Look Alikes? Not so Much...

My friend Stephanie recently posted on her blog a picture of each of her kids at the same age and the same pose to show how similar they look. You could guess which one was which, and then look at the answer. I guessed, and was totally wrong. She even has a boy and a girl, but they look so much alike, they are practically identical. It was a fun post, and made me think of how I thought our girls would look alike. When Leah was born, both Patrick and I were surprised that we hadn't just had another little Kaiya. So I thought I would post a picture of each of them at one month old to show how different they are. Of course, they are baby pictures, so they both have the baby look, but you can see that they don't really look alike. But we think they are both cute:)

In other news, we took Leah to the doctor for her 6 week checkup. When we told him about her crying pattern, he said, "so she has colic". I was trying to convince myself that I could have a baby without colic, and since she wasn't crying all day long like Kaiya did, just keeping to the entire evening, I thought maybe it was normal newborn crying. But apparently 5 hours in the evening isn't normal. So even the going off of dairy didn't seem to help, at least not enough for me to continue restricting my diet so much. The funny (or not so funny) thing is that her crying got much worse after our trip to Carson for her blessing, and with Kaiya her colic started right after our trip to Tokyo. We've decided never to travel with a newborn again.

Blessing Day

Two weeks ago we took a trip to Carson for Patrick's 10 year high school reunion, and while we were there he blessed Leah so that the family could be there. Despite all the chaos of the trip and trying to get everyone ready for 9am church, Leah did really well and didn't cry during the blessing. She was even awake the whole time. Patrick gave her a beautiful blessing, and it was really nice to have family and friends there for it. Here are some pictures of our little cutie in her blessing dress:

This picture kind of summarizes how Kaiya felt about Leah getting so much attention.

First Video

Poor Leah is the classic second child. By six weeks old I'm sure we had at least 500 pictures of Kaiya and several videos. We have considerably less of Leah. Even though she has been smiling for 3 weeks now this is the first time I've attempted to capture it on camera (amazingly, I was successful on the first attempt) and this is also the first video I took of her. I wanted to get her smiling on video, but instead, she sneezed, and Kaiya politely responded, "Bless you Leah". I thought it was cute anyway.

The Whole World is a Stage

I know the setting of this video is kind of odd, but it's the only place she will hold still long enough to film even a short movie. A few months ago, Kaiya started repeating the songs she has been hearing. At first it was just portion of them, but now there are several songs she knows all the way through. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, ABCs, Popcorn Popping, Once There was a Snow Man are some of the songs she sings all the way through now. She usually won't sing the whole song unless she's doing it for herself, but this filming site is the other location that seems to be her stage. We are super proud of how fast she is picking up new words and that for the most part she even knows what she is saying. Not Bad for a 25 month old.

Week in Review

Today is Patrick's first day back at work after his 2 weeks off and home with us. Besides Kaiya not taking a nap and Leah having a few screaming bouts, it hasn't been too bad. Hopefully things will continue to go well. This week finally feels like we're getting out of the fogginess of having a newborn and resuming somewhat of normal life. At least sometimes. We took Leah to church Sunday for the first time. Here's a photo of the girls in their matching dresses:Too cute! I hope they don't hate me for it, but I like to dress them up to match. Leah did pretty well for her first time. But I remembered why heels aren't the greatest when you have to pace the hallways. We also tried giving the girls a bath together. We had only one incident, where Kaiya tried to help rinse Leah's hair by dumping a cup of water over her face, but besides that She was really good, and you can tell by the photo that Leah seems to like the bath just as much as Kaiya does. We took Leah to her two week checkup last week. She's gaining weight and doing great, but we were a little concerned that she was becoming very much like Kaiya was as a newborn. Kaiya began crying more and more every day and at about 3 1/2 weeks we knew she had colic. So we spoke with the doctor about that, and he suggested I eliminate dairy from my diet for 4 days, then on the fifth day start eating it again, and see what happens. So I did. Leah seemed really happy for those 4 days, and we thought maybe we were wrong and she was going to be fine. Then I went back on dairy the fifth day, and everything fell apart. It reminded me so much of Kaiya as a newborn. So we had a difficult day and I'm back off dairy. And now Leah seems fine again. Unfortunately for me, this means no ice cream or chocolate, not to mention all the rest of it, for some time. But it's definitely worth it to have a happy baby. Otherwise, Leah is getting bigger everyday and finally filling out her newborn clothes. Kaiya is (most of the time) liking her new role as a big sister, and Patrick and I are trying to function on less sleep. But we've survived the first 3 weeks!