Sleep Deprived

Last Sunday night the adorable little boy pictured here slept 9.5 hours, and there was much rejoicing. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I was so sure we were finally making progress, and that from there on out I would be enjoying long nights of great sleep. Or at least that those nights would outweigh the nights of getting up.

Before this last Sunday we had gotten Cormac to only wake up once during the night. Then he would wake again at about 6:00 or 7:00, but would usually go back to sleep until 9 or 10. The two nights leading up to Sunday night were horrible. He woke up every 2 to 3 hours. It was miserable. I was exhausted. But it was okay because just when I thought I could do it no more, he finally slept through the night and there was hope.

Well, that is all gone now. He went back to his waking 2 times a night. Then last night he woke up every hour. Literally. Every. Single. Hour. From 11:00 on. I can't do this anymore. Does anyone want to come over and take the night shift?

Five Years

Yesterday Ammon and I celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary. It is much more difficult to have a romantic evening than it used to be. Three month olds do not like seafood or Phantom of the Opera. I had been craving Red Lobster, so Ammon picked some up after work, and I set a fancy table for us to eat here at home. As I was getting the water pitcher out of the strainer the handle broke off and cut up 2 of my fingers. Only one of the cuts is bad, but they all bled a lot. Sad. Then we watched Phantom of the Opera. Back when we were engaged Ammon took me to see that movie right after it came out. It was a wonderful date, so I thought we would relive it last night. Cormac does not appreciate it, and he cried through most of it. All three of us collapsed into bed at about 10:00 last night from exhaustion. Whew. My parents had 2 kids during their 5 year anniversary. We may never get to that point (the 2 kids, not the 5 years).

As I was contemplating what to blog about I thought of a story that I feel demonstrates the kind of relationship Ammon and I have.

My father loves the above pictured floss thingy. I do not really know what they are called. I have never been a big fan. Well, this summer Ammon and I got a bunch of them for free. So one night I decided that I might as well use them. I always start flossing from the very back on the bottom left hand side. I placed the floss in between two of my teeth, and as I tried to pull it out from between the teeth I was reminded of why I have never cared for these things. My bottom teeth are spaced very close together. After pulling for a long time I finally had to admit that it was not coming out without taking one of my teeth with it. So, I did the only natural thing I could think of, I turned to Ammon so that he could try. He gently pulled a little and realized the situation so he gave that up, not wanting to hurt me. But you know Ammon, he is a thinker. He grabbed a small pair of scissors and told me to open wide. We were both laughing so hard at this point it is a miracle that there were no accidents, but Ammon quickly freed me from the evil floss, and I continued the job the traditional way.

So, I think that this story demonstrates a lot about us. We rely on each other. We laugh a lot. We trust each other. Ammon has a very level head and steady hand (lucky for my mouth). I can't live without Ammon, he gets me out of all kinds of crazy situations. Ammon would never hurt me. I like to think I would never hurt him. I am a spaz most of the time. And Ammon is handy with all kind of tools. And, of course, we are still very in love.

Are you a stupid American?

I stole the list below from my friend Koseli's blog (unfortunately it is private or I would send you there. She is very talented.). I wanted to know how all of my friends and family measure up. I have marked how I measure up after each book.

"The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?”

*The BBC just loves ridiculous Americans. Of course they would claim something that would make us look lazy and stupid. Ha! I want to know how they came up with this particular list of books? Who's the authority that said The Five People You Meet in Heaven should be on here? HUH?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X


2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X

6 The Bible X

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (almost, but no, not everything)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (Been meaning to get to this one)

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot



21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X (Thank you Clarissa for recommending this, I loved it)

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (Another one I've been meaning to get to)

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (I own it, but have not yet read it.)

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (only read half. I really don't like Steinbeck much. Don't hate me Tabor.)

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X

34 Emma - Jane Austen X

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X (could have lived without this one)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X



51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (I have started this one at least 10 times but never finished)

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X (creepy, Mom, don't read this one, you won't like it)

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (own it, just haven't gotten to it yet)

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (I started this when I was in high school but never got the courage to finish. I need to try again)

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno – Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray X

80 Possession X

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom X

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X ( one of my favorites)

3 Months Old

Today our little Cormac turns 3 months old. This little guy has been so much fun to have around and is getting more fun all the time. He still sleeps a majority of the day, but now he is starting to sleep better at night as well, which is glorious.

He is still growing. I think he is about 15 lbs 6 oz. I don't think his height has changed much since last month. But I do think he is currently going through a growth spurt, which is miserable.

Cormac is starting to like his bath, but still hates being dressed and undressed. He prefers standing to sitting. He loves to attack the giraffe in his play yard. And he thinks his daddy is funny, which is entertaining.

Cormac hates to have his nose wiped. No longer takes a bottle very well. And is still only mediocre on the binkie, which is sad.

But he gets more handsome every day. He also changes every day, which is hard, but also very fun.

We love this little boy and are so glad he is ours. Which I would say is wonderful, just like him.

Cormac's Blessing

Two Months Old

I'm a little late with this post, but I wanted to show how much our little friend is growing. No one will ever be able to accuse me of starving my child. Cormac is now 14 lbs 11 oz and has grown 4 inches since birth making him 25 in long. He has started social smiling and occasionally laughs at us. He is mostly a pretty serious guy. Cormac is strong! The doctor couldn't believe how strong he is for his age. He can already support his own weight standing, roll from his back to his side and back to his back, lift his head and shoulders off the ground when laying down, sit for a few seconds on his own, and he has great head control (which he has had since birth). The doctor thinks that Cormac will have the strength to start moving around very early on. We will see if he actually decides to or not. And to parrot what Ammon said about him in the One Month Old post, Cormac is a good boy. We love him very much.

Merry Christmas

This year we very nearly canceled Christmas in the Dahl House. Our house was (and is) still in shambles. I had declared that we would not put up a Christmas tree until I had finished painting the living room. It is much harder to texture and paint a room than it used to be. Something about a small child being in the house. Well, we decided that Cormac simply couldn't live his first Christmas without a tree and decorations, so we finally gave in and ventured out into our backyard to find a tree.

The only tree small enough to cut down was quickly found and we did a quick photo op, and then Cormac and I retreated back into the house while Ammon cut down the tree and placed it in the stand.
Sandy and Charlie were perched outside on their wall watching us decorate through the dining room window. They too were looking forward to Santa coming. Unfortunately, they found themselves on the naughty list and so their pickings were a bit slim on the blessed day.

The day after we put up our tree (which happened to be only 5 days before Christmas) our tree decided that it had had enough. We came home to discover that perhaps it would have been better to cancel Christmas after all. So we took a trip to Home Depot to get a stud finder. Ammon then skillfully hung the tree from the ceiling. He said that if it fell down again he would have to retire as a man. We are not exactly sure what he would be at that point. So far it is still standing as is Ammon's manhood.
We were able to celebrate Christmas Eve at my Aunt Julie's house. Cormac and I were jolly as we ate fabulous home made pizza and sipped frappe.
Each Christmas Eve it is the tradition of my mom's family (those whom we were celebrating with) to do a white elephant gift exchange. Having moved into a house where a lot of treasures had been left behind, Ammon and I were really looking forward to this event. Ammon had to fashion a box to contain one of the gifts. We ran out of packing tape so he used duct tape. He also did the wrapping.
Here is the first treasure that we bestowed upon our family. Uncle Jesse was lucky enough to open up this beauty. He didn't end up with it. But we know that Stacy will treasure it always. I believe she has plans to hang it in her bathroom.
Our other gift was a box full of those lovely springs that you find on screen doors. Not sure why we had a box of them, but they made a wonderful gift. After the gift exchange Cormac had his first starting roll in a play as Baby Jesus.
That night Santa found our house. He also found our tree still standing. As you can see, despite Charlie and Sandy not making the nice list, Cormac did very well.
Cormac was happy to start out with his stocking where he got shoes. He also opened Sandy and Charlie's stockings. They weren't too naughty I guess, they did get treats and balls for chasing.
Cormac loves his new play yard. He is fascinated by it. And today we learned that he can roll from his back to his side and back again all by himself. He had to check himself out in the mirror after all. Then it was back to staring at the giraffe. We got a range stove from Santa as a family gift. I have enjoyed it thoroughly so far. Making cinnamon rolls has never been so wonderful. I also received the most glorious pair of snow boots which have been particularly handy with the recent storm. They are also fashionable. Ammon got some walkie talkies that we have been having fun with. He also got a chain saw, but I think we are needing to exchange it for a different version, so it is still in the box.
After the presents we joined my Aunt Harriet and her family for the most fabulous prime rib dinner. Harriet is too good to us. One of the benefits of being back in Utah Valley is Harriet's divine cuisine. We also played a game that Ammon and I were horrible at. Apparently we don't watch enough T.V.
And at the end of the day I found my boys asleep on the couch amidst all the wrapping and boxes. I guess it is good we didn't cancel Christmas. It was a wonderful day. Now we are gearing up to have all of our family here for Cormac's blessing this coming Sunday. It will be an event to remember. I would imagine that after we get through this week of getting our house prepped and then through the actual event you can bet you will find all three of us passed out on the couch, sort of like the above picture. I hope you all had a merry Christmas. We sure did.