A little too big?

Nathan is weeks away from being 3 months old, yet he is still wearing newborn clothes! It is torture because most of his cutest outfits are 0-3 or 3-6 months. I tried to put a 0-3month outfit on him the other day and here was the result:



The picture doesn't do justice to just how huge this outfit was on him. After a few minutes I decided that it was just not working and I put him back into a newborn outfit. Maybe when he is 3 months old he will graduate to the 0-3month range. On a good note, it looks as though it will be a while until I have to buy him any clothes!


And just because I love these pictures:

I'm a winner!

Although I spent probably about an hour of my precious time entering codes on the internet it all paid off! I won not only once, but twice in Huggies Enjoy the Ride Rewards. I won a pack of Huggies diapers ($25 value) the first time around, and then a couple of minutes later I won a $25 Kohls gift card! Woo hoo! If anyone else has been earning points for huggies then check out Freebies4mom (I have a link on the right side of my page), she has posted tons of codes worth about 50 points total.

Also, some things that might be of interest.

**Sept 5th is national bowling night. You can bowl for free all across the country! Just go to this website and print out your coupon! (Check to make sure your bowling alley participates) http://www.bowl.com/coupon/

**For the mommies of little boys, I just saw an ad for home depot. I guess they do little workshops on Saturdays where the kids get to learn how to build different things. From what I can tell it is free. Lowes also does something similar. Here are the websites in case you want to check it out!

https://www.lowesbuildandgrow.com/

http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ContentView?pn=Kids_Workshops&langId=-1&storeId=10051&catalogId=10053

Ok...I really need to get a life!

Mesa

Curtis and I were finally able to make it up to Mesa to go to the temple. It would have only been a 3 and 1/2 hour drive if we didn't have a baby, but with Nathan it was closer to 4 1/2 hours. It was quite an adventure getting there. We had to stop once so that I could feed Nathan, I told Curtis to just pick an exit and see if he could find a semi-secluded place off of the road. We found a dirt road right off of the freeway and as we were about to park we noticed a huge dead cow right next to the road...so we drove a bit further. About 30 minutes after we got back on the road Nathan was screaming his brains out and it smelled as though he was in desperate need of a diaper change, so once again I asked Curtis to take the next exit and pull over so that I could change Nathan. Once I got Nathan out of his car seat I saw that his seat was soaking wet! No wonder he was crying! After he was changed and had a dry(ish) seat we hit the road again. There wasn't an on ramp where we got off so we figured we would find one if we just drove down the road a bit. Unfortunately the road was flooded so we had to turn around, we were a bit annoyed, thinking that now we would have to back track quite a bit to find another on ramp because this was the ONLY road! We only were able to back track a little bit before we found that the road was flooded this way too! We were completely stuck! The only ways we could possibly go were both flooded. Our only option was to get onto the freeway from the offramp! Neither of us were very excited about this plan, but there was absolutely no other way! Fortunately the off ramp was positioned so that we could see the freeway very well and when nobody was coming we went for it! It was actually pretty anticlimactic because it was so easy. Anywho, we finally made it to Mesa and it was well worth the quick day trip, the temple was absolutely beautiful. Curtis, has lots of family in the area and has been there many times, but it was a first for me! Once we were finished at the temple we were able to visit Curtis' grandma, and we also made sure to make a stop at Inn-n-Out.



Nathan didn't seem to enjoy the trip very much. The car seems to be one of the only places that he cries much, which is funny to me because I thought that babies were supposed to like the car! He was perfect on the way home though because it was pretty late and he was tired!

We ended up spending about 8 hours in the car and only about 2 in Mesa. I can't wait until The Gila Valley Temple is finished so that we don't have to travel quite so far. Supposedly it will be finished in December or January, and it couldn't come too soon!

2 Months

The following is more for record keeping purposes than entertainment:

Nathan is 2 months old today! To celebrate this special occasion we decided to take him out for cocktails. That's right, one slammin' mixture of Diptheria, Tetanus, Pertussis, Polio, and Hepatitis B, chased by Rotavirus, Hib and Pneumoccocal Disease. In case you aren't following my lame joke, Nathan got hit first set of vaccinations today. Fortunately one was oral, followed by three not so fortunate shots to the thigh. I'm sure most mothers dread this day and I was no exception! I read up on lots of ways to help relieve some of the pain for your baby (like giving them Tylenol before, for example) and forgot to do every single one of them! I also forgot that they have a bit of a delayed reaction so when I watched the needle go in and Nathan didn't even flinch I thought to myself "man, he's a toughy"...but that thought didn't last long, before long he was screaming his poor little head off. He let out such a long scream followed by silence without inhaling that the nurse got nervous for a second because she thought he stopped breathing. I have never seen his little face so red! For some reason this episode seemed to amuse Curtis. He couldn't help but laugh as poor little Nathan was screaming in agony. Fortunately he has a very short memory and didn't cry for more than a few seconds after. He then managed to sleep for the next 3 hours until I woke him to eat, once he finished eating he slept for the next 2 hours, however this time he wanted to be held while he slept. I tried putting him down several times and every time he screamed bloody murder. When he woke up I noticed that he was running a fever of 101.7 so I gave him some Tylenol. It lowered his temperature a bit, but I am a bit nervous about how tonight is going to go.

Nathan now weighs 9 lbs. 11 oz. He has not gained quite as much weight as we were hoping. The doctor informed us that he should be gaining at least 1 and 1/2 lbs a month. He is not too far off from that, but not as close as we would like. He is only in the 3rd percentile for his weight. Supposedly he was in the 76th percentile last month...but I am pretty sure that that was an error. Anyone who has seen his scrawny little body knows that there is no way that he could be in the 76th percentile! He has grown from 20 inches at birth to 22 and 1/2 inches! He's like a skinny little bean stalk!

Here he is at 2 months, getting a little big for this bassinet

Compared to how tiny he when he was born

Nathan at two months:

* He loves to smile! I even catch him smiling at absolutely nothing when nobody is around.
* He is awake and alert most of the day now.
* He sleeps through the night pretty consistently, from about 11pm to 7am.
* He is starting to respond to things like peek-a-boo more, but still doesn't appreciate them all the time
* He needs to have me in his line of vision almost all of the time. If I put him down and walk away he will whine until I come back, then he usually greets me with a big smile. I now put him in his rocker and drag him around the house with me wherever I go and he seems to like that.
* He is a bubble blower. This just started a few days ago but now he is never seen without lots of little bubbles forming at his mouth. I have to put a bib on him otherwise his clothes are soaking wet in no time flat.
* He is the loudest sleeper ever! He snores pretty loud for such a tiny thing. There is no way I would get any sleep if he were in the same room as me!
* He sometimes sleeps with his eyes slightly open. It is kind of creepy actually...

* He is overall just a happy, well behaved, beautiful baby!

Nathans First Photo Shoot

We took Nathan to get his pictures taken on Saturday, and I now have the feeling that it will be the first of many photo shoots! I was pretty clueless going in, I didn't know how I wanted him to pose, how many pictures to order, what I wanted him to wear...nothing! I think they turned out pretty good considering how clueless I was. But what can I say? He's so darn cute I doubt that it is possible to mess things up too bad. It only took us a short time to get him smiling, but after a while he got a bit fussy and eventually fell asleep, so he is asleep in almost all of our family photos. Oh well!





I wasn't planning on doing any family portraits yet because I still have quite a bit of baby weight to lose...and then some. But about 5 minutes before we had to leave to make our appointment I figured that we should dress appropriately in case we decided we wanted to be in the pictures as well. I quickly tried to throw together some sort of coordinating outfits for us using what clean clothes we had in our closets. This is the best I could come up with on such short notice...but I think it worked out alright.

Summer fun

I have been waiting for one of my siblings or nephews to post something about our fun filled family week so that I could just direct everyone to their blogs...but then I realized that I was the one taking most of the pictures. So I suppose the task falls with me to recount our action packed week.

**Warning: This post may only interest those who were present**

Like we do every summer, the Ashton clan gathers together for a wicked awesome family vacation. As our family continues to grow it becomes harder for us to get together as often as we would like, so we made sure that our rare time together was well spent. We spent the week together in Utah at my parents house and at East Canyon Resort (except for the Socci's who are too cool for school and have a house of their own nearby). The best way to describe our time together is with pictures, so here you go:

I was excited for my nephews to get to see Nathan for the first time and see how they would react to such a small baby. They were both absolutely adorable, always asking if they could hold "baby Nathan".

Jaden and Kaleb were so good at taking care of Nathan. Here you will see Kaleb putting Nathan's burp cloth over Nathan as a blanket because "baby Nathan's cold". Haha...so cute!

Curtis is very popular with the little boys. They love to stand there and let him throw pillows at them. I love how Kaleb prepares to punch the pillows.

Our agenda for the week included going to the open house of the Oquirrh Mountain temple followed by a trip to Raging Waters. (Pictures to hopefully be posted at a later time by someone who had a camera)

The next day we went to some lake that I don't know the name of and rented a ski boat and wave runner. I don't think anyone took any pictures for fear of the camera falling in the lake. Which was probably a good idea seeing as how Julianne, Curtis and I managed to tip over in the wave runner while trying to climb in the boat...what a good start to the day that was! Almost everyone tried water skiing except for my mom who stayed on the beach in the shade with the babies and myself who thought it might not be the best idea just 6 weeks after my C-section. My dad takes the prize for kicking butt on the ski (and I say ski because he at one time used only one!) but he had some stiff competition from the rest of the group. The little boys seemed to enjoy the wave runner (or water motorcycle as they called it), while I mostly enjoyed watching everyone.

We spent some time up at East Canyon playing tennis:

Curtis served the ball so hard that he blew a hole right threw his racket...unfortunately there were no more tennis rackets for him to use so he had to play with a racquetball racket.

Charles had to prove that he was so good that he could play with no hands...which he did!

Nathan just chilled in his car seat out on the grass and watched the action. (Don't know why the picture is sideways...)

Shuffleboard:



Swimming:

and just hanging around the condo:

Holy cow Nathan looks tiny in this picture!

And who could forget the water war back at my parent's house?

Ethan, the little devious genius, managed to find the hose, giving himself a huge advantage

Here everyone is running away from Ethan and the hose. Jaden, however, was the brave soul who managed to sneak up on Ethan and take the hose. If it wasn't for him Ethan might still be holding the hose today...

My favorite part of the water war was when everyone was finished and dried off except for Ethan who remained outside yelling "LET THE WATER WAR BEGAAANNNN!!!"

The slip n slide show down was a close second.

Or making s'mores in the backyard?



We also blessed Nathan on Sunday (August 2nd) in my parent's ward.

Curtis did a wonderful job blessing Nathan...

even though he was screaming the whole time :)

Curtis' mom and Aunt were able to make it up for the blessing.

Curtis and I were able to go out to dinner to celebrate our 2 year anniversary while my mom watched Nathan:

We aren't too good at taking pictures of ourselves...

Finally someone saw our pathetic attempt to photograph ourselves and told us to hand over the camera.

Nathan had his first play date with my old roommates adorable little girl Macie.

Macie poses for the camera while Nathan just puts on his pimpin'-it face

Here Macie looks like she is getting her groove on...paaaaaaaaaaaaaaarty!

Nathan did really well on the plane. He slept most of the time and when he wasn't asleep he was just as happy as could be, which was very kind of him because Curtis left early and I had to brave the return trip with Nathan by myself. Here he is chillin' in the Las Vegas airport.



All in all it was a great time. I can't wait until we all can get together again...whenever that will be!