Great Grandparent Fun

Before we dropped Grandma and Grandpa off at the airport to go home after their stay with us, we went over to see Great Grandma and Great Grandpa for a visit. It was fun to chat with them and see their reactions to little baby. Josiah was fascinated with Great G-pa's whistling and baby J flashed him a big smile which we got on camera here.

For those of you that have it, there are more pictures from this visit in the snapfish album called "Family Photos." If you do not have this album, let me know and I will send you a link.

Grandma & Grandpa Come for a Visit

Grandma and Grandpa came to visit for a few days after Christmas as "their gift to themselves," which was a lot of fun for baby Josiah as well as for Heather & David.

Grandma helped Heather get the house a little more organized by getting various "organizational tools" for the living room and baby's room to clean up the clutter a bit. This included getting a 4 drawer filing cabinet for all my music, (yeah for that!) a couple of bookshelves and a side table to replace the dangerous bookshelf (sharp edges) that we had before, and for the babies room some Sterilite drawers for the closet to organize my craft stuff and one for the baby's clothes and another little shelf with tubs on it to put many of Josiah's toys and books.

It was a huge relief to get all this stuff organized and a BIG THANK YOU goes out to Grandma and Grandpa for this gift!

While Grandma and Heather were organizing, Grandpa had a lot of quality time with baby Josiah. He got to feed him squash and let him grab the spoon and "feed himself" as well as grab the bowl to lick out the remainder of the squash. This of course made for a very "squashy" Josiah to which Grandpa had a little cleaning up to do. It was very cute though. Grandma got her time in with baby J too though when she would read to him and play with him. Now he is spoiled and wants us to give him attention every second!

Christmas Day Fun

Josiah says, "Why is this bow on my head?" We were trying to get a good picture of him smiling with this bow on his head under the Christmas tree as our BEST Christmas present this year, but Mr. Josiah was not in the mood to smile. I looked back at this picture and just laughed and laughed at how mortified he looked with this bow on his head!

Since he had plenty of toys and things already, instead of more gifts, baby's favorite toys today were the wrapping paper and the bows. Mommy got him some special baby books with Bible stories as well though.

Our first Christmas with baby J was a special one and we wouldn't trade it for anything. We started out by reading Luke 2, then we opened gifts and did the stockings last. One of David's gifts to me was a jigsaw puzzle and since he and I like doing them together, the present is also the time spent with him doing the puzzle. This was a very popular gift! We plan to go to church later today and then to lunch afterward at some place that is open. Tomorrow Grandma and Grandpa Walker are coming to spend some time with us. We had a Marti Walker Christmas this year....all the presents opened and cleaned up before 6am! We run on baby time here!

Balloon Bonanza

Today is not Josiah's birthday as many of you might know since he was just born last June. However, "the girl next door" just turned one year old and had a balloon to spare that Josiah was allowed to borrow since he is a balloon lover. I got lots of fun shots of him with the balloon that I posted on snapfish if you would like to see more pictures. These were the best though. He gets to a point with the balloon where it seems he is afraid of it, but at the same time loves to play with it. It is really funny. However, if there is a balloon in the room he will find it and strain to reach it until you bring it over to him.

Teething & Sitting Up

Today baby J was practicing sitting up and so I had him propped up with pillows so he could be supported and was giving him toys to play with. I left momentarily to go to the bathroom and when I came back I found him in this state. It was too funny not to take a picture! He is getting pretty good though at sitting up, but his balance is still lacking a bit as you can plainly see! He is reaching for things more now and gets fixated on things that he WANTS and reaches for them. He will throw little fits if you don't give him what he wants too...and the fun begins! Ha ha!


He has also been teething, which really hasn't made things too bad as he has been handling it rather well. His earlier refusal to take anything into his mouth other than mommy's acoutrements has been upgraded to include cold stuff such as this frozen teething toy to help numb his hurting little gums. Anyway...must go, baby emergency!

Happy Baby!

Grandma & Grandpa Carpenter just sent Josiah a bunch of clothes and this outfit is one of the many they sent. The onesie says "Monkey Around" on it and it is very cute! I added the Santa hat to go with it and baby had some nice holiday attire!

Thank you Grandma & Grandpa for my new clothes!

Christmas 2005

This year we went and got our Christmas tree out in Greenbluff, a local tree farm. Baby J and I stayed in the car, while Daddy, our hero, went and chopped down the tree for us! It was SUCH a cold day, we thought it best to keep Josiah inside the car where it was warm. We went to get the tree with our friends Joyanne, David and their son Sean. Afterward, we spent some time with them at their house and enjoyed a lovely bean soup dinner with cornbread and salad...yum yum!

The fun part of the tree story began when we got home however! When we got
the tree inside we realized that the trunk was too short to reach the bottom of our tree stand. First, I went around to our neighbors to see if anyone had a saw and rounded up an army knife and some pruning sheers. Neither worked because the tree sap was too thick. Sooo...David went to Walmart and got a hand saw and then we laid the tree on a sheet and towels in our apartment and he sawed some of the lower branches off to make it fit. Once he got it up it was a little crooked and we called it our "Charlie Brown Christmas Tree" and were ready to scrap it and start over, but as you can see I was able to disguise the tree to appear presentable. I forgot to mention that ended up having to pick up a bunch of the pine needles off our carpet by hand because the tree sap made it so that the vacuum wouldn't pick them up.

Needless to say...this is probably the last year we will get a real tree...we plan to check out the artificial tree sales after Christmas this year.

Heather Turns 30!!

Today we celebrated my birthday which was actually on December 5th. David took the day off from work and we had a nice day together. We went to lunch at this place called "The White House Grill" in Post Falls, ID. We had heard about it from our friends Joyanne and David from church. It is a Mediterranean style cuisine (LOTS of garlic) and it was SO good! We could smell the garlic in the car as we pulled into the parking lot there. I had this Sea Bass dish with risotto rice and Baclava for dessert. We also had this French Bread with balsamic vinegar,
olive oil, and garlic for dipping sauce as an appetizer. David had the
"Istanbul" which was a chicken breast with peppers and garlic and a sauce
served with rice and rice pudding for dessert.

Then later in the evening, we had one of my students come over to watch Josiah and went to see "The Chronicles of Narnia," which by the way is a GREAT movie! It worked out really well too because baby slept the whole time we were gone. We tried to work it out that way as he gets really grumpy if there isn't a Mommy there to wake him up to eat!

Visiting the Neighbors

We have been getting to know our newest neighbors and yesterday Heather (yes she is a Heather too) invited Josiah and I over to visit with herself and her daughter Brooklynn. It just so happened it was also my 30th birthday that day, but she didn't know that. So it was a nice treat for me to visit with a friend on my birthday!

Brooklynn is almost a year old, so she was running circles around Josiah, but he wasn't letting her have ALL the toys! I went over there around his naptime and Heather let me put him in Brooklynn's crib. He had this petrified look on his face as I lowered him down into a crib with PINK sheets and wall hangings. Not the most popular color for macho boys you know! Anyway, he did sleep about an hour, so that was nice...but he wasn't happy about it! Ha ha ha!

It is fun to have a friend nearby to chat with about baby things once in a while. Heather is a stay at home mom too, so we can have these impromtu visits which are fun. It is just a real bonus too that they are also a Christian family...we have a lot in common!

SNOW, SNOW, SNOW!!!

So winter has officially begun! And we started it off with getting a new battery and alternator for our new (to us) Chevy Trailblazer. We were getting ready to go to our small group last Monday night and it woudn't start. We had it checked out and the above diagnosis fixed the problem. We are thankful to God that it didn't die on the freeway during this lovely snow storm that followed in the week!

David let me park our other vehicle (the white Toyota Camry you see pictured) under our carport so that in case of an emergency with the baby that I could easily go somewhere without having to scrap a bunch of snow off the car and
such. Isn't he a wonderful husband?

I got baby dressed up in his little bunting that our friend Jylle gave us so that I could take him outside in the snow for a bit. We went and visited some of our neighbors. Some of the snowflakes landed on his long eyelashes. It was really fun to see his reaction.

And by the way this photo of Josiah is a prime example of what he likes to do with his tongue now. It is his NEW THING to stick his tongue out a lot!