Ross's Birthday & Leah at 4 Months

I'm going to combine two posts here since I haven't posted in a while.

We've reached a couple milestones here in the Leslie family. Yesterday was Ross's birthday! So we've done a lot of celebrating lately. On Saturday we took some Dutch oven cobbler over to his aunt and uncle's house to share with a bunch of the Miller family before the BYU game. It didn't quite have enough time to bake before we needed to eat it, but it was still pretty good.

On Sunday we went to my parents' house for Ross's birthday dinner and celebration. Here's Ross with some of his birthday cake.
The kids love it when it is someone's birthday because they love the birthday candles. If you're really quick you might even get to blow out some of your own candles before they beat you to it. Ross has three little boys helping him here. We often end up relighting candles so that they can blow out more candles. They also like to help take the candles off the cake and lick off the frosting! As you can see, there's not a shortage of little helpers when it comes to birthday cakes!

Ross had to work on his birthday, but the secretaries at his elementary school took good care of him. They came in and sang happy birthday and brought him a big fancy cupcake for a treat! He works with some great people.

For dinner on his birthday, Ross wanted to go to Tucanos. For those who might not know, this is a Brazilian grill restaurant where they bring all kinds of great meat and grilled foods to your table for you to try. At a place like this it is hard to eat the meat "sparingly." It is so yummy, you just want to have more and more! Ross's mom and Kyle and Amy happily joined us for the joyous occasion.Here's Ross getting ready to open his cards and gifts. There wasn't quite room to spread them out on the floor around him like he did when he was growing up.

Here he is with one of his great gifts.

We all loved this card from Kyle and Amy.

Here's the birthday Daddy and his little Princess! We all love you so much Ross and hope you had a great birthday this year!!!

Our other recent milestone is that on Saturday Leah reached 4 months old. Can you believe it?It also happened to be a BYU game day that day. So here she is with some of her game day gear.She went to the doctor for her 4 month check up on Monday. The doctor said she was doing great and acting like a normal 4 month old baby. She is now 23 3/4 inches tall, weighs 12.3 pounds and is measuring in the 10-25 percentile. It is no surprise to us that she is a petite baby.

She isn't rolling on her own yet, but she can if I help her. She loves to put her fingers in her mouth as evidenced by the picture below. She often has some fingers or her whole fist in her mouth and gets them all slobbery. She is really close to a real laugh. I can get her to smile a lot and sometimes even the start of a giggle but not quite a full on laugh yet. She is getting better at grabbing at things but is still working on getting her hands to do what she wants them too.

The hardest challenge right now is that she has grown quite attached to me, which I find very flattering, but not very practical. She will start crying uncontrollably when others have her (even Ross sometimes). It is very frustrating as parents and we are working with her to help her get through this phase.

A few weeks ago, I took her into the hot tub for the first time. This was the reaction that I was expecting to get...

She still LOVES LOVES LOVES bath time. So I thought she'd really enjoy the hot tub too. Instead her reaction was more like this...I think she still enjoyed being in the hot tub. She didn't ever get upset at all. She was just her normal chilled self - just hangin' out taking in the experience. Here are a few more random shots of our little girl. What a cutie!Here's a shot from after church on Sunday. I love dressing her up all cute for church. She's not sleeping through church as much and I'm sure is more of a distraction to those around us as she looks around and watches and inteacts with them. We get lots of comments on how cute she is.

She likes to sit up more. She can't do it on her own yet, but she likes to see the world from a vertical view. She even likes to stand up on her legs when I help her. She thinks she is so big.

She still is no match for the car and will fall asleep almost anytime we take her anywhere.

I'm trying to post a video again. Hopefully it works. It is just a short video of our precious little girl being happy and smiling for us. Enjoy!