Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Happy Faces



Jenny and Aedyn

Aedyn's 4-month picture (6/23)

Tomorrow Aedyn and I (Heidi) are flying to Atlanta for my cousin's wedding. He just woke from a 3 hour nap in his basinet (no holding, sleep/eating!). I hope we can keep some sort of sleep schedule during all the family fun. Grandmas, aunts, uncles, second cousins, 2 1/2 fun days.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

oops on the photo

I did take a very nice picture of Jenny and Aedyn on our front porch. But I couldn't find the cable to download from the camera. Then Eric found the cable and our camera's batteries were dead. So on an outing to Target I saw 4 packs of eveready batteries for 1 dollar and bought 3 packs. None of them work. I'll get more batteries soon.

Aedyn hates the car seat. He hates it a bit less than he used to, probably because we've started a 6 pm bedtime. Our friends E&P said that the book "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child," by Dr. Weissbluth was excellent in helping baby Glory get her sleep. I read the 3 most talked about sleep books and found this book included parts of the other philosophies and methods but had a lot more documented research on baby sleep. The methods are working! Aedyn sleeps about 6 hours than wakes to nurse and diaper change, sleeps another 4 or so hours, wakes again, and then sleeps till about 7:30. Plus 2 naps. He is soooo fun when he's well rested and his little brain is getting development time.

Back to the car seat. Because trips in the car can be such a trial, we try to take him as rarely as possible. So I may not get more batteries for a while.

See, my narrative did come together in the end!

Monday, June 25, 2007

a good one

Sometimes the Collect of the day gets it 'right on.' Sometimes not. Today is one of the good days:

Almighty God,
you have broken the tyranny of sin
and have sent the Spirit of your Son into our hearts
whereby we call you Father:
give us grace to dedicate our freedom to your service,
that we and all creation may be brought
to the glorious liberty of the children of God;

through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.


emphasis mine.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Happy Boy


Aedyn is usually a happy person but his little teeth are trying to pop out and this isn't fun. Drooly & feverish, Aedyn wants to eat, chew on our fingers, and never leave our arms. Here's a photo of contentment just before a bath. Right now he's sleeping on my lap and phantom-sucking. I still stare at him a lot. I'm so in love!

Jenny comes today! We're really glad to have her with us for a few days. I'll post a welcome picture tomorrow.

Eric's upstairs working on the guest room. It has been the catch-all room as we've unpacked and the stuff is rather deep in there. He spent 45 min. prying open one of the windows (the other is staying shut). The whole house needs new windows, most don't have storms and many don't have screens. The adventures of home ownership.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Poison Ivy is called that for a reason

Well, that previous picture of Aedyn is actually pretty old. I think about 3 weeks old. It was before we went back to IL for graduation. Hopefully Heidi will post some new pics of him soon (she's better at the stories that go with them). My goal is to try to catch you up on what has happened since we first moved here. Over the next couple of days. That first Aedyn pic was before he even knew how to use his abdominal muscles to assist me in leaning him forward. He is so smart!

On the note of catching you all up, some of you who saw me when we returned noticed that my skin was not all the nice pallor it usually is. No, that wasn't d/t the fact that I had been working like a horse outside around our house for the previous two weeks (although I had been). It goes like this: When I was growing up, there was plenty of poison ivy around us. Lots down by the lake and I'm sure there was some in the ravine across the street from our home. But I never reacted to it. None of the four of us children who lived there did. We probably rolled in it, but it caused us no harm. So I grew up blissfully naïve about its dangers and only dimly aware of the adage: "leaves of three, let it be." A botanist by nature, though, I was technically cognizant of what it looked like and sometimes identified it as the low-growing ground cover at my feet--just never worried about it. Incidentally, it's about 1 in 4 of the population who at a given time is also not reactive to it.

So, working in the yard soon after we arrived I came in one night with my left arm having this lines of terribly itchy blisters. Could not figure it out. Had a brown recluse spider bite a couple of weeks before and these looked somewhat like that, and we did have lots of spiders in our house . . .

Two days later I set the neighbors tree on fire. I'm not a clutz, but the neighbors tree looks well and alive at first glance, but on closer inspection proves to have some well dead and rotten areas. One of the ashes from our controlled fire must have lit some REALLY dry wood (it's been kinda a drought for this area recently). Next thing I know the neighbor from across the street comes over and asks if I knew the tree was on fire? (I guess that's a less active way of *telling* be the tree is on fire). So we had to climb into the tree with hoses to put it out (which is long and arduous when the wood is rotten on the inside--the fire can travel inside to other parts of the tree!).

"Careful, that tree is full of poison ivy."

"Oh that's all right, I'm not allergic."

Up in the tree one can see that MANY of the leaves are not maple at all--I was swimming in poison ivy wearing shorts and shirt sleeves.

This was the result:



The pics don't capture the oozing and blistering. And I didn't realize how bad it was. It took another neighbor telling me they see it all the time and mine looked the worse case ever, 'here, let me get a course of steroids from a friend who has a stash for just this purpose.' It took TWO course of steroids to get rid of it.



The morals: (1) your immune system changes over time, so you may react to something in the future you don't react to now, or haven't in the past. (2) Poison ivy in the south is not like it is in the midwest—in the south it actually acts like an ivy and climbs over trees of incredible height.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Beginning Again


OK. We have demonstrated adequately enough in the last month or so that we are really not that good at keeping in contact. In fact, I expect that to get worse when I begin my job in LESS THAN TWO WEEKS. This blog is for all of you who would really like to know what is going on in our lives, but who don't hear the phone ringing with our name in the caller ID.

In addition, there were many of you to whom we did not give a proper 'good-bye.' For my friend J.R., that's the way he wanted it. For many of you, you were merely casualties of our own haste. Sorry.

We really do love you, and we really do think about and pray for you and really wish we could be spending some time with you. We're just not good at most traditional ways of letting you know that. So, hopefully we will be more successful with blogging. We hope you find it useful. I have found that in the absence of a couple of my better friends, I am constantly checking their blogs or checking my email to see if they've written (we get, and give, very few phone calls). One of those close ones (emotionally, not geographically) will probably be the first to read, and comment, here. In spite of being busy all day long with crazy house and yard activities, I check to see if H. has updated her blog three times a day, at least. It gives me a sense that I am still in her life. (I knew from my first experience with H. that I wanted to be her friend: we were eating ice cream--at an establishment that I now boycott due to the bigotry of the owner--when she disagreed with me about the agenda of the Sadducees. Now, I couldn't really get into it there since it would require her reading a very big book to understand my perspective, but the point is that I thought "Ah, here is a thinking Christian, a rare breed indeed, one with whom I feel at home and can have enjoyable and meaningful conversations." I hope those conversations continue.)

Plus, you'll have frequent access to pics of the cutest kid in the world!