Baby news

If you can't tell from the change in our background colors, we got the big news last week:

IT'S A GIRL!!!

Yay! We are so excited! Sayer is excited to be a big brother and he talks to "sisser" in Mom's tummy all the time. It's very cute. Now that we know, this pregnancy is getting very real. I am starting to show A LOT and have pretty much given up on most of my normal clothes. Sunday is my halfway mark; I can't believe how fast it's going by! I am definitely seeing the difference between my first pregnancy and being pregnant while chasing a toddler. I am always tired and have discovered that lifting Sayer is going to be a challenge for my back. And I'm not even five months yet!!

A New Baby and An Old Cradle

Cody and Teera finally had their baby!!! She had a bit of a dramatic entrance, including a C-section and a stay in the NICU, but mom and baby are both home and doing great. And of course, my mom and I couldn't stay away. So this weekend we packed up Sayer and Hallie and drove to Utah to see baby Athena Lee-and to do a little shopping, of course!



Cody and Teera are wonderful parents all ready, and baby Attie is beautiful! It makes me wish my little one would just get here!






I found out a nifty piece of family history while I was there. Cody and Teera have a beautiful baby cradle for Attie, and imagine my surprise when my mom told me that she used it for me! My Aunt Phoebe bought it when her oldest daughter was born, and it has been passed around the family for 25 years. Cody and his sister, Rheanna (who are my cousins, by the way), also slept in it, as well as a few of my other cousins. When each baby outgrew the cradle, the mother would write their name on the bottom of the cradle. I was so excited that I made my mom and Cody turn it over (I was holding Attie :) and take pictures of this neat little heirloom. Hopefully I'll con it out of them by the time my baby comes in February :)



You can't read the entire NOVEL my mom wrote, but you get the general idea. Cody's name is above mine.


It was a quick trip, and we got a lot done but had hardly any breathing room. We missed a couple of stops we really wanted to make, but we had a good time and hope to see Attie again very soon!

I need to post!

I am so bad at posting this summer! It's funny, because I have so much time to post but I have been rebellious. Much has happened in the past several weeks:

• We FINALLY threw away Sayer's binkie. Okay, so I actually just hid it. I can't seem to part with that particular security blanket, even though it's been two weeks and he doesn't seem to care about it. The first few days were awful, though. Endless nights of screaming conjured from the darkest depths of Hades, a heartbroken little boy crying for binkie and a weak mother having to be threatened by dad if she gave in. It's definitely a lesson I've learned to keep in mind for the next little one: TAKE THE BINKIE AWAY EARLY LIKE THE BOOKS SAY.
• My mom and dad FINALLY started their addition, which means that Jake pretty much has two full-time jobs. He gets home from work around five and heads straight to Mom and Dad's for another three or four hours, and we're there every weekend as well. But it's exciting that we've begun and it will be even more exciting when it's done and we have somewhere to put our huge family. The best part about it is how excited Sayer is. He loves tools and being with the "guys" and wants nothing to do with Mom or Grandma when the boys are working. Here are some pics from our adventures so far:

Tearing down the back porch my dad built himself


This is what happens when we let Howard loose with the backhoe :)


Possibly the last pic of Sayer with the binkie

• Another fun change for our family: My Uncle Howard and Aunt Linda are staying in their fifth wheel behind my Mom and Dad's for a few months. They actually lived here for years and raised all of their kids here, so not only is it fun for us to have them around, but their old friends are enjoying it as well! My dad is grateful for Howard's help with the house, and we love to have Aunt Linda's company while the guys slave away.
  
• My cousin, Cody, and his wife, Teera, are having a baby girl ANY DAY now. Last month (told ya I've been slackin'), my mom, Aunt Linda, and my niece Kylee drove to Utah for her baby shower. She is the cutest lil' pregnant gal! I didn't, of course, get any pics of the shower, because I'm dumb. Afterward, however, we took advantage of Jennifer's (my big sis) hotel pool and lounged around with Aunt Jan and my cousin Rheanna. It was a fun afternoon!

Mom and Aunt Linda


A particularly flattering pic of Janet :)


Rheanna


Ky...she LOVED the water!

• Last weekend, we took off for our annual McBride family reunion in Bear Lake. Talk about MISERABLE. Not only did the wind blow the whole time we were there, but we woke up Saturday morning to rain that was seeping through our saturated tent. By eight, everything in our tent was soaked and we were loading up to go home! My mom and dad and most of the rest of the family there braved it out. (That's pretty easy when most of them had campers!) We still had fun, even though it was too cold and windy to get in the water or launch the boat for more than a few hours.

Jake and I drove up Thursday night and encountered some major smoke from wildfires. When we got there, the smoke was so thick you could barely see the sun. Yeah, that's not a mountain. It's the smoke:


My silly mom put her dishwater on a rickety table that collapsed and drenched her. The funniest part? This pic is of the next night, when she did the exact same thing!

• I went to the doc last week-everything is looking great! Of course it's too soon to find out the gender of our baby, but I feel like it's a girl just because this pregnancy is so completely different from my last one. This baby's heartbeat is also a lot faster than Sayer's was, and the doctor said that girls' heartbeats usually run higher than boys'. Of course, I probably jinxed myself by saying that, but we really don't care either way. Another boy would be just as fun; we will see!
  

Birthday cakes, a trip to the zoo, and big news!

I am in total shock. My baby is two! We celebrated Sayer's birthday last weekend in total style. We were lucky enough to have his Grandpa and Grandma Lilya in town for the week, who have been living in Alaska for work since April, and they decided to take all of us on a trip to the Hogle Zoo. Sayer loves all of his cousins and since they're pretty much the only kids he spends a lot of time with, they're all his pals. We had some fun times!

*Warning* This post contains a lot of pics. Sorry. It's my first kid and all.

Sayer and his cousin, Maddie. She's about two months older than Sayer and they are the best of friends.


Is it just me, or does he look unimpressed?


Cole and Ridge are especially good friends to Sayer. They all spend a lot of time at Grandma's together and all weekend Sayer wanted to know where "Widge" was if he couldn't see him!


I just love how he's sitting in the wagon!


All the grandkids, minus one. It was lunchtime, which might explain the look on Sayer's face.


Grandpa and Sayer waiting for the bird show to start. I guess now that he's two I'm running out of excuses to let him keep the dang binkie


After the bird show, they brought out a special bird who was taking donations. It would take them right out of your hand and put them in the donation box! Here's Sayer's turn.


Grandma and Ridge the Zookeeper



After the zoo, Grandpa and Grandma took us to the This Is The Place Monument. I love Church history but I've never been here, so this was a treat for me!

Brigham Young and Joseph Smith-these are two of my favorite prophets to study and learn about. I got chills reading about them planning and envisioning the Saints settling here.


What a view!


We got back to the hotel and had some fun in the pool for awhile, and then had a pizza party for Sayer. The pizza was from Pier 49 Pizza and was yum! Grandma was a little concerned that she'd only been able to find a pink cake for Sayer, but I don't think he minded.







By the time we headed home, Sayer was worn out.


The weekend was a good one; we had a lot of fun and Sayer got a lot of new toys. When we got home, we had another surprise waiting: Grandma and Grandpa McBride bought Sayer a new pool, and they had it set up for him to swim in when we got there!





Sayer and Aedan had a lot of fun playing together. Before we knew it, they both had their clothes and diapers off and were skinny dipping! We couldn't convince them to get dressed again. Sayer even played on the swings with Grandma in the buff.



So here we are with the terrible two's and more fun news. (Oh, my gosh, that rhymed. How pathetic.) Are you ready for this??? Sayer is going to be a big brother!

We are expecting baby #2 the first week in February. Everything looks great so far and we are excited (and maybe a little crazy).

We're very boring, really

I just realized that I haven't blogged in like a month. That is so weird for me! It's mostly due to the fact that we haven't been doing much of anything, and partly because I don't have any new pics to post, which drives me nuts.

Life tends to be a little boring for us this time of year. Most of our summer fun happens in July-August, and believe me, we're looking forward to it. My parents have been gone a lot for business trips, and Jake's parents have been in Alaska most of the summer for his dad's job. Since we don't do much outside of our families, this equals BORING! Jake has been busy finishing his brother Jason's house and helping my parents get ready to add on to their house, and all of this of course is in addition to his full-time job. What a man, baby!

Sayer is driving me CRAZY! I guess it's a good kind of crazy. I can't believe he's going to be two in a couple of weeks! The kid never stops moving. His bedtime went from 8:30 to 10:30 and it's all we can do to get him to sleep then. His vocabulary is amazing. These are some of our new favorites:

• "Coons" (cartoons)
• "Samat" (sandwich-usually in conjunction with "Peen", which is peanut butter :)
• "Mahee" (Handy Manny-the least annoying cartoon on Disney and fortunately, Sayer's favorite)
• "Sing" (Swing...our church building has nice swings out back. We walk over there a few times a week to swing, but now when we walk to church Sayer gets all excited and thinks we're going to swing. Pretty sad when I have to tell him that instead we get to go sit quietly and listen to grown-ups talk for three hours.)
• "Peesa" (pizza! his favorite!)
• "Cweam" (Ice cream. Of course.)

My life is about to get a little busier. I have been called to serve in the Mia Maids in our ward! I'm pretty intimidated because not only do I not know ANY of the youth in our ward, but our Mia Maid class is so big we have to have 3 leaders! I was actually pretty excited; serving in Primary for so long left me ready for a real change. This should be really fun. I'll let ya know how it goes.

I'm gonna go gray and have wrinkles before I'm 30!

We have had an eventful couple of weeks! Jake got nine days off from work, lucky dog, and I've had him pretty busy with "honey-do's" for most of that time. We are hitting a lot of milestones with Sayer and I've started to realize that (almost) two-year-olds require a LOT more attention than even a newborn! Or maybe it's just MY crazy (almost) two-year-old.

The parenting books call his type the "spirited" or "difficult" child. I call him hell on wheels! I constantly find him climbing the drawer handles, after I have put all of the chairs up on the table, to get to the knives or the phone just because he knows he can't have them. It took him ten minutes to figure out the childproof doorknob covers I put on in an attempt to keep him out of the bathroom and away from my makeup!

To make things even more interesting, Sayer learned how to climb out of his crib AND open his bedroom door all in the same week. Goodbye, bedtime! Not that this is a huge difference from before. Sayer used to go down for the night very easily, but ever since our moves we've had a hard time getting him to bed at night. But NOW, instead of just letting him cry himself to sleep, he can get out! His new bedtime routine is laying in bed with Dad (it HAS to be Jake, he doesn't want anything to do with me at night) until he falls asleep, when we carry him to bed. He has been waking up in the middle of the night and climbing in bed with us, which is not too great for our sleep because of course, he has to take up half the bed. I am currently trying Diana's "Super Nanny" trick that she used with Hallie. Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated! I am going crazy!

This has led to a milestone in Sayer's life! We started to worry about him getting hurt or breaking the crib, so we've converted it into a toddler bed with the guard rails. Sayer was excited to help Dad:





He is also having fun "helping"with yard work. My two boys both love their Texas hats; if you know Jake at all, you know that he doesn't buy a hat unless it's a Longhorn hat. He doesn't even support the team; he just likes the hats! What a poser :)



I get to watch Hallie and Dewey every once in awhile, which is so much fun for us! My mom bought Dewey, Aedan, and Sayer matching pj's, I got some cute pics of Dewey and Sayer in their cute pj's. Some day, this is going to make a great yearbook pic, or blackmail; I haven't decided which yet.


I love these two! They are so cute and so much fun to have over!


Life gets more and more interesting every day. I complain a lot about Sayer, but I am really totally in love with him and I love watching him learn new things. His deductive skills are better than mine some days and he is a genius at finding solutions to problems like, oh, how to get his pacifier off the top of the fridge (yes, he did manage this one-my final hiding place he couldn't get to!). He definitely keeps me on my toes!

Update...wow, that title sounds so lame

No new pics today, just a few quick tidbits of fun for the Lilya family. First of all, Jake has switched jobs YET AGAIN. As of today, he is now working for the railroad again. He's worked for the railroad on and off for almost four years, but it's really hard on us because it usually requires him to be away from home. With the construction market so down, we knew he was going to have to do something. He started bidding for positions and finally got word on Wednesday that he'd caught a bid for a position in Pocatello. So he will be close to home and working one week on, one week off, which will give him time to finish up the jobs he's been working on and do a few things on the side.

The CRAPPY part...we were asked to speak in our new ward on Sunday. Jake had to call and bow out, since he will be working, but I'm still on the hook! And this isn't the first time he's done this...when we were asked to speak for the first time in our last ward, he had to work unexpectedly and I had to speak by myself! When he found out about the job, he told me, "The Lord really blesses people, doesn't he? ...especially people who don't want to speak on Sunday!"

Punk. I'm so telling the bishop.