Latest maternity/fashion blogging installment...

[from the world's least likely maternity/fashion blogger...]

So I had some 'free' time this morning (aka Jack is asleep and Will is reading and gettin' some screen time in, he loves him some Sid the Science kid!) so I evaluated all the things I could do... and blogging won. Specifically blogging about Sunday outfits/the expansion of my midsection, because, why not?

Last time I left off at the end of October, so this stretch will cover November-February, aka the period of time where I strove to provide my baby with the softest, squishiest, most well insulated environment possible :).

November:(Pregnancy weeks 12, 13, 14, 15)

The first outfit was this year's homage to autumn and the debut of my yellow tights. I'd planned on wearing a red cardigan, but it didn't really jive (as the rest of the outfit obviously did...). The second outfit is one of my favorite dresses and I try to stick with browns as much as possible in November, so here it is. And then the last two weeks were just more mix-ups of autumn-y colors. P.S. Those tights in week three NEVER stay the same length. Just thought I'd share. It's a phenomenon.

 December:

(Pregnancy weeks 16, 17, 18, 19, 20)

I might have had a  little lot of fun in December with Christmas colors. I remember the first outfit being a last minute change... the second outfit still makes me laugh. The third week Clyde was not super into taking my picture and we didn't get a good baby bump shot... hence the substitution of one from the Christmas party the night prior. The fourth week originally had a green shirt, but I broke my rule of waiting to get dressed until riiight before church and dripped syrup on it. Classy. And the last outfit for New Year's, the shirt was sparkly, hooray!

January:

(Pregnancy weeks 21, 22, 23, 24 1/2)

Football play-offs! The first outfit was for my Packers... alas, it didn't work and they lost. Obviously don't want to talk about it... although I'd clearly gotten over it by the next week since I wore 49ers colors! And it worked! So you're welcome to Quinn and Chuck. The next week was my bday weekend so I replicated my bday outfit from last year, haha. The last Sunday in January we actually stayed home sick so that picture is from when I went to the temple later in the week.

 Aaaaand, February:(Pregnancy weeks 25, 26, 27, 28)

This is where things get serious, hahaha. I remember this time frame marking some pretty legit growth during Jack's pregnancy, and this go-round was no different. So the first outfit was Superbowl Sunday, and I picked the Seahawks since their colors sounded more fun to coordinate. The next week was for Valentine's Day, so I dug out every girly-colored article of clothing I own. The next week we were in Utah for baby Leila's blessing. I like how in the top picture it looks like I have to go to the bathroom. I was actually just turning to say hi to Quinn's friends, but let's face it: I probably also had to go to the bathroom. This baby lounges on my bladder like it's a sofa. And the last week's outfit was thrown together at 10:59 (church definitely starts at 11) because the orange dress I planned on wearing would absolutely not zip and I already had the leggings on :).

And those are my random Sunday outfits from the last few months! I continue to feel silly and vain and shallow carrying out my 'different outfit every week' goal, but it's really fun and harmless and makes me happy, so there you go. It is hard to get a picture every week, most of these are taken by Clyde but a few are definitely a result of using the self-timer and balancing the camera on the hood of the van.

Sidenote on Clyde's photography: it's pretty tricky to know when/if he's taken a picture... hence my confused face in a lot of the pictures, haha. He also likes to keep clicking when I think we're all done:

And last Sunday he helpfully captured me sneezing with these three shots. Thanks kiddo!

My Birthday And Other Noteworthy January Occurrences

Hey, January's over! In addition to the big remodel-y projects at my mama's house, here's what we did all month: 

Dentist appts for the boys: Clyde and Will were superstars, Jack hated every second. Jack's overall temperament has improved quite a bit but his sleeping schedule leaves much to be desired, one night he wouldn't sleep unless he was draped over me, which is SUPER comfortable when you're six months pregnant. So I sent this picture (top middle) one night to get sympathy from Chuck, who was out on a Scout campout and probably deserved more sympathy, hahaha.

 Oh, Clyde started basketball and built a snowman one day. I just like the picture of Chuck picking up Willy boy from school... oh, and Chuck and I tried out Costa Vida pork salads since there's one in Nampa aaaand I have to say I prefer Cafe Rio. I know they're supposedly identical, but, alas, it just didn't do it for me.

I got a new driver's license! Chuck is economical and does the 'renewal every eight years' option, but I go every four. I just can't fathom looking that far into the future, it freaks me out. Plus I awesomely wore my hair back last time and so obviously that picture needed to be retired.

I got a black and white paper temporary license to take home that day, so here's that picture. My favorite parts are how one eye is darker than the other and how in addition to being an organ donor, I'm also a 'BRO DONOR'. Which is true. Pick any of them. All of them.

January Girls' Night:

Three January birthdays in this group, wooo!

My bday was prreetttyyy low-key this year, but the day before Chuck and I were able to sneak away for a lunch date, hooray! We started with a quick stop by the car wash before heading to Tucano's to cash in on my free birthday month meal:

This was our first time there; I'm not a huuuge carnivore (well, technically I am currently huge and also a carnivore...) but it was so delicious! And the salad bar was highly impressive. And I got a free ice cream sundae at the end, so obviously they scored high marks. Thanks to Grandma Pam for watching the boys!

And then it was my birthday! The ridiculously thoughtful Emily put the word out in our ward for people to bring me cookies for my birthday (Em and I share a serious weakness for cookies, hahaha) and several awesome people heeded the call:

Plus Em herself hooked me up with a box. Cookies make turning 29 muuuch more palatable!!

Here are some pictures from my actual birthday:

Emily will never give me cookies again after now that I've posted the shot in the bottom right, hahaha. We hired her (she does amazing work cleaning houses!!) to spend the morning in my mom's kitchen, while I worked in the dining room and I insisted on a picture before I left :). Then I went home to my sweet boys and we headed out for Clyde's basketball game. We finished up the day back at my mom's!

 Our Relief Society activity for the month was our take on the typical January New Year's Resolution-type night and it turned out SO well! We asked a few different sisters to share their thoughts on some different topics: the importance to making time for ourselves, cleaning/organizing, setting spiritual goals, developing our talents, thrifty living, and tips for eating healthily. Emily and I relied really heavily on the Spirit as we recruited women to speak and gave them minimal direction - we really wanted to see where they were inspired to go with the topics. 

It ended up being such a great mixture of spiritual and fun and uplifting and funny! and encouraging. We wrapped up the night with yummy spinach smoothies and my buddy Will (enthusiastically posing above) showing us some basic arm exercises. GREAT night, thanks to everyone who participated and especially Miss Emily for picking up so much of the slack while I was a bit overwhelmed with other things.

One of the (many!) reasons that I love Will's kindergarten teacher Mrs. Keene is that she 'assigns' a special homework project each month for the kids to complete with their families, and for January it was any kind of snowman picture. I love it because this is totally the kind of thing I should just do with my kids anyways, but sometimes you just need a little push, right?

So one Saturday we pulled out the glue and paint and got 'em done. Left to right is Jack, Clyde, Jana, Will. When Will was tracing his circles he accidentally left a little gap between the top and middle ones, so he brilliantly thought to draw the man to the left in the process of putting the head onto the body - love it.

And finally, I think all of the Zimbio quizzes going around facebook right now are hilarious. I never post my results on there, but these two in particular made me happy:

We're considering doing a family Harry Potter theme for Halloween this year, and I was Hermione back when Clyde was a baby so maybe I'll have to be Luna this go-round...

And thus concluded January, woooooo!

Christmas 2013

We had a very nice, quiet Christmas this year (er, last year?) at the Izatt home; none of us left the house once and I'm pretty sure I took two naps. FABULOUS.

Here was the scene Christmas morning just before Clyde and Will were set loose.

Props to Grandma Pam for waking up early with them and then keeping them in their room until 7am!

As always, it was so fun to watch their excitement (Will's was a bit muted at first; he was still tiiiired) as they found their presents - and each other's! The boys have a lego table in their room, so most of the legos end up as communal property :).

They got as far as stockings before they adjourned to the kitchen table to start building with their new legos - a Harry Potter quidditch set for Clyde and a Spiderman set for Will.

Somewhere in there, Jack woke up! And promptly climbed back into bed, aka his brand new TODDLER bed!

Clyde and Will paused their activities to come help Jack open his stocking :).

This might be where things get fuzzy; I for sure slipped away for my first nap sometime around here, but after I woke up I was treated to this view:

 Clyde's sweeeet quidditch field! 

Oh, and Jack got to open his gift from Grandma Pam, an orange and blue fleece blanket for his new bed!

 

In an effort to divert Jack from the older boys' legos and lego table, he received one of his own, hooray! Isn't that little Duplo table so cute? I'd been looking for one for a while and like two weeks before Christmas Will and I happened upon this one at D.I. and I was sooo happy. Jack also got fun Duplo sets from Grandma and Grandpa Izatt that were quickly opened and loved as well :).

Next it was time for some more literary gifts, starting with Grandma Pam opening her presents, including a photo book of the boys' adventures from 2013 (my dad and Chuck's parents received similar books):

And Grandma Pam returned the favor by gifting the boys with awesome books: Clyde got his own set of the Chronicles of Narnia series, and Will got a set of the Littles series, which he loves. And all three boys got 'seek and find' superhero books, woo!

Uncle Cody arrived in the afternoon just in time to see the boys open their gifts to each other... gifts that had been referenced and hinted about (always accompanied with "BUT I can't tell you what it is!!") for weeks leading up to Christmas.

Soon afterwards, the boys opened an unassuming brown box that turned out to be the new Lego Marvel video game, which they had reeeallly wanted but didn't actually expect (we usually just library it up for our video game needs). I love their mirror image "OHHH!" faces, hahaha.

Chuck's grandma sent us a super cool version of the classic game Parcheesi, which Chuck, the boys, and Grandma Pam broke in... while I took another nap :).

And that -- along with lots more wonderful presents and time together and good food and phone calls/facetime with extended family -- was our Christmas! Yay!

December incidentals

Before I force my short attention span to focus long enough to click through dozens and dozens of pictures of legos being unwrapped (aka the Christmas pictures), here's everything else random from the month of December that hasn't already been preserved for posterity:

Ahhh, little bundled boys are so cute! Although I am for sure counting down the days until t-shirts, shorts, and crocs (do you know how much time that will save us in the morning? They might even be on time to school then!).

December was, as usual, a crazy, wonderful month. I'm cheesy and I love the happy, giving spirit that is in the air - I always walk into Walmart expecting to make friends with fellow shoppers, and in December it seems like everyone goes along with it more, haha. This year brought a big project to tackle: our church Christmas party! Our committee was asked to do food and decorations... yikes. I'm pretty sure Emily and I put blood, sweat, and tears into all the planning and executing:

We had sign-ups for people to make 'festive' potatoes and brownies, but we were in charge of buying and distributing all the ingredients to those fine volunteers. OH my goodness, that was intense. I want to say Em and I went to five stores that day... and then spent a decent amount of time divying up the ingredients and dropping them off. I'm so glad that Emily and I love each other so much, because we definitely got lots of bonding time in! [Also, her kids were superstars! I happily left mine home with Chuck that day]

The set-up and decorating happened the morning of the party, and actually went really smoothly. Then we met up a bit before the party to start getting food ready to serve.

I was in the kitchen the whole night (serious thanks to my mom for coming to wrangle the boys and Chuck for getting off work early so he could come and help me out - he was one of the meat servers) but here are a couple pictures I took of the crowd. Attendance was great, and the program was fabulous - various musical presentations and a fun video of ward members answering questions about Christmas. My favorite part was in response to "What would you give Jesus for Christmas?" - Will answered (in kind of a slow, patient tone) "Uhh, nothing. He doesn't live on this earth..." Haha, that's my literal kid!! (Clyde answered that question with "Uhh, clothes" - that's the kid of a Savers shopper!!)

We donned some pretty sweet holidays ensembles for the party (I wish I had gotten a picture of Chuck in his 'festive' holiday striped sweater...) and Jack let us know exactly what he thought of Santa Claus :).

The party was definitely worth it; I think everyone had fun and we bonded as a ward... particularly those of us in the kitchen who laughed and cried as we boxed up leftovers and marveled at the wide variety of brownies that came in :).

My other slightly time-consuming project of the month was making Jack a special pillowcase with his name on it to go with the toddler bed that Santa (that savvy craigslist shopper!) was hefting down our (non-existent) chimney for him.

As with anything crafty I embark on, it took loads longer and came out loads wonkier than expected, but that's okay! I'm slightly addicted to fabric (most of my stash has been stolen from my mom as we pared her stash down...) and so it's fun to use some of it, thereby justifying its existence in an almost overflowing tote in the playroom closet!

I made sure to sneak out for some fun in December, including a high school orchestra concert featuring my good buddy Will:

He's the cute boy (partially blocked by his music stand) playing the violin in the middle of the picture. Will is a superstar musician - his piano playing is incredible - and I loved hanging out with his mom Joy while we enjoyed the concert together!

We also had our monthly girls' night, wooo!

 Have I mentioned these nights restore my sanity? Because they do :).

 And finally, the boys had a fun last day of school before the holiday break and I got to hang out for most of it.

Clyde's class kicked off the day with a breakfast/Rudolph party. I grabbed a chair and sat in the back with Clyde to watch the movie and some of his cute little friends.

Next up was their school sing-a-long in the gym (Chuck and Jack joined me for this part). It was cute, although not terribly exciting since the parents sit behind the kids and get to admire the backs of their little heads :). But it was nice to hear the complete songs that we'd been treated to snippets of at home, haha.

 Grandpa Pam rolled in right then, just in time for lunch and to come to Will's classroom party! Oh, and the picture on the bottom right is the boys with Ms. Emily, one of the awesome ladies in the front office who calls me whenever Clyde needs me at school (some weeks I talk to her more than to Chuck...) and who also smiles at us every. single. day. when the boys walk in late to school and doesn't judge us. Love her and Ms. Elsie - they both got Christmas presents from the Izatt boys!!

Will's party was decorating little gingerbread boys and girls and watching the Grinch. Please note that Will's cookie has a chocolate chip belly button :).

 I love how tightly Will is clutching his card for Mrs. Keene - and how when she opened it, he explained that the gift card inside meant she could "buy anything she wanted at Target!" 

And that was the rest of December... minus Christmas, of course. Stay tuned for that riveting account of a day opening legos, playing legos, me napping, more legos, eating, legos, napping, etc. It was fabulous.

Our wintery weekend with Grandma and Grandpa Izatt

[Ack, it's February! How did that happen?? Turns out I might be a wee bit behind on the ol' blog, so expect a rash of catch-up posts...]

We weren't able to do any traveling in December, so lucky for us Grandma and Grandpa Izatt made a trip our direction! They came up the weekend before Christmas and all sorts of fun was had.

They drove up late Friday night during a big snowstorm that made for a slightly stressful drive (so glad they arrived safe and sound!!) but a fun activity the next day: SLEDDING!

There's a nice little hill at the park near our house that Chuck and the older boys go to regularly; Jack and I hesitantly joined in this time too.

Pops settled in at the bottom of the hill and captured all the action for us. 

Here's Clyde, who believes that if you make it all the way down still on your sled, you're doing it wrong... to the extent that he usually catapults himself off before he hits that point, hahaha:

Will prefers to stay on his sled, but his giggles definitely vouch for the fact that he has just as much fun his way... and stays at least a little drier.

Chuck took Jack down a few times and then got a running start for a solo ride:

And at one point Chuck's and my parenting instincts simultaneously failed and we agreed to send Jack down with Clyde... again, who has never made it to the bottom still upright on his sled:

Whoops! Off flies Jackers!

So I stole the 'running start' move from Chuck and slid myself down ASAP to rescue my cold little baby:

Who wasn't much worse for the wear - honestly, he probably liked it pretty well :).

Sunday after church the boys got some craft time in with Grandma - decorating paper gingerbread men with puffy paints, and making new ornaments for the Christmas tree.

They also started in on gingerbread houses!

 Alas, they needed a bit of extra time to sturdy up, so decorating had to wait until the next night after Grandma and Grandpa were gone:

(I love Clyde sporting his green and pink eyepatch...)

And of course Pops and Grandma left us with piles of thoughtful and fun presents to open for Christmas.

 Thanks so much for coming to see us! The boys had a great time, we love you lots!!