My Glorious Gwena

I can hardly believe this tiny girl is already six months old. HALF of a YEAR has flown by and she brings so much joy and happiness to our family. She is perfect.

Gwena Florence
17 lbs 3 oz
66 percentile for weight
78 percentile for height

Gwena started eating solids a little after five months and LOVES real food. Her favorite is sweet potatoes and peaches. She loves sitting in her high chair and trying to eat Cheerios.

She sits like a champ and rolls everywhere. She is constantly trying to sit up when laying flat on her back. She gets up onto her side and tries to inch her way into a sitting position. She loves to plank and pivot but is not quite making true crawling movements yet.

I just barely got her moved into her own room and out of the swaddle. Ben and R & E spent a couple weeks sleeping downstairs on and off so that I could spend some time sleep training her without fear of waking up the whole house. She did awesome and now sleeps from 8pm-6am, and then goes back to sleep till 7:30am. She is napping 2-3 times a day.

She is getting better and better going to sleep at night. She is a perfect angel for me but has had some rough nights when Ben tries to put her down. She's a mama's girl.

After a lot of inner debate, I am weaning her from nursing. She has become a very distracted nurser and feedings are taking me forever and she usually ends up furious. I am going to hang on to the early morning feeding for as long as I can. Plus we are getting ready for a couples only trip (to HAWAII!!!!) at the end of June and I want her to be well adjusted.

Gwena loves her tag blanket softie and snuggles it to her face all night and at naps.

She is very grabby and loves to pull Mommy's hair and anything else she can reach and bring to her mouth, including her toes.

Gwena has the most content, sweet, easy going, always happy personality.

She loves her binky.

I love the way she greets people with a great big smile and then turns away quickly into my shoulder.

I love listening to her babble and growl in the car and the way she paws at my face and breaths very audibly when she lays next to me in bed. She also likes pawing her daddy's scratchy face.

She loves lying on her changing table and looking out the window, bring snuggled in the rocking chair, riding in her swing, playing in her office (excersaucer) and on the floor with her little box of toys.

Gwena loves her sisters more than anything else in the world. She loves just sitting and watching them and laughs for them like she will for nobody else. They are crazy about her too. We have to be careful with Rosie because she can be a little too rough trying to play with her, hug her, and attempt to move her around.

If I could, I would keep this girl in cozy infant sleepers and snuggled up in the cradle right next to my bed forever. She is really, truly the best baby in the world.

April Scrapbook Style

Oh how the time ticks by. I give up. I am realizing and coming to accept that for now, I can't fit a lot of blogging in. I swear time is moving faster than it ever has before. My goal is to keep up at least a brief record of what we are up to but  more in the form of a pictures with notes rather than lengthy posts. It is what it is.

APRIL
Ben's parents came into town for a very brief, but fun visit to help move Daniel and Becca to Arizona. The day they left I cried and moped around all day. It was so fun to live close to them.

 April was spent being obsessed with Frozen. Watching the movie, singing and dancing to the songs, pretending to be Elsa and Anna, dreaming about them, and freezing mom or dad whenever they are coming after you to drag you to bed, get you dressed, do your hair, or anything else.

We had gorgeous Conference weekend. Holy smokes these two are getting so big, so fast.

What Evie put on instead of the outfit I laid out for her:

We went to Bear Lake for a weekend just to get away. It was a little chilly so we spent most of our time cozy inside, going on drives, and swimming in the pool. Poor Ben got food poisoning (we think) from some weird chicken pizza and was violently ill the last night we were there. Not awesome.

Rosie and Evie participated in 4 different egg hunts for Easter at Grandmas, preschool, in Draper, and at home. They loved it and got tons of candy. The one put on by Draper was attended by about a dozen Disney Princesses which the girls loved meeting. We got there in the nick of time for the egg hunt. We had to jog most of the way there and shoved R&E onto the field right as the they blew the start horn.

My parents were out of town on Easter Sunday so we had Erin and Zar over for dinner and an egg hunt and got some great shots of all these gorgeous cousins. Rosie and Evie got a lot more out of the Easter story this year and have been playing all kinds of games involving tombs and Frozen characters. "Hey ELSA! Come feel His feet! He is alive again!". 

March March March

We went up to Fish Lake this weekend with my family and had a great time in the Hayes' amazing lake front cabin. There was an unfortunate incident involving me doing some poor navigating on my phone which got us lost and lengthened our drive by over two hours. Then poor Ben hardly slept that night because it was really hot and smokey from the lovely, cozy fire Zar kept ablaze all night long. But the next day was perfect hiking in Capital Reef and eating delicious burgers at Slackers drive-in and playing games and just hanging out. And of course Rosie and Evie looooved some concentrated cousin time.

                      

                                    

                                    

                                    

Evie watching Frozen on the car ride home. 

Gwena will be 5 months old next week and I can hardly believe it. She is growing up too fast and is nothing but smiles. She is starting to push her self way up on her hands and turn herself around which is madness. We are making plans to move her into the nursery in the next little bit and I don't know if I can bear it. Please just stay little!

We've had some Spring storms and Eve and Rose have been so obsessed with Frozen lately that we had to get out there and build a snowman... even if it meant scraping the lawn to gather up enough snow. They named her Anna. 

 Lucky the Leprechaun came to our house and left a shamrock scavenger hunt for the girls and dyed our milk green and left tiny footprints in the bath tub. I wasn't even planning on doing much for St. Patrick's day but I'm glad I did-- they went nuts for it and were so cute. They had a blast celebrating at preschool too.

They also had a pajama day at school with a pancake and bacon breakfast to help wake up Spring and are still loving their ballet class. 

We've been busy painting the house and Ben has started some crazy project in the backyard. I let the girls help me paint their room lavender and it was super fun in small doses. Two silly toddlers with dripping brushes can go south very quickly. We are slowly slowly making progress. 

Can't get enough of these 3.