Ok, here it goes. It's time to loose the baby-fat!!! Aaron and I are both begining a diet and excersice regimen. I think everytime I've gotten pregnant we both take advantage of it and let ourselves gooooooo! But, I'm already tired of being chonchita, as Aaron likes to call me. This is it! Here I go...full on. I am giving myself a due date of 3 months to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight. I hope I won't need to bite my tongue. Aaron's doing Atkins. I am just going to wing it with trying to eat healthy, jogging and doing Power 90, my work out dvd, he-he! We'll see in 3 months!

Jocie at 4 months

Reaching out for the toy

Making friends with a teddy bear

Baby talk

Attack of the stickers. (Naomi's work.)

Jocie is getting so big. She's already laughing and giggling. She's trying to sit up. If I try to lay her down she will do a baby crunch to avoid going flat on her back. I guess she enjoys the view from a sitting up point of view . She is so alert and awake. She's reaching out and grabbing things. She has yet discovered how to put them in her mouth. She gets so hyper and excited exploring new object to shake around that she will start to giggle and end up mad out of excitement. It's funny. You'd have to see it to understand what I am talking about. She loves bath time. She loves to be held, rocked and sung to. She always has a big beautiful smile for you if you have something to talk to her about. She loves to have her sister tickle her and smutter her with kisses. She also loves to be entertained by her goofy sister. Jocie is such a good baby. We are working on getting her to sleep through the night (12hrs of uninterrupted sleep) She goes to bed around 7 pm and wakes up around 3 am for another feeding, and then go back to sleep until 7 am. I think it wil happend soon, I am not worried. Babywise rocks! Anyway, we are blessed to have another beautiful baby that I am ready for the third! .....In about 2 yrs from now. LOL!

It's official. She is now into the terrible 2s!

Wow! Naomi has turned 2 yrs old! The older she gets, the cutter and funner she gets too, as well as rebellious. It's almost as if she purposely wants to do the opposite of what I need her to do at times. I read that this is normal at this age and that a good strategy to avoid some of the battles is by, in my words, "tricking" her to think that it was her idea, or changing the scenario and again tricking her to think that she is in control. For example; sometimes when we're about to leave she will give me a hard time to let me put her shoes on. So I ask her "do you want to go the park?" and she will say "yes" so I say "mami needs to put your shoes on first before we go to the park" and then she will let me. Or, for time out I will put her in the crib, so if she's behaving bad all I have to ask her is if she wants to go in the crib and then she'll stop, if she doesn't, then "bye-bye" she goes in the crib. It's hard at times to the point that I'm continuously making a conscious effort to be patient and not melt down with her. She is so cute though, and a lot better tempered than other kids her age we know. Anyway, going back to her b-day. We had a little party for her. The family was invited and a few other friends who have babies around her age. The babies seemed to have a lot of fun. It's hard to organize something at this time of the year when it's not very cold, but still not warm enough to do something outside and our house is only big enough to hold a couple more people besides the 4 of us. Anyway, I think it went good. I am learning every year of the do's and don'ts when having a b-day party. Looking forward to another year of fun!

I win!

Who does she look like?

Candy did the trick!

I tried to take her picture but she wouldn't let me because she wanted the camera for herself, so I had to give her candy. I just had to take advantage of the leaves. Heres's a picture before the candy, and then problem solved! and one after with candy.

binky free

Naomi is turning 2 yrs old! They do grow up so fast, and the saddest thing is that there's nothing you can do to stop it. Mi nena linda. Anyway, so we taught her to fall asleep on her own since the very beginning, or did we? Actually we followed all the rules in the Baby Wise book, which works wonders, we recommend it to all our friends, most of them or maybe none of them put it to practice and are now still suffering the consequences. Anyway, the only rule we decided to brake was the "no binky" one. It just made bed time smooth, it calmed her down and avoided us the frustration of listening to her cry. It really was a life saver. Well, we also decided that the 2 yr old mark would be a the one to wean her off of it. Last Sunday, Aaron complained that Josie cried too much that day and that it was all my fault because I hadn't "trained" her right to fall asleep on her own yet. So I decided to take responsibility and "train" her and Naomi since, she was turning 2 in a few days anyway, and off went the binkies. Yeah, fun! No binky night, woo-hoo sing me in at any time! So sad! Naomi cried like I have never heard her before. It was almost as if she had lost someone, not something. It was heart-braking. I was regretting it so bad and just wanted to give it to her and end her suffering, she was so miserable, you'd have to have been there to know what I'm talking about. She finally fell asleep after almost 2 hrs of going back and forth into her room trying to calm her back down. The next day I read on the Internet that cutting the tip off the binky was a better approach, kids would loose interest and just wouldn't want it anymore without shedding a tear. So I tried it the next day before her nap and told her Tank took a bite off of it and was now broken. She was really upset and kept saying "Tank no-no!" She said that all day long. She sure lost interest, to the point where she on her own threw it in the trash can, but continued to cry. But even with the crying it worked. She stopped looking and calling for it, and only cried that night. She was fine the next day and has been all week long! Yeih! Josie's still enjoying her binky and Naomi won't even try to even take a little lick. She knows it's the baby's. We also put her in a toddler bed the week before this whole ordeal. That was a breeze, she loves her big girl bed. Anyway, this whole process got me to think. Where did I get the idea that 2 was the age to kick the habit!? Here I am wishing that my baby stays little forever, but at the same time pushing her to grow up. I guess that's life. Next step POTTY TRAINING, fun!

General Conference

Babies do make things change. Our family has a little tradition of going downtown on Sunday for General Conference whether we have tickets or not, if we don't we just go to the tabernacle or the chapel next to it. We had been able to keep up with the tradition even after Naomi was born. Not this time! Aaron and I had tickets and my parents were going to babysit for us, but Joceline decided she wanted to keep us up all night long the night before, and it was too hard to get up on time. So, needles to say, we didn't go and decided to watch it from home. Yeah, right! We made our best efforts to pay attention as much as we could, but sadly I do not think I was able to listen to any of the speakers from start to finish. Anyway, I know one day it will get easier and we will be able to go and have conference pic-nics with our little, or big family? Here's a picture of Aaron trying to watch conference.

Our new family blog

A recap on our family life and how it all got started. Aaron and I met through friends during the summer of 2001, 6 months after he had come home from serving a misison in Tampico, Mexico. So that answers the question "Did you meet during his mission?" No, we didn't! We met here in Provo, Utah. After one year and a half of hard to get or best called "friendship", 2 weeks of dating and 5 months of engagement we got married on August 15, 2003. It is now the year of 2007 and if you did the math right, we have been married for 4 yrs! We have two sweet little girls who make every day so precious. Our oldest one Naomi will soon be 2 yrs old and our brand new baby, Joceline, is almost 3 months old. Aaron is currently working as a software QA and is attending school to become a programmer, and at the end of the day he rushes home to become super daddy, which I think is his favorite job of all. I am a stay home mom, thanks to all his efforts, and get to tend to my sweet, beautiful babies all day long. Best job I've ever had by far! Oh, and don't forget our 5th family member, Tank-man, our german sheperd, guardian, running buddy and nanny. Life is sweet and keeps getting better and better!