Jack meets Grandma and Grandpa Izatt

Chuck's parents came for a visit a couple of weeks ago to officially meet their 10th grandchild:
Sweet baby Jack!

I'm pretty sure it was love at first sight on all sides :).

Of course, Clyde and Will got plenty of love and attention as well - here a costumed Clyde and Grandma are playing with the 'Songify' iPad app.

Clyde accompanied Grandma and Pops on a special trip to the grocery store and came home with an awesome clone trooper helmet!

Will was intrigued enough by the helmet to try it on for a brief moment, but he was mostly enthralled by our game of catch while he simultaneously jumped on his trampoline. There was actually very little catching going on :).

Jack was a doll and sweetly slept for most of the weekend, accompanied by a new llama stuffed animal!

As always, Chuck and I were spoiled just as much as the kiddos - Pops brought me beautiful flowers and cooked us an amazing steak dinner on Saturday night. And he got up e-a-r-l-y each morning to make Chuck breakfast and see him off to work.

The visit was quick, but very fun. Grandma had her iPad from school with her, and the boys were pretty psyched to each have 'their' own for a while.

Chuck took the chance to show Pops all of his favorite apps. I had to laugh; right after I took this picture Clyde snaked the iPad away from Chuck and started showing him how to do something. Sons always think they know more than their dads, apparently!

We spent that evening playing Monopoly Deal and Qwirkle and enjoying root beer floats.

We attempted some quick pictures after church before Mom and Pops had to hit the road, but (shockingly!) my children were hard to capture.

I sneaked in for a picture so we could record our coordinating outfits (it was Superbowl Sunday so we sported red, bright blue, and white to support the New York Giants - and it worked!!).

We tried for a nice picture with Grandma and Grandpa outside to no avail, so we moved inside with better results:

Thanks for coming to see us Grandma and Pops! We sure love you!!

Jack's nursery

Despite my (and probably Chuck's) fervent wishes that third trimester nesting would manifest itself in a newfound desire to scrub floors or deep clean the garage, my only true motivation was to coordinate a fun, cute nursery for baby Jack.

First off, here's the semi-before of this room. It's technically a bonus room since it has no closet. When we first bought our house, it was the guest room for about a year until we combined the boys into one room and moved the guest accommodations to Clyde's old room. We didn't have a pressing need for the bonus room so it became the catch-all room. The train table was in there for a while, our camping gear, shelves of movies, laundry, boxes, etc.

Even before I found out the sex of the baby, I knew I wanted to do a blue and orange room. Instead of finding new bedding, I used Will's light blue crib bumper and a cute blue and orange blanket that my mother-in-law picked up when Will was a baby.

A Boise State inspired nursery worked out pretty well since our posters from the first Fiesta Bowl were already hung up in this room, so we added Chuck's BSU flag (courtesy of his sister a couple of Christmases ago) and called this wall good to go.

I love having the boys' names in their rooms; here are Jack's letters drying after their final coat of paint.

Aaaand here they are up on the wall, where they will remain FOREVER because I don't want Chuck to see how much damage I inflicted upon the poor wall while I was power drilling the screws in.

I randomly decided to get crafty (which is hilarious because I can't sew, hot glue guns scare me, and I'm the exact opposite of a perfectionist) and make some canvas word art.

So I painted some canvases, used my cricut to make stencils of the letters and painted the letters in white on top.

And then I utilized a kitchen chair, some pushpins, and my own questionable sense of spacing and leveling to hang the finished product above the window.

Here's a close-up. This makes me happy every time I walk into Jack's room!

For my next craft-y decor idea, I wisely opted to recruit other people! I started with Clyde and Will and then expanded to other extended family members, giving each person a blank canvas and blue and orange paint and having them create a piece of artwork for Jack's room.

Here's a cheatsheet with the artists identified. We're still waiting for a few more to be finished.

Here are the most recent additions that still need to be hung up. I think it will be really fun for Jack to have these pictures to look at as he gets older.

And finally, here is the corner of the room that both Jack and I cite as our happy place, aka where we hang out eight times a day when Jack nurses! Eventually the glider will be recovered in light blue but so far, purchasing the fabric is as far as Nicole and I have gotten :). For now, Jack and I are completely content with the glider, the bottle of water I keep in the side pocket, the laptop, my boppy (I would not live/breastfeed without it), and Jack's bouncy chair. I love this corner, even at 3am :).

And that's Jack's room!

Some Valentine's Day love.

I randomly haven't blogged for a couple of weeks, which is silly because I have all sorts of things to say/share/record for posterity; I just haven't had the get up and go to do it. I think it's partially because most of my computer time is while I'm holding a sleeping/nursing/tired baby and it's superbly tricky to type one-handed. Also, after any blog absence longer than four or five days, I feel like my 'comeback' post needs to be extra exciting/hilarious/groundbreaking and our lives are remarkably routine at present time.

SO, to get back in the swing of things and in the spirit of the holiday today, here's a collection of what I currently love and adore:

* Love that Will has been happy and active and the picture of health all day despite the fact that he woke up quite sick around 5 am. Bummed that it meant no preschool for him today, but I'm just so so so glad I haven't spent the day with a wee puke-y child.

* Love that Jack is six weeks old and chunking up and leaving that 'newborn' stage behind. Don't get me wrong - new babies are wonderful, but I love when they start seeming a little less fragile and breakable.

* Love that Clyde has such an active imagination - he is constantly adding characters into his play. At last count, it's a mesh of Clone Wars (of course), Harry Potter (we borrowed the Kinect game from the library a couple weeks ago), 'Duty Black Ops' (grrr, this references Chuck's shoot-em-up video game that is never played in the little boys' presence... apparently its enticing cover provides plenty of inspiration on its own), MetalStorm (some iPad jet flying game?), Mike the Knight (cute new Nick Jr. show) and Tinkerbell (that's my boy).

* Love that we had such a nice visit at the beginning of the month from Chuck's parents. It coincided with Chuck's first few days back at work and Dave and Terri helped me a ton - thank you, thank you! And I promise to blog more about it sometime soon :).

* Love that after almost four years in this house, I've finally got somewhat of a plan for the plant shelf that runs along/above our living room. Much thanks to Nicole for climbing up amongst all the dust yesterday to help me test out some arrangements!

* Loved seeing the waves of reds and pinks at church on Sunday so I could prove to Chuck that I wasn't the only person who dressed the family to coordinate with Valentine's Day. Also love that creating our white/grey/black/red outfits only required purchasing a $2 tie at Savers the night before for Chuck.

* Love that Will has seemingly adjusted to going to his Sunbeam class without me. I went once, but the last two weeks he's marched in just fine - much kudos to his sweet teachers who keep him distracted when he asks for me. (Next step: get him to sit in Sharing Time without me!!)

* Love catching up with old friends - spent 45 minutes on the phone with Lynndi last week and immediately thought of five other things I forgot to tell her. Probably we shouldn't go so long between phone calls this time, Lynnd!

* Love that the Blue and Gold Banquet for Cub Scouts went so well last night and that I had so little to do with the planning :). At Sister Murphy's wise insistence, I took the whole month of January off from Cub Scouts so I just got to waltz back in to a fully planned event! I did make the cupcakes again, and at the last minute was recruited to present all of the awards to the boys but compared to last year it was delightfully stress free :). (And thanks sooo much to my dad for watching the boys until Chuck got home from work!!)

* Love that there were such happy reunions last weekend in Utah - Nate is home from his mission and Courtney and Chase are there visiting and my mama was able to go down and see them and the rest of the Smiths and Quinn and Eden and Sam and Terri and Hazel and Bailey. I would have loved it slightly more had I been able to be there, but such is life/having three kids/not owning a private plane.

* Love that we've done so well in reading the scriptures every night as a family so far in 2012 - we might even finish the Book of Mormon (four years after starting it!). Clyde is SO into it (I guess we should be grateful for the murders and wars and such that keep little boys' attention?) and it's fun to see him be excited to read the next night to see what happens next.

* Love how hilarious Ellen DeGeneres is and how watching her show puts me in such a good mood. She's so positive and kind and generous. It is one of my lifelong dreams (that started a couple of years ago) to be in her audience someday.

* Love that I actually have a slight desire to start "running" again in the next week or so. I'm sure that desire will lessen greatly after my first few attempts find me gasping for air and aching and walking after fifty feet or so, but it's all good. My plan is to do the Race for the Cure 5k in May that I did last year (about a week before I found out I was pregnant, yay!). We'll see how that works out - if I chicken out last minute, I will come back and delete this bullet point and we will never talk of it again.

* Love that Castle was new last night! It is safely waiting on the DVR so that our Valentine's date tonight can be putting the boys to bed and then firing it up. I love that Chuck puts up with my obsession with Castle and Beckett and the 'will they/won't they' aspect and only slightly rolls his eyes when I have to pause and rewind all the cute moments.

Happy Valentine's Day!
(and happy 10th birthday to our sweet niece Courtney!!)