Busy, Busy, Busy

I don't have much time, but I wanted to let everyone know that we are doing well. Whitney is now 3 weeks old and is a sweet baby. She loves to be held and cuddled as she sleeps, which would be fine if she was our first. i am spoiling her a little since the poor child doesn't even have a room or crib, just the pack n' Play in our room. At 2 weeks she was up from 6 lbs 11 oz to 7 lbs 4 oz, so she is getting lots of food, even though she is a quick eater. I am glad about that!
Abby had her last baseball game yesterday and did great, sadly a lot of this seaon was rained out or we missed because of our crazy schedule, but she loved it, anyways. Isabel continues to be herself, wearing dresses every day and very interested in everything. She loves Whitney. Sara also loves the baby and wants to hold her all the time. She just looks at her and laughs and laughs. She doesn't even mind if she is screaming, she hangs on. She has gotten louder, but she is doing better than I had expected.
Scott continues to work a lot, but is loving it. There has been a lot of drama as the FBI and BLM raided a bunch of people down where we are moving because they were selling artifacts they got off federal land. 23 people were caught, and a few days later a well-loved doctor who was arrested killed himself. A few days later another person did the same. The community is obviously upset, and there is already a lot of animosity against "the feds" so it is not a fun situation to move into. Scott was not involved in any way, but it still is hard. click here for some info, or visit www.ksl.com
I have been packing as much as I can considering the circumstances. I don't get a lot of sleep, but we are pulling through. I can't believe in 5 days I will be in my new house!! I keep waiting for something to go wrong, but hoping it doesn't. Our new house just needs a few last things but is basically done. This house is still working with the buyers, no major trouble although they have been a little weird with their requests.
I will post more pictures and things in a few days. tuesday Scott and I and Whitney are going to Monticello for the final walk through and I hope to take some nice pictures. After that we will be posting from our new home!

Baby Whitney

Here she is, finally! I was induced Saturday, the 30th about 3:00 pm. Whitney Hope was born at 9:11 pm. Things went pretty well, I am doing fine and not in any pain, just tired. We spent most of Friday waiting to be called in to be induced and that didn't happen. But it all worked out. Whitney was 6 lbs 11 oz, a tiny thing but is already showing some personality. She slept most of her first day, going 12 hours without feeding but she was fine. I should have been sleeping the whole time. Today she is much more awake and is eating constantly. She has figured out nursing quite well and I am hopeful that won't be a problem, except keeping the other girls off of her. All three have been very good, gentle and interested in their new sister, it will just take some adjusting to working around a newborn. We are glad Scott will be around for a few days to help.

Other big news is that we got and accepted an offer on our house today. We are cautiously optimistic about it. I don't want to get my hopes up, and we didn't make quite as much profit as we would have liked, but in this economy we are just glad it sold, and at the right time. Our house in Monticello is done June 23, we should close on this house June 30, so we will have to work all of that out. We are excited that things are finally coming together, just have a another crazy month until we can settle down in our new home. I will write more later, but just wanted to get these pics out to all of you! She has almost strawberry blonde hair, very light eyelashes and eyebrows so I am thinking she will stay light. All our other girls were dark so this was interesting to see when she came out.

New House Pics

We finally got some recent pictures of the house. Scott went down a few weeks ago but we used new cards in the camera and it is not uploading very well, so we will have to see what the problem is. Our builder took these today. The drywall tapers are almost done, and things seem to be moving along well. The pictures are of the great room, one end with the stairs and hall where we will have the couch and TV, etc, the other way is the kitchen, you can see the corner pantry. Then the outside, of course. They had to raise up the foundation, so hopefully we won't have 20 stairs. We might need to add some rocks or dirt later, but all this is better than flooding every spring. The builder is never going to do a basement in this development again. But we got ours, so we're happy.

Scott is working in Ferron (middle of nowhere, Utah. About 2.5 hours away) with another officer this week. It should be a busy Memorial Day weekend. Then he will be home on Tuesday night to have some time off, and we are hoping to have the baby. If she doesn't come on her own, we are scheduled sometime Friday afternoon to be induced, but I am after 10 other women that day, so who knows. If she decides to come sooner, I will have to get ahold of Scott and hope things don't go too fast. We have gotten a few things ready but it is hard with showing the house to get all the baby stuff out. We will keep it simple until we move. So no cute nursery pictures for this one. We have had quite a few people looking at our house, with more tonight and tomorrow, so I just spend a lot of time cleaning. Abby is done with kindergarten next week, and Isabel will have her Joy School graduation. They will both miss it, but I think we will keep busy with baby, packing, friends and everything else.

I have been monitored very closely with this baby after all my bleeding around 14 weeks, and everything since then has been great. No problems. The last ultrasound on tuesday said she was 7 lbs, 4 oz. so a good size. Abby and Isabel were 7 lbs 13oz and 7 lbs 14 oz, so that sounds about right for me. The older girls are excited and understand, but Sara does not get it. We set up our pack n play and she didn't try to climb in it, so that is a good sign. She says it's for the new baby, so that is also good.

Scott is liking his job, had a lot of action with people up in Boise, and has now taken his 4 wheeler to work with him. Such a rough job. We are both ready to live together again, only about a month we are hoping now.

Abby has been doing a lot of baseball and loves it. Isabel plays a lot with friends and is always sad about leaving them. Sara talks like crazy and wanders around. She loves to dress up "like a princess" and loves being outside, in the dirt. I am thinking a lot about doing a sandbox for her. The dirt down in Monticello is red, so that should be fun to wash off.

I have been fine with the pregnancy, it is just everything else I am juggling that is stressful. It has been pretty warm and that is not fun, but not much longer, and we gave in and turned on the A\C in the afternoons. Just wondering now when she will show up, but pretty sure it will be within a week! I can't really believe it!

hope all is well with you,

House Pics...Finally!

Scott was able to get a guy he works with to take these pictures for us. They started framing on Wednesday, and this was Thursday afternoon. On Monday(the 11th) Scott is planning on going down to see the house and make sure they rough in the electrical in the right places for us. He will also take a load of stuff down to a storage place in Moab so we can start with all that. I really wanted to go down and take the big girls to see it, but it is a really tough day trip. Hopefully we can take them down once before it's done so they can really see where we are going to live.

I will update on the rest of our lives later. For now we have just been crazy with all the regular stuff. We have had a few more lookers at the house, which is good. Scott is on his last 3 days in Idaho, then he will be home for almost a week, which will be great. After that he will work 10 days straight, right up to my due date, so hopefully this baby is like the rest and stays in forever. I have bought newborn diapers and other baby things we needed, so i feel sortof prepared...physically if not mentally at this point.

Scott and I celebrated our 7 year anniversary one state apart, but we are planning a date for next week.

Da Hole

Spectacular, isn't it??We hope to be able to post more exciting pictures soon. This is our hole with rocks in the bottom so our basement doesn't
flood every spring. They also raised the house up so we will have more light in the basement, but more steps up to the house. In the third picture you can see the top of the temple behind the dirt pile :)

Someday my Spring will come.....

The past weeks have been a tug of war between full-on winter and hints of spring. We keep attempting activities geared to Spring, but I don't know if it is ever going to come for real. This weekend has been full of Easter activities, although Scott had to work most of it. I still have eggs to dye in the fridge, but we'll do it sometime. We went yesterday to the city egg hunt, and the girls did quite well. I also gave them their baskets Saturday, since we try to reserve Sunday for actually thinking about the reason for Easter. We spent most of the morning in Tooele to see our niece Ashley be blessed, and then played with the family afterwards. We came home to see Scott off to Boise, ID where he will be spending the next month of his training. Hopefully we will see him a few days per week, but we are still not sure on his schedule.

A few weeks ago the girls and I went to Thanksgiving Point to the farm, and it was fun. We were showing the house and I needed to keep them out of it. They loved it, Sara is big enough now to walk and enjoy everything. She even liked the pony ride, which I am pretty sure she screamed at last year.

Isabel had a field trip to the Fire Station with her Joy School. It was nice and close. Afterwards we had a little birthday party at the park for her friend, Olivia. They did an Easter egg hunt on the playground, which everybody liked.
Abigail started practicing with her baseball team a few weeks ago. She is the only girl, and has the pink glove to prove it! It is Coach Pitch this year, and she loves it. A lot of our games are at 8 am, so I think we are in for a chilly season, but we can bundle up. Her team is called the Bobcats, and her coach seems really great.
Scott has completed his first area of Field Training in Ogden (where he was able to come home at night) and now goes to Idaho. When he completes that after 20 working days, he will mostly be down in his area by Monticello, but with another officer along to train. After that, he will be on his own, finally!! Scott applied for this job about a year ago, it seems to have taken forever to actually get where we are headed, but we are now in the home stretch. He really enjoys the job when he can be out in the mountains. The trainer in Boise wanted him to bring a helmet to ride motorcycles, sounds pretty rough :)

Our house in Monticello seems to be taking forever to get going. They found groundwater a little higher than expected and had some bumps with the foundation company down there, so our builder is using his own crew now to keep the cost down, but also puts our schedule back a few weeks. They hope to make up time during framing, but we really thought we'd be a month into this by now. So far we have a nice hole with rocks in the bottom. Hopefully everything goes smoothly after this. We have a picture, but it is on the camera Scott took with him, so I will post as soon as I get that.

The baby contiues to grow, and is being monitored closely. So closely that it is exhausting for me to make all the crazy trips to the doctor's 45 minutes away. We will figure out a system for these last 6 weeks. I feel pretty good. The baby kicks enough that I know she's alive in there, but not enough to drive me crazy. I have very few problems with the pregnancy side of it, for myself. It is stressful trying to figure out what to do since we still have no offers on the house, have so many things going on with school, Joy School, baseball, doctor visits, and Scott pretty much gone. But we will figure it out, one day at a time. We are all happy and healthy and can't complain too much. Hope all is well with you!

To Disney... and Beyond!

I figured it would be easier to just do pics in one post and write in another, considering I can never get the words next to the right pictures, anyways. So here is the latest from us:
Scott finally graduated from FLETC on March 2 and took a few days to drive home. It was very good to finally see him, and have him around. He did very well in his course and got awards for his driving and shooting skills. Not a suprise, but we are proud of him. I guess the instructor shouldn't have told him "no one can get up that hill, it's impossible." Scott did not love being in Georgia, but he learned a lot about being a Law Enforcement officer and all that that entails, like handcuffing, questioning people, and lots of other things I personally hope he never uses. He now has lots of cool toys, from fancy flashlights to a Tazer to a truck, so he is happy. I think he will be even happier when he is in Monticello on his own. He is now training in Ogden, and will be training with different people the next few months.
A few days after Scott got home, he and I drove down to Monticello to sign some things, pick colors, and look at a house similar to ours. It was a long day, 4 hours each way but it was good to be together. We picked most of our colors and agreed on them, and later finished picking our flooring closer to home. We are excited to get going on it all. Things have taken longer than we thought, but I think we are going to be digging a hole on monday, and pouring concrete on April 1.
On Sunday after Scott got home, we headed out for California. We stopped in Fillmore with Aunt Tafta to go to part of church, and then hit the road again. We drove to Barstow and stopped for the night. It was a good day of driving, we had packed all our food and the girls did well. The next day we got to LA, checked into our hotel early and then went down to the beach. Those are the first pics by the pier and with Sara by the puddles, and sand castle. Sara was afraid of te waves, but the girls loved it. Sara found the puddles and played in the sand. They all collected lots of seashells. After that we ate and walked to Disneyland to check how long it took. we also got our tickets without long lines. The next day was all Disney, and I have to say a lot of the rides are really scary for small children. But after a few misses, we had a lot of fun. Sara needed her nap, so she and Scott went back to the after lunch and I stayed and did a few other rides with the girls. Wednesday we had "lunch with the Princesses" which I had pre-booked. It was pricey but better than standing in the princess lines. Just the big girls and I went, since all the online reviews said it took a while. You get 3 course meal and 4 princesses come around to each table. The girls liked it, but didn't have a lot to say to them. We had a fancy dessert, that is the picture. The next day we went on a lot of rides the girls knew they liked. We got there early and left early, so the lines were not too bad. The kids were really good about waiting. Overall it was an exhausting but fun trip. We had a cool hotel with a kid suite. It had bunkbeds and a fold out couch, and a king-size bed for me and Scott. I booked everything in October, but it was all great and except for the really expensive food in LA, it was all good. The last night Scott took the older girls back to watch the fireworks show, and they really liked it. We drove back in one day and were happy to be home!
Now we are back to showing the house and all the regular stuff. Abby missed school a lot and is happy to be back. Scott is working and busy, but we get to see him at night so it's ok. Baby #4 is still kicking and growing and I can't believe I am 30 weeks and getting into the 2 week doctor visits. I am not that uncomfortable, but getting there. I still sleep fine, so that is nice.
We hope you are all happy and healthy!