Morning People

This weekend, I wasn't feeling well, so Grant got up with Kendra and took care of her in the morning so I could stay in bed a little while longer. He commented how much happier she is in the morning--she's always a very pleasant baby but he noticed that she's more active and happy first thing in the morning (he misses that because she's always asleep when he leaves for work, because she is, in fact, the world's best sleeper).

I'm a night owl by nature but as a nanny-then-missionary-then-homemaker, I've learned that there is something magic about the morning hours and you can get about fifty times more done during them than any other hours of the day. So, I use them.

Grant however...

Well. I think that speaks for itself.

After bathtime

Bathtime in the Farnsworth household is a very grievous time. I'm not sure where we went wrong, because supposedly most babies love bathtime. But Kendra has pretty much decided that baths=death. And she reminds us of that by crying very loudly from the time she touches the water until we take her out. I won't take any naked, angry baby pictures, but luckily afterward, with a little love an assurance from Mommy, she comes right around

Don't you love that little towel/robe? We bought it at a garage sale for 25 cents. She's our cute little ducky.

I don't particularly have much of a story to go with this one, but Ashley insists that we include it. We took it because she was doing such a good job of sitting up in the crook of my arm. Such a good little sitter.
The day is clearly at hand when she will be able to sit up herself with no support. Sigh.

An introduction to crying

We've been trying really hard to get a picture of Kendra's adorable face that she makes right before she cries. It's really hard, though. She does it for just a brief second, in between making this face
And this one....
I think these sad pictures are so adorable. At the time it can be stressful, but we have learned what makes her cry and for how long. It turns out, she never cries for more than a few seconds. However, we as we were trying to take this picture, Ashley made a crying sound and Kendra went from zero to sixty in, well, no seconds. Ashley and I felt really bad. All we wanted was the lip curl, not a fully upset baby! Well, we might not make sad sounds again for a long time because we are traumatized. We like to think we have a very, very happy baby.

See that colorful mat behind her? I bought that when I had a loft bed so it wouldn't hurt my feet when I jumped off the bed. Who would have thought it would become the most useful thing ever for my children. It's soft-ish, textured a little, and there's friction so she can move around. And barf cleans up really easily. I think I mentioned before that Kendra has learned to roll from her back onto her stomach. However, to go from her stomach to her back she does this


Actually it's usually a slightly more aggressive superman pose, with arms and legs held high in the air. She'll hold that position for as long as it takes...minutes on end. I think she learned it while on the bed propped against a pillow of some kind. If you do that on an inclined surface you are likely to roll over. It also works in the middle of the room because if she does this (and she often accompanies it with an adorable little sigh) one of her parents will come roll her over. Ashley thinks she can roll onto her back, but I haven't really seen it. She definitely prefers others to do the rolling.

She's getting pretty good at eating peas and rice mush these days. And she loves squash. Tomorrow we are going to dry her on oatmeal mush. Mmmmmm. If she loves that, you'll know she's Daddy's little girl!

Catching Up

Grant and I were clicking through our photo archives and we decided to share a few beauts that somehow didn't make it here in a timely manner after they were taken.


We begin with the beginning of our family. This is when we got our marriage license (the thing you need before you get married and then you have to wait some period of time after to make sure you're not high or something when you decide to get married). There were 2 ladies helping people, and I ain't kidding 3 other couples got theirs from the other lady while ours was helping us! In our excitement of the moment, Grant whipped out his camera and snapped this shot. However, in the moment afterward everyone in the room yelled at us for taking it. I was seriously afraid they were going to confiscate his camera. We lucked out.


Ahhhhh. Our first summer together in our little honeymoon studio by Northwestern. So many good times! Getting accustomed to married life and enjoying the simple things. Like eating artichokes. in your pajamas.


Then there's the Farnsworth family reunion last summer. How did we miss that?! It was here I realized I was a married woman and had officially lost my ability to wear cutesy t-shirts with dinosaur prints on them. Even if they were only five dollars. This one went into the work out clothes drawer after this trip.

A few of our nieces. They're pretty awesome. Though they dote on Grant noticeably less since he brought a wife home, apparently.

While we were there, one of our nephews made himself Grant's shadow where ever he went. You might even say he was attached to his leg.

A little later, we got a tripod and tested it with this shot. Such a happy family!


I also had the priviledge of visiting one must-see for anyone who is associated with the Farns...
...the Rock Museum!

This really is a neat little shop. There's all sorts of cool things in there.

Then, there's my first (and mostly likely my last) attempt to make strawberry pie out of frozen strawberries.

While it gets an A for taste (come on, strawberries and sugar in between 2 crusts?), it looks awful. Oh, well. Grant still enjoyed it.

And speaking of food, we replaced the waffle iron our friend moving out of town gave us with this.

Seriously, I'll be making waffles for my grandchildren with this bad boy. We had to make an extensive search for an iron that didn't make Belgian waffles (with the large squares, this one's got small squares). Perfect for my grandmother's french cookie recipe!


And what could be in this box, you ask?


Our video camera! We've been making good use of it, no?

My visiting teacher threw me a lovely baby shower at the end of January--thanks again ladies, it was so much fun! I have used or will use all of this!


When my belly got to the right size, I was able to preform some amazing tricks. Here's one of them.
Yes, we definitely had ourselves some fun with that belly.

Our last shot is another exciting moment for our family...we took this one on the way out the door to go to the hospital to have Kendra. We were hoping to be parents 24 hours later. We only had to wait another 36 hours after that. Meh. She was totally worth it. Good times!


We have so much fun keeping this blog--we hope you all have fun keeping up with it too!

Toeses are roses!

Yes, "toeses". (Don't worry, I hadn't heard of where it came from either.)

They are Kendra's favorite new toy.

Though she has figured out to smile when we pull out the camera...and make goofy faces at her.

Sometimes, she makes goofy faces right back.


Doesn't that just crack you up?!

In other news, we acquired some new baby food to try. After rice cereal (and small pieces of our fruit bars and maybe even a taste or two of jello) the first real food she had was peas. Because that's what someone who had some baby food they never used gave us.

However, she was less than impressed with her first tastes of it.

We're hoping this doesn't rule out all hope of liking vegetables altogether. Then we realized it was probably pretty nasty to just give her a straight up spoonful. She tolerates it MUCH better when just a dab is mixed in with her rice cereal.

However, whether she eats her veggies or not, at the end of the day, she's still our sweet, smiling, darling little girl.

Oh, how we love her so!

For the record, that's the outfit I had her in because that's what the temperature outside dictated. In the middle of July. With long sleeves.

Eatin' it up...

Kendra has recently started eating rice cereal. Very fortuitously for us, a friend in the ward was moving away and had a high chair among a few baby items to give away. As it's the perfect timing, I snapped that thing right up! I was amused by how small she looks in this huge honking chair...but then I remember that she is only four months old.


She's picking it up very quickly, though. And she gets quite enthusiastic about it as she reaches out and seems to want to give a go herself...


Though that ain't sayin' much as she pretty much puts anything she's able to pick up right in her mouth. And if she can't pick it up to put it in her mouth, then she just swoops down to put her mouth to it!

We have some fun with it.

Though I have learned that we don't have enough of 2 things: bibs and wash cloths. We can just barely make it through a whole week--but that's only because these first couple of weeks we're only doing it once a day.

We have a special toy for "Sleepy Time" and she only gets it when it's time for a nap or to go down for the night. She's Lilly Lamb and she was a gift from my great-aunt Susanne. Kendra loves Lilly Lamb--when I hand it to her she takes her and nuzzles her face into the soft fur. This week I went in to check on her and found her like this.


All cozy with Lilly Lamb. I've seen her start to rouse from sleep and reach out for Lilly Lamb and pull her close and konk right back out. Pretty sweet.

And speaking of sleeping habits--does this face remind you of anyone we know?


No lie, I've seen her sleep with her eyes open too. I'll be sure to grab the camera next time I notice it.

But no matter how she sleeps, at the end of the day, she's our darling little girl.

Happy Talk

When my dad was here visiting us a couple of months ago, Kendra showed us a brand new trick by starting to coo. By now, she's really got it down pat. In fact, she loves the sound of her own voice. It's her favorite toy when Mommy or Daddy aren't in her line of sight to keep her entertained.

This morning Grant was doing his morning perusing of the Arachnoboards and I was making him pancakes in the kitchen when I took this little video. It's such a good example of what she does--all. The. Time.

But only if you're not looking at her! As soon as she catches your eye, she stops to interact with you. But look away...and it's a little more of this...

Mind you, no one's playing with her or interacting with her in any way. Grant's got his back to her and I'm in another room and she's just going on and on like this for-ev-ER.

Hilarious! Well, it cracks us up at least.

The Sweetest Thing

We've actually seen this (and better and longer) several times--but this is the first time we successfully captured it on camera!

Sorry about my feet ruining the visual aesthetics of this video...

Going mobile

We've mentioned that Kendra can roll--but I finally have PROOF! Just when I was about to give up on her doing it for the camera, and stop recording--BAM!

I decided not to trim the video because it gives you a really good example of what a sweet, pleasant baby she is, and I deemed that worth posting. And besides, it's only 2 minutes of your life and no one's forcing anyone to watch it.

But basically, she's the coolest. And this is proof.

Nice Day for an Outing

A Farnsworth-Sized Trip

We are usually serious home bodies (we kind of freak out when we look at relatives' blogs and they are always out traveling and hiking and stuff), but the weather went from hot to amazing this week, so today we decided to take a little outing as a family to a small park that we call the rose garden.


We had the idea of having Kendra sniff the flowers and get lots of fun pictures as we expose her to things outside of our house (we are trying to expand her horizons). Alas, this is what the trip was like for her


She loves that carseat. Still it was a wonderful little outing, and this was one of the first places Ashley and I visited when we got married (we walked there from the little studio we were living in at the time), so it brings back a lot of nice memories. Life is so different now, but in the nice ways, it's very much the same.

Here's a picture of us when we went last year. We look so young, don't we?


This was also one of the first times we've taken our sweet camera outdoors. We had lots of fun photographing the fountain with our sweet, sweet camera. Long shutter speed and the water looks all silky, really quick shutter speed and the apparent stream of water shooting up is seen for what it is...a bunch of individual drops.

Actually you have to have seen what a solid stream this looked like in real life to really appreciate it. Oh well, we were there and appreciate it, and that's what counts.

Kendra News

Kendra has been making several significant developments. One of the most noteworthy is that she has learned that she has feet. They are pretty much her favorite toys now.


The other big news is that she has learned to roll over and loves to do it all the time. That is, she can roll from her back onto her stomach. We have yet to see her roll from her stomach back onto her back. Actually it's quite a problem at the moment because she will roll onto her stomach at night and then wake up and cry because she doesn't know how to roll back and doesn't like to sleep on her stomach. I guess she couldn't be the perfect sleeper forever. Hopefully she will learn that she can roll back to her back soon as well...that way mommy and daddy can go back to sleeping through the night!

Mischeif

She's only 4 months old, really.

Oh my Gosh!

Just 10 minutes ago I witnessed a crime out my window. A guy totally broke into a car and stole something out of it. A radio or GPS or something and then ran off. It happened so fast it was amazing. I tried to look casual as I walked over to the window and looked at him, but I was totally gawking. He freaked out and ran off with whatever he stole, after dropping it and running back for it.

Then I called the police. Can you believe it? Our car was parked across the road. Never leave a GPS or anything else of value visible in your car.

Dude, it was right in front of my house! Right across the street from our car!

More Good Parenting

Today I was at the library to pick up a book for Grant and there was a huge line of people waiting to check out books. When I took a closer look at the throng, though, I noticed that it was all large groups of Moms with kids so it was moving fairly quickly. Kendra was being her usual adorable self looking around at anything and everything with a huge flower on her head and cooing to boot to really win on-lookers affection.

I heard, "Look at the baby!!" about 40 times in 5 minutes.

In front of us was a woman with a son about nine or ten or so. She saw Kendra and said to her son, "Look at the baby!! Look! You used to look like that, you know."

The kid stopped fidgeting and took a good look at Kendra, who peered back at him.

"I used to have white stuff all over my face?"

I had her in the Moby Wrap, which doesn't give the wearer the best view of her face and she had barfed all over herself without my notice. Awesome. I didn't have a cloth with me, but was only 60 degrees here today so I wiped her face with my long sleeve to make due--just call me the "Human Kleenex".

Parenting: FAIL!