This & That...

I feel like my blogs have been quite a melting pot of things-I guess that's what we are experiencing right now in life! Aaron's new job has gone well so far-he really enjoys the short 5 minute commute, nice coworkers, and most of all, a nice paycheck! Who can complain right?
I am enjoying the longer-daylight, 24 pound weight-loss so far, and my new calling teaching the 11 year old primary class.

Yes, we get to gaze into those sweet eyes every day, jealous? She's 6 months old, has one tooth, weighs around 16 pounds, sleeps well at night, rolls over willingly, and is in the 95% for her age in height, 60% for weight! She must be our baby!

Izzy is becoming quite the big sister. She loves getting reactions out of Olivia lately, they are having a blast as sisters!

Grandpa has made a few visits lately doing some handy-man work. I love that he'll take a few extra minutes to be goofy grandpa to his growing grand-daughters!!!

Izzy has 3 neighborhood boyfriends she has play-dates with every Tuesday. When we hosted it in March, they made fruit-loop rainbows using paper plates, white frosting, and you guessed it...fruit loops!

Aaron and I have a date-night co-op set up every Friday night. We take turns with 2 other couples dropping all our kids off at one house while the other 2 couples have a date night! For our time hosting in March, I gave all the girls pedicures!!! They absolutely loved it!!!!!!!

Hope all of you are having a great month, we are excited for what's to come in April--

General Conference

Spring Break from teaching

Adam arrives!

Family photos with warmer spring weather!

Lately...

Lately... Olivia has been smiling up a storm. We are all competing for her attention!

Lately... Isabelle is obsessed with taking over Mommy duties at bath time...

...Even when she's sporting a big--fat--pink--eye.

Lately... Izzy has been feeling a lot better and has been taking her favorite baby for some strolls.

Lately... we've been getting Izzy ready for her preschool photos coming up on Thursday!

Lately...Aaron and I are still working on our diets. Each of us have almost hit 20 lbs lost!! We're excited for spring, warmer weather, and watching the final season of LOST!!!

2010: New Year, New Stuff!

Yay! We are so excited to be in a new year! Although 2009 was very successful with Aaron's College Graduation and Olivia's healthy birth, and celebrating 8 years together, it's always fun to start a new year and look ahead at what can be accomplished! Here's to 2010!


Aaron is excited to be a full-time RN at the V.A. hospital in February. This hospital is going to be a great fit for Aaron. He did his capstone work there and it's only a few minutes from our house. Aaron might even brave the commute with his bike in the summer! Congratulations to Aaron!

"BEFORE PHOTOS"

Aaron and I are participating in a "biggest loser style" family weight-loss challenge. These are our ever-so-motivating before pictures. (I'll spare you the full body-shots) So far both of us have lost almost 10 pounds and are discovering new things to eat for dinner and to snack on during the day. We are getting our money's worth of our gym membership and we are both excited to continue towards our goals!

Isabelle

I feel guilty not posting about our girls. Isabelle is doing well. She is a new Sunbeam at church, seems to be making a new friend a week, and is working on getting dressed by herself in the morning. She's trying to learn her numbers & letters a little better and she has started to "read" books to Olivia.

Olivia

Sheis our little queen. She is absolutely adorable and is starting to discover that her voice can make other noises besides a cry. She laughs, smiles, coos, grumbles, yells, and make anyone melt. Her hair is starting to lighten a little, but she's still considered the brunette of the family.

Bless-ed Olivia

January 3 2010 Aaron blessed Olivia Claire Norton in our ward sacrament meeting. We are so thankful that Aaron was able to perform this sacred ordinance and many family members were able to participate. Thank you to those of you who took the time to support our family!

Olivia wore the same blessing dress as Isabelle did way back on August 5 2006. That seems SOOO long ago! Grandma and Grandpa Kunz were excited to be a part of both blessings and Grandma & Grandpa Norton were so nice to give a special blessing bracelet to both girls for their special day. Olivia was a dream during the blessing and the whole day was a huge success!

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Christmas 2009 has been so much fun!!! We are excited that Izzy and Livi were good girls all month and had a visitor on Christmas Eve bring them gifts galore!

When we got home from Grandma Kunz's house on Christmas Eve, we noticed Santa's elves had left the girls one gift each to open on Christmas Eve!!

Christmas Pajamas!!!!

I have to brag about Izzy, she took this photo! Talk about photographer in training!!!!

The whole fam ready for Santa's visit!

Izzy left a treat for Santa and Livia thought it looked really yummy!

Christmas morning! Gifts everywhere, smiles, bed head, what more could you ask for?

Mmmmm yummy ribbon!All of us on Christmas at Grandma Kunz's. Santa was good to us all this year. Thank you to the North Pole!

Ode to Olivia

Our Lovely Little Livi

Olivia turns 3 months on the 18th. She's as adorable as she looks!

Friends, Fall, and Fresh Snow!

Wow how time has flown by! I'm sorry if you've been watching for a blog update only to be dissapointed for a while! Here are some photos of what we've been up to lately. Our lives has been a little crazy, hopefully things are going to get better this week-we'll keep everyone posted. For now, enjoy these pictures. I'm also going to be a really good Mom this week and actually take pictures of our cutie pie-Little Livi. Sorry for the lack of them in this post. You'll see if you scroll down the reaction Izzy gets when she's not the one posing for the camera.

Love you all!
Izzy and I enjoy our ward playgroup. This was a beautiful November day that we were lucky enough to enjoy with friends and fall colors!

I'm sure everyone has a picture like this. You don't think the leaf is ACTUALLY going to end up in front of their face-and then it does. Typical!

This is Izzy's new best friend, Lizzie. They are two peas-in-a-pod. They will be sunbeams together in Primary in just a few weeks! This past Sunday they got to sit in Primary during singing time and I was told they held hands while walking into the primary room, sat next to each other, yelled their little hearts out to "sing" and left smiling. Wow she's growing up!!!

How cute are they with their matching sweatsuits and holding hands?

Izzy and her ever growing baby sister. Little Livi is just starting to debut her smile and laugh to those that she meets. She's also sleeping through the night most nights-It makes me feel like a new woman! Thank you Livi!

One of her first smiles-adorable!

What I mentioned earlier. Izzy's response when Mommy tries to get one half-decent photo of her sister. POOOOOOR IZZY! Look at that lip!

Here's Izzy showing us her candy house she made at preschool. She ate almost all the candy off of it in the car on the way home from school. Aaron was dissapointed that the actual cone-shape was made of paper and not more candy-dang it!

Welcome snow! Izzy and her friend Caiden made snow angels in our backyard. Caiden lives a few houses down our street and has been a really fun friend for play-dates!

Pink Puffs!

Izzy and Caiden posing on their sled next to their "SNOW QUEEN." Notice the queen's tiara.

We hope everyone is having as much fun in the snow as we are! And if you live somewhere without snow, I'm sure you're soooo jealous of our snow queen and snow angels right???

Bring on Christmas!

This is Halloween, oooooo!!!

(if you want to skip the text, scroll down for a couple pictures and videos)


As with most blogs I've visited lately, Halloween seems to be the theme. We are now jumping on the same train-here is our Halloween blog 2009. Isabelle was a beautiful lavendar princess this year. Her dress and hat framed her beautiful princess face and flowing blonde curls so well. She looks absolutely adorable. She even would walk like a princess when she had it on by keeping her hands in the air-as if someone was about to kiss the top of her hands and she would walk with her eyes closed. Don't know which disney princess she learned that walk from, but it was so cute to watch.

On Halloween Aaron and I always have the best and biggest intentions of "going all out" but it always seems to happen so fast and the going all out ends up being a missing out instead. This year was no exception. We had a great laid back day with newborn Livi and didn't try and do any big outings and opted for a Izzy to take a big healthy nap to keep her a pleasant princess. Her nap didn't begin until 3ish and ended about 5. When she woke I was prepared to feed her a healthy chicken tetrazzini meal which we enjoyed while Aaron was busy working on his vampire transformation. After slurping the last noodle we decided to get ready for trick or treating. During the 2nd curling iron curl in her hair, the madness began. The doorbell rang, my halloween shirt was still drying in the dryer, my make-up had yet to be applied for the day, Aaron was half-vampire-half-daddy, our treat bucket hadn't been prepped, the rootbeer cauldron sat in the kitchen waiting to be filled with dry-ice chilled witches brew, livi slept soundly during this crazy 30 minutes (thank goodness!!!). After the first ring of the doorbell I opted to let go of my dream of having izzy trick or treat with adorable ringlets and strapped her princess get-up on her and sent her out the door with her blood-sucking daddy. The door kept busy while I decided to wear my half-damp halloween shirt anyway and draped a glitter infested cape over it, a black wig on my saturday hair, and balanced a witch hat on top of that. I felt bad for some of the trick or treaters that carefully rumaged through our treat bowl while Livi was in my other arm scaring them with her "screaming pea-pod" costume (it was a bit traumatic, no pics of that part of the night-sorry!). The treat of the night for me was seeing Izzy and Aaron come home after making their rounds for treats and her delight in what she had in her bucket-her favorite treat of course was the candy wand she scored-fitting for a princess!

Don't you feel special when your child waves at you from afar? Izzy was adorable during her preschool program for Halloween. We've been singing the Halloween songs she's learned there all month and to my surprise, my Mom was having dejavu since Izzy attends the same preschool I did!!! I had no idea!!!


Izzy led the way with her preschool class parade!!!! She did a great princess wave and blew a kiss to all her fans!

Have you blogged Halloween?

Check this out

Christmas cards will be coming soon, click on "the dotted line" to get started!!!!
------------------> --------------->-------------->

What are little girls are made of?

Sugar and Spice, and everything nice. Right? We are 6 weeks along with baby Olivia and so far I've been a good, bad, and ugly Mom, or sometimes a down-right witch! I wish I could be a time traveller (btw, saw the movie last night, 2 thumbs down!!!) and talk to myself before I had kids and when I had newborn Isabelle and tell myself to revel in the good moments. Ok I'm trying to be a good writer here and it's going nearly as well as my sisters blog sound (http://www.trueblueskies.blogspot.com/).

Top 10 Sugar & Spice moments of week 6

10. (High) Waking up Monday morning and realizing I had only been awoken once between midnight at 5 by Olivia in stead of twice, great feeling!

9. (High) Watching Olivia be an absolute angel for her visiting grandma and grandpa Norton for 3 days.

8. (High) Having 2 meals provided for me this week.

7. (High) Watching Isabelle prance through the newly fallen snow in 2-sizes-too-small boots but loving every minute of it.

6.(High) Watching Izzy in her ADORABLE preschool Halloween parade and program.

5 (Low) Realizing she wasn't singing her program songs due to the piece of gum she demanded and was chewing from earlier that morning.

4. (High) Loving the fact I got her costume for $5 from KSL.com and that she actually didn't mind the chin elastic to keep her hat on-miracle!

3. (High) Getting my hair cut and colored.

2 (Low) Coming home from getting my hair cut and colored and looking in the mirror-I really had her hack off a lot of length!!!!

1. (Low) Racing out the door Friday night when Aaron returned from work after one of the hardest days and lowest points of my parenting years thus far. I needed to get away, asap, for everyone's sake. I went and got myself a smoothie, a long quiet drive, and a dollar movie and came home much calmer and thankfully the house was calm as well.

6 weeks has brought extreme highs, and extreme lows. For the first time this week, Olivia only woke up once for a night feeding, helping me feel extremely energized the next day. She also experienced for the first time staying awake an entire 16 hour day-resulting in me holding her the entire day or not holding her and listen to her scream-not exaggerating! Maybe these two changes are related-asleep more at night, and awake more during the day-ok yes I'm sure they are related. What has been so hard for me this week is feeling so much better physically, but having that energy be drained so quick by Olivia during the day. It's almost as if she's allowing me to prepare for the day with more sleep, because she knows I'm gonna need it! Could that be? It seems babies are so aware of what mommies are doing-always squirming awake after finally falling asleep when Mommy's head finally sinks into a pillow, or choosing to have her cute moments when company is around, or getting away with sitting on my boppy pillow as we speak right next to me so I can write this without her crying as my soundtrack.

I know this sounds like a vent-post, and I'll freely admit that it is.

Bring on Halloween!!!!! (I have adorable pictures/videos from Izzy's Halloween program I'll post after all the Halloween festivities are done, stay tuned!)

Month One

We made it to 1 month!! I have to say we are very lucky to have Olivia in our family. She has been a good baby-no surprises compared to our experience with Isabelle as a newborn. Isabelle has done well with another child in our family. I haven't noticed major changes, just my patience is tested a lot more from the lack of sleep!!! I don't have 2 hours anymore to convince Isabelle to take a nap every afternoon so instead she goes to sleep a little earlier on those days-which is a great alternative to no nap! Olivia has done well with what newborns do best-sleep and eat (and pee and poop). She does all of the above as she should-as if you really wanted to know that I'm sure!

We are doing our best to keep the germs/flu viruses out of our house. It's tough when I have 20 families coming into my home every week for violin lessons, Aaron's working around illness at work, and Isabelle is at preschool every week. Although these three germ-fests are among us, I wouldn't give up any one of them for anything!

Olivia Claire-1 month "photo shoot"

almost snagged a smile on this one!

She's very alert when she's awake now, so fun to watch her grow!

Her best furrowed-brow look...

I think this was a grunt from Olivia-not a smile-but it almost looks like a smile! Isabelle looks adorable as always!

Week One

Well Aaron and I made it through our first week of parenting 2 children. It's definitely been a tough week but also one we've been wanting to have for a long time! Isabelle is adjusting pretty well to having Olivia around-Izzy's naps are becoming more sparse, but it least Olivia naps lots to make up for it! So far Olivia has been having a pattern of a good-night, bad-night, good-night, bad, night, etc. Last night was another bad night, but she slept until almost 11 this morning giving Aaron and I a chance to make up for the 2+ hours lost of sleep in the middle of the night. Poor Izzy watched a couple movies while we caught up on our sleep.

I've had help from family, Christel, and ward members taking care of Izzy and bringing meals and cleaning, does that have to stop? Olivia is awesome, we love her very much!

After one week. She's now starting to have awake time-without eating!

The proud sisters!!!!!!!!

The4Nortons!

It's official!!! We are a 4-member family! Here a few pictures from our eventful weekend! Olivia Claire Norton is perfect and we are so excited to have her here with us. She arrived on Friday, September 18th at 5:45pm weighing 7 pounds 6 ounces and stretching out to 21 inches long.
On our way to the hospital for my scheduled induction. We made a pit-stop at Grandma's house to drop off Isabelle.

Olivia Claire and all her gorgeous dark hair. She looks ridiculously like Izzy did at birth, who knows what she'll look like in a week-they change daily!

Dad and Olivia. He did the "catching" again this time during delivery and was such a great support during all the contractions & progression to the big moment. Love you babe!

My swollen self and my sweet sleeping baby. She's such an angel and is a great nurser-such a relief! I can't say the same about Izzy so I was very nervous about what it would be like the 2nd time around!

Can you figure out Isabelle's opinion about the arrival of her baby sister? Just a tad bit obvious!!!! We are all elated!!! We hope she can meet you soon!