Keeping Up With the Joneses

Right before Thanksgiving, Hannah made us this gratitude tree to work on. We did it for Family Home Evening and it was hilarious to see the things the kids were thankful for. Among my favorites: "my brothers (sometimes)"

Yesterday we took Myles to the doctor's office and while there I weighed McKay on the baby scale. He was 5 weeks and 3 days old and weighed 10 lb 9 oz! In three weeks he gained more than 2 lbs! It makes me so happy because my other babies always struggled so much to gain weight and so far we are off to a good start with this little guy. It takes away a lot of stress when you don't have to constantly be worrying whether or not they are starving to death! McKay is doing so great in every other way. He has started to smile which just melts our hearts. He smiled first at Mason which made Mason feel pretty special. He is still sleeping pretty well at night. He cluster feeds from about 6-9 PM and then usually I'm ready for a break and go take a bath or go to bed while Marshall stays up with him and occasionally gives him 2 oz of formula or pumped milk in a bottle to give me a break. Then Marshall usually brings him back to me at 11 PM to eat. I feed him, usually fall as...

We had a  great low-stress Thanksgiving this year thanks to the generosity of Marshall's parents. Thursday morning we drove down to Delta and stayed the day for a delicious dinner. That evening Marshall, McKay, and I drove back to Provo (I didn't want to stay overnight with a 3 week old) and left the 3 older boys in Delta to play with their cousins for the weekend. The boys had a wonderful time in Delta. We kept getting texts from their grandma telling all the fun stuff they were doing. They played lots of computer games, had a huge Nerf gun war, played at the playground, saw Santa riding the fire truck (Max even got to talk to Santa), and went to church. Marshall and I had a wonderful time too. I had been concerned about how I was going to get Christmas shopping done while being tethered to a nursing newborn in the middle of winter, but Marshall and I went out Friday afternoon and got it all done with very minimal stress. What a relief! We spent the rest of the weekend relax...