The Independent Girl

I took Autumn to get her 3 year portraits. I think that first off I picked the wrong time of day to do it. I thought we could go after her nap. Well as it turns out, she decided to take a long nap today, so I had to wake her up to get ready. I wanted to wet her hair, and blow- dry it, so maybe once it wouldn’t be hanging in her face. Well getting her hair wet was traumatic, blow-drying her hair was traumatic, putting a nice dress on was traumatic. In retrospect, I should have just let her wear the outfit that she wanted, but Ben really wanted her to wear one of her nice Sunday dresses, and she wasn’t happy about this. She kept telling me she was still tired and just wanted to stay at home.

We get to the studio, and I know I am byast, but I think Autumn is a really cute kid and has a really cute smile. Well she was showing her stubborn side today, she either refused to smile or would do a monster smile, like it looks like she is imitating a monster. The photographer was really patient and kept trying to catch her with a cute smile, but it was hard work. We kept asking her to do a pretty smile, and she would tell us that she didn’t have any pretty smiles, or that her friends was going to teach her how to do pretty smiles. When we had finished taking pictures, I asked her if she wanted to help me pick the one we were going to get, she told me she didn’t like any of them without even looking.

While two weeks ago when I got Prairie’s pictures taken I agonized over which one to get because all of them were so cute, with Autumn’s I agonized, trying to decide if any of them were cute enough to buy. Needless to say it was not Autumn’s best portrait experience. When we went a little over a year ago for Autumn, she was amazing, she would hold all of these poses, do the cutest smiles, so I thought I would have another experience like today, but not exactly. Though I think she displayed another of her charming traits, though maybe not as photogenic, that she is very independent.

When I get the smiles by wires, I will post a couple of the pictures, a couple of the “monster” smiles and the one I ended up picking.

Prairie's 9 month stats

Last week I finally got Prairie's blessing dress studio pictures. I was worried because she was so old, that maybe the dress wouldn't fit, or that she kind of has scraggly hair, but I was realyl pleased with the pictures.

We had Prairie's 9 month appointment today:

height: 28 inches - 75th percentile
weight: 17 lbs 12 oz - 30th percentile (she lost some weight because she was so sick last week)
head: 47.5 cm - no percentile -- she is still way above the percentil mark, each visit she is getting farther and farther away from the percentiles, but it finally looks like she is curving, not just growing straight up

I went to Georgia last week for graduate school interviews. This was the first time I have been away from Prairie. The day after I left she got really really sick, so sick that Ben's sister had to get campus police to go get him out of class. She was pretty much only eating liquids the whole time I was gone, and lost a little bit of weight, but she is doing a lot better. Her double ear infections haven't cleared up yet, but she seems do be doing better otherwise.

I had a roller coaster trip to Georgia, I had really bad luck with the air travel. I got there, enjoyed visitng University of Georgia, but while sitting in during one of the session of the graduate student symposium, realized that I didn't want to go to graduate school, and then for the first time that whole weekend felt at peace and happy. So there is no further graduate school for Ben or me in the near future and we both feel really happy about that. Now we are trying to decide if we want to stay in Utah a little bit longer or move sooner to where we want to settle down. Who knows we will keep everyone informed.

It is so good to be home, and it is so good to be home full time with my daughters, I really love this job so much.