Baby Stephen!

Stephen Jay Larsen 
born at 8:56 AM 
7 lb 8 oz
20 inches 

We were the talk of labor and delivery with our one hour in the ward and delivered on a slow Sunday morning. 

The poor nurse had no idea that she would be grabbing the hospital's on call doctor and nurses out of the hall to catch a baby within 5 minutes of getting me settled in the delivery room after my first contraction there. (I was talking through the contraction) 

Stephen's birth certificate even had a little blood spot on it. According the nurse handling the paperwork that is how you know that things were fast and furious in the delivery room. 

Even after all that crazy, Stephen came into the world healthy and calm. 

Elissa's birthday

I had a low key birthday, but it was a good day. It is hard when you are super pregnant and have gestational diabetes to really celebrate, but the family made me feel loved.

Daniel is a very observant and noticed that I only had one cloth for straining yogurt, and that it was a pain. So he got me a very tight weave strainer to use instead.
As long as you know to ladle in your yogurt instead of dumping the batch in, it works great. It is super easy to clean and can hold a whole gallon batch of yogurt!

I'm glad that he loves me even though I can be a little super pragmatic sometimes.

Baby Boy's Room

We finally kind of decorated Baby Boy's room. Thanks to Daniel being crafty and handy. He had some big colorful origami balls which we hung on the walls
And:

An awesome circuit board rocket ship! Daniel agreed to construct something from circuit board for baby's room. We settled on a rocket ship.

Ella Letters

Ella has started to have us help her write notes. She learned this from our friend Daniel Tiger. All of her notes (which we have dozens) go like this:

Dear                :
This heart is for you
(Heart picture)
Love, (recipient's name here)

Big Girl Bed

Ella had joined the ranks of big kids who work in big kid beds! She spent days pretending to nap just so she could climb in and out.

She loved helping Daddy convert her crib into a bed. Ella loves to be a helper.

Water table

Pinterest strikes again. I'm surprised that Daniel hasn't deleted the app from my phone this pregnancy with the number of projects I've come up with to do.

This time it was a water table. He did a great job executing it! Ella thinks it is awesome!

Cute Ella!

Ella had become that inquisitive toddler. She is always asking "what is that?" or her favorite "what does that word mean? Tell me about it." (Incidentally, Daniel got a dictionary app on his phone recently. This is not a coincidence.)

She is also starting to make astute connections. One day Daniel was wiggling his fingers to go tickle her, and she said,"No Spider, I'm not a spout!"

She also loves to be silly and insert one of her favorite nonsense words in place of words in stories or songs. One of her favorite replacements is "ham"

One day we were talking about being a helper and she piped in,"I'm a helper, mostly!" We smiled because that is a pretty apt description.

Our favorite is, what we've dubbed, her super hero/tv catch phrase: "I can do it. No problem."