His Name: James Edward Phelps

His Blessing: Beautiful.

I am so thankful for a wonderful husband who holds and honors the Priesthood and was able to give our baby a blessing. It was a wonderful blessing. And I am also thankful for the other wonderful men in our lives that were able to share in the special blessing.

Of course after the blessing we celebrated with food, friends and family.

James was passed around to everyone! By the end of the day all he wanted to do was be all alone on the floor by himself with no one bothering him. (I tried to get pictures with James and everyone who came, but he wasn’t too happy about that, and some of our family snuck out before we could get pictures. Oh well.)

Thank you to everyone who came and celebrated with us. It was a beautiful day.

baby feet

Riddle me this: How is it that in James short 12 weeks of life that I have clipped his fingernails too many times to count, but have never had to clip his toenails?

I blame Bryan.

In our 4 years of marriage, I have never seen Bryan clip his toenails. I’ve never seen him clip his fingernails either but I’m fairly certain that he bites his fingernails (I know he can’t be biting his toenails because #1 that’s gross and #2 he’s not that flexible).

My boys just have magic toenails that don’t grow.

I wish I had magic toenails too.

This year my handsome handsome husband officially celebrated his first Father’s Day. It was a pretty good day. James and I picked a movie to give him for Father’s Day, but couldn’t wait until Sunday to actually give it to him, so we gave it to him on Friday and watched it as a family Friday night (well, all three of us actually fell asleep, but we attempted to watch it as a family).

Sunday my two boys celebrated the day by taking a three hour nap after church and before our family barbecue. I made my grandma’s rolls and yummy peanut butter bars (I had never made these bars before, so I was a little worried about how they would turn out, but they were WONDERFUL. Click the link, follow the recipe and try them yourself, they are so yummy) while the two of them slept. I was pretty excited about the peanut butter bars because I know how much my handsome husband loves chocolate and peanut butter and I wanted to make a special treat for him for Father’s day. He loved them. SUCCESS!

(sometimes I feel extra homemaker-y)

My snoozin' boys

Note: this picture wasn’t taken yesterday it was a little while ago. My hands were covered in flour so there is no picture of their snooze yesterday. But I love this picture. Notice how they are sleeping exactly the same with their hands up behind their heads. What you can’t see is that they both have their legs crossed the same too.

I’m so wonderfully thankful for Bryan and what a wonderful dad he is. One of my favorite things about sweet baby James coming to our home is watching Bryan be a dad. He’s wonderful.

Bryan, you are going to be a wonderful example and influence on our sweet baby James and all of the kids we have later. I know that they are going to learn so many wonderful things from you. I hope that James grows up to be as patient, kind, smart, hardworking and wonderful. I love you.

Grandpa:

Also this year, my dad was able to celebrate Father’s day as a grandpa for the very first time. James is the first grand baby on my side of the family and my dad is such a cute grandpa.

Earlier this past week, James and I were in Provo near BYU and decided to stop by and say hello to my dad at work (and use his sink to make James a bottle because he was SCREAMING). My dad took James around to all his co-workers to show him off, beaming “This is my grandson, James EDWARD.”

When we named James, we gave him both of his grandpa’s names: James after Bryan’s dad (Sherman James Phelps) and Edward after my dad (Edward McCracken). As James grows up, I hope he realizes what wonderful men he was named after.

James and Grandpa

As a dad my dad is pretty wonderful too. I know that no matter what he will always be there for me.

Toward the end of my pregnancy, I got pretty sick and was throwing up everything that I ate. It started in the middle of the night and the next morning I was still feeling horrible. My husband had a meeting, so he had to run to work, so I called my dad. I knew that he would have to drive past my house to get to work, so I asked him if he would bring me a something to settle my stomach. He brought me four different drinks, bananas, rice cakes and more. He said just in case one thing didn’t work, I would need options. I thought he would just bring me something from his house, but he stopped at the grocery store on his way to my house to make sure I had everything that I would need to feel better. After he dropped the food off, he realized that he should have gotten me a coke as well (he said the coke syrup would help my stomach, but I can’t stand the taste to actually get it down to my stomach), so he drove to the gas station by my house and bought me one and brought it back to me.

He always wants to make sure that we, his kids, have everything he needs. He is a wonderful example of love and service. Growing up, I remember him always helping other people. As a home teacher, neighbor and friend he would always be there if you needed him.

Dad, I love you and am so thankful for the wonderful example you have been to me and for the many things you have taught me.

His name was Bryan.

I hadn’t worked there for very long, so I didn’t know who she was talking about. I told her I would keep my eye out for him and think about it. A little while later, while I was working another Target employee came through my lane. He was buying toys and food for a dog.  We got chatting about his dog, Phoebe. How long he had her, what kind of dog she was and I looked up from the register and noticed his name tag. It was the Bryan that Kylee had told me about. She was right; he was cute.

After that initial meeting, nothing happened.  We closed together a few times and we chatted when we saw each other. During one closing night I remember putting away abandons with him and his two friends, Brett and Shaun in A and B, standing by the greeting card aisle. They were shooting elastic headbands at me. Now that I think about it, I don’t think that Bryan shot any at me, or Brett, it may have just been Shaun.

Another night we closed together I was talking with him in between toys and the seasonal section of Target. As I walked away Janeen, one of our fellow Target employees, came up to me and asked me what I thought of Bryan. I was putting on chap stick and told her that I didn’t know. I had never thought about it.  She told me that she thought that he and I should go on a date. We would make a cute couple, she said.

(It’s funny the things you remember.)

Janeen happened to also be one of the team leaders over the cashiers. So when I worked, I had to do what she asked. One evening, the store was super slow so we were all just kind of standing around talking.  I was talking with Janeen and Bryan came up again. She really thought we should go on a date and she was determined to make sure it happened.  She disappeared for a little while coming back with a bow from the gift wrapping section. It didn’t have a tag and needed one.  She told me that I needed to go over to the aisle and find Bryan and have him get me a number so we could make a tag for it.

I found Bryan and he got me a number for the bow and asked if I wanted to go and get some ice cream at Sonic after work. And we had our first date, one summer evening at Sonic in American Fork.

Now, six years later, we celebrate our four year wedding anniversary. It’s amazing how something as small as a white gift wrapping bow without a tag can change your life forever (with a little help from Janeen, Kylee and a few of our other Target friends…).

The story doesn’t end there, the next two years before we actually got married is full of all kinds of drama and intrigue… but I’ll save that for another day.

Bryan: I love you more today than I ever thought possible.  Thanks for marrying me.

My little alien

Our Story:

As I mentioned in my last post, the doctor was getting worried about my blood pressure, so I was on bed rest for about a week. During that time, I was in and out of the doctor’s office and hospital being monitored to make sure that my blood pressure wasn’t going to elevate more and develop into anything more serious.

(This is going to be long… but you are reading my blog, so obviously you want to hear all about my story. And, I have to have a record of it lest I forget)

Thursday night, I went to bed looking forward to another exciting day of bed rest. I woke up around 1:30 with a pretty painful contraction. I walked around for a minute and got back into bed and went to sleep. Around 2:30 I woke up again with another contraction. After it was over, I tried to go back to sleep only to be stopped by continuing contractions.

Inside, I think I knew that he was coming and I could only think, “No, you can’t come today, this is the only day that mom can’t come to the hospital.” (She had a field trip with her students.) But the contractions kept coming and there was nothing I could do.  I wondered around the bedroom trying anything to make myself more comfortable though the pain. I started timing, and the contractions were getting closer and closer.

Around 3:45, I woke up Bryan telling him that he needed to wake up now, I think I’m having this baby. It took him a little bit and a couple of poking, but he finally woke up. I wondered around the bedroom some more and he rubbed my back through a couple of contractions, before we decided to call my mom. My contractions were a little different than the doctor and my mom had said they would feel, so I wasn’t totally sure if I was actually having real contractions. And after being in and out of the hospital the last two weeks, the last thing I wanted to do was go over there only to be sent home.

I called my mom knowing that at 4 a.m. it would be hard to get her on the phone.  I heard her on the other line pick up her phone, and then close it. “Great, she thinks I’m her alarm,” I thought.  “Mom, Mom, this isn’t your alarm; answer your phone. I’m on the phone; answer the phone.”  (She answered her phone thinking it was her alarm, then set it back on her nightstand. I knew that if I just talked loud enough into the phone, she’d finally answer.)

After chatting for a few moments we concluded we should go to the hospital. So I brushed my teeth and brushed my hair (a little earlier, while wondering around my room in pain, I had thought about getting in the shower, and briefly considered it again, but decided against it). Bryan got dressed, we let the dog out and away we went.

We arrived at the hospital around 4:30. Bryan dropped me off at the front door and went to park the car. I walked in and the security guard offered me a wheel chair. In my head I laughed a little bit thinking about all the television shows I had seen with the woman freaking out in the lobby of the hospital, doing her labor breathing as they wheel her up to the delivery room in a wheel chair. As I wasn’t freaking out, and could still waddle, I declined the wheel chair knowing that Bryan would catch up with my by time I made it to the elevators  — He did, because I had to stop walking half way to the elevators with another contraction.

We got up to labor and delivery and were hurried into a room to be monitored. I was dilated to a 3 and things were looking good to have the baby. We sat and waited an hour watching the contractions on the monitor, well Bryan watched the contractions on the monitor with lots of helpful words of encouragement like, “Oh, that was a good one” and “that one was bigger than the last one” or “it will be cool when you can get four peaks on the screen at the same time.”

I can’t really imagine being the husband just watching your wife go through labor. I know he wanted to help me and somehow make the pain go away, but he couldn’t do anything and just had to sit there and watch as I mumbled to myself, “no, no, no. I don’t want to do this” or “I can’t do this; I can’t do this; I can’t do this” or “I changed my mind.”

After they watched us for an hour, my contractions continued to get closer together and more painful and I was dilated to a 4 — so they decided to officially admit us.

They moved us into a delivery room and started to hook me up to more monitors. The nurse was wonderful and did everything she could to make me comfortable. Then, she asked the golden question, “are you ready for your epidural?”

Yes, yes I was.

They hooked me up to an IV and showed Bryan some things he could do until the epidural arrived to help lessen the pain of the contractions.  The nurse told me we were very lucky, because we were able to catch the anesthesiologist before he was going to be busy for 2 hours helping with a c-section.

Dan, the anesthesiologist, came in and they told Bryan he had to sit down in the chair right in front of me and hold my hand. “We can’t have you standing up and hitting the floor during this,” they said.  Then they told us about more than one dad who saw the needle and passed out.

The epidural was heaven. It was kind of funny though, because it worked first on my one side of my body and not the other, so I could feel the left side, but not the right.  It trickled to the right side, but I felt a little lopsided for a little bit.

Through this whole process they had closely been monitoring my blood pressure and just after I received the epidural, the doctor came in and decided he was a little worried about my blood pressure still and didn’t want anything to happen later during labor and put me on an IV of magnesium. This added a little bit of drama to the whole situation and tons more wires, tubes and monitors attached to my body.  At one point during labor, I had 9 different things attached to me. I felt a little bit like the back of my computer tower at work with everything attached to me and connecting me to so many different things.

After I received my epidural, everything seems to move into hyper-speed. My parents showed up and so did Bryan’s parents. I was dialated to a 6 and even though I couldn’t feel any thing but pressure, my contractions were consistent and from the look of the spikes on the screen, would have been pretty painful (thank goodness for modern medicine).

The thing that I thought was so amazing about labor was how instinctive everything seemed to be.  It was as if my body knew what it needed to do and although the monitors were telling me what should happen, I knew myself.

After kicking everyone out of the room except the nurse, Bryan and my mom I knew it was time to push.  I told the nurse, I was ready and I needed to push.  She told me just to hang on for a few seconds and then we could push. She check and I was completely dialated and ready to go.  She said I could start pushing and explained to me what I needed to do.  She went and got to the doctor and we were on our way.

After about an hour of pushing, at 10:45 a.m. he was here.  Over my stomach, after he arrived, I could see little hands and fingers moving — it was a baby.  Then I heard him cry and I knew — it was MY baby.

My Baby

Yes, I cried.

They were a little worried about his breathing so after cleaning him up a little bit, measuring and weighing him, he and Bryan went downstairs to make sure he was okay.

And the nurse brought me a Mr. Pibb and cookies.  Ahhh — Wonderful.

It was an amazing day.  Here’s more pictures:

Baby and Mommy

Baby Toes

Family Photo

Grandma and Baby James

Stretching

So Tiny

Bryan's Best Birthday

The day we came home from the hospital was Bryan’s 26th birthday. He was a little sad James didn’t wait just a few more days to share a birthday with him, but it was still Bryan’s best birthday present ever.  We had a small celebration for Bryan that night with 24 candles and 2 matches. He’s a wonderful dad. One of my absolute favorite things about becoming a mom is watching Bryan become a dad. He’s so cute with James. Bryan made sure and introduced James to Jazz basketball the first night he was here with us. It was so cute.

Because it has taken me so long to record the events of that wonderful day, so much seems to have happened already since then. So I’ll leave you with a video. Our baby has the most amazing neck strength already. On Saturday, at 8 days old he was enjoying “tummy time” with Bryan at my parents house and wanted to get a better look at the world.

Last Tuesday, Bryan and I celebrated our 3 year anniversary.  Even though we didn’t do anything super exciting, I must post about it. We just went out to eat, and then to Target to buy a fan for our bedroom (and we found an awesome fan that has a remote, sadly though the remote didn’t work).

But, I am so happy that Bryan and I are married.  I often think about how much I like being married to him.  He is wonderful. I think I’ll keep him for a little bit.

Tonight when my handsome, handsome husband and I came home from work, we decided it was probably time to do the dishes (sadly, we don’t do the dishes as often as we should, because there is only two of us, and we don’t make that many dirty dishes so we wait until we have more to do.  By time that happen though, we have a huge pile.).  So we went in the kitchen and got to work.  Then, I guess we got in the mood and our kitchen cleaning turned into entire main level cleaning, which then turned to master bedroom cleaning and ironing.  It was a very productive evening.

While I was cleaning tonight though, I was thinking a lot about the cleaning as I did as a child.

I am very thankful that as a kid, my mom made sure we always had jobs to do and she taught me how to clean.

Tonight, I was vacuuming the living room and I remember as a kid when we had to vacuum the living room, my mom insisted that we move the piano bench out of the way and vacuum everything.  So now, when I vacuum the living room, I make sure and move our ottoman so I can vacuum everything and not just around things (I don’t move our love sac out of the way often enough though, it’s a pain to move).

Then, when I was dusting, I moved everything off the end table and bookshelf and dusted the surfaces while they were empty.  Then as I put the items back in their places, I ran my dust rag over then to make sure they were also dustless like the shelves they sat on.  This practice was also something we were instructed to do when dusting the piano when we were little.

Another thing my mom taught us to do when we cleaned that I still do is after loading the dishwasher, you rinse out the sink and faucet.  Then dry the inside of the sink and buff faucet so there are no water spots.

While I know these type of things are standard things that people do when they clean and I complained about when I was little, looking back now, I’m so thankful that my mom taught me these things and got me in the habit.  I know sometimes when I am being lazy in my cleaning and don’t move the things when I dust or something like that, it’s never really the same.

One thing that my mom did though and taught us, that I DO NOT follow her lead is ironing.  (Her method is better than mine, but I hate it so much, that I just can’t do it).

My mom irons like this: when she does laundry, if there is something that needs ironing, she puts it in “the ironing basket.”  This included all kinds of things, like my dad’s dress shirts, polos, her shirts, our shirts, pants, pillowcases, table cloths and sometimes even sheets.  Often, one of our jobs for the week was to iron 5 things — not a lot, but considering how much I hate it, it was torture.  We would sift through the basket to find the pillowcases and table cloths.  If you were one of the first to do your 5 things, you could normally get away with only having to iron the easy things.  After the pillowcases and the table cloths the next easiest would be shirts not belonging to my dad (so mom’s t shirts or one of the kids shirts).  Then if you had to, you’d move on to dad’s polos.  Then if you were really unlucky, you’d end up with dad’s dress shirts.  Which were just such a pain because they were hard to iron and if we did a bad job, dad wouldn’t look nice and he was a CIO and needed to look nice. After we did our 5 things, mom would finish the rest.  Now, this system was a great system for my family.  It helped us learn how to iron (even though we didn’t want to) and we had lots of really nicely pressed things in our house (pillows do look nicer on beds after they have been ironed. Try it if you’ve never done it).  Don’t get me wrong, our system had some flaws, but we won’t go into that.

So if I don’t follow my mom’s system, what’s my super awesome ironing system, you may ask?  I don’t have one.  I hate the chore so much that I would rather wear wrinkled clothes than have to iron.  This isn’t a problem for me, because I’ve come to terms with it.  It is a little bit of a problem for Bryan though, because his Sunday clothes really do need to be ironed.  The system is probably something I should try to adopt from my mom, but it’s just so hard. For a good portion of our marriage so far we didn’t even have an ironing board. My cousin Brandon and his family came to stay with us once and he was amazed that I didn’t have an ironing board.

So here’s my question to you.  How do you iron? How do you make sure everything that needs to be ironed gets ironed? And it gets done in a timely manner?

I know part of my problem with it is my attitude, but still, there has to be a way to do it that makes it less horrible, or maybe not less horrible, but so that my husband can look nice (because really, even with a good system, I’ll still only do my hubby’s clothes so he looks nice and I don’t feel like a horrible wife). He’s pretty awesome and deserves a nicely pressed shirt.

( ha ha! That turned out to be a really long article about cleaning. Wow.)

Another exciting thing:

The last couple of days at work, I have been creating a special VIP invitation to an event we are putting on for the President of our company and a couple of other important people.  I was talking about the invitation with some of the other designers and we came up with the idea to do a pop up card to invite them.  So with Andrea’s help we came up with some options. We had some big plans for out of control mountains popping up out of the card, but we took a little different route. So today, I finished it and I think it turned out really cool. We only need to make five.  We cut out all the parts today and will put the cards together tomorrow. I’m pretty impressed and was very pleased with the final results. (the pictures aren’t the best… sorry)

Earlier at work, my friends and I were all sitting around talking.  I was showing a friend of mine something on the internet.  I was explaining to him that it was php or javascript based and you just needed to go in and edit the HTML code.  And he looked up at me and said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. All I heard was WAH WAH WAH.” Then another of my friends turned around and said, “She has to be able to talk like that to communicate with her husband.”  Then we laughed. Oh web people are such dorks.

Another time, during lunch we were sitting in the lunch room eating and some people from the Support Team came in and started talking about the things they were working on. This didn’t work here, and this person was talking about their database and the location of their files.  My friends and I at work just looked at each other amazed.  Support people are such dorks.

Today at lunch, we sat around the table and talked for 20 minutes about this really nice font I found at Veer.com.  “It’s a San Serif font with really straight edges.  It’s kind of like ITC Kabel,” I explained to Ryan and Ian. “But I like it better than Kabel because the S has really small space between it’s lines.”  “You know,” Ryan said, “They should have a pronunciation guide for font names.” I said, “Why because I say Kabel differently than you.” He said, “Yeah, but also…” and then we talked about all the fonts that we weren’t sure how to pronounce.  This conversation went on for quite a few minutes. We finished lunch and went upstairs.

Later as I was sitting, thinking…I realized: we’re all dorks.  It doesn’t matter what we are dorks about. All groups of people have the things that they are dorks about.  It doesn’t matter what it is or who you are, there is something that you think is important and interesting that someone else things is so lame.

Isn’t it great?

Anyway. The moral of the story is, if everyone puts all the seats of the toilet down then the great debate will be ended and there will be more peace in the world.

And by the way: I thought this picture of the toilet was so funny. You can find more here. People are so creative sometimes.