Indiana

Well, we got here safely! It was a long 17 hour trip with several stops to let Luke get out and to see friends in Indianapolis over supper. Luke did really well, only a few melt downs when he was really tired and having a hard time falling asleep. He only took a few minutes to warm up to Mimi and Pawpaw before he was crawling everywhere and trying to eat Mimi's feet! He still is making sure I am close by, but he is getting braver! Hopefully the trip back will be uneventful too. Daddy drove the whole way so he is already sleeping down stairs, but Luke and I have lots of energy from sitting and napping all day so I think we'll be up a while playing with Mimi.

Snow and early Christmas!

It snowed!!! Lots and lots! And more ice and snow are on their way (we are just praying that all this beautiful white stuff will be cleared off the roads quickly so that we can have safe travels to IN). This is the first snow to cover the grass completely so I bundled my baby up and took him outside. He had absolutely no desire to touch or taste the stuff, too cold for him, but it was very pretty.

I love the orange berries on this bush and how bright they are against all the white of snow.

We decided to let him open his Christmas present from us tonight, the last night we are all together before we go to Goshen. He was more interested in the camera and this big box full of baby clothes, but once I got the paper off he was pretty delighted. I'm trying to upload a series of videos so you can see his progress...

And here is the happy boy after his bath next to our pretty little Christmas tree.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Here are several pics of my baby, just because he is so cute!

Most of these are bath time shots because I want a bunch to put in frames of different sizes in our new bathroom downstairs.

Picture him dancing!

My sweet boy!

Afterwards I was pretty tired so it didn't take much to get me laughing, and Greg put on some music, and Luke started "dancing", and, well, you can see for yourself...

We leave for Indiana at the end of this week so I am hurriedly trying to finish my Christmas present projects. In the mean time we are very busy. Work itself is supper busy, several inductions or repeat c-sections are scheduled for each day and who knows how many unscheduled pts we may get! I work three of the next four days and we leave on the fifth day and pour Luke has been extra clingy whenever I work a lot (I already worked the last two days with only today off in between). I am worried the drive won't go very well. It has been almost six months since we last attempted this drive, but it wasn't much fun then and I don't think there is much I can do to improve on how that drive went, except to pray that the car doesn't break down this time. I am very excited about spending time with family and friends there, the time already seems too short and we haven't even gotten there.

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I did put up our little fake Christmas tree that we got last year, and today after several failed lighting attempts I finally have it all put together! It looks so pretty in the corner of our living room by the windows, but part of me really wishes it was real!

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Luke is doing lots of new things right now. I mentioned waving bye-bye in my last post and he has since figured out the give and get idea, if I give something to Mom when she asks she gives it back to me. He also really likes to throw things on the floor right now so if I don't have my hand ready he throws it away, and sometimes even if I do have my hand ready he decides he is done and throws it on the floor. He has also started to get better at walking, it is an obsession for him and he loves it when anyone walks him around a room holding his hands. He actually took two steps by himself on the 11th for the first time, but his balance isn't quite good enough yet and he is so excited about the walking that he doesn't want to wait to balance himself before taking off somewhere! Maybe his IN grandparents will get to see him do his first steady steps?

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Well, this will probably be the last post for a while with the holidays and work and our trip, so I hope everyone has a good Christmas and happy New Year and I will see you all on the other side, that is unless I get supper ambitious between now and then and manage to get another post up. (-:

Christmas party

My sweet baby!

We had a Christmas party with our Sunday School Class tonight pot luck style with a chocolate white elephant exchange and games. The little ones were especially cute so we got a few pics... Just a few... (-;


This is little Jeremiah, the youngest member of our class..


Luke is really interested in other little kids right now but he doesn't understand "be gentle" yet so we have to watch him pretty closely. He mostly just wants to hug and kiss them but his lovin' isn't always gentle. Unfortunately we missed most of the kisses, he kept wanting to pose for the camera. (-: He has recently started to smile for the camera while sticking his chin out, funny since I never tell him to smile, usually I'm trying to catch him doing something and would rather he didn't look at the camera!

This is little Hope, sharing her mommy, Jyl, with my little boy, so sweet. She is about three months older than Luke.

When Jyl and Hope got ready to leave she was waving bye-bye at everyone and we tried to get Luke to wave too and he did!!! First time ever. At first he just was lifting his hand up and down on the table but then he turned to look at me and I told him to wave and waved at him and then he lifted his arm in the air and waved!

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Greg took a few pics of the rest of the gang, but they didn't turn out very great, mostly washed out and not focused on anyone in particular, so I am guessing they would rather have more flattering pics than these posted. We are getting a new flash for our camera soon which should help with that quite a bit, I can hardly wait. Our Christmas pics should be great!

Pics of Luke's first haircut!!!

Pics of Luke's first haircut!!!

So I woke up this morning and wet down Luke's hair to see what a bad job I had done last night and it actually is fairly even, not such a bad job after all. It still has lots of curl in it even though it ended up a lot shorter than I originally intended. I took quite a long video this morning of him playing and he did his little head shake dance several times, the first I have gotten on video, Yeah!!! Hopefully I won't have problems loading it like I did yesterday.

view at your own risk...

So we found the battery charger for our camera's battery pack just in time for Butchering! Our extended family butchers every year around Thanksgiving over two days, sometimes just two pigs, once as many as five. This year we did three. Everyone who is getting meat has to help and this is the first time that Greg and I have decided to participate. Friday is the killing, skinning, gutting day. Since Greg is a little squeamish he didn't go that day, but he was our representative on Saturday when they cut up the meat and ground up, seasoned and packaged the sausage. I went on Friday and helped with the skinning mostly, something I actually didn't mind much at all. This is the first time in our family history that a woman has helped with the first day of butchering and there were a lot of other young cousins there for the first time that day too. I know it sounds awful but both days were actually pretty fun. I guess it's spending time with people you love that makes it fun, even though the task is a lot of work and can be pretty gross at times. Greg took a video clip the second day, when it looks more like meat than a pig. We also eat borscht together for lunch the second day according to the tradition and so there are a few pics of Luke and cousins Eli and Addie playing together in front of my aunt Donna's Christmas tree which she got up the day after Thanksgiving.



Eating borscht...

And cobbler!


Luke and Eli are best friends. (Eli is reading Luke's favorite book to him here.) At our Thanksgiving reunion a few days earlier we were all sitting in the living room in a circle and when Eli came to sit down Luke crawled right up to him and put his hands on Eli's shoulders. Then he touched noses with Eli and then he laid his head on Eli's chest for a moment. Then he touched noses again and gave Eli a big wet kiss! He sat there with Eli giving kisses and patting him and smiling at him for several minutes before becoming interested in something else, and even then he kept checking to make sure Eli was close by. I haven't seen him do that with anyone before, and it was SOOOOO sweet! All the aunts were hunting for their cameras.

More of the butchering pics...

Making cracklings...

Today (Sunday, November 30) we had the Bartel Thanksgiving get together and I think after three days of being with other people he was just a little worn out because he was pretty whiny, but he did manage to be pretty cute too. When we got home I decided to attempt the hair cut I mentioned before. We have a short video clip of it but no pics because Luke was so exhausted that he fell asleep while I was working on it. We started out with Luke in the tub but that was short lived and we ended up doing the rest downstairs while he sat/lay on my lap. It didn't turn out great, I'm probably going to have to get someone else to fix it tomorrow and will most likely cry about doing it in the first place. He was so wiggly that one side got too short really quickly. I do think he might still have curls as it grows out, tomorrow when he gets up I'll take another look at it and wet it down and see what it does.

.....Ok, so I'm having trouble uploading the videos I took, will try again later, for now enjoy the pics. Once I have Luke's hair cut done I'll post some more.

I wish my camera battery wasn't dead!!!

Ok, so today while I was getting supper ready Greg was watching Luke and listening to music and all of the sudden Greg yells, "Laura, you gotta see this!!!" Luke was "dancing"!!! It was the funniest thing I have ever seen. He had this huge grin on his face and was jerking his head from side to side, like head banging but sideways instead of up and down. (not just to one side and then center and back but from one side all the way to the other and back again) He kept making hilarious faces as he concentrated his hardest on moving with the music, winking and screwing up his mouth, and then he would stop for a second and grin at me before starting to dance again. I was almost in tears I was laughing so hard. I think this is the first time we have ever seen him really try to dance with music, and I'm so glad I didn't miss it! I just wish we had been able to catch it with our camera, but the battery is dead and I haven't been able to find the charger since Greg rearranged the dining room to work on the house. I HAVE to find that battery charger!!!

In other news, we have a working toilet in the new bathroom!!! It has a really short powerful flush but it's not terribly loud, which I'm glad about since it's right next to the dining room.

Construction!

These first two pics were taken the first of November, didn't feel much like November then but it is starting to now!

This baby loves his daddy!

For the last week my father-in-law, Dennis, was visiting us and working on our house with Greg. On his last visit in the spring he helped to frame the bathroom and small room we wanted to put in down stairs, made out of a side entry in our house that wasn't really functional before. Since then we had gotten most of the plumbing and dry wall up in the bathroom but none of the mudding done and no dry wall up in the small room. With his help we got the rest of the drywall up, did lots of mudding and sanding, started to paint, got the light-switches and outlets installed, and the linoleum on the floor!!!

The dust from sanding was awful, all of us got sore throats and Luke and I got runny noses and coughs as well. Only Greg got white though! It is going to take another week to get all that dust cleaned up!

We also had time to enjoy each other. It was great to have Grandpa there every morning to play with Luke while I got an extra couple of hours of sleep, especially when I worked late a couple of nights. We also spent an evening at my parents house to relax.

Aren't my boys sweet, both exhausted and all snuggled up together!

These next two are for Mimi, who gave Luke this toy. We thought since he likes to walk around things maybe he would be ready for this thing and use it to walk around but it's just a little to advanced for him. He really likes it but mommy has to be right there with him or it either tips or runs away from him. I don't think it will be too much longer before he can do it on his own though!

I think Luke really enjoyed his time with Grandpa, especially watching from the gate while Grandpa worked.

The cubby hole on the right of the shower is going to have three shelves in it and the toilet and sink will be on the right hand side too. I have a light blue shower curtain and soap dish and will get some towels to match. It's small but I think it will be beautiful.

This light is in the small room on the left of the bathroom. We haven't figured out what color to paint it yet, probably will get a reject paint. The to do list is a lot smaller now, we need to buy a mirror, lights and doorknob for the bathroom, finish the painting in both rooms including the shelves and door, install the sink and toilet which shouldn't take too long since I think the plumbing is already in place and waiting, install the door to the bathroom and decorate and move things in to both rooms! I can hardly wait to reclaim that space, but I think it will still be a couple of weeks at least, depending on how much time Greg is able to spend working on things.