sienna, our little fighter...

...that little girl has always been a determined one.  here is her early story, as well as chloe's abbreviated birth story.  here is wyatt's.  i share this as i reflect on her premature experience and on how the march of dimes is trying to help others avoid these, and other kinds of birth experiences.

please visit my march of dimes link and donate something if you can...even if it's $1 it will help.  and come walk with me on saturday, april 14th in oceanside, ca. if you are local at all.  i'd love to have friends to walk with!

thank you friends!

soccer season!

i love soccer season!  i love driving by random fields on saturdays and seeing kids running around chasing soccer balls.  i love the feel of it all.  reminds me of the days when i played ayso soccer as well.  good memories!  and it's even more exciting now that i have a child old enough to be involved with it.

sienna had her first soccer game on saturday, and the verdict?  she loooooved it! 

this year the teams are having the younger kids split their teams in half and are playing three on three players.  this gives the kids a better chance to handle the ball and feel more involved in the game process.  sienna started out as a sub and then had her chance to get in there and play.  she's such a timid thing when it comes to new people and places and things that i was praying that she would feel comfortable and just get in there.  and she really did! 

and how cute are the ribbons in all the girls' hair?  the awesome team moms whipped those up for all the girls to match their team color.  our team is extremely organized and the coaches are fabulous.  i'm just so happy that she is having such a great first experience with all of it.

cute girl even scored a goal!  go nenna!!  she was much more aggressive than at practice, according to one of the assistant coaches.  i think hearing us (our family and my mom and mike) cheer for her really got her going.  she seemed to just eat it up.  what cracks us all up is her jumping.  whenever she gets excited or nervous she jumps.  example....ball is coming towards her from the opposing team.  she stops it and before she kicks it, she jumps.  sometimes it just killed us.  we were yelling, "kick the ball sienna!  kick it!" and she was there making sure to jump a few times.  then she kicked it and jumped some more.  must be a nervous habit she has developed.  maybe next game i'll actually count how many times she jumps during the game.  sure would be entertaining to know.

sienna got some nice positive encouragement at half time from daddy.  she was pretty proud of her goal! 

our cute little soccer nenna.  go california girls!!

soccer season!

 so a little over a month ago i signed sienna up for soccer through ayso, as mentioned in another post.  well, her first practice finally came around!  she was so excited.  she even had her cleat, socks and shin guards on over an hour before practice started.  chloe made sure the shin guards worked some more by repeatedly kicking her sister's shins.  very good chloe, very good.

the girls started out with warm-ups.  sienna was very shy for the first five minutes or so.  she was barely able to introduce herself to coach victor.  after that five minutes she was perfectly fine and had a blast!  it was very entertaining watching her do things with all the other kids.  and about every five minutes or so the coaches sent the kids in for a water break.  i think in their one hour slot of practice they had about twenty water breaks.  it was funny.  but really, coach victor and the two assistant coaches were great.  very organized and made it fun for the girls.  sienna's team is a mix of five and six year-olds, so some of them have played soccer previously.  luckily a lot of them are beginners like sienna. 

sienna is a very good little kicker and her stops are great too!  we are so proud of our nenna.  

above is how we kept miss chloe busy.  stephen took her to the playground for a bit and then came back just in time to see the girls' first team scrimmage.  hilarious!  stephen calls it a little amoeba, for obvious reasons.  it was so cute and funny to watch all the girls stay right with the ball.  sienna even made a goal on her own team!  go nenna!  =)  

it's gonna be a great season!  we heart soccer!

a few things this friday

welcome weekend!  i welcome you with gusto!

first off...i'd like to thank my wonderful mother and stepfather mike.  they are exactly what i needed today.  they came and picked up my kids about twenty minutes ago to take them to a movie and keep them until we meet them for my brother's birthday dinner tonight.  HALLELUJAH!  it is exactly what i needed today.  it's times like that when i break down crying with gratitude (for real, i did).  very grateful.

another thing.  we are truly blessed.  it's the little things, isn't it?  well...we won $50 off our rent next month by correctly guessing how many skittles were in a jar.  i never win anything!  and we could use saving money anywhere right now. 

there are no plans this weekend.  i repeat...no plans.  this is a very rare thing.  i'm very excited to just do nothing or do whatever feels good at the moment.  and?  it's the fourth of july weekend!  i love july for many reasons.  a. celebration of our country's independence, b. my birthday is in the third week of july, c. my son is due in the third week of july, d. there is usually summer weather to be had finally (and indeed it is here!).  j u l y = beautiful.

something no so fun, but that is a nice sign of a baby preparing to enter the world.  pelvic pressure during pregnancy.  i'm sure most of you women reading this have experienced this; maybe not though.  when your baby is finally putting serious pressure on your lower pelvic area it feels like the bones in your pelvis are gonna break.  they hurt!  that plus your ligaments and such down there, are being stretched and relaxed from hormones preparing for the upcoming birth of mr. baby.  thus have i been experiencing since early last night (and off and on over the past weeks).  all night long i slept horribly because every time i tried to turn over or move at all it was a serious ordeal.  OUCH.  i figured it would feel better after resting all night.  wrong.  same old.  that and..."resting all night" was not restful.  i seriously woke up at least five times for a potty break and then woke up at least two or three other times just because.  you truly do block these things from your mind after having the baby.  that way you're willing to engage in future pregnancies.  let me express to future self....pain.  not that reading this later will really stop me from getting pregnant again, if that is truly my desire in the future.  funny how it works, doesn't it?  anyway...if you see a penguin waddling around san diego, be careful...it could be me.  me, prego brooke trying to make it til mr. wyatt decides to make his debut. 

flashback friday:  five years ago today, sienna was a chub-a-wub.  considering she was born two months early at four pounds, it's amazing that at this point (at six months old) she weighed twenty pounds.  chub!  sometimes i forget about all the amazing rolls she had going on on her arms and legs.  that cute round little face is still sienna, but she sure has transformed now.

she was such a sweet little baby.  she played scrabble many a time with us. 

any-hoo...hope your weekend is dandy! 

eek! two weeks!

two weeks since my last post...naughty, naughty, naughty!  but honestly?  so many other things to be doing. 

still, i love the blog (in a strange, distant sort of way)...and so i will still post.

a few weeks back sienna and stephen were able to do a speedboat tour in the san diego bay.  it had been my mom and mike's birthday present to stephen back in march.  due to the tsunami warning one particular day, we had to cancel our original speedboat tour and re-schedule it for later.  so we scheduled it for may, but i wasn't thinking too much about my growing belly.  so i opted out of this particular adventure and let sienna take my place.  they had so much fun!

waiting to get on the boat.

sienna getting her vest on.  she was so exited!

chloe and i had a nice little two-hour date that morning in pt. loma while we waited for their tour to come back.  we got hot chocolate, cupcakes and mosied around trader joes.  it was a lovely saturday!  chloe found a sea lion standing around and showed him some love.

chloe and i also tried to spot them at the end of the tour...and we did!  it took a little while, but eventually we saw a group of little speedboats whiz by and we were able to wave to stephen and sienna.  it was a very cloudy and chilly day for san diego, but the water conditions were awesome.

you can barely see sienna in the boat in this...she's waving.  can you spot her? 

thanks for the birthday gift mom and mike!  they loved it!

haircut number two

our lovely five-year-old has this impulsiveness about her that seriously worries me sometimes.  she does things, as if she is in some subconscious state while she's doing them, later getting into trouble for whatever it is.  when she was three and a half we had a similar occurrence, though much more tragic because of the loss of irreplaceable curls.  here's one more post about the subsequent fix.  luckily she ended up looking pretty dang cute after her haircut that time.  this time?  it was a little harder to fix surprisingly.  for some reason her new bangs just aren't cooperating or something.  she just looks like a ragamuffin.  i'll have to post a pic of that later.  i don't think i have one on hand yet.

the sad/funny thing about this time, is that her father was sitting at the same table as her while it happened.  they were both sitting at the kitchen table together, stephen reading his scriptures and sienna cutting out pictures from a primary paper she'd received that day.  lee, stephen's mom noticed it first and quietly pointed it out to stephen.  i was taking a nap at the time...good thing.  i woke up nice and calm and happy, ready to take on anything...even sienna's new hair-do.

tears were shed on her part, only because i was confused as to why she did it.

"sienna, do you want to look like a boy?  is that why you cute your hair?" (nice, sensitive mom..that's me)

(instant hysteric tears) "noooooo!!"

"then why did you cut your hair?"

"i don't know"

oh my.  at least have a good reason child.  the hair was in your face, there was food in your hair that wouldn't come out, you really do want to look like a boy, you were getting even with me for something i didn't let you do...something! 

bling!

just like her mommy at the ripe age of five years old, sienna got her ears pierced!  she was seriously so brave, even after mommy told her that it would hurt a bit.  she said, that's okay!   so on her actual birth day we headed on down to the mall and went for it!  chloe watched from afar, though even after watching it all happen, she still claims that when she's five she wants her ears pierced too.  it probably helps that sienna made it seem painless!

first, the ears were cleaned...

...then marked...

...and then the big moment!  the girls working there were nice enough to offer to pierce both ears at the same time (yes, i have no doubt that helped), and we surely took them up on it.  here they are just before the holes.

and the after!  she was so excited.  she picked light pink studs, of course.  

happy birthday my nenna!

our family

i volunteered in sienna's class yesterday and noticed this wall where all the kids had drawn pictures of their families.  i found sienna's and then noticed that there were five people in it.  she drew her future brother!  is that not just so cute?  i almost started crying (proof i'm pregnant).  it was very heart-warming to know that she is excited about him and that she already considers him a part of the family.

artwork

sienna drew this little beauty yesterday.  it is "a spider and a pumpkin, and a pumpkin."  i watched her draw this one, and the spider actually started out with eight legs, as one might expect, but apparently this one needed 8 more legs (one being a very stubby spider leg).  love her random artwork.

sad - happy

sienna drew this in my notebook one day.  she loves to draw.  when i asked her what this picture was of, she said, "it's a boy that's sad, and a girl that's happy."  when i asked i her who it was, she said it was chloe and daddy.  i mentioned that chloe was a lot bigger than daddy in the picture, and she said that that was "because it was from when daddy was little and chloe was all grown up."

a few things i love about this picture....one, sienna drew it.  two, chloe's branch/stick arms that remind me of a snowman.  three....chloe's big round face and chloe's middle between her chest and her butt.  at least, that's what i'm guessing it is. 

phew!

yard sale went pretty good today.  we did end up getting rained out at the end, and somewhat at the beginning, but we stuck out the first portion.  glad we did!  we sold the main things we wanted to get rid of:  table and chairs, all the books, surfboards and kitchen stuff.  we sold a little bit of other things too like clothes and toys!  it was a relief to have that all out of the way.  no more big pile of random junk heaped in our bedroom.  now you can actually get to that part of the closet.

(sigh of relief)

more about our fun morning at bates tomorrow...stay tuned.

great grandmother

on this lovely friday, i share a picture from my family history.

this is my great grandmother whitaker.  she was my mother's father's mother.  there are two things in this photo that i particularly love.  one being her beautiful green coat.  how perfect it is and how perfectly the shade of it goes with her eyes.  the second thing being her glasses frames.  i have always been rather drawn to older 50's and 60's frames like that.  i also like that she has wrinkles.  no plastic surgery.  no need.  she is beautiful and aged.  sometimes i joke about the "lift" that i'm going to get when i'm all done having kids.  but in reality, i'm not sure about it (tangent!). 

anyway...that's that.

and here is something sienna drew yesterday.  i have yet to ask her what it is...but i will!

(red mouth...vomiting blood?  eating red cotton candy?  way too much lipstick?)

those "things"

i'm laughing as i write this, because sienna just said it.  but it was so funny!

so the girls' friends just came over to play for the morning, and calvin (one of the friends) loves the girls' little disney princess mini dolls that you can dress up.  he particularly likes the ariel doll and is always asking me to put on ariel's mermaid tail.  today as i'm putting the mermaid tail onto mulan for him (can't find ariel), sienna comes over and quickly asks me, what about the "thing to put on those things" (pointing to her own chest at two distinct and seperate spots).  she is referring to ariel's seashell bra top.  bahahahahahaha......

i'm actually quite relieved that she doesn't know what they're really called yet.  phew!

she dumbo?

i am going to start scanning a lot of the girls pictures that they draw into the computer so that i can save paper space, and recycle!  but i love the things they draw...sometimes they are so off the wall.  i actually never asked sienna what this picture was of (i usually do), but my perspective?  a she dumbo, with lovely flowery ears, minus an elephant trunk.  yeah?

death of a toy

i came into the girls' room after quiet time was over for sienna, and this is what i saw on the floor, among other things.  but i was beyond confused because she was so excited when grandma ev gave her the viewfinder with toy story 3 pictures!  at first i was upset with sienna, but as i asked her why she did it, she confessed how much she disliked the purple/pink bear from the movie.  he's certainly not a very nice character in the movie, and sienna took it out on her toy.  she tore out all of the pictures of him, as well as any other mean character from the movie.  ha!  so, technically, we can still use the slides in the viewfinder, we just won't have any reminders of unkind characters!  thanks for that sienna!

nenna

just because she's cute.

here she is.

nenna.

organizer

i came into sienna's room one day after her required "quiet time" and found this beautiful array of books!  i'm sure they're not alphabetical, but i sure was impressed!  very orderly and compact.  sienna did in fact empty the entire bookshelf.  we had already put some books away at this point.