Happy Birthday Seth!

A sweet picture of a sweet boy~taken a few months ago.

Seth blowing out the candles on his 2nd b-day.

Seth and Mom, a little over one year old.

Seth's first Christmas - 10 mos old. Hilarious!

One of my favorite newborn pictures of Seth.

A classic picture of Seth just after he was born.

Three years ago today Seth Gordon Bishop joined our family. What a special little guy he is! He has brought so much love and joy to each of us. He has had his own little personality and opinions since the day he was born. He has always been very inquisitive and full of fun (sometimes mischief). Most everyone agrees he looks like his Daddy, some even call him Mini-Mark. He's a cutie, that's for sure. It's hard to believe how quickly time passes, soon he won't be the baby of our family. It's been rewarding to watch him learn and grow and become quite independent. Just the other week he got Mark's car keys and went out to the garage and started the van. No joke! That gave us quite a scare and we are keeping the car keys away from him much earlier than we thought we'd have to. He's a real smarty, the other day I came downstairs to find that he had made 3 pitchers of a punch type drink mix. He ripped open each of the containers of powder and poured them into the pitchers and then filled each w/ water from the fridge. He watches what you do and then does the same. We'll have to only do good things, because Seth is always watching and discovering. One of my favorite things he does right now is when he says, "Oh goodness!". Your family loves you so much Sethy, we hope your special day is lots of fun!

A good excuse

Sorry for my absence from blogging. I have a good enough excuse though. I'm pregnant, we found out just after the new year and we're very happy about it. I'm just sick! It's actually better than my other four pregnancies (the throwing up aspect) though I feel plenty sick still. What has thrown us for a loop is I ended up in the hospital for 4 nights w/ blood clots in my leg. This is a problem that I had in my pregnancy w/ Cooper, but didn't have w/ Ella and Seth using a preventative blood thinner. Unfortunately, this time for some reason the medicine didn't prevent them from forming. It wasn't quite as painful as my experience w/ Cooper, since I was aware of the symptoms and caught them earlier, but it was still plenty scary. The threat is that the clots could break off and travel to your lungs, causing real problems. We were blessed to not have that happen and I think my leg is healing and I am on a much higher dose of the blood thinner for the remainder of the pregnancy to hopefully keep any more from forming. As to why I have this problem, they did over a thousand dollars in blood work and genetic testing to see if there was any other reason besides pregnancy (I've never had the problem not pregnant) and so far everything has come back negative. That makes me very grateful, since this is our last baby I hopefully won't deal w/ this again. Anyway, if this was boring to you, hopefully you just skimmed over it, but at least the details and the event are recorded for our families journaling purposes. I hope that my kids and grandchildren never have this problem.

The baby is due September 11th. What a day I know, but I usually have my babies 1-2 weeks early, so I guess it won't matter. I'm about 12 weeks along now. I look forward to feeling better soon. I've really been useless. Taking a shower makes me so nauseated, weird hah? I've picked up a bad habit of watching much more t.v. and playing a game called virus buster on John's Nintendo DS. I hold the family record for a high score of 868. It helps to take my mind off of feeling sick. I'm so excited and look forward to American Idol each week, I haven't missed an episode yet, it's sad I know. Mark has taken such good care of us and our ward was nice enough to bring dinners for a while. We're slowly getting back into the swing of things and the house will recover one day I'm hoping. For now just the bare essentials (like blogging, right?) are getting done. Ella wants a girl baby and since it's our last we think that it would be great for her to have a sister also. We know how sweet baby boys are so that would be nice too, we are just praying for healthy!

The kids are doing well in school and Mark is in training at work for a new department, so he's happy about that. Ella is learning to read and it's fun to see her progress. The boys are still in piano and John's Oliver rehearsals have started. Next week he has practice M-F, it's a crazy schedule since the play isn't until April. He seems to enjoy it though. Thankfully, Cooper isn't in a sport right now. Seth is really talking these days, in complete sentences even! He's a cutie and has been my little buddy while I've been sick. Sorry, no pictures of anything to post.

Anyway, Sethy's b-day is next week, so we'll have to post some pictures and blog again then, but for now just an update.