It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all! I'm starting to really get in the Christmas spirit. Maybe it's all the music Hunt's been playing on the computer. Maybe it's both my kids decked out in their Christmas clothes. Or, maybe it's all the snow outside, which is a great excuse for drinking hot chocolate. Yesterday, we got out Archie's Nativity set. Getting my A Charlie Brown Christmas materials together in Power Point form for an English Corner tonight helped, too.

As usual, Grace has more pictures than anyone else! She's just too cute decked out in Christmas stuff.

Merry Christmas to you! Remember to celebrate the Reason for the Season!

Pre-Christmas Presents

Me-maw and Papa sent us a box of Christmas presents today! This one was labeled "to be opened before Christmas." Archie had fun. (Inside were some Christmas stockings for him and Grace.)

Archie still loves shoes. He's a ways off from a foot as big as Daddy's, though.

Cuddles and Cries

I wanted to upload a cute video of Grace's first cereal today, but the computer was too slow and I gave up. I thought I'd show off some of her pics with this cuddly bear. They were outtakes from the session, but I kind of like them anyway :)

With such a cuddly, furry friend, what's the crying coming from? We think it might be coming from hunger. We think we might have started the cereal just in time because we think she's not getting enough milk from me now. We had this problem with Archie at seven months, and it worked itself out in a week or so, but this has been going on for 2.5 weeks now. It was easy to disregard the first week, but we really started thinking through options by Week 2 of mid-night wake-ups. Yesterday, we came to the dreaded conclusion: the wake-ups aren't from cold, teething, or poor scheduling, they're from lack of milk. Thankfully, we're able to mix her rice with soy formula - she, like her brother - want nothing to do with milk based ones, and hopefully we'll get to the bottom of this soon and keep nursing for awhile.

We also realized that our diet these days consists of fried bread and soy milk (breakfast) and rice, vegetables, tofu and occasionally eggs (lunch and dinner) with some yogurt and fruit snacks. I am going to try to eat more meat and yogurt and see if that helps.

Frozen fingers warmed by soy milk

Winter is so cold here, I can't help but have a lot of random musings every time I go outside. Well, make that inside, too, as our apartment heat isn't working very well this year and we stay bundled in layers in our house and often huddle by our electric heater.

I've taken by stopping by the street stand for a nice cup of fresh hot soy milk whenever I take Archie to the park to keep my fingers from freezing. That's what you drink in cold weather, too, right? I mean, hot chocolate is really overrated.

With a corn cob pipe and a button nose and two eyes made out of coal. Carrot noses work, too. But what about a tomato? My first time seeing a snowman with a nose like this!

Archie still has a blast playing outside even if he is the only kid whose mother lets him venture out in such weather.

Babies were made for warm soft beds, blankets, and kisses and cuddles - not for the arctic tundra. This is ONE of the snow layers Grace wears when she does venture out for brief periods of time on our way to an activity.

Crazy English - studio blunders

Anything wrong with this pic? The whole Brown Eyes thing jumped out at me right away! (Don't her eyes look a little blue to you?) The rule for my free photo shoot was I only had input on the photos going into my album and not the display album. That seemed quite reasonable to me, but I knew I would be in for some pretty major English blunders. Since they gave me JPEG's and not the Photoshop files of the page layouts, taking out words and redoing them was rather complex. I think fixing the English on the first three spreads is beyond me so I'll just enjoy what they put.

The original English on this file was "I with the story of small bear" I wanted to fit most of the existing bubbles to minimize editing so I changed it to "Your smile makes my heart sing"

The cover to the display album:

The English translation of their name is "The Son of the Sun"

Here are a few more favorites:


What were some of the other blunders? How about "Rumor is cherished more" on one spread that I replaced with "Sugar and spice and everything nice", "I hope everything all be fine" which I replaced with "Faith is the evidence of things hoped for" and a bunch of garbled gibberish I replaced simply with "Grace".

Pass the rice, please!

Well, actually Grace was really saying "Please DON'T pass the rice" tonight, but it was a milestone nonetheless. When we started with Archie he was delighted to have something other than milk and reached out his mouth like a little bird waiting for the mother bird to drop in the worm. Grace was a little less enthusiastic but took a few bites anyway (after much spitting out). She's starting to wake up really early in the mornings for a 4:30-5:00 a.m. feed so we're thinking she needs a little more in her belly. I'm hoping she'll take more soon because I'm spoiled to a sleeping-through-the-night baby.


Hunt made this picture before the feeding process started. He's proud of it, and I like it, too.

Modeling Debut!

The long awaited day has arrived! I finally got to go pic up Grace's pictures from her modeling session, and I am quite pleased with the results. In addition to giving me the page spreads of the book, they included ALL the shots they took on a CD. I'll be busy for awhile sorting, organizing and maybe even deleting a few unflattering ones.

Now, without further ado. The pages from MY book (which we'll add to at 6, 9 and 11 months):




Pages from the studio book





This is only a fraction of what I have. More coming soon :)