  Last night I was exhausted and needed a good sleep and of course I only got about 3 hours.  So by the time Joie woke up I had been awake for a long time and I was so exhausted that I wasn't acting very happy.  I got Joie out of her crib and poured her a bowl of cereal and sat down at the table at put my head in my hands and started to cry (yes I'm pregnant so sometimes I cry over things like being tired).  When Joie realized I was crying she came over and rubbed my back and said "you ok, momma?" and I said, "No honey Mommy isn't ok right now, but I will be". I guess she didn't understand this and all she heard was no and she started crying.  So of course the mom instinct took over and I took her in my arms and said, "Honey, whats the matter?"  and through her tears she said "YOU OK MOMMA??" in the most concerned heart broken voice I've ever heard.  Of course I responded that momma was ok.  The tears immediately turned into a smile and she said "Ok momma!" and gave me a hug and went on like nothing ever happened.  I felt so blessed at this moment to be a mommy that I knew I couldn't spend one more moment feeling bad for myself and I spent the rest of the time playing with and enjoying my sweet little girl.  

I know this post isn't too exciting but it was a moment that melted my heart that I didn't want to forget.

Day 4

Well Joie is on day 4 of wearing only big girl underwear.  We had a few accidents the first day or two but yesterday we only had 1 little accident and so far today we haven't had any!  We have gotten brave and even left the house a few times!  Why don't these little ones come with an instruction manual?  It would make times like this so much easier.

Tis the season

Well it is indeed the most wonderful time of the year.  As soon as Thanksgiving was over I couldn't even wait a day to pull out all the Christmas decorations.  As an extra special treat we also got snow this weekend to make everything seem even more like Christmas.  It is the only month of the year that I enjoy the cool weather and snow.  This is definitely one of the best times of the year and always seems to go by way too fast...I'm kind of hoping it feels that way again this year because as soon as the holidays are over we will only be weeks away from having the baby.

We had a blast playing in the snow.  In the top pictures Andrew was teaching Joie how to make a snow angel...it was pretty cute.

Here is a belly shot.  It was taken between 31 and 32 weeks and will probably be the last picture I post because I'm feeling like a beached whale!

Here was us decorating the tree.  I can't believe Christmas is only 27 days away!

my girl

Oh how I love this sweet little face.  We have been having so much fun lately.  We have been playing with play doh, coloring on huge rolls of butcher paper, painting our nails, playing in the leaves, building (and destroying) humongous block towers, watching princess movies, baking lots of treats, and about a million other fun activities...but I know that no matter how much we play and how much attention I give her, her world is about to be turned upside down.  I know once the baby comes that I won't be able to give her the same attention that I give her now.  I just hope we can get in tons of playing time before the new arrival!

My little Minnie!

I couldn't resist the opportunity to put up a few pictures of Joie in her cute little Halloween costume.  She has been asking to wear it for weeks so when I finally told her it was Halloween she screamed "MINNIE DRESS" and wanted to put it on immediately.  She loved Halloween and loved Trick or Treating.  It's crazy to think I will be taking two little girls out trick or treating next year!

Although you may not be able to tell, she was so excited to be in her Minnie dress that she wouldn't hold still or pose for me to take a cute picture!  She just wanted to stand in front of the mirror and twirl.

Potty time!

What have we been up to lately??

A whole lot of this

and NOT quite as many of these!

and LOTS of these...

and this!

That's right people!  The potty training has begun!  Joie has done so well!  We have had a few accidents but its only ever a trickle and than it scares her and she runs to the potty to finish her business!  Its been about 5 days since we have had an accident.  Joie just hangs out in big girl underwear around the house.  I'm not brave enough to take her out in public without a diaper yet.  She still sleeps with her diaper on too. I will update on progress made because I know this is just the very beginning of the potty training process.  Its so funny how excited you can get over someone going pee pee in the potty...there is just nothing like being a Mommy!

25 weeks

Many have asked for a pregnancy picture so here it is.  Just so you all know once I start getting really fat I will not continue to post pictures of myself.

This is me and baby at 25 weeks.  We had another ultrasound this week and she must be the shyest baby ever.  They were going to do a 3D ultrasound of her face but she has kept her face completely hidden behind her hands both times now so I guess we will just have to guess what she looks like until her arrival!

Our little helper!

The other day my mom was making dinner and I decided dinner needed garlic bread (which of course I was only interested in buying, not cooking).  So my mom said she would watch Joie while I ran to Smiths.  When I came back Joie was wearing an Apron and cleaning my moms sink...and she was LOVING it.  It was really darling!!

I love her big cheesy grin!  Doesn't she look like such a big girl?

Joie turned 2

I am a few weeks late on this post but my little angel turned 2 on September 10th.  She is getting SO big and cracks me up all the time with the hilarious things she has to say!  Right now Minnie Mouse is the love of her life (which tugs my heart strings a little because thats exactly how I was when I was her age).  We are having such a blast playing together every day and just doing girl stuff.  I'm not going to lie, we think she is pretty darn cute!

Every time we get out of the bath Joie wants me to put product in her hair and blow dry it.  So one day I decided to straighten it and she thought it was the coolest thing ever.  She just kept saying over and over "I'm pretty momma, I'm pretty"

Baby Low: The Sequel. Coming January 2011

That's right people! Baby GIRL number 2 is coming in the end of January.  I am a little over 20 weeks pregnant.  We found out in May that we were expecting and found out yesterday that it is a girl.  We are SO excited to welcome little missy into our family!

Vegas Trip!

Well a couple of weeks ago we took a fun little trip to Las Vegas.  My parents just moved there and we were excited to go spend some time with them before fall semester started.  I was there for about a week before Andrew came down and during that week we mostly just hung out and relaxed but once Andrew was there we fit a lot into a short trip! 

We got to see my brother Phil the day before he went into the MTC and as you can see Joie gave some great snuggles.

We got to play in Gigi's pool everyday, go to the Shark Reef Aquarium, go to the splash park, and do about a million other things.  The highlight of Joie's trip was definitely going to see "Great Sphinx".  The great sphinx was in one of her TV shows once and she has loved him ever since.  She was so excited to see about a million statues that looked like great sphinx inside the Luxor and every time she saw one she would scream "GREAT SPHINX" at the top of her lungs.  She now carries a picture of Great Sphinx everywhere we go and threw a tantrum the other night because I didn't let her bring her picture of Great Sphinx to bed with her.

MORE MONEY!

Joie has a new favorite toy.  It is called Money.  It all started because she loves the movie Robin Hood (the disney cartoon, of course) and in that movie Robin Hood takes all the evil Prince's money and she just loves it.  So now every day we have the joy of hearing Joie say, over, and over, and over......

MORE MONEY
MORE MONEY
MORE MONEY
MORE MONEY

People normally look at me like, "why is your 2 year old asking for money?".  We don't give her money to spend on stuff!  We just let her carry around a little bag of coins and she loves to count them and hear them jingle.  It is pretty cute and I get a kick out of hearing her scream MORE MONEY with joy and excitement all the time.

Bad Mom award

Although it has been a week since all of this happens, I would like to document it and PRAY that I never have a week like this AGAIN!!!  I try so so hard to be a good mom.  I try to make nutritious meals and teach Joie important things, and give her all the love and attention she needs...but sometimes I seem to fall short.

Early last week, either Monday or Tuesday, Joie and I were at Smith's and we were having the awesome battle that we have frequently at the grocery store called, "I refuse to sit in this cart".  I don't care that she hates the cart because I know she is safe when she is sitting there buckled in but for some reason this one day I just couldn't handle her.  I put her in the cart and she was screaming bloody murder and I swear people were giving me those looks like "you're her mom, can't you do something to calm her down" and "oh that poor child".  For some reason on this particular day it was really getting to me and decided to let her get out of her chair and just stand in the cart.  I justified it by saying I was just getting a 2 or 3 things and it would only take a minute.  So we did our shopping and proceeded to the checkout stand and Joie handed me the things in the cart so we could pay for them.  While they were scanning our items Joie started fussing that she wanted some candy and I said, "No, sit on your bum bum, you don't need any candy".  That obviously wasn't what she wanted to hear and she leaped out of the cart to get chocolate and fell out on to the hard floor.  Well if I was concerned about the looks people were giving me before you should have seen the looks I was getting now.  I swear on my life people were considering calling Child Protective Services because they thought I was the worst mom.  I learned from this experience that I know when I'm being a good mom and I was being a good mom keeping her buckled into the cart.  I need to NOT care what kind of mom other people think I am.  No bumps or bruises showed up right away but the next day she had an AWFUL black eye...poor baby. 

So a mere 3 days later my "bad mom" streak got worse.  I went to a friends house to help her pack because she was moving.  I have gone over these few minutes again and again in my mind thinking I could have done things differently but I guess what I learned from both of my stories is that no matter how hard you try to be a great mom you can never just stare at your children 100% of the time and prevent everything from happening.  So I'm helping my friend pack and we are figuring out where to start and looking at the task ahead of us and I glance over at Joie and she had found an open bottle of pills on the ground and had put a bunch in her mouth and was saying "candy".  Needless to say I completely flipped out and ran over to her and fish hooked all that crap out of her mouth and throat immediately.  I grabbed the bottle to see what my child had accidentally ingested and it was XANAX!!!  Now I'm no drug expert but I have seen a half of a Xanax make full sized adults act crazy.  I have also seen it act as a freakin rhino sedative and basically put people into mini comas.  So now I'm even more freaked out.  I was pretty sure I had gotten them all out of her mouth but I just felt sick to my stomach about it and decided to take her to the hospital just to be safe.  I called my parents just to make sure I wasn't completely over reacting and they said, Oh my gosh drive straight to the hospital even if you aren't sure she swallowed any.  So I'm not going to lie I feel so bad for little Joie because I was basically a lunatic and completely freaking out and I think I scarred her half to death.  We got to the hospital promptly and they immediately admitted us.  The doctor came in right away and I told him I was nearly certain she didn't swallow any but I wasn't 100% sure.  The doctor said to me, "Oh it is so good that you brought her in.  Xanax is so dangerous, especially for small children.  Even if she didn't swallow one and just a fraction of one dissolved in her mouth it could slow her heart rate to the point that she couldn't breathe on her own and we would have to hook her up to machines to breathe for her".  So now I feel a little better because he validated that I wasn't crazy for bringing her to the hospital when I wasn't sure she had even taken anything, but mostly I feel 100 times worse because now I'm afraid that at any moment my child is going to stop breathing!  So they wanted to monitor her for 5 or 6 hours because she was too small for them to pump her stomach.  She also wasn't allowed to sleep because that might be a side effect of the xanax and they wanted her to try and stay alert the entire time she was being monitored.  Anyway, she was totally fine, her heart rate never got too low and I took her home later that evening.  All I wanted to do was hold her and cry and say "I'm sorry" a million times because I felt like it was all my fault.  When we got home and finally sat down I started crying, which I think was mostly because I was so stressed and I finally relaxed a little, and Joie came over and sat on my lap and wiped my tears and said "Momma's boo boo" pointing to the tears on my cheeks.  I said, "oh it's ok, mommy just loves you so much" and I guess she just didn't like that I was crying because she started to cry and put her head on my chest and said "sorry momma".  It was pretty much the sweetest thing ever and it made everything feel just a little better.

So now you all know who deserves the "bad mom of the year" award.  It was a horrible week and I still haven't completely recovered and now I'm sure Joie hates me for hovering and never giving her a moments peace because I'm so paranoid something will happen to her. 

Dear Mothers

Dear Mothers,
 
   I understand that these days we have it pretty darn hard.  Not only are our children supposed to always look clean and be perfectly well behaved in public areas, but we are supposed to look like very calm super models who can juggle 100 things at once with ease.  This makes me sad...not because society dictates it, but because we all buy into this crap.  I know, I know, you're sitting there reading this thinking, oh I'm so not like that...but have you ever cried because you just had a baby and you feel fat and unattractive?  Have you ever told your husband "Oh my gosh I'm so embarrassed, I just ran into (insert name) at Costco on the ONE day I'm not wearing any make up and Joie was acting like a circus animal"?  Maybe I'm the only one guilty of this.  It makes me so sad to see other people upset over things like this or so discouraged about their weight when I see them as being these AMAZING, BEAUTIFUL, LOVING mothers.  I do see the hypocrisy in saying this because I know I'm guilty of it myself but when I see pictures of all of you right after you have given birth all I can see is pure beauty.  When I see pictures of you trying to soothe a child who is throwing a tantrum, I see beauty and love.  Please please PLEASE, forget about the stupid world and remember that what you are doing is the most beautiful amazing thing in the entire world.


Exhibit A.  BEAUTY.  This is my beautiful sister in law the day she gave birth.

Exhibit B.  Not Beauty.  Now I'm not saying she isn't pretty but this DEFINITELY doesn't make my heart melt.

I could go on and on but I'm sure you get the point.  Beauty does not come from being 5'10 or fitting into size 2 jeans.  Be healthy and be happy but know that your beauty comes from within and seeing you all be mothers, wives, and children of God is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

Joie and Blossom

So the other day my friend Whitney came over to hang out for an afternoon and she brought her adorable doggy Blossom.  As many of you may know Joie loves dogs, but she was a little too excited to play with Blossom.  This was Joie and Blossom after they had been playing for about an hour.  The squealing was much more intense about 30 minutes prior to this video.  Don't worry, Blossom wasn't hurt, I think she was having as much fun as Joie was. 

Family Vacation!

Well sorry that we have been MIA the past couple of weeks.  We were out of town having WAY too much fun to blog.

We started the trip off by staying just one night in Las Vegas with my parents and my brother Ben and sister Tali.  They were they on a house hunting trip because they are moving there next month and we are SO excited!  Joie is OBSESSED with Aunt Tali and would copy everything she did for hours...it was too cute!

We went from Las Vegas to my grandparents house on the colorado river.  It is right on the border of California and Arizona and it was SO hot but the water was cool and refreshing and AMAZING.

Andrew left from the river to go back to Provo because he had school and work so I went back to my grandparent other house in Irvine.  We had such a blast.  My grandparents have 6 turtles and 2 dogs so Joie was in heaven and my cousin Ashley is living with my grandparents this summer and she is one of my best friends so we had SO much fun!!

We had so much fun in Irvine...Joie was so excited to ride the Carousel, she basically begged me.  So we got on and as soon as I tried to put her on the horse she freaked out.

So we just rode on the little bench instead...she still thought it was pretty fun.

Joie was quite terrified of the turtles for the first few days but she warmed up to them and asked to play with them pretty much all the time for the last few days we were there.

Joie was having a lot of fun playing with Grandpa and the dogs Sophie and Tyson.  Every time she found herself in the kitchen without supervision she would go to the pantry and get doggy treats so she could hand feed the dogs...it was pretty cute and sneaky!

We had a very fun trip but we are VERY excited to be home!!