Momish

Baby Girl was surrounded by friends and in complete heaven this week! 

My parents were on a cruise so we stayed in Spanish Fork with Emily.

It was the best because she would go to bed surrounded by her Auntie Em and Uncle Spencer, who spoil her rotten. Then she would wake up and once again they were there to dote over her.

She wasn't even upset about it.

It was a tough week though. Baby spent the second half of the week not sleeping AT ALL. So we were so tired and on top of that we were juggling school, homework, Baby L, and driving Emily around.

I've been a mom for 5 months, but this was the most "momish" I have ever felt.  When I think about moms I think of my own amazing mom, who spent most of her time in a car driving us three kids everywhere. Well, I definitely got my feel of the car. I listened to Nicholas Spark's book Two by Two audiotape and got through half of it.

Needless to say between all of that driving and this cute girl, I didn't get anything productive done the whole week.

 I wasn't even upset about it.

In all of the chaos, my knight and shining armor was there. Keiton is always there to make me laugh and be my rock. 

I adore these two, they are my whole world!!

FIVE MONTHS

It's crazy to think I spent 5 months straight throwing up and nauseous while I was pregnant with Baby Girl.  Those 5 months were the slowest months of my life.  Now that Baby Girl is here and five months I can't even believe it! Having her here has been the fastest months of my life!

Baby Girl was sick for the first time ever.  All three of us had a cold and poor Baby was coughing, sneezing and her nose would not stop running.

Keiton and I caved and bought a NoseFrida. Yep that's right folks, we sucked the boogers right out of her nose. We were disgusted with the thought but desperate for her to be able to breath so she would sleep longer than 2 hours at a time. The nasty thing is it works and we are converted- seriously the coolest baby invention 😬😬

NEW TRICK!! 

Baby can balance!! She can't really sit up yet, but she is really good at balancing on our laps or if we put her hands out she will sit like a monkey for a while (until her head gets too heavy and she topples over 😂).

Baby LOVES to eat solids!!! She is a sweet potato girl 💕 She has also had carrots and bananas. She loves food too much to be picky so we haven't had any battles with her yet.  In fact, she only gets upset if we don't feed her fast enough.  

The walker is Baby Girl's favorite thing right now.  It plays annoying music and lights up, what is not to love??

It's hard to tell who loves to cuddle more, Baby Girl or her daddy.  Sometimes when she is upset, he is the ONLY one who can calm her down, I guess he has the magic touch.

5 months is so much fun! She LOVES to coo, sing and screech.  She is a wiggle worm who LOVES to play.  She is starting to get bored when there aren't toys or books around.  Bath time is her favorite because she loves to kick and see the water splashing around.  She is starting to sleep a little better at night again... HALLELUJAH 

She is SO happy most of the time.  Life is good, as long as she is not hungry or tired!

Christmas 2016

Baby Girl's First Christmas! 

We had a holly jolly Christmas despite the lack of sleep from our awful experience of getting back from Texas.  Seriously, another huge delay, red eye flight to Vegas and then driving from 5 AM to 10 AM to get to Spanish Fork for Christmas Eve.

(And for the record, Baby Girl didn't sleep well on Christmas Eve night. So we looked stoned in all of our Christmas pictures because we literally hadn't slept for over 48 hours.)

But we made it! Even if we were in zombie mode it turned out to be a perfect Christmas! This was the first time in 3 years that all of the Monroe's were together for Christmas so that was so much fun.  

But what really made this Christmas so special was having this little girl join our family.  It felt complete to have her and having a little one around made Christmas so much fun!

I guess Santa overlooked the fact that she had been naughty by not letting her parents sleep because he came and brought her a lot of presents.  But, she was more into the crinkling sound that the wrapping paper made.  

And she wasn't really feeling the mistletoe either...

She did love the Christmas decorations! The lights and shiny ornaments was made Christmas for her.

While she loved the decorations, I loved being with my little family and celebrating Christ's birth.  Because of Him I get to be with those I love forever, and that makes me so completely happy! 

FOUR MONTHS

Well. . . Baby Girl is a little older than 4 months (almost 5... whoops!) but I thought I would give ya'll the update anyways!

Baby L turned 4 months old in Austin, Texas.  This was her first time on an airplane and she was a CHAMP! Seriously a perfect angel the whole time.  She either slept or sang the whole way there and back, including all of our delayed time.

Baby L is 15 pounds, in the 69 percentile. 23 3/4 inches long, in the 93 percentile. And 17 inch head circumference, still rocking the upper 98 percentile.

The 4 month sleep regression hit her hard.  But we learned if we wrap her up really tight, turn on white noise (specifically the sound of a really loud vacuum), and place a baby doll next to her she will sleep tons better!

 

She absolutely loves to eat anything she can get her mouth on. She loves her babydoll and the sound of plastic crackling.  She can still roll from her tummy to her back and is really close to being able to roll from her back to her tummy!

Baby L is so happy most of the time and loves to laugh, sing, coo, and smile.

God Bless Texas

Nearly 24 hours of travel later, we finally made it to the blessed state of Texas!

Because Baby Girl was stubborn and needed a little help coming 3 days after her due date, she missed Meag's family when they were visiting over the summer. They were so excited to meet her and it was hard to tell who loved her most, Auntie Meag or the kids.   

 

There was no school, warm weather, family and lots and lots of food.  

It was the perfect vacation.

Originally we went to Austin to surprise family but we stayed for the food (kidding) but really guys the food in Texas is so dang good! 

 

While we were there we had the world family Round Rock Donuts, but it was nothing compared to Gourdoughs, which is a food truck right in the city of Austin.

Lots and lots of Tex-Mex, which was amazing! 

And what we were most excited for, Texas BBQ (sadly, we didn't take a picture). Keiton said that he thought he had tasted brisket before but it was NOTHING compared to the brisket we had in Texas.  Which makes sense because Keiton and Adam waited in line for over 2 hours at La Barbecue.

We were living the good life in Austin, even our experience at the movie theater was insane. 

We went to the dine in movie theater and with the touch of a button they brought us delicious food and would refill our Dr. Pepper.  Baby Girl slept and we ate our way through Rouge One. Even though I'm not a Star Wars fanatic, even I will admit that was one of my favorite movie experiences. 

One of my favorite parts of the trip was when Meag and I ventured out and had a girl's trip to Waco.  Home of Magnolia Farms and the birth place of Dr. Pepper.  This couldn't have been a more perfect place for me!

 

 

We were so sad to leave Meagan and her cute family.  They are so much fun to hang out with.  But our pants were getting tight so it was time to head back to our freezing reality.  Bummer. 

 

Aren't the McDavitt kids the cutest?

Are we there yet?

It has to get better now. . . We repeated that phrase MANY times on our what turned into our 24 hour travel down to Texas.  Seeing our awesome family, visiting Magnolia Market, eating Tex-Mex and real bbq, we had been looking forward to this trip for weeks! That was what we had to keep reminding ourselves as we went through this hellish journey.

We left at 2 PM, which gave us plenty of time to make our 12:45 AM flight.  Driving 5 hours down to the Las Vegas with a 4 month old baby, no problem, we just did that for Thanksgiving and Baby L had been perfect so we weren't worried.  Well Mother Nature had a different plan for us.  Keiton, who is from Star Vally, where it snows like 300 of the 365 days of the year said this was the worst storm that he has ever driven in :/

We barley got out of Utah County, when traffic came to a complete stop on the freeway.  We sat there for OVER AN HOUR and we didn't have any service so we had no idea what in the heck was going on. Let me tell you, that was the most annoying hour and when my road rage started raising.  We finally started crawling and pasted the culprits, a semi that had spun off the road and about 5 cars that got stuck.

The snow was hitting SO HARD, there were times when we finally got up to 40 miles per hour and let me tell you, we felt like we were flying. The roads were so bad, we counted over 75 cars that spun off the road.  Some crashed into rails, some fell into ditches and I was so sure we were going to be next. In fact, there was time when we started spinning. I was SO scared but luckily there were no cars around us and Keiton was calm in a crisis and corrected the car.  We were fine and Baby L was sleeping like a log in the backseat but, I cried for the next 30 minutes.  It was so hard, the roads were so bad we couldn't stop or else our car would get stuck, so we had to keep going at snail pace, passing so many cars/semi-trucks that spun off and were stuck.

Around Cedar City, right as the roads were the worst, Google Maps informed us that we would be arriving at 12:40 AM. Shoot. There was no way we were going to make it. We were beyond frustrated but we couldn't stop so we crawled on. Finally we dropped out of the mountains and the rain turned into ice.  The hatred I have for snow increased exponentially and we vowed we were NEVER going to drive in the snow EVER again.

Luckily Keiton speeds like crazy so we were able to shave off the time we would be arriving to 12:05.  There was hope.  We could do this if we ran like crazy.  We had it all planned out and we were ready to make this flight!  We pulled up, Keiton took care of the valet, I took Baby L and ran to security.  We rushed through, Keiton took Baby L and I ran down a flight of stairs, to the train that took us the terminal C, up a flight of stairs and all the way down the hall, to the very last gate.  Stupid Gate 26.  Out of breath, we reached the counter and there was no worker in sight.  What the heck, it was 12:30 in the dot, we had 5 minutes until they shut the doors. We made it, the plane was there, but did they load early?

We had to hunt down a worker but we found out our flight was delayed.  No notice anywhere, would have been good to know.  We sit down and every couple of hours there was an announcement "your pilot is stuck in a snow storm in Colorado but will be here in 2 hours."  2 hours would come and they would announce the pilot never left and would be delayed another 2 hours.  The annoying thing was they knew our flight was going to be delayed even longer because the stupid pilot wasn't even in the same state, but they NEVER told us until after we were supposed to leave.  Finally on the screen it said our flight was cancelled, they never came on the intercom to make an announcement. STUPID FRONTIER thought they could nonchalantly hide the fact we weren't getting on a plane.  Well we noticed, we all noticed.

I have NEVER seen so many angry people. We were all FROZEN (the LV air port doesn't believe in heating) sleeping on the nasty floor, we were tired and upset.  Frontier wouldn't do anything to compensate their cancelled flight.  Not a thing. They were not transparent the whole night and not accommodating. FRONTIER is literally the worst EVER. We ended up booking a panicked last second flight, that was so dang expensive.  But hey we were going to make it to Texas, even if it was the last thing we did.  

Our new flight took off at 8:30 AM.  After a long night, freezing cold and so unbelievably tired we got on the plane and we were on our way!! "It has to get better now." Right when we finished that sentence we hit some pretty bad turbulence.  Just our luck...

But somehow Baby L was PERFECT, the WHOLE time.  Singing and sleeping that whole time!  Even though it was the worst, scariest, and most frustrating experience of my entire life we saw so many little miracles.  The fact that Baby L didn't scream in the awful weather, or plane ride in itself was huge.  But when we went over to the Southwest counter to buy our tickets they needed Baby L's birth certificate.  Of course I don't travel with that.  So with no proof of birthday we couldn't get a ticket for her and we had to turn around and go back home.  BUT somehow I happened to grab her insurance card, which has her birthday printed right on it! I don't know how that happened but that was a HUGE miracle! Also the biggest miracle of them all, we made it safe and sound!  It made our arrival and seeing family that much sweeter! 

Moral of the story, Frontier is the WORST most unaccommodating airline ever and miracles happen! We are currently in the process of making memories in Texas, so stay tuned for the adventures to come!

The Year Without a Christmas Tree

Tis the season to be Jolly!

Ok so the last few weeks leading to finals are filled with projects, research papers and big assignments.  Lets be real, this time is crazy busy and sucks.  Well so does the sleep regression of our almost four month old which has conveniently popped up at the same time.  Joy to the world. . . Oh and if that wasn't enough Keiton has been SUPER sick this week.

This has been the toughest semester we have ever had and we are just hoping to pass our classes so we don't have to relive this heavy semester again!  Because of that, we haven't had time to go get a tree :/ I know pretty sad news.  When we told our Primary class they couldn't even comprehend it and this is basically the face they pulled haha

 

At first when another weekend came and went and the realization hit me that we won't have a tree for our cute baby's first Christmas I was sad.  But driving baby back and forth to my mom's house before and after class has given me a lot of time to reflect on the true meaning of Christmas and what the first Christmas was really like and I have decided there are worse things then not having a Christmas tree. (I mean look at that huge smile in her Christmas jammies)

If anything I think this Christmas has taught me that I get too wrapped up in the hustle and bustle of Christmas.  I start shopping the awesome deals on Thanksgiving and I worry more about having the perfect decorations, the perfect presents and somehow along the way I have squeezed out Christ as the main focus of Christmas.

President Monson taught "Because He came to Earth we can have joy and happiness in our lives and peace each day of the year! Because He came, there is meaning to our mortal existence." We have had the blessing to participate in the 'Light The World' initiative the Church has encouraged their members to be a part of.  That has been the sweetest blessing for our little family, each night we have had the opportunity to reflect on the life of Christ.  That has honestly made our Christmas season a lot more cheery and bright, despite having awful finals looming around us.

Even though we will for sure be getting a Christmas tree next year, when we look back at this first Christmas with our beautiful baby girl, I want her to know it was focused on Christ.  That we spent every possible moment we could with her even if that meant missing out on a few things.  I want her to know she is loved and that most importantly because of the love of the Savior we can be a family forever! I am grateful for the Savior's birth, life, sacrifice and love!

                                               Merry Christmas friends and family <3 <3   

 Love the Dockstader's 

 And our beautifully sassy edition!