Alex's Blessing Day (was in September!)

We finally had Alex's blessing on September 14th (and I'm finally posting it over a month later). He had almost grown out of his special white satin suit! His blessing was beautiful and we had a small brunch with family in our backyard (with our new grass!) afterward and the weather was sunny and perfect.

If you look closely you will see that his pants don't match his shirt. He caught a virus the day before that gave him diarrhea and he frequently overloaded the holding capacity of his diapers. We were sweating it all morning hoping he wouldn't leak on the fancy clothes. Well, we did make it through his blessing and most of sacrament meeting before we finally had a blow out. Grandma Joy's quick-rinsing in the restroom at church saved the pants from total loss. Can't say the same for a couple of his onesies later during the week which we actually cut off of him rather than trying to get the messy shirt over his head. It was a two person operation with Shaun operating the scissors like it was the Jaws-of-Life while I held his hands out of it. And at 3 AM, of course! Ah, babies...so wonderful and yet kind of gross.

Back when I started this post at the beginning of October, I was debating if I should put the outfit on him again to get pictures. I failed to get any special pictures of my other children in their blessing outfits. We tried with Ben, but his Blessing Day also happened to be his first day of colic. We held him and rocked him while he cried all morning trying to figure out what was wrong instead of getting the photo op. I do have a lovely, blurry photo of him screaming, and one of his face nestled against Shaun when he finally fell asleep hours later. I forget what the no-photo issue was with Erik...we have a few photos from his special day, but I know I always planned to put him back in his outfit for some portrait-type pictures before he grew out of it, but alas! Life happened and pictures didn't.

I was trying to decided whether I should try extra hard to get the fancy outfit pictures for Alex, or if that wouldn't be fair for the other boys who don't have nice fancy outfit pictures. Well, it was decided for me in a way because Alex got very unhappy when he developed an earache and wasn't too happy on the antibiotics either. (A side note here: Alex had just gotten over two weeks worth of diarrhea...10 poopy diapers a day for 14 days straight! Finally he got it all out of his system and then earache comes accompanied by 2 days of near incessant crying (poor kid!) and a nursing strike. Our pediatrician gave us Amoxicillan and what did it say on the bottle? "May cause diarrhea!" and it did, again!) Anyway...no one was sleeping well, and getting pictures in his white suit was the farthest thing from my mind. I'm pretty sure he's grown out of it now, so I guess I have no fancy pictures of any of my kids in their blessing outfits after all. At least I've been equally negligent! No favorites here!

And, I'm happy to report there's finally no more diarrhea! HOORAY!