2 weeks old!

Can you believe that it has been 2 weeks since my baby was born?? I sure can't! We had my mom here for the first week, and I have been flying solo with 3 kids for the other week. Yikes!

I did have some fun today and took pictures! Isn't she just the cutest thing??

My baby was born today, September 20th at 10:51 a.m. She was 9 pounds 7 ounces and 21 inches long. She has a ton of dark hair. (I guess the old wives' tale about heartburn really paid off in this instance!) She was born at home in a birthing tub. She is only about 5 hours old now, and I feel really good. My water broke at about 6:30 a.m. It really was a beautiful morning here. Right now, I am watching a thunder storm cleanse the earth...I love the rain.

Evie and Henry were really good to me during the birth. They kept coming over and stroking my hair and giving me hugs and kisses. Evie got scared when the baby started to crown because I was yelling, but we coaxed her out of her room and she was able to watch the birth with Henry. Nathan, my mom and my midwife and my kids were the people that where there. Nathan was great. He stayed calm and held my hand and rubbed my back and whispered that he loved me.

Today is the day!

Well...today is the day! We are scheduled to close on our new house at 3 p.m. I am totally excited, and a little nervous as well. Not only will we be moving to a new house, but it will be a completely different environment than we are used to. For one thing, we will have a yard! I don't know what my kids will do with themselves! We are also leaving the church group we have been in for 5 years, which is exciting, but also a bit scary as well. I was told by my very observant daughter that not only does she have to make all new friends, but so do I. Too true. I hope we can find and make some friends in the neighborhood that will make us feel welcome and won't be too judgmental. I always worry about how people are going to respond to the sight of my daughter's very prominent facial birthmark...even though we are getting it treated and it is looking so good in comparison to what it started out as! I guess every mother is overly protective in her own way, and this is mine. I hate it when new people ask, "What is wrong with your daughter's face?" To this question I generally have 2 initial reactions, neither of which I act on. The first reaction is to punch the person in the face. The other reaction is to ask them, "Nothing, but what is wrong with your brain?". As satisfying as those reactions would be, at least one of them could land me a night in jail, so I generally opt for the polite approach of calmly explaining about her birthmark and the subsequent treatments. It's really amazing to me how judgmental and rude people can be.

Anyway, wish us luck on our closing. We have been completely debt-free for a week now...no mortgage, no student loans, no car payment...so now we will have a mortgage again, albeit a relatively small mortgage...but it was still nice to feel like we had no financial obligations and a huge chunk of money just sitting in the bank gathering interest. :)

Tori and Dustin

I spent last weekend in Idaho and Washington. I flew up to Spokane in the morning the day before my cousin's wedding and spent a lot of that day running around with my aunt and cousins and then taking Tori's bridal portraits that evening. We left the house at 7 p.m., tried to break into the project office where we were taking the portraits, and ended up having to have Tori change into her gown out in the great outdoors. We only were able to shoot for about 1/2 an hour, but we got some pretty nice shots all the same. Click here to see one of my favorites.

The day of the wedding was pretty hectic, but the wedding was wonderful (of course) and we had fun shooting more pictures! Here are 3 of my absolute favorite shots from the temple:

We found it!

Even though I don't want to jinx this whole process, I am just so excited I can't contain myself from shouting it to the world...We found our new home!!! It has been such a long and exhausting process I was starting to give up hope. We seriously looked at close to 40 houses before we found this perfect gem!!! It isn't even a house we had on our "list" to go look at. It is one of our agent's listings and since Nathan and he were in the area looking at another house, they popped by for a little look-see. Nathan loved it and decided that I needed to go see it, too. It is perfect. It has nice high ceilings and is very open and airy with lots of windows and natural light streaming in from everywhere! I am sooooo addicted to light that this is a very good thing! The basement is unfinished, but that is okay. I figure Nathan and his dad would implode if they didn't have a project to do! :) The basement is amazing, even though it is unfinished. It has 10 foot high ceilings! In the basement! There is even a little cubby room that will be perfect for food storage!

Here's a pic of the outside:

Such a grown up!

Yesterday during Primary, my 3 1/2 year old gave her first real talk! On the first Sunday of this month, she decided that she wanted to give a "talk" during Testimony Meeting. She went up to the front and sat with her Daddy until the end and then he prompted her what to say. She did really well...it was pretty cute. Then, she decided that she wanted to give the talk during Primary. Of course we had all week to prepare, but I forgot all about it until Saturday night at about 9:30! Daddy wrote her talk for her on Sunday morning, and they practiced together until she had it all but memorized by the time we had to leave for church. She did really well when she was up in front of the Primary actually giving her talk. I asked her if she was scared and she said, "No." She is growing up so fast! Sometimes it makes me a little sad! But I am so proud of her and how brave and smart she is, so it pretty much cancels out the little bit of sadness I feel when I think about my baby growing up!

I love Liberty Park!

Today I had a photo shoot with a family that I had shot twice before. It has been so fun to see them go from excitedly awaiting the birth of their baby to seeing their baby at 6 months old and now to see their big boy at 1 year old. We shot at Liberty Park. We stuck to the south side of the park near the pond, but we got so many cute shots! With a park as big as Liberty Park we could have spent hours taking pictures all over the park, but I am very pleased with the 45 minutes that we spent and the pictures that we got. It was so much fun.

Here are a couple of my favorites: