Fishing and Yard Work

On Wednesday my wonderful husband spent the evening with Grace and let me go to Activity Days childless. It was fun to be able to give my full attention to the primary girls and I think Grace had fun with her dad. The Young Men were out at President Austin's lake working on their fishing merit badges so Grace got to be one of the boys for the night.

Grace playing on the boat

On Thursday night we had some yard work that needed to be done. I strapped Grace to me in the Snugli and mowed the lawn while Justin ran the weed eater. This picture may look like Grace is not enjoying herself, but she actually loved riding around our yard on the mower. It worked out really well, but I no longer have an excuse for not being able to mow the lawn.

"Ferberizing"

We've decided to "sleep train" Grace. We haven't been having any problems getting her to go to sleep at night or even sleeping through the night. She's been doing that since she was about 4 months old. The problem is that she always falls asleep while having her bedtime bottle. She never gets the chance to go down while still awake, thus making her learn to soothe herself to sleep. We decided to try the "Ferber Method" tonight. I mixed up her bedtime routing so that I would put her down in her crib when she was tired but was still awake. I gave her a bottle, then she had a bath, then I read a couple books to her, and then I turned on her lullaby music and we said goodnight to her. We turned off the light and left the room expecting her to cry and wail for a long time, but much to our surprise she only cried for about 5 minutes. I stood by her door after she quit crying and I could hear her playing in her crib. A little while later I checked on her again and she was asleep. I couldn't believe it. I think this was just a fluke. I'm sure tomorrow night will be horrible.

Halloween... HILARIOUS

Justin left to go camping/fishing with the scouts tonight and Grace is napping so I decided to surf the web for a while. I got an email from diapers.com (I LOVE that website by the way) telling me they have baby costumes for sale. That got me thinking about what I want Grace to be so I decided to Google baby costumes and these are some of the funniest ones I found. I can't decide now if I want Grace's first Halloween costume to be something sweet and cute, or something absolutely hilarious like these. I think my favorite is the car air freshener. It doesn't get any better than that.

I'm afraid someone would sit on her...

...or eat her

If any of you out there are looking for some great costumes for your kids click here.

The Worst Thing

So the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone living in Texas during the summer has happened to us. Our air conditioner has died. I'm sure you can all imagine the grieving that is going on in our home at this time. We will miss you a/c... until we get a new one that is.

Pictures

While Grace and I were in Utah we caught up with Justin's sister and her kids to get some pictures of all the cousins together. Kelli's son Jaxx is almost a year older than Grace and it was difficult to get him and Grace looking at the camera with a decent expression at the same time. The kids were troopers though and we got one pretty good photo. I was also able to get a few shots of just Grace.

Grace just wanted to play with Jaxx's puppy the whole time so we gave her some flowers to distract her. They also cropped the photo to get the black part out of the background.

(Clockwise from left: Alix 4, Whitney 5, Jaxx 17 months, Grace 7 months)