Some videos

Here are some vids of Jori Pori. Did you know I call her that a lot? I also like Jori Bean, like a little Jelly Bean.

http://youtu.be/ghnxeSbBA2M Sam and Jori do a 'tent' sometimes, which is absolutely adorable. I love it. Love love love!

http://youtu.be/lydb-wnztk8 Jori's chattin.

http://youtu.be/65Vzqft3m50 Jori's chewing in this one, for the first time. :) I'm a mega dork though in it. Blagh

http://youtu.be/JzplKcrYJRQ this is her trying rice cereal for the first time, right about at Sam's birthday so when she was 4 months old.

And here's still my favorite growling one: http://youtu.be/Rhx5GFBRUjA so cute!!!

Valentines Day is for LOVERS...

Do you like that spicy, spicy title? Me too.

I've pretty much always enjoyed Valentine's day, except for 2009 when I was still hung up over the guy who'd broken up with me a few months before. I've always thought it needn't be a day solely for romantic lovers, but that we should be able to celebrate all those we love in whatever way. Then one day in...like 2008, there was a devotional talk at BYU-I that I attended that totally supported the idea-it talked about...well, basically this. Just take a look for yourself. Fascinating stuff.

Anyway so almost always, I look forward to a day devoted to love. Why not, right? I love holidays. I always dress Jori and I up for them. (Pictured above, and below is evidence.) And I don't need a huge deal to be made, but I've made it clear to Sam I like flowers and chocolate on Valentines day. (By saying 'Sam, I want flowers and chocolate for Valentine's day this year' several times before the day. I try to make it easy for him-that way I'm not annoyed or disappointed when he doesn't pick up on hints, and he doesn't feel frustrated either.)

So Valentines was great this year. Not that we were able to celebrate all that much-we only saw each other for 45 minutes before 7:00 pm, but we made the time we had count.

When I got home from my Tuesday class, guess what was on the front door? A sweet little envelope with a heart and my name on it. I opened the envelope and found...a CLUE!! Sam sent me on a mini scavenger hunt around our apartment! Since he knew I'd love it.

And love it I did! I had so much fun hunting down all the clues-even though I needed a bit of help on a couple. Finally he led me to roses and chocolate, which he'd hid under the covers on our bed. Joy! :)

He then took me downstairs and had a surprise dinner waiting, which definitely was a surprise. He wanted to do something un-expected, so he got a whole ton of...like snack foods and finger foods, and just made those. He even cut some of the cheese into little hearts. What a romantic! ;)

I had a great Valentines day. I hope everyone else did, too.

Christmas...after Valentines

I haven't been blogging because I knew Christmas was next, and we have a TON of Christmas pics. But I need to get a move on! We're halfway through February folks! Sheesh! So I decided I'm going to just try to load my favorites from Christmas.

So Christmas this year we spent with Sam's parents. It was the first Christmas in my life that I actually wasn't with my parents on Christmas, and I was a bit worried I'd feel...homesick? Kind of. You know what I mean. But we had a great time up in Franklin for the holidays. We stayed from...I think it was the 20th through the 28th, but I forget. I think that's right though. So for a good long while. We spent the time sledding down their driveway, watching movies (a different one every day, which was fabulous for a movie lover like myself), snacking, chatting, visiting others etc. The actual DAY was a Sunday, so we went to church (which I spent the majority of wandering the halls with Jori-the only time she was fussy that day was at church, lil stinker) and opened our presents when we got home.

Sledding with daddy! First day. After this we started turning her around and just holding her, so the wind wasn't blowing so harshly into her face.

This is/was her 'oooo' face. Cooing face. So cute.

Grandpa gave her a ride. :)

Jotham, Jamie and their kids came up one of the days, and we all went sledding together.

Jori fell asleep! Poor Gavin got squished. What a good sport.

Can I just say, it was AWESOME to have a child at Christmas time. I was totally ecstatic to show Jori all the presents we had gotten for her. And we got a SWEET deal off of KSL on pretty much all of our gifts for her, so that was great.

She learned how to sit up just this day, on Christmas Eve! Can you tell how proud she is?

Daddy's a goof ball sometimes.

See?

Christmas angel, here was her outfit for church.

The camera loves this one, I'm telling ya!

Caught in the act!

Most of her gifts we stuck in two big boxes, and dumped out all at once. It was easier that way.

Most people told us their babies under age one didn't care at all about opening presents, but Jori was really quite enthusiastic! She had the 'Baskin Robbins' effect-she would grab one toy, then immediately drop it for another, over and over.

Above-gift from G'ma and G'pa C, and below Jori with the stash of gifts. SO fun having a baby at Christmas time!!!

Look at that nice chubby face. And her lack of a left shoe, that's not pictured.

On the...um...27th or something, was the Hatch Christmas party. Part of the Hatch Christmas party is always a talent show, where each family has to have at least someone perform something. Everyone always wants us to sing, and last time I think I dug in my heels and said no (guess we can see where Jori gets the stinker from), since I felt like a performing monkey, but this year we decided to really wow the crowd and do some super sweet fancy stuff. First, Jori showed her talent by touching both her ears at the same time with her feet, without bending her knees. Can you do that?! She also smiled super cute during it: she is quite the little show-off, which I just adore I must say. And then Sam played his bagpipes, and I Irish danced to them! No one saw it coming. :) I took an Irish dance class last semester so it was fun to put what I'd learn to use. Course they still made us sing which was cheap, but what can you do. Adoring fans, you know.

Besides that, I was really delighted for Jori to not only get to meet almost all the cousins on her Hatch side, but especially all three of the little boys who were born before her in the same year-Gavin (born in January, to Sam's brother Jotham and his wife Jamie-their 5th), Braden (born in February, to Sam's sister Melanie and her husband Jed-their 3rd) and Jackson (born in April, to Sam's brother Rustin and his wife Kim-their 6th). I get such joy out of Jori having all these little cousins who are going to be her age-three on my side and three on Sam's! So we got some fun pics with the four lil babies. It was way funny-the boys kept escaping, since Jori's the only one who couldn't crawl yet (and still doesn't as of February 15th 2012, btw).

Escape!!!

Jori had so much fun with her boy cousins-she was smiley through their whole little photo shoot!

Left to right: Braden, Gavin, Jori (duh) and Jackson.

That's pretty thorough, eh? I guess I'll end it there. adios amigos.

Oh, Christmas Tree...

Raise your hand if Sam reminds you of a mountain man in this pic!

You may have heard, we were planning to move around the holidays. It just didn't work out-for some reason none of the places we were interested in worked. Either they chose someone else or there was one thing wrong with them or...anyway. I got the impression that we really weren't supposed to be moving yet, I just didn't want to accept it. Bah.

But after I finally did, that meant we had no reason not to go get a Christmas tree! So we did. On December 16th. :) Funny thing, we bought one that was still all tied up because we forgot we had to figure out a way to get it home, and we only had our car. But turned out we had excellent choosing skills. Nice.

Setting it up...

Carefully, and gently, the smallest person of the household places the inaugural purple globe on the velveteen pine boughs. What a stunning act of brilliance.

Carefully, and gently, the smallest person of the household places the second purple globe on the velveteen pine boughs. What a stunning act of brilliance.

Yum

Fully decorated. Except we only had this cloth, gigantic angel, so our tree didn't have anything on top for a while until Sam made a paper star.

I have labored many long hours for the chance to delight at least one face on the face of the earth, I hope that its yours. That's what that face says to me. Or like "hu-HA!"

Good times. :)

Not bummed anymore!!

So update on Jori's sleeping:

after that last post, I felt like I really needed to buckle down and endure to get Jori sleep trained. So I borrowed my parents' cot, so I could sleep downstairs in our kitchen (the farthest away room I could possibly be in from Jori) and I turned on the fan of the bathroom that's between the kitchen and the stairs, to try to muffle the sound. And I was able to endure!

And Jori is doing great!!!

She's not sleeping through the night, or anything. But I just committed to not going in to check on her until she was already asleep, except maybe once if it had been like, 9 hours since she'd last eaten.

Really, she's doing stupendous. She is waking up-six months of one way is hard to forget!-but she's putting herself back to sleep within 5-10 minutes. Oh I'm SOOOO proud of her!!!

You know honestly, the plan WAS to do what this friend from our old ward did with her two girls, and let them cry for an hour but if they were still like really wailing at that point, go in and feed them. I thought I could endure that. But the combination of me not being able to hear her much and just utter exhaustion won over, and I kinda accidentally just left her there...but I'm now so glad I did. She's doing better for it.

I think it also helped that I decided I would comfort her to sleep, in the beginning at least. So that at least the night starts off right. And we bumped up her bedtime significantly for this process-she's going to sleep at 6:00 currently. Both were talked about in the book "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child," which was my favorite of all the sleep training theories I've come across thus far.

SO! Our next step is now putting her down still awake to bed at bedtime, and then I think putting her down awake to bed at naptime.

But she did so awesome today! She took 2, 2 hour long naps!! Holy cow!!! I was very proud of her.

Just thought I'd share all about it. I'm so pleased. :)

I'm kind of bummed

You know how people do things for attention, and post things online for attention when they're down? This is kind of like that, but I figured a blog wasn't as dramatic as facebook. Still kind of pathetic but I figured it'd also make me feel better to type it out, so not totally pointless.

I'm rather discouraged about sleep-training Jori. I keep asking people how they did it and people are super nice and tell me, and I've looked up stuff about it online and read some things about it in different books...but I just can't do it. It seems basically the only way to do it is to make them cry themselves to sleep, period. This makes the most logic to me-they learn to comfort themselves that way, out of necessity. But it's so impossible in practice. I'm what my mom has always told me is 'tender-hearted,' and that's certainly true with Jori-she's got me wrapped around her tiny little fingers. I don't want to be a push over but she's only six months old-it seems so harsh to do what feels like is me saying "No, I don't care if you want me and I don't care if you're sad and cry. I'm leaving you here. In the dark. Alone. All night long. Bye."

I tried it ONE night, only one, and it went like this:

Jori was really tired when we put her down at...8? I can't remember, it was late that night, so she fell asleep within about 15 minutes. But then...

12:30 woke up, crying

1:30 still crying, panicked, frantic

2:30 still crying,

3:00 mommy breaks down and goes in. I picked her up and she like, passed out in my arms. Just collapsed. She was so exhausted. She fell asleep in like 10 seconds. Then I put her down, relieved but also stricken with guilt, and she stayed asleep. But then...

4:44 awake, crying. And I gave in and went in and fed her, because I had figured that it was ok if she needs to wake up at 5 and eat, I'd read that was normal. She fell asleep after I fed her...

7:00 awake, very upset. I go in and pick her up; she cried for 45 minutes anyway. Because the ordeal was so awful for her. She even made herself gag/wretch 3 times, since she was so upset.

I can't do that to her! But I can't keep going as it is. Two nights ago she woke up FIVE times, at 10:30, 12:30, 2:30, 4:30 and 6:30. Last night about the same but it wasn't as consistent, with the timing.

It's just frustrating that the only thing I'm really expected to have taught my daughter how to do so far, sleep, I haven't succeeded at.

:(

No menace to society here!!

Sam turned 25 this just past year. His birthday is November 8th, for those of you who don't know. We both for our birthdays this year signed up for all these birthday clubs that restaurants have, and so we got a free Red Robin burger for it. On my birthday we just split the one but this time it was 'buy one get one free.' Still a steal though.

So the actual day, we had only a small window of opportunity where Sam could celebrate between classes and working. But we made the most of it: we went to Red Robin and then watched a fun movie (I think-I really don't remember that well). We both skipped classes so we could make it work.

And btw. Have you ever tried Red Robin's sweet potato fries? Because they are absolutely divine. I could eat those bad boys all day long. Yum!!

We also got a 'buy one meal get one free' to Tucanos. Have you ever been to Tucanos? It's a Brazilian grill that is absolutely delectable. What's better, we had Britany join us when we used that one because it was when she was here! So much fun. :)