ten months

june 2, 2011

about 23.5 pounds

28.75 inches

Carson Robert,

You are growing up so fast! This month it seems like you’re already beginning to transition from baby to toddler. Maybe it’s because you’ve traded in footie pajamas for two piece jammies and are sleeping all night more often than not, or it could be the speed and ease with which you crawl and pull up. Maybe it’s all of the table food or the babbling that’s sounding more and more like talking. Whatever it is, you are more and more fun every day! We are trying hard to savor every moment and new stage, because you’re growing and changing so quickly! It’s been fun to see you become more independent this month. You’re still curious and work hard to learn about the world around you.

You are a fast crawler and always crawl with your right knee down and your left foot up! When Daddy gets home in the afternoons, you crawl as fast as you can to greet him! It is the highlight of his day! You still love pulling up every chance you get and are cruising more and more. You stay busy pretty much the whole time you’re awake!

You are such a happy boy! We are so thankful for your good health and sweet spirit. You bring so much joy to our lives and to the lives of others. When you smile, your whole face seems to smile. Many times, you smile so big that it makes your eyes close. You like to smile back at people when they smile at you or talk to you. You’ve started smiling when we’re walking in the door to church, because you’re so happy to be there! You smile and reach for Madelyn, your sweet cradle roll teacher. You’ve started laughing more and more this month, too! Sometimes you laugh when someone’s being silly, when we sing to you, when I dance for you or with you, when we tickle you, when we give you kisses and zurburts, and when we squeal back at you! You’re a great squealer! You like to look at yourself in the mirror. You touch the mirror, smile, and make sweet sounds.

Some of your favorite toys are books, keys, your purple rectangle, your plastic eggs, Sophie the Giraffe, your blue teething ring, and your airplane puzzle piece. You like to play outside. You crawl around in the grass, pull weeds, play with dirt, and try to chew on sticks! We’ve been enjoying the beautiful spring weather and taking morning walks around the neighborhood. You love to ride in your stroller, feel the breeze and sunshine, and listen to the animals and cars. You help check the mail every day. You always carry in a piece of mail and sometimes there’s a piece of junk mail or catalog that you get to crumple and tear up. You really like to play with paper. You like to play in the kitchen while I’m cooking. You love to play with open drawers and take out lids and towels. You still enjoy your magnets, and playing with the dishwasher is a treat for sure! You don’t like the sound that the blender makes, and sometimes it makes you cry. We know you’ll get used to it before too long! We like to listen to music while we’re in the kitchen. You really like TJ McClouds’ Playground and Andrew Peterson and Randall Goodgame’s Slugs and Bugs.

You like to go with me to Walmart. You look cute sitting up in the shopping cart and looking around. There’s so much to see! A couple of times, you’ve tried to stand up in there, which was scary! You smile at everyone and lots of people talk to you while we shop. You make grocery shopping lots of fun!

You got two teeth on top this month. Just like on the bottom, the right tooth appeared about a week before the left. Now you have four teeth and it’s made biting and chewing lots of fun! You started eating table food this month. We’ve done a combination of feeding you purees and letting you feed yourself finger foods. You really like feeding yourself and seem to favor your left hand when you eat. Mealtime has become messy with scraps of food on the floor afterwards. You’ve tried so many new foods this month! You love fruit. Blueberries are your absolute favorite! You squeal and shake with excitement when I get them out, and it’s adorable! You also really like watermelon raspberries, blackberries, and banana. You eat watermelon from a fork, but you take off and use your fingers for anything else we’ve given you on a fork. Sweet potatoes are your favorite vegetable. You will also eat green beans. You also really like bread and crackers. Goldfish crackers are right up there with blueberries. They’re one of my favorites, so I figure you’re excited that I finally share with you after all these months of watching me eat them. As soon as I walk to the pantry and shake the box, you squeal and shake with excitement! You also like ritz crackers and saltines. Sometimes, I dip saltines in pureed veggies for you. It’s messy, but lots more fun than being spoon fed! You like to eat bits of bread, bagel, bun, roll, and pasta. Your dairy favorites are yogurt and cheese, and your favorite meats are chicken and ground beef. Poppyseed chicken and baked ziti are two of your favorite dishes. You seem to think it’s fun to eat what Mama and Daddy eat. You’ve gotten really good at drinking water from your sippy cup. The one with the straw seems to work best. You take a big drink then throw your cup on the floor!

You wear size four diapers and 12 month clothes. You’ve been sleeping so well this month! About the middle of the month you started sleeping through the night more often than not! This has been a fun milestone for Mama! You usually go to bed between 9:00-10:00 at night, and in the mornings you usually wake up between 7:30-8:30. You take two naps a day, usually 1.25-1.5 hours each. We read to you before your naps. You sit in one of our laps, point to the pictures, and turn the pages. Sometimes you even kiss the people in the pictures. We love reading with you! You nurse four times a day, once before breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and again at bedtime. We love to hear you. You babble (/b/, /g/, /m/), squeal, grunt, laugh, and make your motor boat sound.

One of our very favorite times of the day is bath time. Since the weather’s been warm and we’ve been spending more time outside, you take a bath almost every night. You use your ducky tub now, and you love to sit up and splash. Playing in the water is lots of fun! You like to stand up and hold on the rail on the side of the tub. Sometimes you crawl out of the duck so you can touch the shiny silver drain. After I bathe you, I pass you off to Daddy and he dries you off. You and Daddy love this special time together and I love to hear the sweet giggles coming from your room as he dries you off and plays with you.

It is a joy and honor to be your parents. You make life extra special, and we are so very thankful for you, Baby Boy!

We love you!!

Mama and Daddy

family mission statement

In our hurried culture, it's easy to go through the motions of life without ever thinking about how and why we choose to spend our time and resources. In an effort to live intentionally, Keith and I decided to develop a family mission statement. This exercise gave us an opportunity to talk about why we're here and how we should use our gifts to glorify God. We were able to develop a concise statement that we can look to for accountability as we make decisions and that will encourage us to see the big picture as we live day to day. The idea and inspiration to spend time developing our family mission statement came from one of my very favorite blogs, simple mom. I've never been great at time management, and on her blog, Tsh shares ideas on how to manage your time and home more efficiently, so that you have more time to enjoy what's most important. This post provides discussion questions and a framework for applying your answers to craft a comprehensive statement about who you want to be as a family. She encourages you to display it in your home as a reminder of your family's priorities. We hope our family mission statement will provide direction in our lives as Jesus-followers, in our ministries, our marriage, and our parenting.

nine months

may 2, 2010

21 pounds 5 ounces

28.75 inches

Sweet Carsy,

Nine months sounds so old! Time is flying and you’re growing up on us, Precious Boy! We are so very thankful to have you in our life! We love to play with you and watch you investigate your expanding world. We enjoy sitting with you and reading you books. You still love to touch and help turn the pages. We love watching you play with your blocks and puzzles. You have one stacking puzzle with different colored shapes, and every single time you play with it you take off the purple rectangle first. You love that purple rectangle and carry it with you all around the playroom. In fact, there used to be two purple rectangles, but you took one of them somewhere and hid it, because we can’t find it anywhere! You look like such a big boy sitting up and playing all by yourself. You aren’t at all wobbly anymore and quickly learned to sit up all by yourself from your belly. In addition to the toys in your bedroom and the playroom, you also have baskets of toys on the bottom shelves in the living room and kitchen. You like to sit and take each toy out of the baskets one at a time. Granny got you some letter magnets for the refrigerator and you love to sit and play with them while I’m cooking. We find those magnets all over the house, because you take them with you as you crawl from room to room. You also like to open the bottom drawer and take out the plastic lids while I’m cooking. The kitchen seems to be one of your favorite places.

You have become an expert crawler! You’ve increased your crawling speed this month and crawl from one room to another a lot more frequently. You are a busy boy with lots to see and do! Sometimes you still crawl with your belly on the floor, but recently you’ve begun crawling on all fours more and more. Sometimes you crawl with your right knee down and your left foot up; as if you wish you could start walking.

You started pulling yourself up to standing early this month and it quickly became your very favorite thing to do! You pull up on anything and everything including the open dishwasher door, open dryer door, shelves, dressers, the coffee table, chairs, stools, in your crib, the bathtub, the toilet, and even some flat surfaces like the oven door. The other day I left the toilet lid up and you pulled right up and stuck your hand in the water before I could get to you, oops! Since then, I’ve been more careful. You like to take magazines, phonebooks, and cookbooks off the shelves and crumple the pages. We attempt to redirect your focus to your toys, but you sure do love to pull them down. Usually we get to you before you start crumpling too much, but you have pulled the covers off a couple of them! You’ve tumbled to the floor a few times after pulling up, it startles you sometimes, but doesn’t bother you too much most of the time. One day, though, you fell forward on to the front of the rocking chair and got a knot with a bruise right between your eyes. As the month progressed, you gained more control and got better and better at going from standing to sitting. You like to cruise along the side of what you’re holding on to. You also learned to roll over from your back to your belly this month and you love it. It has made changing your diaper a bit challenging, because you flip over and try to escape!

Another milestone this month was teeth! After lots of hard teething work, two little bitty teeth finally broke the surface on the bottom middle, but you don’t show them off too much and would prefer we didn’t try to peek at them! You still eat three times a day. You love fruit and will eat quite a bit of it. You can easily eat two bananas at one meal! You tried blueberries for the first time this month, and they quickly became another favorite. You still don’t love veggies, so we usually mix some apples or bananas with them to make them more appetizing! You like to sit in your highchair and chew on cold celery or eat puffs while we’re eating. You’ve gotten better at using the pincer grip to pick up puffs, and sometimes you eat 30 or 40 during one meal. You started experimenting with a sippy cup this month. You are really good at getting the water out, but you usually get more on your bib than you swallow! All of this eating has really made you grow! You now wear size 4 diapers. Many of your 6-9 month clothes are getting too small, and you’re wearing more and more 9-12 month clothes. You’ve had even more full nights of sleep this month, but most nights you still wake up once during the night. You don’t have a regular bedtime, but you usually go to bed between 9:00-10:00. In the mornings you normally wake up around 8:00. We love to listen to you playing happily in your crib when you wake up in the mornings. When we greet you in the mornings or after a nap, you are often sitting up or standing up now. You take two naps a day, usually totaling 2.5 hours. We had to move the mattress down in your crib because you were pulling up to standing and we didn’t want you to climb out.

You nurse five times per day, and I am thankful for this sweet and still time with you. Sometimes, after you nurse, you give me sweet kisses and let me snuggle you close for a few seconds before you’re off to play and explore!

You are talking more and more this month, too! You are still saying “mama,” and I am confident you know what it means! You say it most often when you want me to hold you or feed you. Your talking transitioned from cooing to babbling this month. You say “aba aba aba.” You can wave and say “hi” and “bye bye,” though you don’t always do it at the appropriate time and certainly not on command! You’ve also had lots of fun learning to make new noises with your mouth, including one that sounds like a motor. We absolutely love to listen you to, Baby Boy!

You still love your church family and usually handle being passed around from one person to another really well. We’ve had a lot of fun company this month! You were able to spend time with both sets of grandparents this month. They all love you so much and really enjoyed playing with you and watching you learn! We’ve loved and treasured each stage of your sweet little life, and this one is no exception. You are at such a fun stage of development. We can already tell that you’re loving, sociable, determined, curious, and independent. It is exciting to see you grow into the person God created you to be!

We love you, love you, love you!

Mama and Daddy

eight months

april 2, 2011

about 19-19.5 pounds

28 inches

Dearest Carson,

Your eighth month was another special one full of growing and learning! You continue to be a happy and curious little guy! We absolutely love to see your smile and hear your sweet sounds. You’re still wearing 6-9 month clothes. You wear size 3 diapers during the day and size 4 at night. The size 4 will last all night, and you really appreciate not having your diaper changed in the middle of the night. You still usually wake up once during the night, but you’ve slept a full 8-9 hours several more times this month! You usually only take two naps each day now, and are nursing 5-6 times a day. Early in the month, something exciting happened that changed your world; you learned to move forward! After a couple of months of scooting backwards, it was exciting to be able to get where you wanted to go! Instead of the traditional crawl, you crawl with your belly on the floor. As the month progressed, you got faster and faster at moving forward. You really like to get your hands on anything electronic. You spend a lot of time crawling and diving towards the XBox, TV remotes, cell phones, computers, and electric cords. We spend a decent amount of time redirecting your attention and trying to show you that your toys are lots more fun than all of that stuff! You still enjoy your books, puzzles, blocks, and rattles. Your teeth didn’t seem to bother you as much this month. You’ve felt good much of the time and have spent more time playing independently. You started going to the cradle roll class at church on Sunday mornings with Madelyn this month! You sit in the little seat as she teaches you to pat the Bible and plays and sings with you. Sometimes she feeds you your breakfast, too. Another milestone this month was related to food! We introduced you to fruit this month and you love it! You’ve had pears, apples, peaches, and bananas. You open your little mouth like a baby bird and wait for the next spoonful of fruit. You still don’t care too much for vegetables, but sometimes we mix them with fruit and that makes them better. By the end of the month, you’re eating three times a day! You usually have fruit and cereal for breakfast, vegetables for lunch, and fruit and cereal again before bed. On the day before your eighth month birthday, Pops and Granny came to visit and you learned to sit up independently. They teased that you wanted to wait and until they got here to reach this milestone! You’re a little wobbly, but if we help you position your legs in front of you, you can sit and play for a long time. Sitting up on your own makes you look like such a big boy! You are growing and learning so much, Baby Boy! We are thankful that God blessed us with you! Being your mama and daddy is an honor and a joy! We pray that we make wise decisions as we love and care for you.

Much love,

Mama and Daddy

embrace the camera: april 14

i <3 my family of three.

i'm having so much fun embracing all of these sweet moments:)

join emily and embrace the sweet moments with the people you love!

thankful thursday

It's been a looong time since I've posted a Thankful Thursday, but I was reminded of it this week. My dear husband is teaching a Sunday morning adult Bible class based on the book, Good and Beautiful God: Falling in Love with the God Jesus Knows. Every few weeks, we are given a new soul training exercise to work on as we strive to understand God through the Jesus narrative. Previous exercises have included getting more sleep and taking time to be quiet. This week's assignment was to start a running list of things for which we're thankful, so it seems like the perfect time to resurrect this old blog series. Some of the things are obvious, some are not. Some are more important than others, and I list them in no particular order. Remembering to be thankful each day is an important discipline that keeps me grounded. So here's what I've got so far.

healthy baby. supportive husband. conversation partner. peanut butter/banana sandwiches. daily hot showers. changing seasons. internet. loving church family. intergenerational wednesday night class. laughter. tears. honesty. balance. carson's smile. digital camera. getting to see my parents tomorrow. god's creativity. thoughtful budgeting. hand-me-downs. peace.

embrace the camera: spring has sprung!!