The last few months have been pretty eventful for our little family. Our lives have completely changed this month with the birth of Liam Christopher Cotton, but that is another story for another post. (Soon I promise)

The holiday season is a busy time for everyone, this year was especailly eventful for us. For starters, when I went in for my 35 week appointment the O.B. told me that I was dilated to a 2 and 70% effaced. For those of you who don't know the prego logo, that means that I could actually have the baby any time. So the doctor told me to take it easy because we needed to make it a few more weeks for baby Liam's sake. I think I already referenced that in the post about Clara's surgery. But it was because of that reason that we decided to try to get out and take Clara to do a few Christmas activities before we could not anymore. This year was really the first time Clara understood anything about Christmas. We decided that going downtown to see the lights at temple square would be fun to do with her. It was so fun to see how much Clara loved it.

Recently Clara has had a facsination with trains, she loves them! So while we were driving downtown to the temple Chris had the brilliant idea to park a few blocks away and ride Trax up to the temple so that Clara could ride on the Choo choo train, and parking was a lot easier to find a few blocks away as well. So that is what we did and that turned out to be the best part. I think she thought she was in heaven!

Here is Clara waiting for the train. She was so excited she could hardly stand it!

I love her smile!!!!!

I have no idea why I am making this face or why Clara has her hand over her mouth, but it makes a funny picture!



So lately Clara has been so picky about what she wears. She has to pick out everything. Her favorite things to wear are anything pink or purple. And she never wants to take off her shirts, even for bed. So we have just had her wear her shirt over or under her jammies. She loves it! And I guess it keeps her extra warm...

She has also been loving to wear my shirts. She will get into our closet and pull down a shirt and bring it to me and ask if she can wear it. She is such a cute quirky little thing.

Here is Clara (in my shirt) helping put up and decorate the Christmas tree.

She thought it was funny to lean back into the tree while we were trying to take a picture of her...it was. And below is her new fake smile..also very funny.

Above is another fake smile, I just find it so funny. Below Clara is modeling her new outfit from 'Gaga' (grandma).

This is supposed to be a smile, it did not look anything like one!

This picture of Clara I just love!

Clara LOVES to dance! Every time music comes on she starts to dance. I caught a few pictures of her dancing in her tutu.
Tippy toes!

Isn't this picture just the perfect pose? SHe did this all by herself, I promise!

Several people have asked me to post some belly pictures so here they are. I think I was 36 or 37 weeks along.

And this was our 'scare'. When I was barely 36 weeks along we had to go to the hospital. Clara had her surgery just the week before, so she was still in quite a bit of pain and still on all of her medication. So as usual I set my alarm to wake up an give her her Lortab. And as usual she started crying and saying "owie". But in the dark I thought I saw something dark running out of her mouth. So I looked again and saw it was blood! It seemed like quite a bit of blood streaming out of her mouth. It totally freaked me out! So I picked her up and took her to the bathtub so we could wash it out. I had Chris run down and grab her some popcicles because I remembered them saying that cold slows the flow of blood to that area. All the while I was just panicking wondering if my little girl was okay or if I should call the doctor or even go in. So I had Chris look up on the internet how much was normal for bleeding. They did tell us that the scabs fall off at about a week and that is the greatest time for the risk of bleeding. So Chris looked it up and it said 2 Tblsp. of blood would be something to worry about. I didn't think that she had quite that much. So we got her dressed again and put her back to bed, but with us so I could watch her. All the while I had been having pretty good contractions, I know from the stress. So I tried to relax and drink some water. But after an hour and a half they still weren't going away. I was having them every two or three minutes. So we called the on call doctor, since it was only 1 or 2 am. He said to go to the hospital so they could check me, but that 36 weeks was the cut off for stopping labor, because I was thinking they could just give me meds to stop the labor. So we called my mom and she headed over right away. When we got there I was dilated to a 3 and 70% effaced and having contractions still every three minutes. So they hooked me up to all of the monitors and we waited for an hour. They checked me again and I had no change so they gave me some pain medication and sent me home. I think the pain medication helped me a lot to relax and I finally was able to fall asleep and when I woke up contractions were gone! Although I was so sick of being pregnant, I was very thankful I did not go into labor that early, I don't think me or the baby were ready yet.