A Few Videos

What Have We Been Doing?

Watching Praise Baby

Thank you Tuminello family for letting us borrow one of your DVD's. Myers loves it, and I get to listen to praise songs.

Meeting Molly(left) and Mason(right) for the first time

It was so fun to see how different twins' personalities can be. Molly is high maintenence and Mason is laid back.

Going to Mary Abbott's mermaid birthday party

Getting ready for football season

This is what happens when mommy starts working and doesn't lay out an outfit for daddy to dress him in.

The Solid Life

Call me a hippi, granola, or maybe crazy, but I have decided to take on the task of making baby food. Why you ask? 1. So I can do my part saving money. (One jar of baby food $.79; 1 sweet potato $.89 which makes a whole ice cube tray. Myers eats 2 cubes per meal. You do the math.) 2. More nutrients in homeade baby food. Anyway, it really wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. Actually it was easy. Jordan Elkins gave me a really good website to get recipes from. It's www.wholesomebabyfood.com. It gives great details about which solids to introduce at what age. Even if you don't want to make all your baby food, there are still foods you can make for snacks and things. So, last Saturday I went to the farmer's market and bought sweet potatoes,green beans, butternut and acron squash, apples, pears, and avacados. It took me a long time (mainly because I had to entertain a 4 month old), but here are the results.




the green beans


the squash


the pears


the helper

4 Month Stats

Now that Myers is almost 5 months old, let me update you on his 4 month stats. At our doctor visit on August 12th, he weighed 16 lbs. 2 oz. which puts him in the 65th %ile. He was 25 and 1/4th inches long which puts him in the 50th %ile for height. The doctor said that he looked healthy and that we needed to start solids to help him sleep through the night. He also said that we are not to feed him in the middle of the night. We tried to quit cold turkey, but we were so tired from listening to him cry. We have gotten him to make it until about 4 and then I feed him. I don't have the 4 month onsie pic. Sorry! Things just got too busy with my new job.

A few things he loves at 4 months

-All foods
-His exersaucer
-Watching TV in his Bumbo
-Sitting up and not lying back
-Eating ANYTHING he can put in his mouth
-Laughing and smiling in front of his mommy and daddy
-Being shy in front of other people (Do you think he has his daddy's personality?!)
-Drooling

Do We Have a Lefty?

Myers was four months old on Friday. He gets more and more fun everyday. All you have to do is look at him and he smiles. He laughs so much. We probably tickle him more than we should because we love to hear that laugh. He is reaching for everything----with his left hand!! I'm left handed and Matt does some things left handed (golf, throws, bats, maybe), so he had a pretty good chance of being left handed. Our new trick is grabbing precious(see previuos post) from Mommy's hand and putting it in his mouth. He can almost do it. This is an important trick, so that I don't have to put it in his mouth 20 times a night. He is so big! We've started giving him some rice cereal, and he loves it. He won't even give me time to get another bite on the spoon! We had to reschedule his 4 month appointmet due to the funeral, so I don't have his stats. I have also not taken the 4 month onsie pic yet. And stay tuned---I promise the poll will be up this week. But for now you can look at these adorable new pics!

Mamaw

We had a sad weekend. Mamaw Cliburn passed away Friday night. She had cancer, and there was no way her 83 year old body was going to beat it. We are really going to miss her. She was one of a kind. She definitley didn't act 83, and she surely didn't dress like she was 83. She would give me her clothes that didn't fit her or she didn't like, and I would actually wear them! Her friends ranged in age from 18 to 80. She thought all of Matt, Marianna and Marcus's friends were her best friends too. She had the mind of a 20 year old. She knew every major league player and their stats. She knew every baseball game that was coming on and which channel. You couldn't be around her without laughing. She and Matt were very close. He was her first grandchild, and Myers was her first great-grandchild. It's going to be very weird without her, but we know she was excited to see Papa on Friday night!

I also want to say that I am so sad for Matt's mom. She has lost her dad, husband and mother in less that two and a half years. She is the strongest woman I know. If I were in her position, I don't think I could continue the way she does. As I stand back and watch her, she is always comforting someone else. She always speaks positive words and is looking for some way to help someone else (especially her kids). I have an amazing mother-in-law. I know she is going to miss her mama so much!

Champagne Taste

What's the saying? Champagne taste on a beer budget...something like that. This describes our son. I don't know where he gets this from. I finally retired the bassinet, only because he was kicking the top railing of it and his foot was propped up on the top. I decided to purchase a Pack-N-Play. Side note: I am going to move him to his bed when he isn't waking up 2 and 3 times a night. I go to Babies R Us and purchase a lower-end pack-n-play. Actually, it was free because I returned some things we had duplicates of. We set up the pack-n-play and guess what? He hates it!! Before I had a baby, I wouldn't have believed any parent that said this. I listened to him cry for an hour and a half in that pack-n-play. I was so determined that he was going to sleep in it, but he won't. We tried for 3 nights and gave up because we were so tired. Our solution: We traded Grandma Gina for her Cadillac pack-n-play. Of course she has the Graco Playard with a mobile, changing table, hood, and it's like double the size of ours. Only the best for her grandson. Guess what? We had a great night last night. Image that!!

RIP Precious

For those of you who haven't heard the story, we call our pacifiers "precious." Long story short, the only pacifier Myers would take was the mam mini. It was given to us with love last Christmas by Grandma Gina as a joke. There were two in the package-one had a blue heart and the other said "precious" on it. I searched every store and the internet to find a plain mam mini, but the only mam infant pacifiers they make are the heart and precious. Matt decide that no son of his would be seen with this in his mouth, so he took sandpaper and scratched off the word precious. So, since we came home from the hospital we have had heart precious and scratchy precious. All of this to say that preciuos is too small for Myers, so we have laid them to rest and moved up to the next size which is just plain blue and white. We are a little sad not to see that little blue heart in his mouth. Thank you MAM for making the next size up so plain!

Old precious

New precious

A Change of Plans

I got a job . . . .

PART TIME!!!!!!!

I'm so excited! I will be teaching gifted(the really smart kids) 2 days a week at Madison Avenue Upper Elementary. This is the job I have been praying for. Since I began teaching, my long term goal was to teach gifted, but it is a really hard job to get because there are only 1 or 2 gifted teachers in each school When I quit my job in May, I had not idea how we were going to survive, but I just kept praying that God would open a door.

Beach Trip

We took our annual Ginn, Duhon, Elkins beach trip last weekend to Rosemary Beach. I can't believe I actually went!! We had a blast! We had some great games of phase 10 and bachi ball. It was very strange not to have any responsibilities. I kept feeling like I needed to go check on Myers or change a diaper or something. Myers was in great hands. Marianna, Gina and Jamie took great care of him. I know they were completely worn out at the end of the weekend, but I think they all agreed that he is the sweetest, most cuddly, loving baby.




Dinner


Yes, we stayed up until 1:09 A.M.!!