The New Quests of The Turetzky Family

We had a nice Thanksgiving at home, just the four of us. Last year we also had Thanksgiving by ourselves, but this year was so different.  1. There were no tears from me! Since we just got back on Monday from my sister's wedding, along with having spent some of October in Utah, I wasn't missing our families. I was at peace with our family having our own Thanksgiving this year.  2. Our family had little Walter in the flesh to celebrate with us!  3. Darren has employment that he loves this year.  4. We went and had pie with some friends from our ward, so we weren't completely alone anyway! And I made my first ever pumpkin pie (with coconut milk) and I've now fallen head over heels for pumpkin pie :o)  5. I've spent all year counting my blessings and we spent all month adding leaves to our thankful tree. Taking the time to recognize our blessings feels as though it has increased them.  We had a happy Thanksgiving and hope you did too!!...

Four... three... two... one... ...just a few hours old. . . . . .  Today she is 4. She is still my little girl for a while. We played. We painted. We baked a cake. She licked the frosting coated beaters. She put flowers on her cake just like a wedding cake. We went to our favorite place, the library. She made her brother laugh like only she can. We ate her favorite meal of "buttered" gnocchi and spinach. We sang and read stories. We counted our blessings. I will always be grateful for my special girl. This past weekend in Newport Beach with her cousins at her Aunt Hilary's wedding!

Well, I'm not one to talk much about my personal political and religious perceptions, but this is my way of sharing a little bit of my views via the well articulated words of another. If I could write, I would've written something just like this: "Sorry to kill your apocalyptic election buzz…" http://www.feministmormonhousewives.org/2012/11/sorry-to-kill-your-apocalyptic-election-buzz/ And before you choose not to read this article based on the link being from the Feminist Mormon Housewives blog, just humor me and give it a read. I continue to be true to myself, and no I do not choose to label myself. I am not a feminist. I am not a democrat. I do share the views of the sister who wrote the article, but before you get all judgie on me, just know that I will not be defined by the labels of others. What do you think?

I just have to share this article I was just reading while I was feeding Walt. It's called "Turning Picky Eaters into Foodies" (http://m.parenting.com/article/picky-eaters-into-foodies?loc=finalslide&cid=finalslide#bmb=1 I think every mother must struggle with feeding their toddler at some point. I remember when I was taking my nutrition classes at BYU and learning about feeding children, and back then I thought, "Ok, now I've learned how to do this, it will be a piece of cake to feed my children healthy foods all the time!" While I've done decent, feeding a 2 year old became more challenging than feeding a 1 year old, while feeding a 3 year old became more difficult than feeding even a 2 year old! Lila was far less picky at 14 months old than she is now.  So what's changed? I'm not quite sure, but I have a sneaking feeling that maybe I've slipped up a bit and I sometimes do a thing or two from the list in the article. W...

**I wrote this post back September, right before we left town for 5 weeks. I just thought I should go ahead and post it!** So I didn't post about this sooner because of vacation in August, but I wanted to post about breastfeeding in honor of World Breastfeeding Week. WBF week was actually August 1st-7th and on the 1st I participated in a photo shoot by a local photographer friend. ( Photo credit goes to Leilani Rogers .) I don't know how much I've actually written about breastfeeding on the blog, but I may as well say what was a great thing it has been for me and my babies.  I am perhaps one of those lucky women who found breastfeeding to come naturally, and to date have never had any thrush, plugged ducts, or infection. With both babies there was about a 2 week learning curve to getting the hang of breastfeeding and get comfortable. With Lila I made the mistake of introducing the pacifier within the first couple days of her life, which led to some nipple co...

I thought I was going to have a perfect record this year for my weekly blog posts. The last couple of weeks I just haven't been able to make it happen. I dropped the ball, and I'm actually pretty ok with it. Sometimes you just need a break, even from the good things. It's kind of like now that I'm a mom, I can see how mom's sometimes need a break from those precious babes that you love so much. Same thing seemed to be the case with my blog. To tell you the truth, I feel like I've been struggling a bit lately. Coming home from a 5 week "vacation" was a bit of an adjustment (which I expected). I struggled the last few weeks to be a good co-parent again. I had gotten a little bit used to doing it without Darren. Lila had some serious behavior issues the first week and a half we were back, but things were much better this past week. The bedtime routine had to be re-tackled. We conquered that, me and Darren together. I started and quit a preschool co-op w...