First Smiles

First smile caught on camera!

Lily is now 3 months, and 20 days old. Last time she was weighed was when she was 3 months old, and she was 10 lb, 11 oz. She's been smiling for awhile now, and it's adorable!

This is from about a month ago, a few days after Easter. Hi Everybody!

An Easter pic, borrowing her Auntie Anna's bunny ears.

Look at those Dimples!! She's laying underneath her arch with the moving singing Doggy. She likes her Doggy. :) I wasn't even trying to make her smile here, I just came over to see her smiling and kicking her feet real excitedly.

 

And another one! See the bib? She drools non-stop lately.

You can see the drool on her chin. Look at it sparkle, Look at it shine!

I love this expression!! Ahh! She's sooo cute! This is probably my favorite picture of her right now. She likes it when we sit her propped up in her boppy. She's very into sitting up and standing up lately. She's strong. And cute!

She's our little hand-eater. She has come really close to getting her entire fist in her mouth. She doesn't have a favorite position yet that I've noticed, she just likes to suck on her hand however she can get it to her mouth. But she hasn't gotten her thumb in her mouth for more than a second or two, so she's not a thumb-sucker yet. Just a
hand-eater!

Well, that's all the latest and greatest about Lily! Until next time!

5 Weeks and Counting

Over five weeks now, that's how long I've been sick. Lots and lots of coughing. Not fun at all. But I didn't do anything about it until Lily started coughing like me, and then I got us doctors appointments right away. Well, she's ok for now, just a normal virus and not much to do about it except wait it out. But my doctor told me I had pneumonia. Pneumonia! Isn't that bizarre? I thought only old people got that, and then only if you'd been out in the snow or something. So I'm on antibiotics and Tylenol with Codeine (which makes me so sleepy - I took some before I went to bed last night, then had to feed Lily about a half hour later, so I'm reading while I feed her and I cannot keep my eyes open and I kept dropping the book I was reading! It was funny).

Cute cute Lily! I just took this today - she really is being a good sport about being sick.

Other than that life has been pretty mellow around here lately. Ben has been back at work for a few weeks now, and it's been going great with Lily and I at home. She was super cute when Ben came home from being gone all day at work for the first time - when he picked her up she smiled for the first time. It was very sweet. She smiles every once in awhile now, but not very often yet. I can't wait until she's smiling all the time.

 

Non-pregnant Emily! Yeah!

So I've been trying to lose weight (of course) since I'm no longer pregnant and I'm allowed to now. So one way I've been exercising is by going on walks with Lily in a front carrier. It's been really nice. I could have her in her stroller, but she doesn't like that very much, plus this way it makes it a little more of a workout for me as I have to carry her weight as well (all 8 lbs 12 oz of her - she was weighed at the doctors yesterday). It's fun being outside with her in the sunshine - yes, it's actually been sunny in Washington lately. Lily mostly sleeps though, which is ok because I want her to sleep as much as possible right now so she can get better quicker.

 

Lily and I all ready to go on our walk

Lily in her super cute Chilean hat! Jan Pelletier got it for Lily when she went to Chile to pick up Kyle at the end of his mission. It's my favorite hat of Lily's. Thanks Jan!

Lily is getting better at bath time, which is nice. I'd much rather give a bath to a happy baby than one who is screaming and making me feel like I'm torturing her. It's still hit and miss, but generally if we give her a bath when she's fed and in a good mood, and make sure to give her her pacifier and not let the bath be too long, she'll be happy! Yeah, that's a lot of conditions, but we'll take what we can get!

 

Cute contented Lily taking a bath.

So in non-Lily related news, I am reading a non-fiction book for the first time in my life! Amazing huh? I mean by choice, anyway. I've read non-fiction for school before and a few church related books, but I've never picked up a non-fiction, non-religious book just for fun before. It's called "Into the Wardrobe: C.S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles." I'm really really liking it. I've always admired C.S. Lewis for the Narnia books, and then in college more so for his book "The Screwtape Letters," and so it's been fun to get to know the man behind the books a little better, as well as exploring some of the spiritual connections in his Narnia books. I'm really glad I decided to read it, and I have a feeling I'll probably be reading more non-fiction after this.

In the last few days I've talked to both Laura and Tessa, two of my roommates from college, and it was really nice to talk to them. They both got me thinking about how much things have changed for all of us, and how much fun we used to have together. I really miss them! Afterwards I started looking through old pictures and it brought back so many memories! I thought I'd share a few. :) Tess and Laura, don't hate me!

 

Gangsta Laura

Tessa and I for Halloween (we were lollipops)

And to end with, more pictures of Lily! (Hey, I'm a first-time Mom, I'm allowed to be obsessed for awhile!) :)

 

Look at me, I can walk!

Look at how buff I am! :) I love it when she sleeps with her arms above her head like this, it's so cute.

Lily Was Blessed

So today was the first sunday of the month, and so we were able to give Lily her blessing. It went really well. My parents came, and so did my grandparents, as well as Ben's brother Dan and his wife Andy and their little girl Rachel. Lily did really good and basically slept through the whole thing. It was really neat because the dress she wore was orginally made for my mom's blessing in '66. I was also blessed in it, as well as my sister and 5 of my cousins. All of our names are stitched on the inside of the slip that goes with the dress, so now I get to stitch Lily's in there too.

After the blessing everyone came over to our house for lunch, and stayed and played games too. It was the first time my grandparents have seen our condo, so it was nice that they were able to come up. Lily and Rachel seemed to get along well too. It was pretty cute - they're only about 8 weeks apart, and since we're living so close, it'll be nice for them to grow up together.

As far as other news goes, life has been pretty great. Ben has been home for the last 4 weeks, and he get one more week off before he has to go back to work. It's been really nice to have him here. I'm a little nervous for when he has to go back and I'm all alone, but that's life. Nights haven't been too horrible, though she still isn't sleeping regularly at all. Sometimes she sleeps well, only getting up to feed, and other times she's wide awake after feedings for an hour or more. Most of the time she sleeps in her Boppy in her crib, and she does pretty well there. She's slept with us in our bed a few times, but that doesn't happen very often. None of us sleep as well when she does because Ben and I are both very aware of the fact that she's right there and so little, and she gets disturbed by us moving around. But it's still kind of nice when she does. She's just so adorable, and it's nice to open your eyes and have her right next to you. She also sleeps very well in the car. She hates getting into her carseat, but once she's in the car while it's going, she gets lulled to sleep pretty fast.

We went out to dinner with her for the first time when she was almost 3 weeks old, and it went really well. It was actually pretty funny, because there's this place on the way to Woodinville if you go the back way called McCorry's on the Slough. Underneath the name it says "family dining." So we thought we'd try it, thinking it would be nice to go someplace new and what seemed like more "down-home cooking". Well, it was a bar. Essentially, anyway. They had a long bar as the main focus of the room, only about 5 tables, and lots of pool tables. But we'd already gotten Lily out of the car and calmed down and we were both hungry, so we just stayed. We really stuck out as the odd ones there! It might not have been that bad if the food had been at least good, but it was decent at best. So, we won't be going there again!

Ok, Lily is just so cute, so I'm going to put a whole bunch of random pictures here now.

P.S. We're refinancing our home tomorrow. 6% baby, yeah! And that's all, folks!

Lily's First Week Home

So today is Lily's One-Week birthday! Happy Birthday! Today is actually only our fifth day home, though. We were kept at the hospital until Wednesday night so they could give Lily antibiotics - she came out with a slight temperature, so the antibiotics were just in case she had an infection. I had some too. I decided I hate IV's. Lily didn't like hers either, but she was a good sport. She's generally a very contented and happy baby, it's wonderful. The nights aren't too bad (yet, crossing my fingers), but I suspect a lot of that is because my mom has been here helping us, and she'll take Lily during the night when she's fussy and let Ben and I sleep. She's actually going home today, so tonight will be our first night without a third person to help. It'll be interesting!

So before I gave birth I decided I really wanted to try to have an unmedicated birth, but... that didn't last long! I'd been been having strong contractions about 1 1/2 to 2 minutes apart for awhile when I finally decided to have an epidural. I am SO glad I decided to do it that way, because I think I would have been very upset and disappointed by my experience if I hadn't. After getting the epidural I was so much happier and able to enjoy the experience more. Ben was a lot happier too cuz I was much nicer. :) The whole birth took technically about 14 1/2 hours, because they started the pitocin about 8:00 AM, but it really only felt like 8 hours. The pitocin was giving me contractions and after a few hours they were 3 minutes apart, but I couldn't hardly feel them at all. It wasn't until 2:30 when they checked me again and decided that my water hadn't really broken and so they broke it that things really started happening. When I first came into the hospital I was 4 cm dilated, and I was still 4 cm when they checked me at 2:30. So I took about 7 hours to dilate the rest of the way after my water broke, and at 10 I started pushing. I pushed for about 35 minutes, and then Lily was born! Overall I was really happy with my experience. I liked my nurses a lot, and my doctor as well, and it was nice to have both my mom and Ben there. Ben was super supportive, he did great too!

It was been so much fun getting to know the baby that has been in my tummy for the last 8 1/2 months! She's so perfect, it's amazing. It's very cool to see the attributes she gets from me (blond hair, blue eyes, her nose) and from Ben (the shape of her eyes, her adorable chubby cheeks). We're still getting to know her personality, but she seems pretty easy going. She's not very hard to calm, and she really likes being swaddled.

She doesn't like baths or being undressed. We gave her her first bath at home on Saturday and she screamed the whole time. But she really liked being clean afterwards, and she's very awake afterwards too. She'll look at us and look all around and genereally be really cute. But that's a given, of course! :) She's also doing really well with breastfeeding. It took both of us a little while to get the hang of it, but it's going great now.

We put up more pictures on our home server at https://lemmonlife.homeserver.com/photos/ (Click on Lily week 1)

We had a funny surprise on Sunday - our fish had babies! A few weeks ago we bought Black Mollies, which are live-bearing fish, but we didn't know we got a girl and a boy, though my mom suspected the one fish was pregnant. We didn't think she was because we have had other fish look big like her and not be pregnant. But Ben went into the room to feed the fish yesterday and saw a teeny little black thing swimming around!

We found 9 alive baby fishies, and at least 3-4 dead ones. We had to put them in the net so they were seperated from their parents because the parent fish will eat the babies if you let them. I'm not sure what we'll end up doing with them. I think you can sell them to the fish store, so we'll probably do that at some point, though I would like to keep a couple. I have a feeling this is going to be happening every once in a while from now on though, so it'll be fun to see what breeding fish is like. We just have lots of babies around here now!

Lily Sophia Lemmon

The time has finally arrivied. Lily Sophia Lemmon was born last night (1/7/08) at 10:37 PM! She weighs 7 lbs. 4 oz. and is 20 inches long. Right now she's on IV for antibiotics because she came out with a bit of a temperature, but mom and baby are healthy and happy. We're so excited to have her out finally and we just love staring at how cute she is.

Thanksgiving

We went to Colorado to visit my parents for Thanksgiving. We were originally planning on going during Christmas, but Emily will be too big to travel then, so we changed our plans to go during Thanksgiving instead. It snowed after we got there and we went sledding for the first time in a long time. It was very fun! My brother Matthew came with us and tried out his new skis.

Me, Emily, and Matt out sledding

I played a lot of raquetball with my dad & Matthew. That was a lot of fun. It reminded me of how out of shape I am...I guess it's time to go back to the gym. My dad can beat me without having to try very hard at all, but I'm going to practice and next time he won't know what hit him!

Me and Emily went to Casa Bonita while we were in Denver. It's known for it's not so great food, but pretty good entertainment. They have cliff divers, fire jugglers, etc. It made for a nice date, and a fun way to spend time with Eric & Monica (my brother & sister in law).

Me and Emily at the fountain outside Casa Bonita

Recent Happenings

Us at Ipanema (notice the guy in the background with the knives? HAHA!!! We didn't even know he was doing that until we got home and put the pic on the computer.)

It's been awhile since we've updated, so here's the recent happenings in the Lemmon family. Most recently, we went a a fun date to Seattle. My favorite restaurant in Utah is Tucanos, a Brazillian buffet style place that is seriously delicious, but we couldn't find a similar place here in Seattle. Until now! Ben found Ipanema in downtown Seattle, and surprised me by taking me there today. It was really really yummy, and really fun. And the Seattle Art Museum was across the street, so we went there for a couple hours afterwards. Neither one of us had been there before, and it was nice. Huge, too. It was cool how they had so many different cultural exhibits. African, Japanese, Mesoamerican, Native American, and lots of different American artists too. The variety made it really interesting.

I was attempting to pose like the statue, but got distracted by the museum lady who told me not to take pictures. Oops!

Last Saturday Stephanie Roth threw me an awesome baby shower. It was lots of fun to get together with lots of friends from church and talk and eat. Yum... we had three types of fondue, a whilte chocolate, milk chocolate, and monterey jack cheese. Everyone was so nice, and now we have all these beautiful baby clothes and nursery things. It's nice to have more of those things, now her room is all cute and decorated and girly, and I love just going in there to look at it all, and imagine holding Lily... she's not coming fast enough!

However, I did get a new niece this week! My sister-in law Andy was due November 5th, and didn't go into labor until the 12th, and gave birth to Rachel Alexandra on the 13th. She's completely adorable, and Dan and Andy are very happy. :) Ben and went to see them in the hospital, and she was so tiny, but at the same time, I was holding her and looking at her and thinking, "This fits in my belly??" It's so weird. But very exciting. I can't wait till Lily comes!

So for Thanksgiving Ben and I are going to Colorado for Thanksgiving to be with his parents. We're both pretty excited. We haven't been to their place since we got married. We were planning on going up there for Christmas, but with my pregnancy I'll be too far along to fly at that point, which is really a bummer because all the other brothers and sisters are going to be there this year. But Thanksgiving will be nice, and we get to stay there for a whole week. I'm sure we'll blog about that when we get back. Happy Thanksgiving!