Christmas 2004

At Grandma & Pa's apartment

Me (corner), Steve, Kristy, Brennan, Grandma, Harrison, Carter, Pa. That big box was a new TV for us! Yay! This was our first Christmas with Uncle Steve, and the little boys couldn't get enough of him.

2004

Cheesy little Harrison guy

Carter, following in all the big kids' soccer footsteps

Kids on bikes - this was the day Harrison learned how to ride a two-wheel bike.

Bike riding

More bike riding
Carter wasn't much for bike riding at this point, but he sure took to it later.

Baby Rosalind in "her" bed - she slept with us from birth till about six months old, and it was amazing how one tiny girl could force her parents to the sides of their king-size bed.

Our new, necessary huge car

In September, Brennan started 5th grade...

... and Bella started 2nd grade.

Rosalind's Birth

Roz's birth was a little more interesting than the rest of our C-section births. It started off normally - hospital gown, IV, watching "The Price Is Right" - but after a couple of blood tests, the medical people were a bit alarmed at my low level of platelets. They were worried that my blood wouldn't clot, so they made us wait around for a while and think good platelet thoughts before they would perform surgery. Finally they figured that the way to thicken up my blood would be to get me "un-pregnant," so they went ahead. I had also asked my doctor to tie my tubes, because without installing a zipper, there were only so many C-sections I could have. And five kids - really. Hubby gets enough crap at work as it is, and going to the store with five kids and having people ask if they're all mine or if I "know what causes that" (I don't! I really don't!) gets kind of old.

So off we went to the operating room, Roz was born, she was beautiful, we cried, it was great, and then I'm lying there going, OK, let's wrap it up, when I heard the doctor say, "We have a little bleeder here." And you know how casually medical people say things - your arm falls off and they try to tone it down: "Your arm seems to have fallen off." What happened was, when the doctor pulled up my Fallopian tube to tie it, it broke a capillary attached to a major blood vessel - about as big around as my doctor's finger, he said - and it wouldn't stop bleeding. Apparently we didn't think enough good platelet thoughts.

It took a while, but eventually he got me to stop bleeding, and I was totally oblivious that anything different had happened. Later, when my doctor visited me in my room, he said, "That was scary!" and told me what happened. Well, I should say. He told me to tell the nurses that I shouldn't be pushed hard on the right side of my abdomen because this major blood vessel could start bleeding again. I said, "Maybe you should write that on the bandage" - which was less of a bandage and more of a small tarp - and he said, "Hey, that's a good idea." So he wrote, "Do not push hard on this side" on my bandage. Good thing I had my thinking cap on that day or I might not be here typing right now.

But enough about me - check out our cute new kid.

"I've got... PREGNANT FACE"

Enjoying that short sweet time in the hospital

Yawn!

Our oldest and youngest

"What's on TV?"

Bella had fun playing with the hospital bed controls and watching whatever was on the tube

Harrison and his little sister

zzzzzzzzz

It was too much for little Carter - he passed right out.

Our very pretty girl, Rosalind Rachel

We planned to name her Olivia, but we don't like giving our kids popular names, so we watched the birth announcements in the newspaper that summer and dang if there weren't eight new Olivias every week or so. I was really hungry at the beginning of the pregnancy, so we joked that maybe we were going to have twins. We thought of some good twin names - Olivia and Diana so we could call them "Liv" and "Di" and wouldn't that be funny - but then we thought of a favorite TV show, "Frasier," and its two female names - Roz and Daphne.

And we thought, Rosalind is an old-sounding name and a Shakespeare name like Isabella, and it's different, and it's pretty... and we loved the nickname "Roz" for a tiny baby girl, it just sounded clever or something. Rachel is a family name that Hubby and I both love (he loves it so much, he kept calling her "Rachel" during her blessing). That's how she got her name.

Thanksgiving at the Beach

Brennan at Netarts, Oregon - Thanksgiving

Harrison's Soccer Team

Harrison's first soccer team, August - October

Baby Boy

thblblllblblbbbt

Carter, about 15 months old

Christmas 2002

Our first Christmas in the "pink house". Grandma and Pa and Kristy came to spend it with us.

PARTY

Gorgeous Kid Alert

Fourth grade

Brennan, reminding us of Harry Potter.

February 2002

February 28, Blue and Gold Banquet:

The Bleary-Eyed Indian

Three sweet boys

Hubby, Harrison and Carter, waiting for Brennan and Bella's ice skating lesson to be over.

Brennan: Birthday Party

SHOVE IN THAT CAKE BOY

... for his friend Xavier O.

Assorted Pictures From About 2002ish

Cutie boy

Here we have sweet little chubby-cheeked Mr. Bear, participating in a game during Pack Meeting (Brennan was a Cub Scout at the time). Thank goodness for my dear friend Claudia, who had a digital camera long before I did and took such great pictures of all the fun Scout happenings while she had that calling.

Goofy kiddos

What we DID have was one of those little round eyeball-looking cameras that sat on top of our computer monitor. Here's one Brennan and Isabella took of themselves. Brennan figured out pretty early on how to open the pictures he took with "Paint" and then doctor them up to his specifications... that's another set of pictures for another post.

Mr. Baby

Little Carter, being his introspective, serious, hairy self. Look at all that great hair. After the first three babies being completely bald, it was great to have my last two born with hair. They didn't lose a strand of it, either. My friend Claudia always called Carter "Mr. Baby" because he looked so serious all the time. I love him in this little dress shirt.

Me!

Of course, no set of pictures is complete without one of me looking completely dorky. Here I am, trying out the eyeball camera.

Goofy Eyeball Camera Pictures

Brennan doctored up a bunch of pictures. Here are some of my favorites.

Here we've widened our eyes slightly, added a highly useful third eyeball on our forehead, and (for no particular reason that I can see) slapped on a huge Bugs Bunny-ish tooth. I started a blog written by a fictional character, "Hugh Jybahl," and used this for his profile picture.

This one isn't that funny but it does bring back funny memories of the time we had a family picture taken in Logan with Grandma and Pa and Kristy. The guy took picture after picture of us, and one of the shots was great of everyone else, but Hubby's eyes were closed. For the finished product, someone had actually taken paint and a paintbrush, and PAINTED HIS EYES OPEN. It's so creepy-looking (kind of like this picture).

Here we've given Grannie the huge-fried-egg-eyes-and-long-lizard-tongue treatment... it was actually a pretty cute picture of her before Brennan got to it...

The lizard tongue is a popular feature, probably because it's so easy to draw. Here's Harrison.

I don't think this one needs any explanation.

Brennan: Pinewood Derby!

Brennan, Ammon Te..., Richard Fa...

Carter (one month old) and me; Carter looks ready for action

Brennan at Den Meeting

Painting the teepee

Gran's funeral

Since Gran was a veteran, he was eligible for burial in Portland's Willamette National Cemetery, and since my little family lives so close to Portland, we had his funeral at our stake center. It was kind of odd, asking my bishop to "throw" a funeral for my grandfather, whom he'd never met, but it went off wonderfully.

People came from all around the West to pay their respects, including from Redmond, OR, where Neenaw and Gran had lived, and Sisters, OR, where they had served an at-home mission. During the eulogies, I heard some great stories I'd never heard before, like Gran once building someone a new stick shift for their car out of a broom handle. And it worked, of course.

We sang "Abide With Me; Tis Eventide" for the closing hymn. He once heard me playing an arrangement of it on the piano and told me it was his favorite hymn.

New baby Carter was a sweet addition to our group. Uncle John joked that in Heaven, Gran and Carter must have "passed each other in the hall."

After dinner at the church, put on by our ward Relief Society sisters, we traveled to the cemetery and had a short military graveside service.

It was a hard, but beautiful day, very tender, sweet, funny, sad, and joyous. I can't wait to see Gran again.

Christmas 2001

New mixer AND new baby!  SCORE

This was a happy and sad Christmas. We came home with Carter on Christmas Eve, but on Christmas Day, we heard from Grandpa Smith that his father Gran had passed away earlier that morning.

William Ricketts Smith

1918-2001

Love and miss you always

Willamette National Cemetery

Carter's Birth

Carter was our fourth C-section birth. That morning we drove to the hospital, locked our keys in the car, and had to call AAA to rescue us (Mom had her card with her, thank goodness). The birth went well and everything was perfect. Here's our cute new boy:

Grannie took these pictures about twenty minutes after his birth.

What a good, easy baby he was, so happy to be snuggled. I was excited to have him and loved holding him, and the nurses kept making comments about how often I held him. They must have known he was my fourth child and maybe they thought that by now, a mom would be more casual about a new baby. One of the doctors came to see me my second or third day there and said, "I hear you're loving the hell out of that baby!" - which was nice, but weird.

The other memory I have of his birth is how beautiful it was outside, and the nice view I had from my hospital room of the courtyard, where hospital staff had placed white wicker light-up reindeer for Christmas. It snowed while we were there, and it was so pretty, kind of magical. They gave Carter a little red and white Santa cap.

For most of my pregnancy, we thought really hard about naming Carter "Gordon," after President Hinckley (and Barenaked Ladies' debut CD - we were diehard fans of BNL at the time) - but we just couldn't pull the trigger on that one. Hubby was a big fan of the TV show "ER" and we knew another Carter who was Brennan's age, and thought it was a manly-sounding name, a surname like his brothers' names. Robert is Hubby's dad's name and Hubby's middle name.

Carter and Isabella have the most "overused" names in the family. There weren't many Isabellas around when she was born, but there are now, and for a long time, whenever we went anywhere, we'd hear another set of parents calling another boy "Carter." The good news is they're the kids most likely to find personalized license plates with their names on them.

December Pack Meeting

S is for the serious look on my face

Veteran's Day Parade 2001

Our cute Brennan boy with his homies.

With Carson T behind him.

CHEEEEESE