Children's Museum of Phoenix

At the end of November I picked up a culture pass at the library for the Children's Museum of Phoenix. We had never been there before so I thought it would be fun for the whole family. It was really fun, but at $9 per person ages 1 and up I am glad that we were all free except one of us because I don't think it would have been worth the $45 we would have had to pay. Yay for Culture passes! It might be worth the price after they finish their big climber structure in February. I plan to go back and see with the kids to check it out.

Oliver is playing at their cool grocery store where they load & unload all the products.

Here is the "noodle forest." My kids loved this! It was so fun to run around in this area and try to find one another. Plus, the back end was blocked or closed off into an open reading room so that you wouldn't lose your kids.

Oliver on his favorite thing in the whole world!!! He points them out on the road all the time.

This is an awesome race car ramp that you put your cars in and watch them race around part of the whole museum. All the kids could have spent a long time there.

Kelsi just being cute going through the "car wash" on her car!

Cooking pizzas in the kitchen and putting them in the oven.


This room was by far the best in the whole museum for my kids! It was filled with all sorts of ball tracks made out of different materials, etc. Some you could manipulate, like the one seen above with Kendall & Oliver. One track encompassed the whole room and it was so neat to watch. Kendall especially spent a lot of time in there changing up tracks, etc.
So if you have a chance to go to the Children's Museum of Phoenix sometime let me know what you think. Next time we go we are going to take the light rail.

Blessing Day

Dallin was blessed on Sunday, November 1st when he was exactly 2 months old. It was wonderful. Dallin didn't even cry once! Dallin wore a beautifully sewn white linen outfit my mother made for him and Marcus gave him a touching and sweet blessing. My dad and Marcus's brothers in law Wade and Craig were in the circle as well as his good friend Ryan L. It is so comforting to have the blessings of the preisthood to guide us and bring us peace. A good friend in our ward even wrote down almost word for word the whole blessing so that we could have it for his Book of Remembrance - thanks Scott! We had an awesome meal at our house after with all our family. What a great day that I will always remember. :)

Santa Fe - Nov. 2009

So back in the beginning of November a company Marcus does business with was holding a conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico and we were invited to go. They pretty much paid for everything! The resort we stayed at in downtown Santa Fe was gorgeous. It was called the Inn & Spa at Loretto and it had the most beautiful chapel in it that was awesome.
It had an amazing & famous spiral staircase that had no visible means of support and initially no rails. It has an awesome story behind it. You can read about it here: http://www.lorettochapel.com/staircase.html

It was also really nice because we only brought Dallin and we were had a fun getaway without the kids - thanks mom & dad! It was so beautiful and the weather was perfect. While Marcus was at seminars during the day, Dallin & I drove to Albuquerque to visit my little brother and his family. My brother is an ER Dr. there doing his residency and we don't get to see them often because docs don't get too much time off. They finally got to meet the newest addition to our family.

I had a great time with them shopping, eating and playing with my niece and nephew. It was so great to see them. Here are some more pics of our trip:

The first 3 pics are from the resort we stayed at and the last pic in front of a beautiful cathedral in downtown Santa Fe. The last day we were there we got to spend the whole day together sight seeing. We had the tastiest, but longest lunch ever with everyone who attended the conference and their spouses. Practically everything on the menu and that we ate the whole weekend had chiles or spice in it. Even things like watermelon. At this lunch the last day the best part was dessert - a red chile chocolate soup with toasted pine nuts. It sounds gross but it was heaven in my mouth. Finally, we wandered around the square in downtiwn looking at all the jewelry there. The whole time starting with the marathon lunch through shoppong Dallin slept for over 4 hours in his Moby Wrap carrier. You can see me wearing him in the last picture. It was awesome. The whole day everyone kept asking us if we had a baby in there and several merchants offered to trade him for their wares. I think one of them might have been serious. There was some amazing and expensive jewelry there. We finally decided on a beautiful copper cuff bracelet for my mom to thank her for watching our kids. Later as we were racing to the airport almost missing our flight Marcus realized that he forgot to get his ATM card back after getting cash to pay for the bracelet, but we did make our flight and no damage was done to his bank account. I hope this trip is one of many more work trips we take. It was awesome!

So New

Well, since I may never get out baby announcements even though I had Dallin's newborn pics taken when he was 6 days old(courtesy of my friend Jana) I figured I would at least let everyone see the final product. I had planned on sending them out with our family Christmas cards and family pic but we didn't end up taking our family pics until right before Christmas and then Iwas going to send out New Years pics and now it is almost the end of January. Oh, well. :) Enjoy!

October 2009

So I know I'm behind when I have only posted 10 posts on my entire blog and the last one was when my baby was born and he's now 4 1/2 months old! One of my resolutions this year is to post "more often". Notice how I am not more specific than that. :) So here are some pics of what we were up to in October '09:

These were from our annual pumpkin carving right before Halloween. I like to do it earlier in October but because it is still so warm in AZ your pumpkins don't last long so we usually do it for FHE right before Halloween. Here is the finished product - sorry it's so dark!

As for Halloween it was hard to get a good pic of all the kids in their costumes together, so I ended up taking some individual shots as well.

Oliver was the adorable runaway elephant! This was a hand me down costume and when we saw it fit Oliver we had to use it. The only problem was that with the hood and trunk on he couldn't see too well so I had to lead him around. :)

The cutest baby ever! Dallin actually was a monkey but I never got any cute pics of him in that outfit, but this was what he wore during the day. Thanks for the outfit Grandma! He was 2 months old there & weighed 9# 5 oz. He was still wearing some preemie and mostly newborn clothes, but definately adorable!

Kelsi wanted to be a fairy and luckily I bought this costume sometime after Halloween last year for like $5 which is about what I will pay for a costume these days for kids. I found the tights at Target on clearance for $2 and I love how well they matched her costume. I liked that she was kind of a funky fairy.:)

Finally, Kendall wanted to be a ghost which is the easiest and best costume ever courtesy of Goodwill and their bedding section. I thought they were all so cute! We had a great time and our ward Trunk or Treat party and came home with loads of candy! We gave out playdough in protest.

Happy Halloween!!!

Introducing...

Dallin William Seiter was born on Tuesday, September 1, 2009 at 6:08 AM at exactly 3 weeks early!



He has brought such a wonderful sweet spirit to our home. The kids all love him so much and want to hold him and kiss him all the time! He has been my easiest baby by far(knock on wood)- he sleeps alot which will probably change with time and he is a great nurser.




As for how things went down, I'll try to make it short but feel free to just skip through to the pics if it's TMI for you. :)

Last Monday, August 31st I had my weekly OB appt. and my Dr. told me that I was GBS+ which would mean that when I went into labor I would need to get to the hospital ASAP since I would need to have 2 doses of antibiotics administered every 4 hours prior to birth. Now for those of you that don't know my history, I tend to have very fast labors. in fact, with Oliver I was at the hospital only 2 hours before he was born and we were there as quick as we could get there. Here is a pic of me at 36 weeks, 4 days with my friend Becca 3 days before I went into labor:


So I woke up at 4:10 in the morning of September 1st and thought that I felt wet down there and I got up to use the bathroom. At this point, I was pretty sure that my water was broken. I woke up Marcus and had him call my mom to come watch the kids while I called the Dr. and took a quick shower. My Dr. said to go in ASAP since I was GBS+ and my history of quick labors. This whole time I have yet to have any contractions & I naively was worried that I might have to get induced with Pitocin to kickstart my labor. Of course as soon as we are in the car on our way around 5 AM I started have contractions, but they were no big deal. We get to the hospital and into triage and then things really start moving along! Contractions start coming on hard & heavy and no one has even checked me yet or put me on a monitor. Marcus then starts to tell the nurses at the desk about my history of fast labors & the fact that this was baby #4. Things start moving at a faster pace after they realize my water has broken and I am 7-8 cm dilated. All I am thinking about is the fact that I want my epidural now! They then move me to L&D and start my IV with fluids and my antibiotics. They say I can't get the epidural until I have enough fluids in me. This felt like dejavu all over again since this is exactly what happened with Oliver and I barely got it in time to push. Turns out that as I finally was getting my epidural I HAD to push so during the whole procedure I am trying to fight contractions and a major urge to push! As soon as it was in, they prepped me to begin pushing and my Dr. said I was ready to go. The epidural obviously really hadn't taken effect yet and I could feel everything as I was pushing. This was not as bad as I thought it would be, but I definately felt everything which I was not used to. After maybe 2-3 pushes during contractions out came our little man as perfect as can be at 6:08 AM almost exactly 2 hours from the time my water first broke. He came out crying with apgars of 9/9 and has some dark hair with blue eyes. He weighed 7# 2 oz. and was 20.5 inches long and was 3 weeks early! He latched on easily and has been a joy every moment since then. My Dr. speculated later that according to the ultrasounds I had during this pregnancy that my actual due date in reality was more like Sept. 15th 0r 16th instead of Sept. 22nd which explains why Dallin was not smaller at birth for being so early.





I have really enjoyed this past week and we really bonded in the hospital because a majority of the time it was just the two of us. :) We had to stay a mandatory 48 hours from birth because I was GBS+ and also because Dallin didn't get both doses of antibiotics before he was born. Words cannot describe how surreal yet wonderful his birth was and this past week has been great. Dallin is all we could have hoped for and more. So although his birth was a huge surprise, he is the greatest gift we could have ever received!

Minority Rules

So, I am back to report the long awaited question as to the gender of baby-to-be #4. Well, according to all of you my poll says that I am having a girl, by an 80% margin. I also thought it was going to be a girl because I was more sick with this pregnancy than I have been since I was pregnant with Kelsi. Marcus on the other hand thought this babe was to be a boy. The ultrasound made things pretty clear...















IT'S A....BOY!!!








So I guess that Kelsi and I are going to have to get used to being in the minority, but I am truly excited for another happy and healthy baby-to be. :)