Ty - 4 months

This update is almost 2 weeks late but, I wanted to wait until Ty's doctor appointment before posting. But, Ty is 4 months old! I cannot believe how fast the time flies. I know he will be a year old before I blink. I don't think I can say enough to my sweet boy what a wonderful baby he is. Even at his appointment, our pediatrician said "He is so smiley. If you have a baby this great...don't even jinx it by going for a third." Ha! I have no idea what God has planned for that...but, it is just a true testimony to how happy Ty is. His smile is ear to ear and can melt any heart in the room.

Statistics:

Height - 26 1/4 inches (70th percentile)

Weight - 16-1 lbs (60th percentile)

Head - 17 1/4 (80th percentile)

Overall, he is a much bigger baby than we are used to with Kinley!

A few things his 4th month entailed:

• Ty has found his hands and loves to chew on them. I swear he is teething...but, there are no signs of any teeth yet!
• He can grab almost anything with his hands...mostly his left hand at this point...who knows if that will change.
• He can roll over both ways - front to back and back to front
• He had his first Christmas and first long road trip to Colorado and was a total trooper
• He got sick for the first time...a little cold and congestion that he caught from his ever loving sweet big sis.
• If Ty is starting to get tired or the least bit fussy, if he sees Kinley it totally evaporates and he has smiles for miles. He is just totally in love with her.
• He is starting to eat more milk than I can produce. Such a sad dilemma for a mommy. I am totally not against formula feeding. I think it is awesome but, I just love being able to produce that milk for my babies and am sad when I can't just give them something they love. It is a stressful thing for me...which is totally bizarre and ridiculous...but,I have had to let it go. Ty has had about 3 bottles of formula up to this point and luckily he loves it! Our doctor told me yesterday that I should start to supplement with formula a little more so that when I decide to quit feeding him, he will like the taste! He told me I could just skip rice cereal all together and when he needs a supplement to just give formula instead until he is ready for vegetables. So, maybe I will try that and get a better eater in Ty than I had in Kinley.
• Sweet boy is not quite the sleeper he used to be. His nighttime schedule is now go to bed at 8-8:30 and wakes up around 1:30 and 5:00 to eat before waking up for good around 7:30. It is not too bad...but, I have no idea what it is like to have any child under 7 months sleep 12 hours straight. I apparently produce snackers and not eaters and I need to stretch his feedings out and get him to eat 6-7 ounces each time so that he will sleep all the way through the night.

Here are a few of my favorite pics from this month...starting with our little photo shoot.

serious concentration on that football...which is his fave toy right now...that crinkly paper stuff is a hit!

this is a pretty dark pic that I took one morning...but, this is what he wakes up like. I still swaddle him in the miracle blanket and he wakes up every morning with the biggest smile on his face like he can't wait to be unwrapped to start the day. If he ever wakes up from sleep crying...something is off.

some sweet sister pics...she wants to be near him constantly

he puts up with it like a pro

and this is still what we travel like on most days...luckily he still likes his car seat

Some of my fav pics of Ty with my dad...my current phone background

a little blurry...but, still cute

Happy 4 month Ty-Ty. You are a precious angel of a boy and we love you more and more with each passing day!

thankful

I am just a little overwhelmed with gratitude today with how thankful I am for these sweet angels. I hope and pray that they know how much they mean to me and how absolutely crazy I am about them. The days get busy and crazy and sometimes we never all sit down together in the same room...but, when we do my heart just swells with thankfulness. It may be cheesy but, I just couldn't hold it in.

DIY Laundry Detergent

I can't tell you how excited I am about this project. It was truly so much fun to do. My sweet cousin, Amy, pointed me to this project on Pinterest.

As soon as we were getting low on our regular detergent I decided to make this. Everything cost me about $20 and it is supposed to last 9 months to a year!

These are the ingredients for my detergent:

• 1 4lb 12oz box Borax (found in the detergent aisle)
• 1 55oz box Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda (detergent aisle)
• 2 and 2/3 small containers of Oxyclean or about 3.5lbs total (detergent aisle)
• 2 2lb boxes of Arm & Hammer Baking Soda (in the baking aisle)
• 3 bars of Fels-naptha soap (detergent aisle)

Before I did this I had not even heard of some of those ingredients. But, I found every last one of them at Walmart. It is crazy how you can walk by this stuff day in and day out and have not ever seen it!

First, you grate the bars of soap with a cheese grater. This Fels-naptha soap smells amazing! I just loved it. I want to think of more ways to use this soap. The soap dissolves when you wash.

It also looks a lot like cheese...so maybe don't do this with kids awake who might mistakenly think it is cheese.

Then you just pour all the ingredients together inside a trash sac in a 5-gallon bucket and stir it up. I transferred it back and forth between the sack and my glass container a couple times to get it good and mixed. I also picked up the trash sac (over the bucket) and shook it around a little.

*Note - keep one of the Oxyclean scoops and put it in your finished container. You will just need one scoop of your finished mix for each load of laundry!

I bought this glass container at Walmart too for $9.97 and used my Silhouette to cut out a vinyl label.

I already did a couple loads of laundry with this and it works great and has a very subtle smell. I just love it and it kind of makes me excited to do laundry. So crazy!

lately...and a moss letter project

I am finally back! It feels like forever since I have blogged or really had anything to blog about! The holidays kinda did one over on us and I have felt a little overwhelmed ever since. We have been sick off and on for a while now and are just starting to get back in the swing of things. Just to catch up....

Ben and I celebrated our 6 year anniversary on the 7th. We celebrated with a night out in Ft. Worth at Del Friscos. Mendy was the first one to babysit both kiddos for the night by herself. She was a total rockstar and had both babies asleep and in their own beds when we got home. The past 6 years have seemed like forever and just a moment at the same time. They have been the absolute best of my life and I am so in love with Ben and the man, husband and father he has become. I am so excited for many more years to come. (pardon the pics of pics from our wedding album)

Kinley is back in the swing of school and loving it this semester (and so am I). I love her school and the theme months they have. There is a color and shape of the month and a different letter and number every week. Apparently this month they are learning that they live in Texas and so it's Western Month. They took these adorable pics of her whole class and made them into cute Wanted posters outside their classroom. (also pics of pics here)

When she is not at school, she has been having fun cooking at Honey's house in total princess gear.

Ty turned 4 months old on Saturday....we don't go to the doctor until the 26th so I am going to wait and post his 4 month post then. But, we did celebrate McKenna's 1st Bee-day in Temple on Saturday and it was unBEElievable. Take a look for yourself. Kinley was totally beat afterward.

We have been doing a couple of home improvement projects around the house over the last couple weeks. I am trying to re-make-over my office to be much more functional for a true home office. More on that to come. We have had lots of help from kinley driving around Lowe's.

I actually have been doing a couple craft projects lately also. Friday night we had a little girls night at Mendy's to make some moss letters. Mendy, Natalie, Ashley and I busted out the Silhouette and cut out some letters for templates to hot glue some moss on. It was a messy but super simple project and I totally recommend it if you need a little pop of green somewhere. I think I am going to put mine in my huge hutch at the back of our living room. But, in truth, it may travel around a few places till I get it where I like it.

Ty slept through all this fun.

In case you want to make one too...

Pick any font you like, cut out a template on the silhouette (or by hand), and trace it onto foam board.

Then cut your letter out of foam board

You can get some of this flat Instant Green Moss Cloth at Hobby Lobby or Michaels.

Then cut it a little bit bigger than your letter

and hot glue it on.

not sure why this pic is kinda dark but it did turn out cute.

More posts and crafts to come this week!

Kinley's first haircut

It has been a long time coming. Two years and 9 months to be exact.

But, we finally did it.

We got Kinley her first haircut. It was such an inner battle for me for months. Could I dare cut that little bit of precious hair that she has been working her entire lifetime to grow!?

It just felt so wrong.

But, it just got to the point where I could not handle the mullet anymore.

So, I just spur of the moment, before I could talk myself out of it, took her to chop it off. I told her when I picked her up from school that she was going to get a haircut and she cried the whole way there.

She was not interested.

But, as soon as she got there and saw the cool pink car and firetruck she could sit in and saw Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on the tv...she just forgot she was afraid and could not wait to sit there. She ended up saying it just tickled her and she loved her haircut.

Here she is before...it is kind of amazing I let her mullet get so long.

I am not going to lie...I did tear up a little when she just sat there like a big girl and got her haircut. I guess that is normal.

The new Kinley. I think she looks adorable. Brandi, the hair cutting lady kept saying we could make her bob more dramatic and it would make her look more "edgy." I did not really feel the need for my 2 year old to pull of an "edgy" look. So, I just told her to go for "cute."

She did honestly say that it will probably be six more months before we need another haircut...and we will still just have to cut the back a few more times before we ever need to cut the front or sides. But, keep the faith...she is sure it will actually grow one day! Yay!