Over a month old...My how time flies!

The days with Grace quickly pass by, and here she is, over a month old already! To recap this past month, I thought I'd share with you a list of her accomplishments. In her first month, she has learned how to: smile, lift her head, sprawl (stretch out), make animal sounds (or at least it sounds that way to us), hold hands, focus on people, roll onto her side, open and close her hands, and kick like crazy! She did all these things before one month old, but it's been fun to see her increase doing them, especially smiling in response to us, which she started doing right at one month old, and rolling onto her side, which she (did first on day 10 but) does almost daily now.

Here she is smiling and looking at her dad:


Holding daddy's hand:


And I thought this was just too cute! I laid her on the bed for a second after changing her daiper so that I could wash my hands, and came back to find her like this: rolled onto her side and fast asleep! =) Funny girl!


When we lay her on her back, she loves to kick and talk, so as soon as I can capture that on video, I'll post it! Well, til the next Grace update...

Grace's Baby Blessing

Today, we gave our sweet Grace Lorraine a name and a blessing at Church. Travis performed the blessing, with our Bishop, my cousin Richard, and Travis' dad, brother-in-law Mark, Grandpa Larson, and Uncle Ray joining him in the circle. It was a wonderful, sweet blessing, and an overall joyful experience, sweetend by the support of all of our family and friends. Thank you to everyone who was able to come!

Here are some pictures of our beautiful Grace girl in her blessing dress:














Her pretty socks and shoes, which she proudly showed off to her great Aunt Candace at Church =)


We even got some great smiles out of her while we were taking the pictures! In fact, she's been quite the smiley girl all day long; maybe she has an idea of what a special day this has been for her.

After Church, we had a lunch with everyone who came for the blessing at our Grandma and Grandpa Larson's place. It was SO nice to have this opportunity to see and visit with our loved ones before we move out East later this month. Thank you again everyone for coming, and for supporting us and visiting with us! We love you and will miss living so close to you!

My good friend Chelsea and Grace:

Grace with her loving cousin Gavin (who requested the chance to hold her):

Me and my sweet baby:

We love you Grace and are so grateful for you! We're glad we could share this special day with you too!

Update

Well, it's been a while since we posted anything and we just wanted to let everyone know what's going on with us.

The main thing we want to let people know is that Grace will be blessed in our ward on the 14th of June. You are all invited to come if you can. Really. Anyone reading this is likely a family member or good friend and we would love for you to be there when we bless our wonderful baby Grace. Call us or send an email if you're coming so we can plan on you and tell you the details, like sacrament meeting time and church location. We will only be on this side of the country for a few more weeks so we'd love to see you all if you can make it. It won't be as easy to get together once we move.

Speaking of moving... The other day we signed a lease for a house to rent in Parma, Ohio. It is right next door to Brandon(my brother) and Rachel and we are very excited about that. We love the house, or at least the pics we've seen. It will be a nice upgrade from our one bedroom apartment. Mostly, we are just glad to have housing arrangements settled. Below is a picture of the front of our soon-to-be home.

We are counting the weeks and days until our big move. The plan is to load everything up on the 29th of June and leave town on the 30th. My parents and I will drive the truck and our car and Jenny and Grace will hang out in Blackfoot for a few days, then fly to Ohio with Tia(my sister) on the 3rd of July, our scheduled move-in day. We've been slowly packing what we can. It's nice to be able to take our time getting everything ready. So that's the deal on our upcoming move across the country.
We've taken some great pictures of Grace. She seems to be the subject in almost all the pictures we take these days. Hopefully we can post more photos soon, so stay tuned for that.