Ainsley turns 1 month old!!

Yep….our little sweetheart celebrated her first month birthday yesterday on November 7th. It is a little hard to believe that she has already been with us that long! She is changing and getting a little bigger now and is just as darling as ever. We think she has some red in her light brown hair and that could be fun if it stays. She partied with Mom and Dad at the Bent Fork Grill and Barnes and Noble while the girls and Jantzen loved having their favorite babysitter over. Mom and Dad paid for the party (which included Ainsley sleeping in her cozy carseat the entire night out) later when they got home and Ainsley was awake for the next three hours! Dad stayed up with her while Mom got to sleep first, then Mom got up with her in the night for a while and then in the morning. If only Daddy didn’t have to work and they could do this night-sharing thing all of the time……

Mom and Dad also celebrated Ainsley’s birthday by deciding to change her middle name from Ella to Madelyn. Well, mostly instigated by Mom who has been having a name crisis for about two weeks now. Dad has been a good sport about it all. (Mom also needed to get her hair cut and highlighted and she would’ve hired a housekeeper if she could’ve found one that could’ve come by Friday! It’s so fun to go through these postpartum hormonal change!) Turns out it’s not too hard to change the name and it sure makes Mom feel much better about things. What a stress it is to give someone their name!

Everyone else seems to be doing just fine……..We had a normal week, and quite a warm one at that, following our big snowstorms of last week. We enjoyed some park time and some bike riding time. Jantzen and Mommy visited Alyssa’s preschool class for her belated Halloween party. Alyssa also started her new level of gymnastics. A little unfortunately for Mommy, Alyssa loved the new class. It’s longer in duration and not at a very convenient time, but we’ll try it for a session and see how it goes. Ashtyn started back to horse riding this week and was in absolute heaven! Jantzen goes along for the ride and is happy as long as he gets his time, lots of teasing and wrestling, and just some good one-on-one contact. He is a sweetheart! Today at the end of sacrament meeting he was just DONE…..so I tried to distract him by having him try on Ashtyn’s shoes. (He loves to tease us all by trying on all of our big shoes and saying they are his.) He looked so funny with these dress shoes on under his cute little boy outfit, but everyone around us was giggling as he started pacing back and forth in the row saying “I so pretty, I so pretty”. It was great!

We had more leaves than ever in our backyard and they got raked up, leaf-blown, and jumped in yesterday. We’ll see if we can get those photos on the blog this week.

Jason is trying to adjust to his new position at work…….it’s a lot of work and a lot to learn still. I know that he will do a phenomenal job! It will be a few months of transition still and a busy year next year.

Jason also spent an accelerated camping trip on Friday night with the Boy Scouts. The camping trip is an annual trip to the Pawnee National Grasslands, which is about 45minutes east of Windsor. The trip starts with a 3.5 mile night hike using compasses and maps. When the boys finally arrive to camp after stomping through cactus and Yuka bushes and avoiding the water-ballons of the priests, hot dogs and chili were served and greatly enjoyed. In the morning, the teachers came out victorious in the rocket-launching competition! It was a bunch of fun!!

Just a brief update for y’all! We send our love and best wishes for a happy week!