Cole is here!

We are now a family of 4! Little Cole Alexander came as planned on July 2nd at 12:37 pm. He was a healthy 7 lbs 6 oz and 19.5 inches and all the staff at the hospital commented how much he looks like Matt.


All checked into the hospital:)

He has Matt's hair color, Matt's same cowlicks, Matt's nose, Matt's ears, Matt's darker skin tone......basically he is a little version of Matt!

Kendall is transitioning well to her baby brother. We are still working on the idea of being "soft." And whenever Cole cries she'll come to one of us saying "baby crying" over and over. She likes to give him hugs and kisses, hold his hands, tickle his feet and shove the pacifier back in his mouth whenever it comes out. Its fun to see her be a big sister.

Mommy-in-training

Kendall is getting ready to be "mommy's little helper" for when her brother comes. We bought her a doll (we call her CeeCee (sp ?)...a name we figued Kendall could say easily) about a month ago to help her get used to the idea that a little baby was coming. She didn't do much with her at the beginning but now she'll walk around with her and pat her back while saying "shhhh", or she'll wrap her up in a blankie, or give her a bath, or change her diaper complete with wet wipes, diaper cream and a newborn diaper.  But...with all those cute moments there are also times when she'll throw her down the stairs or chuck her off of the couch or shove random junk in her mouth....I guess we'll have to wait and see how she'll handle a real baby.

Taking care of CeeCee. Check out that sweet stethoscope we got at a garage sale for 25 cents!

Putting a diaper on Mr. Bear

Holding the bottle for her cousin Parker.

Getting ready for baby

Ok, Baby Deighton is scheduled to arrive here in 9 days...thats right, we're in the single digits:) I can now say that his nursery is  completely ready for him and all of our major projects around the house are as complete as they will ever be. So now if he decides to come a little early....I guess I will allow it!

New nursery wall color. No more obnoxious pink walls!

I have to do a picture for this crazy bedskirt I decided to make. (Since the picture isn't super clear, it just has 3 rows of grey ruffles.) This made my life horrible for about 3 days....maybe next time I should read the entire tutorial before I start cutting fabric, etc and realizing I completely missed an important step. Oh well, lesson learned.

Carseat and hospital bag (mostly) ready for "go time!"

Check that out, we even have some diapers for when the little guy comes home!

Kendall's room (used to be an office) complete with a big girl bed!

Matt did some built-in shelves for her closet!

A growth chart we made:)

A random shelf we just finished for our bedroom:)

Here is our last project yet to be tackled. You see that white smoke detector at the very very top? You know, the worst possible place to put a smoke detector? Well, long story short, it has been beeping for about 2 days now and we don't have a ladder (yet) to switch the stupid battery. I have climbed up on a chair and wacked it with an assortment of things but to no avail, it still beeps and mocks me. It looks like another trip to Home Depot is in our future....

Our latest projects

Since we moved into the house, we have been busy with all types of projects. We like the idea of doing cool projects but they always seem to be a lot more work than you think they would be....right?! So here's a list (accompanied with a few pics) of stuff we've been up to:)
1. Planted a garden. We feel like we had no idea what we were doing but some plants have already started to grow. We hope we can manage not to kill them....or dig them up, in Kendall's case.

2. Painted the swingset. The swingset the homeowners left was in good shape but the maroon color was fading and there was some rusty parts too. We decided to buy a few cans of brown Rustoleum spray paint and it looks awesome.
3.Fixed the kitchen sink (was not planned). So the night before Matt's parents came into town we found out that the gasket/putty to our sink had seen the last of its days and broke apart. This allowed water to drain into the cabinet below the sink rather than the pipes. Luckily, I decided to store all of our huge serving bowls right underneath that leaky sink. Those bowls were almost full to the brim meaning no water leakage anywhere else! The next day, Matt's dad took a look and fixed it right up!
4. Refurbished a dresser into sewing hutch. We bought this dresser off KSL a year ago. It worked just fine holding our clothes but gave everything an old musty smell (not huge fans of that). So we took a trip to Home Depot and voila! Now my sewing machine has a home:) The sewing machine can roll in/out, we can close the doors so its out of Kendall's way, and the drawers give me storage for fabric, etc!

fits nicely in this little nook!

5. Spruced up an old bookcase. We got this guy from one of Matt's friends for free! They we leaving for an internship 3 months earlier than expected and had to get it out. It had quite a few scrapes and scratches but a little Pledge goes a long way!

6. Fabric wall hanging. I've been wanting to do this for a long time and we were able to hash this whole thing out in one night!

There's a little belly shot too!

7. Picture collage. Got this idea from pinterest, of course. We got this huge frame from a garage sale forever ago and it was in pretty bad shape. Matt picked out the paint color and it turned out great. We have this up in our bedroom.

8. Picture for the little man's nursery. Also inspired from pinterest. This beast took a lot longer than I thought...  We'll hang it up once we paint the nursery.

And there you go!

On a quick note about this pregnancy (in case you wanted to know) I've been diagnosed with gestational diabetes again:(  Its a mild form but my doctor is monitoring me like crazy. I have to test 7 times a day to track my blood sugar. Sad, huh? Luckily, my levels from this last week were great so my doctor relaxed a bit. Now, I test twice-a-day for 5 days of the week and only 2 days are those crazy 7-times-a-day. My due date is exactly 2 months from today so I just keep telling myself that the end is in sight. Let the countdown begin!

Grandparents are coming to town

Kendall has definitely been a spoiled girl lately. Both of her grandparents were able to come spend time with her (and us of course) this last month. My parents came down for Easter weekend and got to watch Kendall "hunt" for Easter eggs and eat lots of candy. Mostly, Kendall would pick up the Easter eggs we had pointed out and wouldn't move to the next one until she had eaten all the candy inside. (Maybe she just didn't trust that mom and dad wouldn't steal the candy for themselves......smart girl!)
Here's some pics and a video of my dad playing with Kendall. (I don't remember my dad ever doing this thing to us but Kendall sure loved it!)

Holding her basket. The green things on her back are supposed to be wings but they wouldn't stay up right. oh, well.

About a week later, Matt's parents came into town. Matt's younger sister Randi was graduating from BYU and his other little sister Renae was receiving her endowments at the Provo temple. Busy weekend for sure but it was a lot of fun. Kendall really latched onto her Grandpa Deighton. Here's a cute video of them playing.

Randi graduated! I stole both of these pics off of facebook so thanks to those who put them up:)

A group shot outside the temple. Looking into that sun was brutal for the eyes!

House Baby!

Oh my goodness, this last month has been a roller coaster...not literally because that would be silly. But seriously, this month has been crazy. We bought a house! It feels weird to say that, but we really did buy a house. So lets rewind.
At the beginning-ish of March we were in the midst of house hunting. And it felt like we had seen/put offers on every single house in Utah county (not really but it sure felt like we had). So one day after work, Matt picks me up to go look at a house in Pleasant Grove with a separate 2 bedroom/1 bath apartment in the basement. It was a beautiful home but it was priced out of our original budget so I didn't think it was realistic for us. I had already moved on toward the idea of building a home while Matt was stuck on this Pleasant Grove house. After nearly a week of this, I thought what the heck, lets throw them an offer way below list price. They'll reject the offer and we can finally move on toward building a home. So that next morning, we threw in our offer and by that afternoon we were under contract for the home!
The next 2 weeks involved a home inspection, lots of packing, signing mounds of paperwork, a nervous breakdown or two wondering what the heck I was doing, and a moving party 3 days earlier than expected. (Thank you to everyone that helped in all the craziness!) And to top it all off, we were able to find an awesome little family to rent the basement who moved in mid-April.
After all is said and done, we are very happy with the new house. It has everything we were looking for plus a little more:) Enough talk, here's some pictures.

Kendall's favorite part of the whole house!

Just kidding, it's definitely a boy!

I obviously haven't updated this in a bit because we are definitely having a BOY...not a girl, like we originally thought. We had our 20 week ultrasound and asked our ultrasound tech to double check the gender because we were not very confident with the results of the 1st ultrasound (to say the least!). Within 3 seconds of looking our tech says that is 100% boy right there. And sure enough there he was making sure the whole world knew that he was definitely a boy. From our reactions, (Matt jumping around and screaming) she knew it was a suprise and asked us who did the 1st ultrasound. We told her and it turns out they know eachother, and this 1st ultrasound tech has been making quite a few gender mistakes lately and simply needs to retire. Wish I would have known that before we handed out that $45!

Anyway, what's done is done and we are excited to have a healthy little boy growing inside. Here are a few purchases/crafts I've done for the little man since then!

I bought the outfit on the left. The 2 onesies are ideas I tried to recreate from Pinterest.

This will eventually become a carseat cover. We need to buy another carseat. (We had to throw out Kendall's 1st one when I was in that car accident last year.) Once we have a carseat, I can sew straps right where they need to be.

And of course I had to buy little shoes. I couldn't help myself!

Kendall is officially 18 months old! She can now (legally) be in nursery at church.....and thats pretty much it. But she is a fast little bugger. When ever she goes somewhere, she is running. And it seems she is even faster when she finds something she shouldn't have.  Here she is helping mama make banana bread. (She loves to watch me cook.)

She is learning so much. She says ball, on/off, water, Jesus (which sounds a lot like "cheese"), cookie, and duckie. This video is during bathtime and Matt is trying to get her to say duckie. I tried "editing" out certain body parts so that is why my finger is moving up and down all the time...its the thought that counts, right?  :)

Here is one of our latest splurges from Costco. (The moose, not the baby.)

Kendall and her buddy Everett.

We like going to this jumping-gym-place down in Provo. Its free because Kendall is under 2 years old and I just follow her around trying to make sure she doesn't kill herself (which is harder than you think as you can see in this video). I love this video because she was super excited....before she fell. Note: She was completely fine after her fall. The ground is basically another trampoline so she didn't get a single scratch or bruise!

 

We haven't had much snow this winter, so here are some pictures I took before it all melted.

Here is a cute moment I found. Daddy and Kendall snuggles. Awwww.