More Leo

LEO

Here he is!! One day old and won our hearts already!



Proud Daddy! Or is that a nervous daddy... probably both.



Going home.



"I love baby Leo!"



Doesn't matter what it is as long as it is WITH baby Leo. Look at those brothers, can you say mischief?!!!



Big sister, big helper! Ky has been so great helping with Leo, she loves it!



And again WITH baby Leo.

SURPRISE!!!

So who knew... the flu induces labor...
The punch line is that our beautiful baby boy, Leo Oliver Seamons, was born 3 weeks early on June 10th. Weighing in at 8 lbs. 2 oz. and 20.5 inches long.
The long story is that we had the flu at our house, Ky Sunday night then Johnny and I Tuesday night, why do kids always get sick in the middle of the night?! It was a fast working bug, 12 hours of the sickies and then back to normal. Except for those who are 37 weeks pregnant and really dehydrated after 12 hours of fluids going out and none going in... Contractions started around 3 pm, after a half hour of telling myself it wasn't real then another half hour of trying to track down someone to tell me they weren't real I gave in and called my dr., you know what he said... "hospital." The good thing is that Steve had stayed home from work to take care of us so when the word came down he was already there packing bags and calling neighbors to watch the kids. We did have a plan of who to take them to but they are in Colorado this week, didn't think 3 weeks before my due date there would be a problem with that... We got the kids to friends and us to the hospital by 4:30. I was in a bed and hooked to monitors and an IV faster than my flu induced stupor could keep up with. The IV is usually the WORST part of labor for me, crazy I know, but the threat of an IV could be the best birth control for me. But this one was in so fast, I could have kissed the nurse! My dr came to check things out and decided that this was the real thing, baby was coming one way or another. He was concerned I may have to have a C-section because the stress the baby was under. Thankfully the IV fluids did the trick and 5 hours later we had our healthy baby Leo. He came even faster than Johnny. We were all super surprised but very very thankful!
We are home now being taken care of by Steve's parents and are doing great! Kyla and Johnny love the new baby! When we got home Ky ran to the car to greet us and asked, "where's the baby?!" first thing, forget that I hadn't seen her in two days, (also thanks to the flu, no kids allowed in the maternity wing...). At least Johnny had an excited "Mommy!!" and a hug for me before Leo stole his attention. :) When Johnny had his turn to hold Leo he said, "I love baby Leo." It was so cute!! Now he is always checking to see if he is awake, he really wants to play with him, and whenever Leo makes any noise Johnny wants to know what and why. Kyla is being an awesome big sis, she loves to hold him and wants to help take care of him.
I have about a million pictures of Leo, next post I will put some up. He really is a cutie, but then I am biased...

"undone" and back again

So we got our room finished 2 weeks ago, enjoyed it for 4 days, decided to not pass up the free carpet offer we got and took it apart again... It was suppose to be for a day, pull out all the furniture take out the carpet Thursday night and have new carpet Friday morning. Well it rained and I guess you can't lay carpet in the rain. It was kind of bad timing, Friday before Memorial day... They told us they couldn't come until the next Wednesday. UGH!!! The only major problem was that we hadn't planned on this being long term so I stuffed the laundry room full... which meant no access to the washer and dryer... forget that our kitchen had a computer desk in it and the living room was stuffed full, when everyone in the family started to run out of underoos that is when this mommy started to lose it. Wednesday morning came and "the carpet guy" called to say he couldn't come until Friday! I cried, Steve called someone else and the long story short is that we finally got our carpet in Friday night. (crying and calling someone else didn't really speed the process much...) After a Saturday of cleaning we are back to done... again. It is nice to have carpet done and not have that hanging over our heads "to do sometime" and with the extra couple days without carpet, Steve put in the tile for the new door entry and under the fireplace. SO it really is great that it is done but it took a tole on me, which means the whole family had a rough week... :)

Life back to "Normal"

It's DONE!!! Steve finished the construction last Wednesday, we took the rest of the week to get everything clean and put back. I can't tell you how NICE it is to have our house back AND an awesome new room to enjoy. As usual Beave did a great job and the room is wonderful.


This is the basement before... way before. These are pics from Steve's buying of the house. We changed some things along the way but it mostly looked like this until last month. The sliding glass door is gone, three new windows are now in its place. The curtained shelf above the door was taken out a year+ ago and Beave put in an attic storage with a pull down ladder...




2 months ago Beave remodeled our laundry room, he switched out the bifold doors for a pocket door and put in some DEEP shelves for me! During demolition we discovered that at one time this ENTIRE room was the blue of the doors...
The month before that he redid the stairs...




There is now a door where this window and wall heater used to be.




Drum roll please... This is it!! I tried to get the room from every angle, more info and more pictures than most of you will want but I am really excited about it all.




New stairs and laundry room door.





One of my FAVORITE parts about the new room is the toy "room". It has not even been a week but I love it! Johnny's favorite game is "dump 'd out" and he does just that, dumps out all the toys into a big pile! With this set up I am not walking through the "toyses" pile all day long. I still don't love it as we have to clean up all the toys which were never played with other than their brief moment of glory as they were dumped out of their bucket. BUT this makes it so much better.




The toy room even comes with walls for writing on. We got the idea from some friends and Beave had to do it. For the most part the marker has stayed on the walls...
The window we took out to make room for the new door found a home here. I love all the natural light in here now!




And speaking of light, here are the new windows. They are great, we wished they faced the forest though instead of the road...




In case some of you were concerned about the fate of Bucky the Beaver, here is proof that he is doing well. Someone suggested he should find a new home, in the attic or something but don't worry the idea was promptly shot down.




Oh yeah, here is the one thing left to do, before next winter we have to tile behind the fire place. Beave was worn out and I was done with construction so we opted to wait on it.





The new door, I am a big fan of blinds inside the door.




The desk's new home along with coat hooks and shoe bench.




I am really happy about this room being done even though Johnny still calls it the construction... I am extra happy because the rest of the projects for the summer are outside things!!! Oh and "have a baby" moved to the top of the to do list...

Johnny's Birthday!!

Our little Johnny Boy turned 2 on Saturday! It was an eventful day with daddy doing construction and mommy in charge of a primary activity but we got it together for the party that evening and he had a great time.
He is such a cute kid, you also get to see his new hair cut, yes I did it myself and yes it will shortly be followed by a second hair cut to "fix" the first one.



Kyla and I put the decorations up during Johnny's nap on Friday, when he saw them he called the decorations his birthday. When he walks into the dinning room he says "my birthday!" The decorations are still up today, I just love how excited he is about them. Not many more years I can get that kind of reaction from a little crete paper...



Johnny is into cars, trains, and balls. Oh and dinosaurs, trucks, airplanes and dogs. I couldn't decide what kind of party to do for him, he gave me a different answer every time I asked him. He finally decided at the store, he went with "bally balls." I have to say the basketball cake was a lot easier than the princess castle I did for Ky's b-day!! I got a little off on one of my lines and it doesn't look quite right but the black gel frosting was not going anywhere so I let it go. Exactly, I let it go that is why I am explaining myself to you two days later... Anyway, Johnny loved the cake!



I promise I didn't pose this, he was just hanging onto two of his favorites while I did last minute prep for the party and I thought it was super cute!



SQUISH! I love that he still has baby cheeks. He is looking older and more grown up everyday and I am sure when we have a really little one around in a couple months he will seem even older but in a lot of ways he is still my baby boy.



He had the right idea but not enough umph behind his blow to get the candles out, Beave helped him after a few tries. He pulled the candle out, licked off the frosting and wanted to stick it back in for more. When I didn't let him he tried to eat the candle, for some reason the wax didn't get the same response as the frosting... next he went for the cake, while Steve was cutting it Johnny leaned over and licked the side. I think we got that piece on his plate...



Johnny opened a train present first and was not interested in anything else, he just wanted to play with his new train. We talked him into opening another present and he tried to give it back, "here, here." Kyla finally convinced him that he could open ALL the presents and play with ALL the new toys... She really is a great big sister!

ESCAPE

Steve went to Yuma for work this week and we decided to go with him. Tough choice, stay in Flag with our unusually cold spring and house under construction OR hang out with dad and go swimming...


Ky is fearless with this life jacket on... makes me worry about when she takes it off. Swim lessons are on the list of things to do before the baby comes.





Beave has a tough job eh?! We were glad he got to swim with us before going to work.





They were like this for all of 10 seconds but I thought it was so funny and somehow had my camera in hand...

"Calipators"

We had kabobs for dinner on Sunday and Kyla said they looked like caterpillars. She had just played with two caterpillars the day before, she brought them leaves to eat and made a "home" for them. Sunday when she looked for them they were gone, and so was their food!! She is sure they turned into Butterflies.

Room with a VIEW

Steve has been wanting to do this project for awhile and I have been putting him off because it was too cold to have a hole that big in our house... When we decided to stay home Easter weekend I knew I couldn't keep him from doing some project, three whole days at home and he gets anxious. This is the project he choose! I was gone a couple hours Friday morning and came home to a hole the size of a sliding glass door. Not too bad considering what was coming. He worked all day Friday and boarded up the hole that night, we woke up to snow on Saturday so the boards stayed up until noon on Monday. He took a half day and had some friends come over to help. And this is what the house looked like Monday afternoon. YEAH!



Johnny loved the construction, he played outside on the "gate board" all day Friday!



Johnny was a great helper, he wanted to do everything Steve was doing. I had to keep telling him to spit out the nails... what?! dad puts them in his mouth...



And this is what the house looked like Tuesday morning. It has been a week and a half and you can imagine, or maybe not, the changes that have taken place since then. I will share some more pictures when I find the camera and computer at the same time. We are living in a bit of chaos right now. It will be so nice when it is all done, just have to keep telling myself that... :)!!

Snowflake Temple

We took a trip to Snowflake, AZ last weekend to go to the temple. Steve went with the young men for baptisms, I did a session and the kids played at the church with friends from our ward. It was great! Snowflake is about 2 hours away so to leave them in Flag for a temple trip means 6+ hours of babysitting... This way it was only 2 hours, plus they got to go to the temple too. They were excited to see temple and loved looking at the waterfall and flowers. They thought it was cool to touch the temple, which I thought was sweet. It was a great day.

Easter Weekend

We had an eventful Easter weekend. We thought about going to Utah but decided 3 days was not long enough and the weather said snow for Utah... Then we thought about going to Phoenix but we wanted to go swimming and 70 degrees is too cold for unheated outdoor pools... So we decided to stay home. We had some great Easter surprises for the whole family. Starting with an Easter egg hunt, and by hunt I mean Steve and I helping the kids find the eggs which were all in plain sight... "Ky, why don't you look in the lamp, or the piano, or behind this cushion..."



Johnny and his Easter basket. The first couple eggs he found he just opened them and ate the treats, we finally convinced him to fill his bucket with eggs...



And then there was the surprise for Steve and I, SNOW!!! We got about 4 inches.



It was perfect snowman snow...



Our daffodils were trying so hard to bloom... they were still beautiful in the snow and survived it, they look great today!



The kids Easter basket/sand bucket were great for building a snow castle!



Just like our sand castles and Lego towers this lasted until the flag went in and then Johnny and Kyla started to kick it down. I think they build them just so they can destroy them. We had fun in the snow, it was an unexpected Easter treat. And we still got some swimming in at our INDOOR pool here in Flag.



By Sunday morning the snow was gone and it was a beautiful Easter Sunday!



Silly Johnny.



"HAPPY EASTER!!!" We tried really hard to get a cute family pic with the timer, this was the best, I should put up all the attempts, it was pretty funny. OK, it is funny now looking at all Ky's funny faces, not so funny at the time when all we were asking was for two kids to look at the camera at the same time and smile and couldn't get it to happen.