Important Updates

Approximately two weeks ago, we waved goodbye to Grandma, Jessie, Daniel, and Melanie. Since then, Constance has learned a few new tricks that we should probably warn them about before they return.

#1. She graduated from scooting and now crawls . . . everywhere. Not only that, she walks around the room while holding onto furniture. She is mobile and can get practically wherever she wants. Nothing is safe. Nothing.

#2. She has made friends with the living room plant. One morning I caught her conducting a soil test. The other evening, she was tasting the leaves. 

 #3. She pushes buttons. The entertainment center is in grave danger. Her favorite place to stand is, of course, right next to it. Also, she knows how to turn on the stereo.

 #4. She's technologically up to date.

 She is starting her first novel. . .

 . . . about what it is like to be a baby.

 #5. Remember how she used to squawk in the bathtub and eat her duckies? Well, now all she seems to want to do is splash all the water out of the bathtub and onto Mommy.

#6. And finally, her Daddy and Grandpa are in a fierce competition all the time to get her to say their name. Meanwhile, I'm convinced that "Ba ba" is "Ma ma."

Life in Colorado

I think it is safe to say that the initial shock of moving is over. We still have piles of boxes of books in the basement but Constance's crib is up and I have located most of the items that went missing during the move. We've settled down to everyday life again.

Constance is 9 months old this month and has discovered how to get around. She doesn't crawl the right way; instead, she scoots across the floor at an impressive speed. She will be in one corner of the room one minute and on the other side turning on the stereo before you realize it. She never wants to sit still anymore. Instead, she always wants to stand and hang onto your knees then inch her way along the couch toward the remote so she can put it in her mouth.

 Luckily she's getting better about not pulling my hair. Unfortunately, she's traded that habit for sticking my hair in her mouth and sucking on it. I don't know what it is about my face but she always wants to eat it. I'm trying to teach her how to give kissies the proper way but she is still quite adamant about doing it her way, which is to open her mouth wide and lick my lips or cheek while squawking loudly.

She loves taking things out or apart. A look of great satisfaction appears on her face after she has pulled absolutely everything out of my bag and thrown those items in every direction. She doesn't want to put them back in the bag. Oh no, they must be out of the bag. I have a little box of cards that I keep on her toy "shelf" and usually the first thing she does in her play corner is snatch that box and either pull the cards out by the dozen or tip the box upside down and dump them on the floor all at once. I will start gathering them up and putting them back in the box, and she immediately she grabs the cards out of the box and out of my hands and tosses them on the floor again. It's like that with all of her toys.

This past weekend Tom and I spent our Friday evening taking numerous mug shots of him. It was quite the date night. He had to have a passport-like photo of himself for the test he took on Saturday. The requirements for the photo were pretty ridiculous: had to be certain dimension, had to have a white background, no shadow on face, no shadow in background, no pixelation, head NOT tilted, and head perfectly centered. The shadow requirement was what turned out to be the hardest to meet. Tom finally went into Photoshop and edited out the small shadow behind his head from the flash. Here was the final product:

 We celebrated Tom completing the test with Taco Bell, of course.

I finally scored some work with my old company. Now I will be training their customers on how to use the course administration platforms and putting together documentation on functionality. It will be nice to have something to put in our bank account again. As a result of me working a bit here and there during the day, Constance has had some time to bond with her Daddy. I came upstairs one morning to find her like this, fast asleep.

What a great Daddy!

A Night of Romance and Roses and Wedding Cake

After the horrors of the bar exam, we were happy to turn our attention to more joyful matters: the wedding of Daniel Stone (Tom's older brother) and Melanie Rowe. In preparation for the special day, Tom dusted off his guitar and strummed a few chords; I rummaged through our piles of boxes and recovered all of my most romantic music; and Constance, well, she sacrificed her sleep for almost an entire day just to be sure she didn't miss a moment of it. Meanwhile, Grandma Stone went over her emergency contingency plan in case Constance decided to cry, scream, or squawk during the ceremony.

Everything was a flurry of purple, organza, roses, screaming toddlers and babies, and white lights up until late afternoon when all the tired decorators retired home to get dressed for the special night. As one of the bridesmaids, I had attempted to find a suitable purple dress in the Provo mall but none were in our budget. So the first thing I did once we were in Colorado was put my sewing machine (a special gift from my Grandma Van Ornum) together and make a couple trips to Joann's to get a pattern and material. I cut all the material one night when Constance went to bed early (for this baby, that is anytime before midnight). Then while Grandma Stone was watching Constance the next day, I quickly sewed the dress together. Unfortunately, we didn't really get any good pictures of me in it, but it was nice that Constance and I matched.

Constance's dress came from Grandma Stone who went on a special search with Jessie for the prettiest purple baby dress in Colorado Springs. I think everyone who saw Constance in the dress would have to agree. It was gorgeous.

She doesn't know how lucky she is to have pretty dresses like this. All she wanted to do was chew on the beads in the front of her dress. I guess they must have been pretty tasty.

The dress came with a little bonnet of sorts which made Constance look like one of those porcelain dolls people sometimes collect.

She ripped that bonnet off so fast before I could get more than one picture. Clearly she was not a fan.

We were lucky enough to beat the rainstorm and arrived at Church just before the downpour. Tom and I were also privileged to make it into some of the wedding pictures (Tom was the best man and I was one of the bridesmaids). Constance's responsibility was to be cute. She did a pretty good job at it.

Before we knew it, wedding guests were filing in through the doors. I quickly fed Constance, passed her off to Grandma, then hurried to the piano in the chapel to start the prelude music. I was tempted to play different versions of "Love One Another" for the wedding music and see if anyone noticed, but decided to play it safe and use some William Joseph music instead. Unfortunately, while I was up there playing the piano, Constance decided it was simply unacceptable that I was not holding her and burst into loud wails. Luckily, the bishop's wife kindly offered to take her so that Grandma Stone could join the wedding group in the chapel. A few minutes later, Constance was fast asleep and stayed asleep until the start of the reception.

How Constance woke up is quite the story. Jessie and I were standing in the line and greeting all the people wandering into the reception. It was getting pretty hot and we decided that if we were feeling hot then Constance must be uncomfortable in all the layers on her dress. So we decided to get some air flow under the dress by taking her shoes and tights off her. Mind you, Constance was fast asleep when we began this endeavor. First, I removed her shoes. Then Jessie began slowly pulling off her tights. She got them halfway off when suddenly Constance's eyes popped open and she looked up at me with the most startled, confused, and puzzled look. And that is how Jessie and I ended up giggling for two minutes straight. Ok. Maybe you had to have been there to understand how absolutely hilarious it was.

Back to the blissful couple--here they are cutting the cake.

 And here they are smearing cake on each other's faces. Awww, how cute!

 The first dance.

 Mother and son.

Unfortunately, Tom was put on a very unexpected and inescapable babysitting duty during the dancing so we didn't get to do the family dance we were hoping to do. But a little later on, we tried to make up for it.

Constance is quite the dancer when she's not trying to eat my hair or necklace.

Congratulations to the wonderful bride and groom! We hope they will forgive and some day forget the loud, wailing baby who will be sleeping one floor below them under the same roof.

Surviving the Bar Exam (part 2)

(If you haven't read part 1 of this story you really should)
Day #2 of the bar exam was 200 multiple choice questions split into two 3-hour blocks. Constance and I checked out of the hotel in the morning and then met Tom during his lunch break.

This was lunch

For the rest of the afternoon while Tom was test-taking, we wandered around, mostly along 16th street mall trying to avoid the creepy homeless people and cigarette smoke. Every so often I would head back to the convention center to use the restroom, change Constance's diaper, and feed her. It was the only safe, cool place I could find. The only problem is that once Constance was happy and wanted to play, her loud squawks and squeaks echoed all over the building. With the enormously high ceilings, she sounded like an opera singer of sorts, and I was very self-conscious especially since one of the security/information workers kept on trying to usher me into a "mother's room."

Finally around 5:15 pm we saw some people emerge from the end of the hall. They were running. Then more people trickled out--and then an overwhelming crowd.

Here's what I overheard the bar exam takers say as they walked out:
"60 [percent] ... isn't that what we have to get?"
"That was a ---- hard question."
"We are not the bottom X percent--we are fine!"
"What was the answer to that question?"
"There were a lot of really hard...." [crying]
And my favorite:
"I don't want to feel miserable. I just want a day where I feel . . . decent."

Here is the person we were craning our necks to see. Surprisingly, no one at the bar exam commented on his shirt. The only one who did was the cashier guy at the gas station where we stopped in the morning on our way into downtown. He said: "Robot law? That's the only kind of law."

Although the bar exam is finally over, the suspense continues. It's hard to be fully happy and relaxed when you don't know whether you passed or not. At least no more 12-hour long study sessions every day. Hmmm, what did we do when life was "normal" anyways?