Baby Dedication Pictures

This is a picture of all of us before the service. As a side note and prayer request, my Mom wasn't here because she flew to see her Dad who is in the hospital. He is very ill and is likely to die soon, so please pray for the whole family as we go through this time of grieving and saying goodbye.

This is our Pastor George praying for the babies.

This is my Dad (Paul) praying for the babies.

This is David's Dad (Ken) praying for the babies.

Dedication Day!

Here are some cute pictures of the babies on the day that they will be dedicated at church. I took them after the middle of the night feeding, so they are a little droopy looking, but cute nonetheless! I think in the first one they look more alike than I have ever seen them! And by the way, for those that need this Caleb is on the left and Daniel on the right. In the 2nd photo, Caleb is yawning and Daniel has the typical David eyebrow raise going on. Too cute!

Carpenters East Visit Carpenters West

We have had the pleasure of having David's parents, sister and niece come visit us for a few days this past week. They flew in on Thursday and will be flying out on Tuesday. It has been since April of 2006 since we had last seen them in person (see previous posts for that event). Both Josiah and Anna Grace have grown considerably since then! Josiah was just crawling when we went there last time and Anna Grace was walking and would pretty much tackle Josiah and he couldn't do anything about it. Now he holds his own pretty well, but it is interesting to see the dynamic between the two for sure! Josiah has taken to pretty much doing what Anna Grace says, but from time to time he gets really frustrated and starts crying about something she did that he didn't like. It was funny because off and on he will call her, "A grape," or "mr. grape" and will say, "Where is mr. grape?" or somthing like that. He does know how to say Anna Grace though and now that she has been here longer, he has been saying it correctly more often. By the way, this picture is of Anna Grace & Daniel. She is crazy about the babies and wants to hold them all the time!

Here are some of the memories thus far of this week with the family. I am sure there will be a post with more at some point as well, but this is a start.

Grandpa Carpenter has had a lot of chances to read to Josiah & Anna Grace and Josiah for one has taken advantage. He loves his "I Spy" book, which incidentally he ripped many of the pages of way back when and we had to purchase a new one for the library (whoops!). So Josiah has been holding it up (which now has been fixed with tape)saying, "Read I Spy!!" Grandma Carpenter has ordered some more "I Spy" books for him, which should arrive soon.

The Carpenters also brought with them a lot of boy's clothes and shoes that they were given from a friend of Mary's. This shot is when Anna Grace and Josiah dumped all the shoes onto the floor and decided to climb in the box. At one point, AG said, "Let's all stand up now." and Josiah did what she asked. They were having fun playing together. After this, AG got out and went over to the toys and retrieved a toy bee and said, "Let's play hive bee" and asked Josiah which bee he wanted to play with.

My Dad came over as usual on Friday and had a nice visit with the Carpenters East as well. He and Ken had fun swapping funny jokes and Ken is showing my Dad a puzzle game online that he likes to play. It was nice that the pastors got a chance to converse a little more. The last time they met was at our wedding over 4 years ago and they really didn't get a lot of opportunities to talk much.

David's Mom has had lots of times to hold the babies and has been a huge help with our fussbucket (Caleb). She has been really good at settling him down and has had her fair share of feeding him as well. Our little boys love their Grandma Carpenter!

The Carpenters brought Josiah this Thomas the Train painting set for the bathtub and so Anna Grace and Josiah wanted to try it out. We thought this would be a longer event for them playing in the tub, but it ended shortly after Josiah got bubbles in his eyes from Anna Grace who tried to help "clean" him. Josiah hates water on his head and/or bubbles in his face. So this picture is rather characteristic of their "fun" in the bathtub.

Prayer Alert

Here is a picture of our little Caleb who appears to be getting sick again. He has had this suspicious cough that has cropped up recently and we are hoping that he will be able to make it through whatever illness this may or may not develop into. So far, he does not have a temperature or any sign of breathing distress that we can tell. However, he does have a reduced appetite and he has been spitting up a lot of his food in the last few feeds. If he worsens with his eating, I plan to take him into the doctor tomorrow, but hopefully like his first cold he will pull through OK on his own with the Lord's healing as his doctor. Daniel shows no signs of illness at this point, so hopefully he won't get it too. Please pray that Caleb will get through this without any need to be hospitalized and also that we as parents will be able to tell if needs more help than we can give.

More Fun Pictures

The brothers blue with their typical expressions: Daniel smiling and Caleb frowning. Perhaps we can put their images on masks and display them as artwork? Hee hee hee!

This is Josiah with his babysitter Sharel. You can see the lovely tree in the background, which has bloomed in our front yard.

Here are the boys together in their crib intently watching the mobile. And our little Caleb boy actually has a half smile this time!

Spring Has Sprung!

David planted some daffodils here a while back and now we are seeing the fruits of his labors. As you can also see, Josiah still has a little bit of a runny nose left over from the recent cold he had. He is fine though despite that. Anyway, the daffodils are a great addition to the front of our house and look great around the blue wishing well.

Colorful Chicks

Today we went over to my friend Laurie's house and let Josiah play with the little chicks that they got recently. As you can see they are colored various different colors. They do this by injecting the eggs with dye and they are then born this way. They actually had 26 chicks sent to them in the mail! I guess they keep warm and upright by cramming them all in this box together. Of course the box has little air holes in it for them as well.


Josiah thought they were "so cute" and had a blast holding them and looking at them. Before we left to see them, I told him about the chicks and he said, "They are so cute....like brothers!"

Fun New Pictures

I had my babysitter Sharel take some pictures of the babies today since they were both wide awake at the same time. I showed this one to David and he laughed out loud. He said that Daniel has his mischievious eyes and I agree with him. David's parents wished upon him the parental curse, "I hope you have a child JUST like you someday!" David was a bit of a troublemaker as a young lad. We shall see which of our boys will test Daddy's patience the most!

I call this the Caleb surprise picture. It is hard to catch him smiling on film and this is about as close as it gets. He has been smiling more for us lately, but at the oddest moments. I came into the room late last night (or shall I say morning) around 3:30am to put Daniel down (Caleb was already fed and in bed) and when I looked over at Caleb he was smiling a lot at me.

Here is a cute picture of the boys looking at each other. Both of them were being rather fussy until I suggested that they lay on the blankie together, and right away they calmed down. It is apparent that they are more aware of each other now and are perhaps forming an attachment to one another.

Here is Daniel our smiley boy. He gives lots and lots of smiles. David was playing with him today and even got a small little squeal of delight. He was tickling his tummy and Daniel would open is mouth really wide in a smile like this and give a little squeal.

Caleb was working super hard today to get his head up. As you can see he was successful! This is such a funny picture of our serious little concerned one. Such a sweet little baby though! He is just a little more needy for the time being.

Here is a new use for your formula scoops all you moms out there who use formula. Josiah took the scoop from one of the used formula containers and decided it would be a spoon to eat his vegetable soup with. He has been very inventive these days in other ways also. He builds what he calls "ramp machines" with his Megablocks. There are a number of ramps for cars you can build with the blocks and he stacks them on top of one another and dubs it his ramp machine.

I included this last picture as it was my favorite of the boys together. Daniel has his typical happy expression and Caleb has his pursed lips concerned expression. Daniel does look MUCH bigger in this shot, but that was partly the angle at which it was taken. However, Daniel is still the bigger of the two. By the way, they have been sleeping around 7-8 hours each night! That has been helpful! Now if only I can get to bed when they do, then perhaps I will catch up on my sleep. Speaking of which, I should be in bed now!

Funny Josiah-isms & Other Fun Stuff

Hello to all of you out there! Sorry I haven't been as diligent with the blog entries as in weeks past. The twins are having more and more wake times now that they are older, (3 months old now) and so I am finding that my times to care for the house and Josiah are getting crunched a bit to play with the babes as well.

I have not been totally neglect in my blogging duties though as I have been taking pictures and collecting funny Josiah-isms to share. Now I finally have a moment to type them all into an entry. As you can see in the picture above, Josiah has taken on a new responsibility to feed his baby doll. My mom bought him this doll for use when we teach him how to potty train (which we haven't done just yet). You can put water in the little bottle and it will "pee" it out in this little potty chair that it comes with also. One of the steps in this book my mom gave me entitled "Toilet Training in Less Than a Day," is to teach a doll to go potty first. As a side note, she says she used this book to train my brother and I at the age of 3 and both of us learned easily and never had any accidents following the training. From time to time while I am feeding one of the twins I will say, "Josiah, why don't you feed YOUR baby?" (in order to get him occupied in doing something other than aggravating his brothers). He usually responds with "I can't...I'm busy right now," (he got that lovely phrase from me...hee hee) or once he said, "I can't....baby is sleeping right now." Once in a while though he decides that his baby needs some food and this was one of those moments!

David has been trying to take Josiah on more outings lately and one of these times they went to the school nearby and played on the playground. Josiah met a little friend there who wanted to pose for the camera with him as you can see. Apparently, this little girl was singing the alphabet and David asked Josiah to sing it too and he sang, "A, B, C, D...I don't know that word," and that was it. Not sure why he stops at D in that manner, but it is funny because he does that everytime he tries to sing the A, B, C's on his own.

As we have been working with Josiah these days, I have sometimes broken out the old , "I said NO!" phrase in regards to one behavior or another. The other day he came back at me with "I said YES!" and though I shouldn't have, I laughed out loud at that one and then tried to still enforce the point at hand.

The other day I gave Josiah a shamrock cookie and told him that it was a shamrock as I gave it to him. He looked at it and said, "Broccoli?"

David decided to mop the kitchen floor while I was gone the other day (kudos for the hubby) and asked Josiah if he wanted to help mop the floor. He said, "I don't want to go to MOPS!" MOPS is the group I attend which stands for Mother's of Preschoolers. Once David explained what a mop was, then he was into it. Of course, it took them a lot longer to clean the floor, but the result was the same! When I came home, Josiah said, "Wook...shiny!" (He still pronounces his L's as W's incidentally.)

Sometimes when the babies are crying or Josiah wants something, I might say, "Be patient, Mommy will be right there." Josiah has learned this phrase too and once when a baby was crying he said, "I'll get him...right there and then "Be patient, be patient, be patient," as he patted the babies' head.

Josiah fell down the other day (which is not an uncommon occurrence around here) and stood up and said, "I hurt my body." To me it just sounded funny!


Here is a nice shot of my Dad feeding Caleb the other day.

Here is the mighty Daniel in the new swing that Grandma got for the babies.

OK and this one is for all our English teacher/grammatically correct friends & family out there (that means you Mom, Mara, Kaytie, Youssef, Kathryn, & Jee). Do you all find it ironic that they are inviting people to a literacy festival, but spell festival like "fetsival"? David caught this one on film on his outing with Josiah.

Saying Goodbye to Jon

David's brother Jon made the decision to move back to South Carolina, and he came over this morning so that David could take him to the airport. He got to spend a little quality time with the boys before he left, since for once they were both awake and alert at the same time. He volunteered to pose for this shot down on the floor with the babes, and I think it is so cute that they are both smiling at him.

We also got some video of the little ones during this time and I will post some of the footage when we fill up the disk and finalize it on the camera.

And for those of you who can't tell yet, Daniel is in the froggie suit in the back and Caleb is Mr. Eyeballs here in the front of the picture. This is the look he gives whenever he is very intently checking things out. He is our super curious boy. Daniel is curious too, but he is more of a sleeper and eater than he is curious. Lately, we have been calling him "Mighty Daniel AKA Champion Eater." Caleb is still our "Clockwork Gnome" as he always seems to notify us right on schedule that he is hungry! Incidentally, he is over his illness now and is doing great! I noticed that right after I posted the entry that in the hours afterward he seemed to be improving. Thanks to the Lord ultimately for his speedy recovery and for all of you who prayed for him!