Kaylee

Here are some more darling pictures of Kaylee...

These 1st two are from my cell phone, so the color is off, but they are so cute! She's such a happy baby!

Watching TV with Daddy
(we don't allow her to watch very often, but when we do she loves it).

Just plain cute

Kaylee is such a big girl. She loves to take a shower every morning (Paige P., we totally copied this from your blog).

New nursery class

Joel and I have a calling in nursery and with the new year we were switched to a different nursery class (there are 4 in our ward). The one we were in before had around 9-12 kids each time and most of them were boys. This new one had 5 or 6 and 2 were the other couples kids. I loved it! The kids were all so cute! Oh, and most of them were girls!!! I love playing with little girls that age. They seem to like me more than boys, so it's good.

We've decided that we'll just take Kaylee to nursery with us unless a kid seems sick and then one of us will go to relief society/priesthood. Kaylee handled it pretty well, but by the time we got to sacrament meeting (yesterday was her first full 3 hours at church) I think she had had sensory overload. She was not handling noise well at all. The speakers talking in the microphone were loud and every time a kid would yell or scream she would get upset. I'm thinking Woods Cross needs to do what they do in Chile... only 2 hours of church. Kaylee would like that.

Joel is Magic

He really is. And not just because he does cool magic tricks (and then refuses to tell me how he does them :( ). But because he can calm Kaylee down with just the sound of his voice! I knew he was able to get her to sleep really easily by talking to her and rubbing her nose, but I had no idea just his voice had such an effect on her! Here's the story:

Last Friday Joel had a Quick Wits show. Kaylee had a slight cold, so we stayed home. She started to get ornery in the evening and didn't want to calm down. Joel called on his way home and I told him she wasn't a happy girl so he had me put the phone up to her ear, so he could talk to her. She calmed down immediately once she heard his voice!!! It was so cute! She loves her daddy so much!

Really neat talk about the Spirit World!

I got up to nurse Kaylee this morning and flipped on the TV to entertain myself. I flipped to KBYU and listened to the 2nd half of a talk by Robert J. Matthews about the Spirit World. It was awesome! I hadn't heard many of the quotes he used. Since Grandma's passing I've been wondering more about the Spirit World and what it was like for her. I knew where she was and that it's a better place than here, but that's about it. This answered my questions in more detail than I've ever heard before (talking about buildings and flowers and such). It's a really good talk, so I thought I'd share.

The Spirit World and the Resurrection of the Dead
Robert J. Matthews
BYU Education Week 2007 (8/23/2007)

Click on the format you'd like to view/listen to it on:

Windows media player

Quicktime player

mp3

What I've been up to...

It's been awhile since I last posted, so I figured I'd give an update on what we've been doing:

• Christmas and New Year's were great! With both families living so close and being party animals, we were very busy this holiday season. It was a lot of fun!
  
• My Grandma White passed away December 22. Her favorite time of the year was Christmas, so it's fitting that she'll be remembered around that time every year. It was expected and everyone got to say their goodbyes before she passed away peacefully. We will miss her.
• We flew to Spokane, Washington for my grandma's funeral the weekend after Christmas. The funeral was really good. It was fun to remember Grandma and all the good times we had with her. There was such a feeling of peace at the funeral. I'm so grateful for the gospel and that I know she is in a better place and that I'll be able to see her again. I was also able to get reacquainted with my cousins I haven't seen in over 10 years. I can't wait to visit them again!
  
• Kaylee was blessed (as you know from Joel's post about it) and it was great! I'll post pictures of her beautiful blessing dress once I figure out how to get the card reader on this computer to work. Her Great grandma White made it for her before she died. Kaylee looked like an angel in it.
• Kaylee had her 2 month checkup yesterday. She's 12 lbs 1 oz!!! And 23 inches long! For weight she's in the 87th percentile for her age and 91st percentile for her height (I think... I left the papers out in the car and it's too cold out to get them now)! Big baby! She is still sleeping well through the night and being the best baby in the world! We love her so much! (BTW, there's a ticker thing at the bottom of our blog that shows exactly how old she is if you're ever wondering)
  
• Lately I've been working on budgeting (I've made this totally cool budget worksheet in excel with formulas and everything... I'm quite proud of myself) and making a menu plan for the next month (I have something different planned for each weekday of the month, we'll see how it works out). I've tried to make it so I only have to do one big shopping for the month and then quick weekly shopping for items that spoil. I really hope it works out because I'm not a fan of grocery shopping. I'm a weirdo, but I enjoy doing things like that.
  

Now here's everyone's reward for reading all of that. You better not have cheated and skipped right to the pictures ;).

Here's beautiful Kaylee!!!

The next 2 pictures are from her first airplane ride. She slept most the time.

Joel and Kaylee on New Year's Eve

See??? We TOLD You So!!!

Ok, for those of you who don't remember the last time I talked about how crazy our ward is go back and read it now -- for those of you who were there this week, it'll have much more meaning when you read it this time.

So we blessed Kaylee today. For those of you that didn't know about it, don't worry or stress -- we still love you. We just wanted to keep it small and low-key because 1) our ward is pretty darn crowded, 2) our apartment isn't the biggest one in the world, and 3) the weather wasn't the best.

The actual blessing was fine, but the meeting was quite entertaining to Beth and I because all the family got to see that we weren't kidding about the. . .uh. . .nature of our ward.

Right off the bat we knew it was going to be fun when we got there 20 minutes BEFORE the meeting was about to start and we were waiting in line to get in. It was like a rock concert. When we got inside, we had to scramble and fight to actually get seats by each other in the back of the third overflow.

Kaylee was amazingly well-behaved during the blessing and we had a lot of people there to help with the blessing. Thank you to everyone that made it out and for helping me not pass out because of stress.

Then the "testimony" meeting began. Right away there was a hoard of kids literally running up to the podium to introduce themselves. There were some special memories made and there are some names that we will never forget.

We did get a few adults up there, but still something just seemed off with the majority of pulpit-talkers. I was just grateful that we did get a sincere testimony of the gospel every so often.

When the show was over, we came back to our humble apartment and had our first family party here. It was a little squished and a little warm, but everyone got plenty to eat (thank you all who brought food) and it turned out really nice.



So thanks again, everybody, and let's keep that petition going to split the ward! :)