Medication

Sydney's reaction to antibiotics...and really any medications.

Christmas

We had a pretty good Christmas, once we finally got to my parent's house. Sydney enjoyed the paper the most, but she does love her new toys that she got.

Tied up in strings

The best part of Christmas.

Tasty

Sydney eating rice cereal for the first time at my parents' house in Nebraska.

Victory, Victory!!!

Tonight Valerie laid Sydney down in her cradle and she didn't even cry. We didn't hear any crying for a while so Valerie went and checked on the baby. She was just laying there looking around. After five to ten more minutes we decided to have another look and she was fast asleep, no crying. Go Sydney and Valerie!

Fighting the Bedtime Battle

So, I've been a bad mother and have always gone and picked Sydney up as soon as she cries at night since she was born for two reasons: 1) It just kills me to hear her cry...to the point that I get physically distressed and can't take it and 2) If I don't fix her crying quickly, I cannot go back to sleep and get even less sleep than I already do (which is a really small amount as it is). But, since we're going home this week (YAY!) and I want to be able to spend time with my family and not always be fighting the bedtime battle, I've been working on letting her cry it out a bit and teaching her to put herself to sleep. Instead of letting her scream until she falls asleep, I let her cry for five minutes, then go comfort her and give her back her pacifier and leave the room again. Sometimes it doesn't work for a while, but today at nap time, I only had to go in once and then she went to sleep. And, while it isn't working right now, it's nice to think that maybe, one day, I won't have to rock her to sleep every night, making myself motion sick in the process.

Babysitting and Cookies

This Tuesday, Jamie Phair, one of our friends, entered boot camp for the Air National Guard. His sweet wife, Karen, and their three kids are still here while he's gone. Because of this, Karen needed a babysitter Tuesday night so she could go to a dinner. We gladly volunteered and thought that the kids might enjoy making some cookies with us. It was a ton of fun, even if it was a bit hectic watching four kids under five. Here are some pictures of our adventures.

What a big girl!

She looks so tiny in the cart like this.

Snow!

We woke up this morning and were surprised to find that it had snowed. We were even more surprised that it snowed ALL DAY! And what an eventful day it was. Charles got up early to head up to campus and take the LSAT. He got home from that around 1:30 and felt pretty good about what he did. Too bad we have to wait until January 2nd to find out how he did.





After Charles got home, we decided that we should introduce Sydney to snow for the first time. It's snowed before, but never enough to really stick and so this was her first real snow. Here she is testing it out. She seemed to enjoy it, since she kept going back for more. It was pretty cute.



Later on that evening was our ward Christmas party. And this year we had a special visitor reappear, Santa. (Our previous bishop didn't think Santa was church appropriate and banned him. He also teaches his kids that there is no Santa and they decided to yell this at the top of their lungs when Santa came...his wife was not happy about that) Anyway, this was Sydney's first time meeting him and I was quite thrilled that she let me get this picture without any problems.