Ben & Mary Alice's Blog

So much playing... I need a rest!

2008-07-28T15:28:00.000-06:00

Miss Curiosity

2008-07-28T15:21:00.001-06:00

Our growing family

2008-07-09T14:24:00.002-06:00

Here is a time lapse of our family at Valley Creek - images from the last 3 summers.

First off, 2006. Here we are in front of the majestic sawtooth mountains.

And - still 2006 - posing for pics along the trail.

In 2007, we visited Valley Creek just 3 weeks before Katie was born... Mary Alice was ready to pop!

And here we are in 2008 - Kate has joined our crew.

We can't wait to see how our family will continue to grow - we've still got about a dozen kids planned, so stay tuned!

Valley Creek

2008-07-07T10:26:00.010-06:00

Last week we spent some time in Stanley, ID. Mary Alice's granddaddy bought some land up in the Sawtooth mountains during the Great Depression. The spot - known as Valley Creek - is a favorite vacation spot for the family. We gather there every year to play games, go fishing, hiking, play at Redfish or Stanley lakes, look for wildlife, and swat at mosquitoes. Luckily no one contracted West Nile virus.

Ben and Katie enjoy a swing in Stanley, Idaho. We had dinner several times at the Stanley city park. Look closely and you can catch Mary Alice in my sunglasses.

Mary Alice and Kate watch a dog swimming in Stanley Lake. On my first trip to Stanley, Idaho, Mary Alice and I rented a paddle boat and we sailed it (peddled it?) around the bend of the trees on the right. Fun times. That's where the dream of owning our own yacht and sailing the world began.

Katie was curious about the beach and the sand and enjoyed playing there. She was a bit nonplussed the first time a wave came in on her, but she quickly got used to it and enjoyed splashing.

Kate was a hit with her cousins. Everybody wanted to hold her or play with her. Kathryn was such a sport about it all - she was almost always in a good mood.

I know you can't see me in my camouflage, but I've got a baby strapped to my back, out on a hike to the 'reservoir' at Valley Creek.

Here's Mary Alice looking cute with our Katie. Our friends the Dustin's lent us this baby backpack. It was definitely appreciated.

Family photo op by Mama C's cabin at Valley Creek. You can see that our cabins have a bit more character (and age) than what you typically think of as cabins. There's one 'cabin' up here (the funny cabin) that was used by actual trappers before the settling of the west.

Katie and some cousins at Valley Creek. Katie liked spending time with the older kids.

After a long day of playing, Katie is ready for bed.

Daddy and Katie blending in.

As always, Kate is popular with her cousins.

Joe is cooking up some dinner at the Valley Creek cabins. Joe and his kids make some mean fajitas.

Mary Alice and Marin share parenting tips. Katie is eager to start a game of Catchphrase.

Katie can't wait for next year to come back to Valley Creek!

Climber

2008-07-01T10:06:00.004-06:00

Our little gal has finally become a climber - she loves to climb stairs. She still needs a spotter, though, for all those times she loses her balance or leans back a bit to far. Plus she still tries to go down face first. We're trying to teach her better form.

More Braces Fun

2008-06-24T17:43:00.002-06:00

For all of you who just couldn't get enough of my braces, you're not alone! Katie has a hard time leaving my mouth alone if she can reach it. Lately I've had to wear rubber bands, and she especially likes to flip those.

Sometimes Kate can play kind of rough. I can't imagine where she would've learned that.

If you're curious, we just set the date for the removal of the braces as October 13. There will be much rejoicing in the land. That will mark 52 months in braces. It must be some sort of record. My own mother asked me recently if I'd had these braces on during my mission in Ukraine (the answer is no - but it feels like it).

Arts & Crafts

2008-06-23T17:24:00.002-06:00

Katie and Mary Alice worked on a Father's Day present for dad. I should have a picture of it posted. Anyway, it was Katie's first painting. She really had a good time with it, as you can tell.

Ben is really a lucky Daddy. You can tell from Kate's onesie that she loves her Padre. Happy Father's day to all the Dad's out there.

A New Trick

2008-06-10T17:15:00.002-06:00

Kathryn has just learned how to pull herself up to a standing position.

Some of the these normal milestones like sitting, crawling, and standing have been a real challenge for Katie because of her weak neck muscles.

If a baby can't hold her head straight, she really can't balance at all - think about how big a baby's head is compared to the rest of her body! That's a pretty good percentage.

Luckily Katie has her own personal trainers who have been helping to strengthen those poor neck muscles, and now, thanks to lots of stretching and exercising, her neck is getting much stronger. She's making progress in leaps and bounds (but luckily for us not leaping and bounding... yet - we've got a lot of baby-proofing still to do)!

Out for a Long, Wet Stroll

2008-06-07T17:08:00.001-06:00

Here we are after finishing a very wet 5K for the Springville Art City Days festival. Mary Alice entered in the 'female with stroller' division and got first place! I need to get a picture of the plaque she won. MA even beat most of the men with strollers, coming in 3rd place stroller overall, with a time of about 26 minutes. And let me tell you, there were a LOT of strollers.

Ben ran with her the whole way and had a grand old time. Katie was the only one of us to stay dry underneath the rain fly that MA had the foresight to bring. MA and I were soaked to the bone! But it was all worth it to see MA accept her 1st place award.

The worst part of the whole day was how freezing we were while waiting around for 2 hours after the race for the awards ceremony.

Morning & Night

2008-05-30T17:03:00.001-06:00

Here is Katie just getting up for the day.

And here she is all ready for bed (showing off her dog, Savvy).

Heavy Lifting

2008-05-27T16:58:00.001-06:00

For those of you wondering how I keep my physique in tip top condition, wonder no more. Its all thanks to my lifting buddies Wayne and Micah. We lift every Mon-Wed-Fri (when I don't sleep in).

I've known Wayne for 8 or 9 years now, ever since he was in the bishopric of my student ward. Micah is a neural science genius.

Mmmm, Carrots

2008-05-25T22:14:00.000-06:00

the Little Gym

2008-05-22T20:59:00.004-06:00

Brian and Emilie invited us to attend the Little Gym with Matthew. Ben took some time off from work and we went and had a great time playing with Matt and the other lil' tykes. Katie had a fun time discovering new places to play. She really liked 'bubble time' when there were lots of little bubbles floating all over the place. She even said her first word - Bubbo!

Even after a hard workout at the gym, Kate isn't ready to call it a day. Here she does some stretches with Mommy before heading to bed.

A Few of our Favorite Things

2008-05-21T22:06:00.001-06:00

Mary Alice is big on baking - breads, casseroles, rolls, or my favorite - chocolate chip cookies - she can do it all. Here she demonstrates her skills by baking hockey pucks for a church youth activity.

One of Ben's joys is reading the newspaper. You can see that he keeps up with all of the most important events happening in the world.

Bath Time For a Baby

2008-05-15T22:02:00.001-06:00

Warmer Weather

2008-05-11T21:57:00.003-06:00

As everyone in Utah knows, its been quite a cool spring! But finally the weather is warming up and we're enjoying being outside. Here are Mommy and Katie all ready for church. Daddy is sure a lucky man.

After church we had G&G Wilson over for dinner. Katie likes to play with her grandparents.

The Pits

2008-05-10T21:52:00.001-06:00

We visited the Bingham Canyon Copper Mine on Saturday. It is the biggest man-made pit in the world! You've got to see it to believe it. 2 miles across and over a mile deep. Its CRAZY HUGE!

We had a bunch of the Wilson clan with us so it made for a fun family trip. It was pretty breezy, but Ben was able to keep his hair under control.

New Food

2008-05-01T21:49:00.001-06:00

We've been experimenting with letting Katie feed herself. She's pretty strong willed and always pushed food away when we tried to spoon it in to her mouth. Maybe we gave in too soon, but she sure loves to feed herself.

Here is our first try with rice cereal. We also tried other kinds of baby food. We sure kept our kitchen floor cleaner when we had to mop up after a baby's meal every day.

The Difference a Flash Makes

2008-04-26T21:43:00.002-06:00

We think Kate's coloring is so much better without the flash. The flash just washes out all her skin tone. Maybe if we had a nicer camera all our pictures would have better lighting. We are grateful for the fun little point-and-click that we have, its perfect for what its made for. But sometimes we long to shoot 'em like the pros.

I love reading

2008-04-26T21:38:00.000-06:00

Katie loves books! She loves to hold them, chew on them, turn the pages, and roll in them. She likes to drag them around with her. Just last week she finished 'A Tale of Two Cities,' (though we found it in her diaper the next day).

Accessorizing

2008-04-16T21:27:00.001-06:00

The shiny thing on Katie's head is her helmet. She got it on at the end of March. It is supposed to help shape Kate's head back to normal. It had developed a flat spot on her left side because of her torticollis.

Ever since Kate was born she tended to lean her head to the right and look to the left. We've started on physical therapy where we do stretches and exercises to try to strengthen and lengthen the affected muscle groups. She doesn't like it, but when she's 14 she'll thank us. She is, luckily enough, just fine with the helmet itself. She never complains about it. In fact it has saved her from many a bump and knock to the head.

Just Chillin' with my Books

2008-04-14T21:23:00.000-06:00

Playing in the Dark

2008-04-13T23:16:00.000-06:00

We have an LED book light that Katie just loves. If she's ever fussy, we just hand it to her and she's busy for MINUTES ON END!

You can see Kate's helmet next to her head. We take it off for baths and doing her therapy stretching and exercising.

The Orthodontist

2008-04-13T20:48:00.005-06:00

Ben has braces.

I've had them for about 4 years now. Initially I got them to fill a gap in the top of my head - I had an adult eye tooth that never grew down. That was on the top. To get all of my bottom teeth to fit, they had to remove one of my front teeth - above is a pic from 2006.

I visit Dr. Paulos' office regularly every 5 or 6 weeks. I thought that it might be fun for our vast readership to see a visit to the orthodontist.

Here is Ben checking in at the front desk with good buddies Julie and Laura. Over the years we've grown very close. I think that Mary Alice is kind of jealous! ;).

Here is Lisa. She is one of the lucky technicians who gets to work inside my mouth. I appreciate all of her work - though she's not the only great orthodontic specialist to whom I'm indebted. Other thanks go out to Lisa, Lisa, and the other Lisa. Everyone there is named Lisa, I promise!

Finally, here is the good doctor himself. I really like Dr. Paulos. He's a neat guy, and my teeth are quite straight thanks to his expertise. Just one tooth left with a bit of rotation, then I'm done!

Our Winter

2008-03-02T19:47:00.010-07:00

Okay, so we've been awful at new posts. I guess blogging isn't in our blood. But to appease the clamoring of our loving family, here are a few highlights from the last few months.

This was taken way back on December 13, before Kathryn was mobile and would mostly stay in one spot on a blanket. We don't bother laying out a blanket for her anymore because she rolls all over the place.

Here is our lil' gal and her Christmas stocking on her first Christmas morning ever! We spent Christmas up in Blackfoot, ID with the Cannons. It was fun, but we didn't stay nearly as long as any of us would have liked to because I had to get back to work and try to meet some hectic deadlines that in retrospect seem meaningless.

We have a sort of gym at the office where I work. We've got a treadmill, elliptical, bike, and weights. During the height of winter, Mary Alice and Katie would come out to the office to work out with me, rather than trying to run outside in the cold. MA and I would switch off between the cardio machines and Katie would wiggle on the floor. Good times. If we were to try to do the same today we'd have to be a lot more careful about Kate getting too close to the moving equipment.

I don't know what I'm looking at, but at least Kathryn is having a good time. Here is a good look at my pate for all those who don't know how bald, er, distinguished I've become. This pic is from Jan 23.

Around mid January, Katie started becoming upset every time we'd eat dinner, because Mary Alice and I would sit at the bar and concentrate on our food, leaving her out of the loop. She couldn't stand not being the center of attention, and so started a new habit of dinner time fussiness. We found her much easier to handle if one of us held her in our lap so that she could join us for dinner. Of course this couldn't last long with little girl hands reaching out for plates of food to dump on the floor. Recently she got her very own seat at the table. Its one of those Greco clip-on chairs that can attach to any table or counter top. She loves joining us for dinner and playing with toys up at the big kid table.

With the approach of spring, Katie has been anxious to start going on runs outside again. Here she is suping up the ol' stroller in preparation for its 2008 inaugural run. We think that Kate has a real mechanical aptitude.

And here is the piece de la resistance for everyone who thought we'd never make another blog post... a movie! I wanted to edit together a little film of Katie rolling, but all you get is raw footage, because our camera captures in .mov files, which Windows Movie Maker can't import.

The Evolving Hemangioma

2008-02-24T19:08:00.001-07:00

Kate is now 7 months old. She's growing so fast and we're having so much fun! She's now about 26 inches long and 15.2 pounds. She's actually quite small for her age - 25% height, 25% weight, 10% head size. She's just our little cutie.

A few weeks after Katie was born she started getting a 'bruised' nose. Its actually a hemangioma. It develops in the first 6 months of life and then fades over the next few years. Its usually gone by 3 or 4 years old, but can stay as late as 9 years. We think that Katie's spot is starting to fade a bit already, though we don't have pictures where its really easy to tell.

A Day For Goodbyes

2007-11-10T21:04:00.000-07:00

Today we're saying goodbye to some old friends. The first is Kate's cradle. This cradle was built by Grandpa Wayne Wilson and has held generations of Wilson kidlets. Katie is the latest, but as of today she's graduating to a big girl crib (another borrowed piece of furniture from Brian & Emilie).

Here Mary A and Katie A are taking one last trip down memory lane (with special appearance by our humidifier).

Our next goodbye was to the warmish fall weather - winter is just around the corner! We took a walk to take in the beauty of the season while it lasted.

Our final goodbye for the day was to Mary Alice's long hair - she felt it was finally time for a trim so we decided to take a few photos before the chopping.

And here is MA with shorter hair! Granted, this picture is about 5 years old, and about 6 inches shorter than her new haircut, but we don't have any pix of her new haircut yet, so you'll have to use your imagination.

Baby Blessing Blues

2007-10-14T20:43:00.000-06:00

Okay, there wasn't really anything 'blue' about the day, i just liked the alliteration :).

Here is Mary Alice trying to get out of the picture. We just dressed a girl up for her baby blessing.

These cute little slippers were hand knit by our friend Stephanie Talbot. They really are darling!

Here's our babe all dudded up for the event. She ended up crying through the whole blessing, but at least she looked cute.

We had lots of friends and family come out to Kate's baby blessing. We met in a park, and though the weather was a bit brisk, we had a great time. Our little two room condo wouldn't have held everyone. And the nieces and nephews had a great time playing frisbee and croquet.

first snowfall & cavernous hemangioma

2007-10-01T18:41:00.001-06:00

Every fall we harvest apples from Grandma Cannon's Macintosh apple tree and make applesauce. This year we visited on the weekend of September 29th.

For Mary Alice, making applesauce is the start of autumn. We're looking forward to making it a family tradition. There's something about the smell of those apples that means fall has arrived.

This year was no typical year for apple gathering. We got up Saturday morning ready to harvest bunches of apples and saw that it was snowing!

And we still had to pick a lot of the apples! Ben devised a tree shaker - a rope with a block of wood tied to one end - to shake the branches and drop the apples. We didn't want anyone climbing ladders in the snow.

Kate's first snow fall.

Tyler, Scott, Justin and Rachel cranking out the applesauce.

After playing outside in the snow, Katie was getting a little bit cold - look at that blue nose!

Actually, Kate has had a blue nose since she was about 4 weeks old, and it has steadily gotten more purplish-blue.

At first we thought that is was a bruise from bobbing her face on the floor during tummy time. Still, it didn't seem to be getting better. We started calling our cute little girl "blueberry."

We found out today during her two month checkup that she has a sort of birth mark our doctor called a cavernous hemangioma (hemangiomas are about a third of the way down the linked page). The idea is that Kathryn has an overabundance of veins that increase the blood flow to that area, resulting in discoloration.

Our doctor says that the purplish-blue color is pretty permanent, but that it may clear up by the time she's 3-4 years old. We'll be watching how our little blueberry develops!

Family Photos

2007-09-23T19:42:00.000-06:00

On September 23 we took a few family photos...My girls sure are CUTE!

Out for a Stroll

2007-09-15T14:04:00.000-06:00

This morning we went out for a family walk/run. Mary Alice has a goal of running a half marathon before the end of the year (she's done a marathon, but that was before the baby).

Here is MA getting the stroller out of the trunk.

Ben and Katya watch Mommy in action!

Please keep your hands and legs inside the car at all times...

Normally Katie loves her morning stroll, but today she was totally zonkered the whole time. Here we are leaving our parking lot and heading out on our adventure.

Kathryn's First Over-Nighter

2007-08-19T11:47:00.000-06:00

We took Kathryn on her first trip. We went to Logan to introduce Katie to her Great Grandma and Grandpa Wilson.

Visiting Riverton

2007-08-19T08:09:00.000-06:00

Grandpa Wilson holding Kathryn

Our family

2007-08-18T20:42:00.000-06:00

Well, friends and fiends, this is our first blog post ever. As such, we'd better introduce ourselves (since a ton of strangers will be checking us out daily). This is our family - Ben, Mary Alice, and Kathryn. This picture was taken about 20 minutes after Kate joined our new little fam.

Here are the vital stats

5' 11'', 155 lbs. What? Oh! you wanted baby info, okay. Kathryn Alice Wilson was born at 4:35 am on July 31, 2007. She weighed in at 6 lbs 7 ounces, and was 19 inches long.

Mary Alice was only in labor a short time. Our air conditioning was on the fritz that night, and MA awoke at 2am feeling uncomfortable and not able to go back to sleep. She just chalked it up to being hot and tired. It wasn't too much longer, however, that Mary A felt her first contractions.

By 2:40am MA knew it was for real and she woke me up.

"Honey, I think we need to go to the hospital." "What, now? I'm not ready!" "Well, ready or not, here she comes!"

So we got ready to head out to the hospital. I guess we didn't feel too terribly rushed because it still took us half an hour to get out the door. By 3:10 we were on the road... to Sandy! Yes, we had a doctor 40 minutes away at the Alta View hospital. We won't make that mistake again - we couldn't afford to!

We arrived at Alta View at 3:50 and got checked in. The nurses were just taking their time, but Mary Alice was really having some pretty intense contractions, she just wasn't showing it (my wife is stoic that way). They checked us in, got MA changed and on the bed, and started filling out the admissions info. During the interview, one of the nurses thought she'd best see how far along MA was.

"Sweetie, I'm just going to see how you're doing... Holy Cow! Judy, we've got a 9.5 plus, get her doctor on the phone! Honey, this room is going to get really busy really quick."

So while the nursing staff were all getting ready to deliver a baby, I took one leg and the nurse that checked Mary Alice took the other and MA started to push. Pretty soon there was a head of hair poking through and just a few minutes later our little Katie was born, with the doctor arriving just in time to catch the baby on the way out. I had no idea it could be so fast! The whole birth was over before I even knew what was happening!

It helps that my wife is a real obstetric athlete. You should have seen her in labor, nary a peep I tell you. But she did get a really big vein going in her forehead, and by the end of the pushing her legs were shaking. Because everything happened so fast, it was completely unmedicated - not even an IV, and no monitoring on mom or baby, besides a blood pressure cuff.

I like to claim responsibility for the easy labor. I was the labor coach, after all. It was me who spent all those evenings doing pelvic tilts, and all those mornings doing Kegels with my wife to get her in shape. Well, maybe I shouldn't claim too much responsibility. I can feel the scathing looks and words coming my way already. Lets just say that Mary Alice is incredible and I'm so happy she is my bride.

Welcome to the world, Katie A!