Super September 2014

Look who's been growing?! She has been sleeping about 7 hours a night lately. Jordan jokes that she makes us want 5 more babies because she's so good!

I love watching my babies sleep - I also love her few random strands of long hair on the back top of her head :)

Lexi has started to laugh! Her first laugh was when Jordan had a 2 day old scruffy beard and was kissing her cheeks. She is very ticklish. She is getting better control of her arms but it's still very random. She will push herself up when on her tummy, but doesn't seem to have any interest in rolling over yet. She loves to put her fingers in her mouth. In fact, she refuses pacifiers now since she prefers her fingers. She totally lights up when I get her out of her crib in the morning and she also has lots of smiles for her sisters and daddy. 

Lucy loves to play with Lily's favorite toys while she's gone at school :) Not her "special toys" of course. We let each of them have just 1-3 "special toys" that are their own, everything else, including birthday presents, they have to share. 

Lily reading to Lexi while waiting for me to gather everything together in the morning. 

Lucy refuses her naps but sometimes is still very tired. So every now and then I find her laying on the floor under her blanket. Usually it starts as a place to hide and suck her finger when she's tired and then she falls asleep. 

We went camping! The "we" in that sentence is debatable. We went with some friends to Lake Monroe to get some last wave runner time in this season. We didn't get there until about 5 pm on Friday night and the water was already pretty cold but the kiddos still insisted on swimming in the lake. 

Happy Helper

Lexi Hair Watch. Looks like we'll have another mullet baby in the family.

The official tent supervisor. 

They were all shivering by the time they got out of the water but there were no regrets!

The fabulous Lifferth Ladies

Lucy's first S'more!

We were up so far past Lucy's bedtime that she finally just past out in her camping chair. It was around this time that Lexi and I said goodnight and headed home to sleep in our nice soft beds while Jordan, Lily & Lucy stayed to sleep in the small tent. He reported that it was much nicer without me there this year, quickly adding that it's because our tent is so small. Next year we will have to upgrade our tent. 

Lucy, Lucy, Lucy. Technically, she is potty trained. She knows when she has to go to the potty and she can take care of business all by herself. It's getting her to choose to go in the potty. This picture is when I asked Lucy to go before we left to take Lily to school. She didn't want to. It started to become more of  a fight, and she started to never go on her own anymore so we decided to take a break from potty training and to let it be her choice. Sometimes, when she wants to, she goes. But most of the time, she doesn't want to. 

Lucy ran her first race! Lily had trained for this Fun Run and was registered for it as well. However, we got an email the week of the race telling us that parents weren't allowed to run with kids, except for the kids in the Tots division. Lily remembered how chaotic it was last year and the thought of having to run the race all by herself made her cry each time we brought it up. I don't blame her, it's a pretty young age to be expected to run in a big crowd and somehow be able to find your family after words. So Lily chose not to run (it was a free race so it wasn't a big deal). Lucy had fun running with her dad and was exceptionally focused during the race. When Lucy chooses to do something, she excels. 

We ran into our friends the Davis's at the race! 

The marathon commity gave her a banana to help promote health and exercise, we took her out for frozen yogurt. 

The poor super star was so exhausted by the event that she fell asleep during the 2 minute drive from YoMama to our home.

Lots of love. Some one accidentally ran into Mushu our mini van this month so we had Cinderella, a rental van to drive around for 2 weeks while Mushu was getting fixed ($4550 in damages + fees for the rental van! I'm glad we didn't have to pay 1 cent of that!). Cinderella is a Town & Country while Mushu is an Odyssey. While I will always be loyal to our Mushu, it was fun seeing the pros and cons of a different mini van. Most of the things we liked about the T&C were the upgrades which we could have gotten with the Odyssey but weren't willing to pay for. 

Parenting Tender Mercies

Tender Mercy #1 Tonight as I was singing the good night song to the girls, Lily requested "the new one". It took me a minute to figure out that she wanted the new primary song for next year, I sang it once last week after hearing it during the woman's conference. As I was singing it, Lily got a big smile on her face and at the end of the song she told me, "Mom, I feel so happy inside! I feel love!" It was a wonderful opportunity to explain to her that she was feeling the Holy Ghost testify to her of her Heavenly Father and Savior's love for her.


Tender Mercy #2 We've been doing children's yoga this week in an effort to help calm Lily's anxiety. She can get worked up and stressed pretty easily. I found some great videos on you tube that both Lily and Lucy love. Yesterday while she was doing a puzzle she got extremely upset that I wouldn't jump in and do a difficult part for her. She started yelling, crying and ran off to her room. Once she calmed down and we hugged, we did some yoga. Right after yoga she returned to her puzzle and finished it without any difficulty. Afterwords she said, "I wish I didn't cry and run off to my run like that.". We talked about some strategies she could do to calm down when she feels frustrated like that again. I asked what she would do if she got frustrated at school and she said, "Turn on a yoga video!". LOL, I don't think that will be possible, but maybe she can do the deep breathing techniques.

Tender mercy #3: Lily has been looking forward to being in her ballet studio's annual Nutcracker production since the beginning of the summer. However, she recently learned that her class will have the roll of the mice. She was so no okay with that! Her solution? To wait until next year to be in the ballet! She would rather wait a whole year to be in the production than have to be a mouse! Well 2 weeks ago while we were at the library she picked out a audio book. I thought it was too advanced for her to listen to, but I let her check it out anyways. It has been sitting in our car since and we were instead listening to a collection of fairy tales that I had picked out. However, the fairytales CD was left in Mushu (our Odyssey) when he went to the car repair shop (someone accidentally ran into the side of our van). Yesterday while we were running errands I needed to nurse Lexi, so we stayed in the car, parked in the parking lot to do so. The girls were not happy about that prospect, so I threw in the only audiobook we had, which was the one Lily had picked out, Nancy Drew and Clue Crew. Get this, the story was about a girl being upset about having to be a mouse in the Cinderella ballet production! Nancy Drew had to be a mouse and she had a good attitude about it, but another girl was not handling it very well. We related it back to Lily and she saw how she was acting and changed her mind about not wanting to be in the nutcracker this year. I really think that was the only thing that would have changed her mind. We had even read Fancy Nancy and the mermaid ballet to help her and that hadn't! It is true that Heavenly Father is in the details of our lives.

Hopefully next I'll be writing about some tender mercies in the potty training department with Lucy. That girl is so smart, and can pick up on anything so quickly, when she wants to. The thing is, she just doesn't want to very often. I think that sometimes I also have to just remind myself that she's a 3 year old.