2 Months Old!

I can't believe that Madison is already 2 months old! We had her check up yesterday and everything checked out normally...she's as healthy as can be! She now weighs 12 pounds, 12 ounces and is 21.5 inches long. Basically that means she is chunky and short...no surprises there! She is such a wonderful baby and we love having her in our home. I haven't been very good at taking pictures of her or the other girls lately...this one of the three of them is pretty funny. My girls love to dress up in their swimsuits and lay out this big blue blanket on the floor and pretend they are swimming...that is why they are wearing swimsuits in the photo. I am so blessed to have 3 beautiful little girls!

Madison's Blessing and a very long drive....

Last Sunday we had Madison's blessing which was a little crazy since after we scheduled it, we found out that we had to leave the very next morning to drive out to VA for the summer! The blessing went very well and we really appreciate all the friends and family that came to support us...I think we had about 50 people there and it was wonderful to be able to see everyone before we had to leave for the summer! Madison continues to be such a fabulous baby....the last few nights she has slept 8+ hours at night without waking and she still takes really long naps during the day too...when she is awake she is generally content just to sit and watch all the craziness around her! In the last couple of weeks she has really started to smile a lot which is so fun and the other girls love to try to get her to smile. And, just like her big sisters, Madison is filling out pretty nicely these days...no surprise there! I'm curious to see what her weight is at her 2 month check up next week...I don't think she is quite as big as Paris was at that age, but she's pretty chunky!

Our drive to VA was very, very long....but I suppose it could have been much worse. We had to make the drive in 3 days, but we did end up all going in one car which was so wonderful. If Bubba and I had been in 2 different cars, I'm sure I would have had the kids most of the way and it would have been very difficult to be driving and entertaining 2 kids while reinserting a binky a thousand times for the baby! Savannah and Paris did really well and hardly complained at all about being stuck in the car for so long, but they also hardly slept at all which wasn't a huge surprise since my kids have never been great car sleepers. However, after spending 3 days in the car for about 17-18 hours a day and getting only about 6-7 hours of sleep in a hotel each night, I think they only slept for about 2 hours total while driving! Madison, on the other hand, slept amazingly well during the whole drive, and even more amazingly, she still slept great at night once we got to the hotels, even though she had slept all day too! On day #2, everything was going fine until after dinner when Paris told us her tummy hurt. We ended up having to stop 12 times within about 2 hours while the poor thing had a horrible bout (rather 12 bouts) of diarrhea. That was really not fun and did not help our progress on the road....but it finally ended and the next day she was just fine. I guess we had to have something exciting happen....oh, the joys! Anyways, we arrived safely in VA Beach and our apartment is really nice...there are lots of fun parks, pools, stores, etc. that are all really close to where we live so we are excited to explore while we are here this summer!

It's all gone...

The other day as I was trying to comb through all the tangles in Paris' hair, I told her that I thought short hair might be fun and asked her if she wanted to get her hair cut. She emphatically told me no several times, but Savannah told me she wanted her hair short. This shocked me because she has always wanted her hair to be long and always gets so many compliments on her beautiful long hair. I kept asking her and thinking she would change her mind, but she didn't so I made an appointment at the salon for the next day. I thought that as soon as we got there she would change her mind, since she is not a big fan of strange places and had never been to a salon before, but she walked right in and sat in the chair. She said she wanted it at her chin and the lady started cutting. I just kept waiting for the meltdown where she would decide she had changed her mind but it never came....she sat so still and when we left she had a huge smile on her face and she loves her new hair. I was sad to see it all go, but the new haircut is so cute on her and it is soooo much easier to comb through and deal with....now I just need to keep trying to convince Paris that she wants short hair too!

False doctrine?

Tonight I was putting the girls to bed and was frustrated because it was taking them a very long time to go to sleep (thanks to Daylight Savings) and I told them it was their last chance to go to sleep before I took their dolls away. Paris then piped up with "We need to make the right choice or Joseph Smith will send a big fish to eat us up." That took me a little off guard, but I told her that wasn't quite true and she insisted that "if you make wrong choices, Joseph Smith sends the big fish to eat you up." I asked her why she thought that and she said that's what she learned in Primary today! I'm guessing I just have a 3 year old that wasn't paying very close attention in class!

More cute pics of my angel!

Madison is almost 2 weeks old now, and is still so good...she's only cried a few times and it never lasts more than a few seconds...we're still keeping our fingers crossed that this behavior lasts for the next 18 years! :) Anyways, here are just a bunch of random pics of this sweet baby of ours...

My little artists!

Savannah has always been artistic...even when she was as young as 18 months old, she would sit and color for long periods of time and has been drawing very good pictures from the time she was 2. Lately her pictures have become very detailed and very recognizable and she is very proud of them so she has been taking pictures of her drawings. She has become very interested in our camera and loves to take pictures (we're going to have to get her a more kid-friendly camera to play with so she doesn't have to use ours!)...I'm actually impressed at how good she is with centering the pictures and it's pretty funny to see some of the pictures that show up on our camera! So here are some photos from Savannah...some of her own drawings and the others were just random objects that she wanted to take pictures of!

Paris has never been quite as artistic, but she is definitely creative and imaginative and not afraid of messes! The other day, this is how I found her after the girls had been coloring...she decided to use herself instead of her paper as her canvas! She explained that she just pretended it was makeup! Oh, and those markers hanging from her hair were her curlers....yep, that's my Paris!

Introducing....

Madison Celeste Tracy! She wasn't due until March 12, but decided to come 3 weeks early and was born on Feb. 21st instead!

On Saturday, the 2oth I started having a bunch of contractions in the afternoon but didn't think too much of that since I've been having lots of them for weeks now. Bubba and I actually had a date planned that night, and by the time my parents came over to watch the kids, I was having contractions every 4-5 minutes, but kept thinking they would go away and they weren't really that painful at that point. We went up to Orem for dinner, and during dinner the contractions were getting more painful and were every 3 minutes like clockwork so I started getting a little concerned. We had tickets to go up to a play in Salt Lake, but I really didn't feel like we should drive even further away from the hospital (in Payson), since my last 2 labors only lasted about 4 hours from start to finish. So we decided to head to the hospital (I didn't want to wait for the contractions to get worse since I found out that I was GBS positive this time around and they wanted me to try to be on antibiotics for at least 4 hours). I walked up to the nurse and told her that I thought I might be in labor and I'm sure she thought I was crazy since I wasn't really in much pain or anything but they put me in a room and hooked me up to all the monitors and checked me. I was only dilated to about a 3 at that point but was having a contraction every 2 minutes so they decided to keep me there so they could get the antibiotics started. This was at about 8:00 pm. The contractions started getting much more painful a couple of hours later but I was only dilated to a 4 at that point so I got my epidural at about 10 and then my dr. broke my water shortly after that. I thought things would move more quickly at that point, but I continued to only dilate about a centimeter an hour until just after 4 am when they told me I was ready. I can't believe things moved so slow this time! The dr. came in at about 4:15 and they got everything ready and then I pushed through a few contractions and the baby was born at 4:31 a.m. She gave a little cry but then was so quiet I was starting to wonder if she was ok, but it turns out that so far, she just is really quiet!

Madison Celeste weighed in at 7 pounds, 7 ounces and was 19.5 inches long...good thing she didn't wait 3 more weeks or she would have been quite large! So far, she is such a wonderful baby and we love having her in our home. She hardly ever cries and she sleeps so good right now which has been wonderful. Last night she went to bed at about 10, woke up at 1 to eat, went right back to sleep and then I woke up at 6 am in a panic because she was not awake yet so I woke her up to feed her again! Who knows how long she would have slept? I feel like I'm constantly waking her up to eat because she just really loves to sleep right now! However, when she does eat, she nurses like a champ and so far has been my best nurser too. I know she's only 5 days old and a lot could change, but up until this point, she has been the perfect baby and she is just so sweet. Even when she is awake, she just lays there contentedly and looks around which is unbelievable to me because the other 2 had to be bouncing or moving or being walked around to be happy when they were awake! I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this isn't just a fluke! I feel great and am so happy that I got to skip the last few weeks of being pregnant! So far, the girls love her and haven't seemed to be too phased by her appearance. They come look at her for a few minutes and then continue on with playing like normal, although they keep telling me that they want her to grow up so she can play with them too.