Nellie's Baby Blessing

Nellie Kathleen Pratt was blessed on Nov. 2 and it was such a fun time for our family! I love that our family is growing and it's going to be so fun for Samantha to have cousins her age on both sides! Nellie has added such a sweet spirit to our family. She's such a tiny gorgeous little thing. Brian gave a beautiful blessing and then we spent the rest of sacrament meeting trying to keep Samantha contained... which will happen ever Sunday for probably the next 10 years.

Look at that sexy bearded man!

Grandma knows the way to Sammie's heart- FOOD!

Beautiful proud momma and babe

This picture would be perfect if only Morgan hadn't been sick

"Gimme your camera mom"

Just thinkin

Halloween 2014

Samantha's first Halloween was a huge success! I am so lucky to have married a man that will let me do group costumes. Ryan even helped me figure out how to make everything work once we decided to be Mary Poppins, Bert, and a penguin! It actually wasn't too difficult making all our outfits. Ryan was a genius and may have used a little reverse-psychology on me to get me to finish our costumes before Halloween-eve... like I'm famous for doing.

That night we had friends over to party... and it's amazing how much things have changed now that we all have children. The party ends about 9pm now... when before that's about when we would get started. We wouldn't have it any other way though. It was such a fun night!

This is right after I finished sewing her hat and had to text Ryan how cute it was!

She wouldn't bit still long enough for a good photo...

Grandpa and his penguin

 

 

27th Birthday/Weightloss Challenge

How is is possible that I'm now in my late 20s? Really, sometimes it feels like I just graduated from high school, but it's almost been 10 years! Stop. Really time needs to slow down. My 27th birthday ended up being super fun even though I'm getting up there in years. First, Ryan wasn't going to be able to do much on my actual birthday because on Mondays he leave for school at noon and doesn't get back til 11:30.... yes, commuting to Weber is getting old. But he surprised me the weekend before with a good amount of cash to re-decorate our front room! It was something I had been talking about doing for a while but wasn't getting around to it. After a trip to Target, I love how the room turned out.

On my actual birthday my employees surprised me with some delicious pumpkin bread in the morning, and I received a bunch of fun surprises/calls/texts all day. And I am so incredibly lucky to have such amazing friends who planned a party for me that night so I wasn't spending the day alone. Really, how did I get so lucky. They even made me a cake made out of fruit (because I was dieting... more on that later). It's always so fun getting together with these girls.

One year ago... 1 baby, now... 7 babies (Jack isn't in it) Crazy!

I can't forget to talk about our weight-loss challenge. As you can see, most of us had babies this year and we were all wanting to shed some excess weight. So we decided to make it a challenge to get us all motivated. With a $20 buy-in we had a pretty good pot to win for #1- total amount lost & #2- % of loss. The challenge went for 8 weeks and we all had our ups and downs. For the most part, I think we all lost more weight than we would have had we not helped each other stay motivated. My arch-nemesis was mostly Amy though... we battled it out til the last few days. And even though we tried really hard to beat each other, it ended perfectly with her winning the most amount lost and I won the percentage. Of course, after 8 weeks of hard work we decided to treat ourselves to a girls-night-out getting pedicures!

4th Anniversary

Yes, Yes, many of you may know that our anniversary was back in October. I may have gotten a few months behind on my blog... And for some crazy reason I cannot let myself go out of chronological order when I blog. So here comes the flood of blog posts to catch up!

First item on my calendar is our anniversary!!! October 9th we had been married 4 years... seriously where did the time go. Ryan was kind enough to plan our anniversary celebration this year. And in preparing for it, he (strongly) suggested that we get someone to watch Samantha so we could leave for the night. But I struggle (ok really struggle) at asking people to watch Samantha, nevermind watching her over-night! Long story short, Samantha ended up joining us for our getaway.

At first it was just fine. She went with us as when we went to the Archery and shot arrows. (Ryan and I had some fun wagers going, which I lost $2000 but it's alright because he's still in-debited to me about $4000.)  Samantha was also great when we went to a late dinner, even though she was showing signs of a cold coming on. We want to eat at India Palace which was fantastic. Sammie even enjoyed the rice. Then Ryan surprised me with staying at the cutest little B&B the Hines Mansion! It was incredible. The house was beautiful and charming.

We fed Sammie and got her to bed, which lasted for about 30 min before she woke screaming. She wasn't feeling well at all and being in a strange place was probably adding to her misery. Long-sad-story-short, she was up all night crying and wheezing and it was the most expensive night of no-sleep we have had. Around 5:30 am Ryan and I were debating if it was worth it to stay for the 8am breakfast or if we should just throw in the towel and go home. Luckily Samantha finally slept for a hour or two and we got a little sleep in. One good thing was the breakfast was amazing. Ryan had planned for us to go shooting that morning but after a really tough night we decided to just go home and sleep. Which we all three did. Ryan has now made me promise that we'll leave our babies behind when we leave for over-night getaways...

Watching dad shoot

He killed it... I did not

Three for dinner

Picture of a picture of a picture... every anniversary!

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All laughs and giggles before bed...

Ryan had this all set up so pretty!

At least in the morning she was being cute and happy again...