Painting

I've tried to establish Hailey school after her nap and snack. Our first "lesson" was about water paints. It's funny to see her discover how it works. I showed her how we first dip our paintbrush in the water, then in the paint color, and after that we are ready to color. At first she went straight from the water to the paint and back to the water. By the end she got the hang of it and kept mixing the paint together. Also we have been working on her colors. For a few weeks everything was blue. Now everything is yellow. So, I was pointing to each color and saying the name and Hailey would repeat "yellow" after everyone until we got to brown. Apparently, she thought it was a fun word to say.

Cookie Monster

Hailey loves to help in the kitchen. Every time I'm in there she'll drag a chair over and climb up. She even enjoys doing dishes and gets upset when I'm not patient enough to let her help.

So, we were making cookies and while my back was turn Hailey grabbed an egg and started to crack it. (Earlier in the week, we made muffins and watched how to crack an egg and apparently remembered it.)

I just made sure she stayed over the bowl.

She had her own cookie sheet to drop the dough on.

The finished product.


She was so proud of the cookies she made, and as a reward for being such a good helper she could eat all the cookies she made.

Sleeping Beauties

Ever since Hailey was born, she always had her own room. I think we tried a couple of times sharing a room with her but she randomly cries in her sleep and moves around a lot. Also Nathan snores when he isn't sleeping well which woke up Hailey a lot. So the real person who was suffering was me!!! Even when we moved into McIntosh which was an one-bedroom apartment, Hailey slept in her bouncer in the living room (it was only for a month).

Robert on the other hand is a very quiet and still sleeper so he slept in the bouncer right beside the bed. However, since he is growing at a quicker pace, he grew out of the bouncer around two months. Also, he has been very congested and needed a humidifier on.

So, at two months we moved him into Hailey's room and things were really good. When he woke up in the middle of the night, Hailey didn't wake up. The only downside was that they both woke up around 6:00 when Hailey used to wake up around 7:30-8.

Now, the routine is to put Hailey in bed by 7:30, by giving her a bath, lather her up with lotion, letting her brush her teeth, reading a book and singing a song. Also she gets to bring a book into bed with her. She picked Beauty and the Beast this time and fell asleep before the end. Then we give Robert a bath, I feed him, and he's in bed by 8:00.

For two days now, starting when he turned 4 months, he has slept for 12 hours straight!!!!

This is Robert asleep on the couch after we went to the park for the free school lunches (for Hailey only).

In the afternoon, after Hailey goes down for her nap and I have lunch, Robert and I take a nap in my bed. I nurse him to sleep and enjoy cuddling with him. Then I sleep for an hour or two, and get up with Hailey while he continues to sleep for another hour. I couldn't do this with Hailey. When Hailey and I took naps together it was always on the couch with her on my chest.

Facial Hair

I hate facial hair. It could be because I really haven’t been around a lot of people who had facial face. At BYU-Idaho it is not allowed and a guy almost had to leave class because he had a five o’clock shadow. (He had an excuse and the teacher let the class vote if he could stay or not.) My dislike could also come from my dad rubbing his scratchy face against mine to tease me.

Since we have moved away from Rexburg, Nathan has gotten lazy about shaving. At the beginning I would remind him that he hasn’t shaved and it would take him 2 or 3 days to get to it. But now, he’ll only shave for special pictures and occasions. The other problem is that his hair grows so slowing that it never really passes the scratchy, irritating phrase.

Obviously, this problem of facial hair growth runs in the family. This is the last paragraph from Nathan’s dad’s journal that Zeke found written May 31, 1974.

“Over the past six weeks I have been sporting a goatee and moustache. It took
about four weeks to look good or filled in enough to be presentable. The part
that bothered me was the moustache. It has gotten in the way when eating and
when I had a sinus problem. It would get in the way of the handkerchief. The
goatee never got in the way. I just could never get it symmetric. Part of the
problem of both was the inability to keep it as clean as I would like to. I
always felt it was a bit on the dirty side. At six weeks the hair is getting
long enough to get in the way but not long enough to comb and trim especially on
the upper lip.”

I hope this is a phase and that his job will have a strict dress code about facial face but until that time, I just laugh that what take some guys 2 days to grow, takes Nathan 2-4 weeks to grow.