Merry Christmas

Hope everyone has a great Christmas. I know ours is extra special this year.

Esther Update - Rolling Over

Esther is growing up fast. She is really starting to get a little personality. She is starting to react to us a lot more which is fun. It is really easy to get her to smile and giggle at us. That is pretty much all we do these days, try to get Esther to smile and laugh at us.
A big thing happened today with Esther. She rolled over for the first time!!!!!!!! She went from her back to her stomach and then kept rolling the same direction back onto her back. She did it today at home with Margo and she called me at work she was so excited.
I know everyone thinks their baby is the best but I really think we got the best kid in the world. Esther is such a great baby. 99% of the time she is happy and content wherever she is. She is good when we leave her with other people, we always get comments about how happy and easy she is to take care of. She is super smiley and super cute. And she sleeps through the night which is awesome. We absolutely love her and love being her parents.


One great thing about having a good friend watch Esther during the day is that she truly cares about Esther and is just not caring for her. And she is excited about all the new things that Esther does and all the cute moments. One amazing bonus about Kristy is she likes to take pictures and video. So, she has been sending us pics and video of Esther while she is keeping her. This has been such a blessing and a huge deal for us.


Now for some pictures. WARNING: Extreme cuteness that you may not be able to handle.


Here is Esther sleeping at Kristy's



Esther has started sucking and chewing on her hands all the time. Seriously, does it get any cuter.






Here she is checking out Kristy's Christmas tree



It was super cold on Sunday so we got to bundle her up in a super cute warm clothing thing.



Here she is today, being happy

Esther Update

Sorry that we have not been updating very often lately. We have been extremely busy with some things going on around here. More on that in the future. For now, I thought I would give you an Esther update.

She is growing like kudzu. She is starting to get a little personality. She coos a lot, grins and laughs, plays with her toys, and more. She has started doing this really cute thing where if you are holding her, she will smile really big at someone else, and then turn her head and bury it in our chest like she is bashful or flirting.

Last week was the first week with both Margo and I back at work. Margo is going to work part time (three days a week). We decided to leave Esther with a good friend of ours, Kristy, while we are at work. It was kind of hard/sad to leave her there for the first few days but we are getting used to it. It feels like there is someone else raising your kid and that you are going to miss something. But, I would much rather that person be Kristy than a random person at a daycare. I think she is probably getting tired of me calling a couple times a day though.

She had her 4 month doctor visit today. She weighs 14 pounds (50th percentile) and is 24.29 inches tall (40th percentile). She has definitely grown since her last visit.

Now for pictures!!!!!!!!!

Here is Kristy with Esther

Here is Kristy's daughter Sophie with Esther. Sophie started kindergarten this year so it worked out perfect for her to watch Esther.

Last week for Thanksgiving we went down to Waldron and spent the day with my parents and my aunt and her family. But, we made a little detour down to Mena on the way to see some friends. This is Esther being inspected by Audrey (daughter of our good friend Sarah)

Here we are on Thanksgiving

Here is Esther in a new shirt that was sent to her from good friends of ours, Dylan and Molly, who live in India. It is really cute.

Getting Old

I am not the only one getting old around here. Esther is 4 months old today.

Lots of Pictures

We are still trying to decide what the plan is for the blog and if it will be private or not. So, until we get all that worked out, I thought I would go ahead and post some new pictures of Esther.

Cute pumpkin hat

Seriously cute

Razorback cute

Esther has been doing a lot better at grabbing her toys and playing with them

This is her in her exersaucer, she laughs and laughs at the lion

Lots of big smiles these days

Yesterday we went hiking with some friends. I wore our moby wrap and put Esther in it and she did really good. She loved looking all around. After a while though she fell asleep and slept the rest of the time.

30!

Happy 30th Birthday!
We love you,
Margo & Esther

Privatization

Not of Social Security, but of this blog.

I wanted to let you all know that we are thinking about making this blog private. This is something we had always talked about doing when we had kids. I don't like the thought of random people that we don't know out there knowing all the things I put up on here about our Family. It seems like in a worse case scenario some creep could use the information to do something bad. I know that may seem like crazy thinking to some of you, but I just don't like knowing that any crazy person out there can have access to Esther's life through this blog.

If we do this, it means there will be an added step of signing in, in order to read our blog. And you probably won't be able to read it through a feed reader or rss feed (if you don't know what that is then that won't matter to you). I know this means that we are going to lose readers. Even I tend not to read some blogs of our friends because they are private. But I think it may be worth it. I will continue to have this blog even if we lose all of our readers because I think it is a great way to document our lives and have a record of it for the future.

So, let me know what you think. And let me know if you would like an invite to be able to continue to read our blog.

I will let you know later in the week when we decide for sure about this and send an invite to whoever requests one.

Orphan Sunday

Just wanted to let everyone know that this Sunday is Orphan Sunday. A few organizations that help orphans throughout the world decided to have a day each year that churches could focus on helping orphans. A lot of orphan organizations, adoption organizations, churches, and others are supporting it. It is a Sunday for churches to focus on orphans and promote helping them. It is a very important duty that we have as Christians (for those of you who are Christians) to take care of the orphans as the Bible tells us to.

There are approximately 143 million orphans in the world. Half a million kids in the U.S. live in foster care and around 125,000 are up for adoption. In Arkansas there are 7,000 kids in foster care and over 500 available for adoption. Arkansas ranks #1 in the U.S. in the number of moves a child will make while in foster care. They will move an average of 30 times while in foster care. 30. An even more shocking statistic is this....In Pulaski County (most populated county in Arkansas) there are 600 churches and in Northwest Arkansas there are over 300. So if just one family out of each of these churches from just these three counties would adopt that would be over 900 adopted kids which is almost twice the number of waiting kids in Arkansas. JUST ONE MORE FAMILY IN EACH CHURCH AND WE WOULD NOT HAVE WAITING KIDS IN ARKANSAS. And that is just 3 counties.

There are lots of ways to help. There is an organization in Arkansas that seeks to help these children in Arkansas. It is the C.A.L.L. which stands for Children of Arkansas Loved for a Lifetime and their vision is to have no waiting children in Arkansas foster care but instead to have families waiting to take them in. On their website you can find all kinds of ways to help. But the best way is to become a foster parent or to adopt one of these kids.

I wanted to also post some videos about Orphan Sunday in case you are more of a visual learner.

This one is from the CALL

And this one will make you cry.

"Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for the orphans and widows in their distress..." James 1:27

Halloween

Our community group had a Halloween party this weekend. We came up with some last minute costumes and decided on "things from the 80's" for our family.

Josh as Mr. Rogers (complete with the creepy King Friday puppet) and Margo as a Glamour shot.

Margo made a Smurfette costume for Esther.

And here is a shot of the whole group (minus Esther, she was sleeping).

Esther's new favorite toy

Several years ago, Margo and I bought our future child something. I am guessing it was 5-6 years ago. The Razorback shop was having a big 50% off sale and they had something for a baby that we could not pass up for our future baby. We never would have thought at that time that it would have taken so long to get to this point but it was worth the wait. And we finally get to use this awesome toy. We put it on her changing table to give her something to look at when we are changing her diaper and dressing her.

It is a razorback mobile. The little hogs go around and it plays a nice little tune that is supposed to be the fight song but Margo and I can't really make it out. Esther loves it. She kicks and smiles and watches the hogs go round and round. It is a lot of fun to watch her watch it.

3 Months!

Today Esther is 3 months old! We can't believe how much she's grown and changed. She is such a sweet baby and is so fun. We are loving every minute with her.

Here are a couple of pictures of Esther sporting her Halloween outfits this week.

Toys

Margo and I went to a couple consignment type sales for children's clothes and toys. We found a few clothing items but we also came across a couple toys we could not pass up. As some of you may know, Margo and I really like old stuff/antiques. I don't know if Esther will also, but we will do what we can to push her in that direction. I think these types of toys are much better than the electronic noise makers they make today.

Margo and I both had one of these growing up. It is a Fisher Price School Days Desk. It has a magnetized chalkboard and comes with magnetic letters and cards with simple words you can trace with chalk on the chalkboard. It is missing a few letters but we were really excited to find it. It was made in 1972

This one Margo found. It is the Fisher Price Two Tune TV. It is from 1966 and you wind up the yellow knob and it plays row, row, row your boat and london bridge while the picture stories with words scroll across the screen. They still make this today as a "retro toy"

Sleep!!!!!!!!

I don't know if it is a fluke or not but on Friday night, Esther slept for 7 hours straight. And last night she went 6 hours. She had only been going 4 hours for the past few weeks. If this continues it would be awesome. She is now sleeping in her own room which helps me sleep more because I am such a light sleeper, which meant I did not sleep much when she was in our room. We have also started swaddling at night when she sleeps. We could not do it when she was younger because she could get out of it so easy but now that she is bigger it works better.

Here are some new pics. Which by the way, I have a random question for you pertaining to pictures. I feel like we (and people in general) take too many pictures these days. For instance, we have taken over 300 pictures of Esther so far. After I take them, I put them in a folder on my computer and then at the end of the year I back them up on my large capacity external hard drive. I just wonder if I will ever look through all of these pictures in the future. And it is just not of Esther. Pictures of the farm, vacations, holidays, etc. Will Esther ever care to look at all the pictures we have taken over the years? Will they get passed on to future generations? I cherish old pictures of my ancestors. It is really awesome to see how they looked back then. But there are very few pictures of them. If there were hundreds of pictures I think I would still be interested but only of the good ones/interesting ones or the ones with lots of people in them. I am just worried that we have so many these days that it is just too overwhelming to go back and try to look at them. Any thoughts? I know, I know you just want me to shut up and to show you pics of Esther.

She is so very sweet, how could you not love this little girl to death.

Rockin some awesome hair

She smiles a lot at us these days but it is hard to catch on camera. She also likes to smirk.

Out like a light

Here is the baby burrito in her swaddle blanket

Esther's World

I thought I would post some pictures of Esther's room now that we have it pretty much set up (it was one of our guest rooms before). I still need to hang some stuff on the walls. It took a while to get it set up since she was such a surprise and we had nothing ready. I was in the middle of painting the furniture for her room when we got the call about her.

We bought the little bookshelf for her. We love books (even though I don't read a whole lot) and have got a pretty good collection going for her. We have started reading to her some, I can't wait until she gets old enough to understand. The rocking chair was my grandmother's rocking chair so it means a lot to me. It is kind of hard to see but the canvas on top of the bookshelf with Esther's name was made by a good friend and is really cute.

Here is her crib and changing table. Some awesome friends gave them to us and I repainted them. I also repainted the dressers that were in this room to make everything the same color and somewhat match.

The little wooden cross above the bed is a dutch cradle cross that one of my good friend's dad got for us. We really liked it.

This is a canvas painting a girl at our church did and gave to us. It is really awesome, Margo cried.

I also thought I would post a picture of Esther's favorite place to be, from her perspective. She loves her swing and this is her view. It is a toucan, a monkey, and a frog that spin around.

I might be a felon

Before I get to the felon thing I wanted to share a funny video. Do you remember the funny old spice commercial that came out several months ago? Here is a link. Well Sesame Street made a spoof of it that I thought was pretty funny so I thought I would share.

Now to the felon thing. Over the weekend, four kids (ages 17-21) got arrested and charged with a felony for making a sparkler bomb and setting it off in an empty field on private property (read news story here) in Farmington. If you don't know what a sparkler bomb is, it is when you tape a bunch of sparklers together with duct tape or electrical tape and light them. It makes a loud explosion. You can search it on youtube and find hundreds of videos of it (you might even find one of me and another guy(who I won't name since we might be felons)). I can't tell you how many times I have made these. I think it is ridiculous that they would be charged with a felony. I think the Farmington police are being stupid like small town police can be and I hope the prosecutor does not follow through with the charges.

Family

We took a little trip down to Little Rock on Wednesday to spend a couple days seeing my (Josh) extended family. This was Esther's first time to meet her great grandmother (my grandmother on my mom's side) and some of her great aunts and extended cousins. It was a fun time seeing family.

Esther with great granny.

Esther with Great Aunt Diane

Esther with Great Aunt Sherry (I know she will love being called Great Aunt)

I am not sure how the cousin numbering/naming works but this is Esther with my first cousins Kelly and Nikki

Again not sure about the cousin numbering thing (are they second cousins, third cousins, or great cousins? it is too confusing, can someone help me with this) but this is Esther with one of my first cousin's two girls (Sydney and Lorelai)

Here she is with another of my cousin's kids (Jacob), who is 3 months older than Esther

Cutest Picture Ever and a Visit to the Doctor

Esther had her first doctor visit with us yesterday. She saw Dr. Jackson who was great. He said she seems to be doing great, no problems. She weighs 10lbs 11.5oz, and is 21.81 inches tall. She is around the 20-30 percentile in height and weight and everything is proportional like it should be. She weighed 6 pounds at birth (and 7 pounds when we got her 5 weeks ago), and was 18.5 inches at birth.

Here is the super cute picture. She is in her little monster hooded towel after a bath.

Recent Pictures

Esther and I swinging on the front porch.

Esther is getting big, not only in size but in development. She is doing really well holding her head up. She still does the bobble head thing some but she is doing good enough we can set her in her bumbo for a little while.

Her cool tie-dye shirt that she wore to the car show we went to on Saturday.

Our good friends Adriel and Emily and their daughter Eliana were in town this weekend. They moved to St Louis a few months ago. This was their first time to meet Esther. Eliana is 10 months older than Esther. I am sad they do not live here anymore so that the girls could grow up together but hopefully they will know each other and be friends in the years to come.

Today is our first doctor appt with Esther. Stay tuned for details.