Welcome, Baby William!

Introducing...

William Julius Jensen. Born on November 16th, 2010 at 2:47 pm. Here's the proud father showing off his first son. He was a big boy weighing in at 8 lbs. 10 oz. and 21 1/2 inches long.

The labor and delivery went really well. I only had to push for a little over 10 minutes and he was out, luckily. Despite what he looks like in most of these pictures, he really is a pleasant baby who doesn't cry much. We just caught him at a bad time.

This is the last picture I got of him before he came out. Definitely the biggest I've been in my 3 pregnancies.

My Mom came the day before I was induced and has saved the day by taking over for me. Joseph gets paternity leave and it is wonderful to have him home as well and he's done so much to help. The girls sure are spoiled, and so am I.

Sophie is completely enamored by her little brother. She thinks he's the best thing since sliced bread and wants to hold him all. day. long. The first night they came to see me at the hospital she did hold him for about a half hour and thought it was pretty neat that he didn't cry the whole time.

Avery thinks William is cool, but she was much more interested in what they had brought me for dinner. We're going to have to keep a close eye on this girl for sure, or she will love him to pieces.

We are now a family of five and so happy about it! (Don't ask me why Sophie's covering her mouth in this picture. I don't know the answer.) We love having William in our family and hope he'll love being in it. What a lucky girl I am! Welcome to the world, Baby Boy! We love you!

Preggo

Because people actually want to see my full-term belly (okay, by people I mostly mean my Dad) I will oblige and post these few pictures. No worries if you just want to skip this post. I would too.

The doctor thinks this kid is going to be big, as in over 9 lbs. if I go all the way to 40 weeks. I don't know about that, but we shall soon see!

Sophie took this picture of me. Other than the odd angle, she actually did pretty well!

This is after my baby shower last weekend with some of the spoils. And boy was I ever spoiled! I don't deserve it. But can I just say that I love boy clothes? They are all so cute! The line that Sophie is helping me hold was a cute idea my friend Pamm made. It's a clothes line with all the little boy stuff being held up by clothes pins. I just might put it up in his room for real as a decoration it's so cute.

I think we are ready for this guy to come out and meet us! We can't wait to meet him, especially his sisters. We'll keep you posted when he comes!

Our Mischievous, Sweet, Funny Avery

I'm finally getting caught up on my posts and felt like doing one just for Avery.

Avery is so many adjectives all balled up into one as these pictures will show, and we love her so much.

We love her smile, and how her eyes disappear like her daddy's when she does. People still comment all the time how much she resembles her daddy.

We love how friendly she is. She's a charmer and everyone loves to get to know her.

We love what a comic relief she is. She loves to make people laugh and will go to great lengths to keep you laughing if she can. And if you can get her to laugh (which isn't hard) you're in for a real treat. She has a deep, throaty laugh that I would defy anyone to try not smiling at once you've heard it.

We even love what a mischief maker she is. If you turn your back on her for 30 seconds you'll be guaranteed to find a great mess when you turn back around. She is a quick one and it's a full-time job keeping up with her!

We love how she loves to mimic us and Sophie. She loves when I aim my blow dryer at her when I'm drying my hair, so one day I just let her have at it herself and she had a blast.

We love how she's always happy. Not much gets this girl down.

We love how she loves music and dancing. She dictates to us exactly what kind of music we're allowed to play for her and loves to move her body to it. She's also a good little singer and will belt it out if she knows the words to a song.

We love how adventuresome she is. She's very athletic already and will try anything. She's also tough and usually pops right back up if she falls down.

We love how quickly she can go from a crazy monkey...

...to a pretty princess. She loves to dress up with her sister and be girly, but she doesn't want to be that all the time.

We love how she loves life. She loves people, she loves having fun, and she is just a beautiful, happy little girl. We love you, Avery Jane!

3 Princesses

Sophie got to go to another very fun Princess birthday party for her friend Tatiana. She calls this dress-up dress of hers the Glinda the Good Witch dress, so not exactly a princess, but close enough.

Sophie's good friends from school, Tatiana and Maggie.

The girls were completely spoiled and I think all future parties for Sophie are forever ruined thanks to this one. They got loads of Princess stuff, gobs of candy from the pinata, and spent forever in the bounce house/slide that I had to literally drag them from at the end. And I was spoiled with delicious Salvadorian food that was catered all evening because that's where Tatiana's father is from. The party was a big latin family-style affair and was so much fun. (I love that in this picture Sophie's in front of Ariel. She's her current favorite princess, thanks to the hair.)

The family was sweet enough to also invite Avery who was in heaven there. She had been wearing her BYU cheerleader outfit all morning that day for BYU's game and wouldn't change out of it for the party, so she didn't really look like a princess either. But they had a blast and it was fun to watch them have such a good time. I love my princesses!

Gymnastics!

The girls started taking gymnastics about 6 months ago but I didn't get around to taking any pictures of them until last week. And I chose to do it the day that they told the kids to come dressed up in their Halloween costumes. Thus, Sophie is in her costume in all these pictures. Avery refused to wear hers because she loves her leotard so much.

I think it's safe to say that Avery LOVES gymnastics. She's a natural monkey at home, so being given permission to hang and climb on stuff at the gym is like heaven.

Sophie in her costume on the obstacle course. They have a new theme every week, and this week's was of course scary stuff like spiders, so they had a bunch of those littered underneath where the kids had to climb across. It didn't bother my girls at all, and they even wanted to play with them (unlike most of the other kids who were totally freaked out by them).

Look at that smile. Could she be any happier?

We love this little gym made specifically for 2 to 5-year olds. And I love that the girls have classes at the same time, so while I'm over helping Avery in her class, I can still watch Sophie do her tricks at the same time because she's just a few feet away.

Sophie practicing her cartwheels.

See? Monkey through and through.

Sophie always waited so patiently for her turn to do stuff, and often won the Star Student award for her class because of it.

This net leads up to the zip line and down to the ball pit, unarguably the two favorite spots in the gym for these two. It's right where they head when they get free time.

Sophie's getting pretty good at balancing on the higher beam.

Avery not so much, because she refuses to go slow enough, but she'll learn.

I love watching the girls do gymnastics and hope they love it as much as I did growing up. We'll even sneak over to the big gym occasionally and watch the big girls do tricks on the bars, beam, and floor, and it brings back so many great memories to me. Of course I quit when I was about 12 so I never got as good as most of the girls there (especially since that gym turns out Olympic athletes all the time), but I could hold my own. Sophie can't wait to be old enough to learn all the advanced stuff, and whether she actually does or not doesn't matter much to me. I just love to see my girls enjoying something so much.

Halloweening 2010

We kicked off Halloween with the usual activity of carving pumpkins. We thought since the weather was so much cooler than usual that they might actually last a week and a half until Halloween, but they still molded and melted by a week. We're definitely not in Utah anymore.

The girls loved scooping out the guts and designing their pumpkin faces. Avery really got into it for the first time this year, and Sophie was able to do a lot more to help this year, so they both had a great time.

We had a pumpkin for William but he wasn't ready to come out and carve his apparently (for which I'm grateful because I didn't want a Halloween baby!)

Our first Halloween party was for MOMS Club and Sophie insisted on bringing Mr. Bear with her. Mr. Bear is her preschool class's bear and it was her turn to have him for a couple days and document what they did together. So we used the same little pumpkin costume that she and Avery both wore for their first Halloweens and dressed him up for the party.

Sophie's preschool class had a Halloween party but they didn't allow costumes. Instead they had a pajama party and Sophie thought it was awesome that she got to go to school in her pajamas. She was pretty bummed the next preschool day when she actually had to put real clothes on again.

While Sophie was having her Halloween party I took Avery to our little downtown to trick or treat all the shops there with all the gobs of other kids from the city. Shhhh, don't tell Sophie we did it without her. Avery got so much candy, and looked adorable in her little cupcake outfit.

At the end all she wanted to do was sit and eat her candy (she's not dumb!) so instead of fighting her and only giving her a piece or two, I let her eat as much as she wanted for about 10 minutes. She seemed satisfied with that and really didn't eat too much, and then I took the rest home and dumped it into the bowl for trunk or treating. I'm all about recycling candy.

The ward trunk or treat was Saturday night, but we told the girls that day was Halloween because we weren't doing anything Halloween-y on Sunday, and they didn't know any different. This is so not a great picture of Sophie, and Joseph is showing off his scary look, but you can see the back of our mini van that we love!

The trunk or treat always starts out with a chili cook-off that is delicious, and then they have a costume parade. We told Sophie to keep Avery close by as they walked around the gym, and she took it literally. I don't think she took her arm off Avery the entire time. Over-protective big sister already.

Sophie was Little Red Riding Hood this year and had the most adorable hood/cape to go with this dress, but it somehow disappeared in the month and a half between when we got it and Halloween. It was maddening because it never left the house, so we can't imagine where it went. I literally looked in every nook and cranny in the entire house for it and never found it, so Sophie wore a vampire type cape instead. Luckily she loved it, even if I wasn't a fan.

My friend loaned me this pumpkin costume that she wore when she was pregnant, and it ended up winning an award for me at the trunk or treat. My stinker friends who were in charge of the awards gave me the "Most Natural Costume" award. It's true, that's all my own stuffing in there! Thanks for helping me win, Baby Will!

Oh, and Joseph was a tourist, which was convenient since I put him in charge of taking all the pictures this year anyway. We love Halloween at our house and had a fun couple weeks of celebrating it. Hope yours was fun, too!

Pumpkin Patch at Tanaka Farm

We took another field trip recently to visit the pumpkin patch at Tanaka Farm. We went there to do strawberry picking in the spring and had so much fun that we were looking forward to going back.

We went with our great friends the Hyers and had so much fun with them.

Unfortunately this tour of the farm was run very differently than the strawberry tour was and involved a ton more walking which was hard for me, but we survived and had fun. The girls got to try to find their way out of this corn maze at one point.

We got to ride a wagon around and saw the whole working farm.

We visited a petting zoo filled with goats and sheep.

Sophie was a little more fearful of them, but she soon warmed up.

The girls loved that there were scarecrows all over the farm, even on this tractor! We also got to be there with our cousins Austin and Gabe and so the girls were really in heaven.

Here are the two pumpkins we picked and subsequently made into jack o' lanterns. The pumpkins weren't too big, but thankfully they were just the right size for these two to carry since I already had one inside my tummy. The girls even got to pick some vegetables out of the ground and bring those home. We had a fun trip and sure love fall!