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.

Esther's New Ride

We got a new (used) truck today. We needed something that all of us could ride in. I had planned on upgrading to a full size truck soon anyway because it would make my life a lot easier on the farm. My old small truck struggled some with hauling heavy loads of hay, mulch, gravel, etc. We have been looking for about a week for a new one. This one we found in Oklahoma and it met all of our criteria. I did not want to spend a ton of money so I knew that I would have to get one that was a few years old and with mileage on it. I got a really good deal on this one, the owner had just gone through a divorce and needed the money pretty bad. I got it for approximately $5000 below private party blue book value.

It is a 2005 Ford F150 XLT 4x4 Quad Cab. It has a 5.4 liter V8 Triton engine and has 97,000 miles on it. (It is 3 years newer than my old truck with 40,000 less miles) It has a custom hood and grill on it. I am not a huge fan of the hood because it has the fake hood scoops on it, but it is not so terrible that I want to pay a lot of money to get a regular hood. It also has big tires on it, but they are not the huge ones that are ridiculous so I can live with them also. It has lots of room inside. The backseat is big enough that we can fit Esther's car seat in without scooting up the seat.

Temporarily a one car family

Well, we sold the truck yesterday. It sold a lot faster than I thought it would and we got a good price out of it. It was kind of sad to sell it, I have had it for 6 years. I have used it for lots of stuff over the years, especially on the farm. I have used it hauling hay, goats, chickens, mulch, wood, rocks, even a calf a couple times before I got a stock trailer, and lots more. It has been down to south Arkansas with me hunting a few times, along with lots of other trips. It was a really good truck, it never needed any work and never let me down.

So long Nissan Frontier, thanks for everything. (Stay tuned, as soon as tomorrow, to see the replacement)

Smiley

I guess Esther woke up this morning and decided she was going to start smiling a lot more and even better, smiling at us. It just so happens that we caught some of these smiles and smirks on camera.

This is a little smirk

It is really hard to catch her smiling with the camera. Hopefully she will continue to do it more so we can get more pictures. These pictures are from this morning. We were taking pictures of her new dress she was wearing to church that our friend Kathy got us.

Esther needs a new ride

We are going to try to sell my truck. We are not really able to haul Esther in it. The back seats are just those fold down from the side seats which you can't put a car seat on and it is really not the best to put her in the front seat. And if we did put her in the front seat, Margo would have nowhere to sit except in the crappy back seat. So, we are going to sell it and try to buy a used full size extended cab pickup that we can put a car seat into the back seat to haul Esther around. It would be much better for us to have two cars that we can use for the whole family.

Here is what you can do. Spread the word to anyone you might know who would be interested in buying my truck. And if you know of a good used full size, extended cab, 4x4 Chevrolet or Ford truck, let me know.

Here are my trucks details....2002 Nissan Frontier XE, extended cab, V6, 4x4, tow package, running boards, bed liner, sliding rear window, cruise control, CD. Never been wrecked, no major work done, no problems with it at all. 135,000 miles. $7250 obo.

A new discovery

I thought I would post something farm related. I have been working on the garden the past few days. I did not get to plant a fall garden because of the drought we had. I have been trying to get it cleaned up and ready for fall and I made a discovery.

One thing that I have never had good luck with is getting a compost pile going. We feed all our food scraps to the animals as well as the garden waste. I have tried to make a pile out of wood mulch, horse poop, and leaves but it never worked so well. Well, I think I finally stumbled upon a compost pile of sorts to use for my garden. Let me explain. I do raised bed gardening and when I build my beds, I took off the top good layer of soil from the aisles between the beds and put it on the beds. This helped make my beds thicker but it created the problem of water collecting and standing in the aisles for a few days after a rain. I just put up with it for a few years but this past year I got a load of mixed wood mulch from the city of Fayetteville and spread in the aisles so I was not walking in water. I also put some hay in places after the mulch settled some. It seems that the mulch, hay, dirt washed off from the beds, and the water created compost over the summer. I was not expecting that at all. I went out to get the beds back into shape and when I scraped the hoe in the aisles it uncovered some pretty good mulch. So I have been scooping out the aisles with a shovel and putting on top of the beds. Then I am putting new mulch back in to the aisles so it will do the same thing for next year. I was pretty excited because I am killing two birds with one stone. Here are a few pics to show you.

Here is the before picture. It is hard to tell what is bed and what is aisle in the pic but right in the middle from top to bottom is the aisle. It doesn't look like much and that is why I did not think much about it.

Here is a pic after I have scooped up the dirt from the aisle and put it on the bed. See how nice and dark that soil is.

Weekend

This past weekend we went down to Mena to see friends and family. It was a really good weekend. It was fun showing Esther off and catching up with people we don't see very often. Esther did really good on the trip considering some issues that came up with her. (turns out we think she really does have a milk allergy, the birthmom told us she did but we decided to test it ourselves and the milk formula gave her really gross poop and congestion so we switched her back to soy formula. This also involved a trip to Mena Wal-Mart at 2am.) Besides seeing friends in Mena, we took her to the church down there that we consider my "hometown" church. We also spent time with my parents and some other relatives.

Here is Esther in a new shirt we bought her. We found some band shirts at Target on sale that we could not pass up.

Here is her cute dress for church on Sunday

We stayed with some good friends in Mena and had a great time hanging out and seeing some other friends while there. Somehow I did not get any pictures of Esther with them, but I did get some good videos of them with her. Here is a good pic we got of the three of us on their deck.

We went to see my parents in Hale Town. Most people don't believe me when I tell them my parents live in Hale Town. It is several miles east of Waldron which is north of Mena. The Hale family settled in that area in like the late 1800's or something like that. All of my ancestors lived there and a lot of my dad's cousins still live around there. My parents built a house there last year on my grandparents old property (my dad was born on the front lawn). Anyway here is proof of Hale Town.

Here is another pic with my parents house in the background

Here is Esther with my Aunt Freddie

And with my cousin Cindy

There is a small country church in Hale Town that my parents go to (my dad went there growing up), and after church on Sunday night a lot of the people came over to my parents house for snacks and to see Esther.

Photo Shoot

As I mentioned in the previous post, one of our friends who has started doing photography on the side, came out and took some photos of Esther the other day. She put some of them online and they are really cute. I thought I would share her site with you so you could all check them out. Her website is http://www.alishiasnookphotography.blogspot.com/ and there are a few pics of Esther on the main page if you scroll down, but if you click on Babies at the top of the page and scroll down until you see her name, there are many more. I will try to post details about our weekend whenever we get home tomorrow.

Quick Update

This week has been a good week. We are starting to settle in with having and taking care of a baby. Esther is sleeping about as well as can be expected, and we have figured out our sleep schedule so we are doing good on sleep. We have still been able to see lots of friends who have come to see Esther. Margo took Esther to her work to introduce her there and she was a hit. This weekend we are going to Mena to see friends and family so that should be lots of fun. Here are some pictures.

Our friends BJ, Brandy, and their kids came out the other night and brought dinner. Their kids are really cute. I took them out and let them feed the goats which was a lot of fun. Here is Jordan (4) holding Esther. She is very mothering and did a great job holding her and supporting her head for the little bit that we let her hold her. I was very impressed.

We started using cloth diapers this week intermittently. We are still need some cloth diaper things but our good friends Adam and Sarah are lending us their newborn stuff until we get all of our stuff so we can get started. They also brought us dinner this week which was awesome. Right now we are just doing cloth diapers during the day. Once we get a little more used to it, we will try and do nights also. I think when we travel we will probably just use disposable.

Although you might think this picture is something I would do, it was actually Margo.

Last night, a friend from work, Ali, and her husband Josh came out. Ali does photography on the side and she did a little photo shoot with Esther. This age is kind of tough because she does not stay still for very long but also doesn't have good head control or smiling on queue ability. Anyway, I will let you know when she gets done with those and share them with all of you. I have seen a few and they are super cute.

Busy Weekend

This was a really busy weekend for Esther. It started on Friday. I will tell about it in pictures.....

Margo's good friend and co-worker Linda and her daughter Kaylee came out to see Esther Friday afternoon. Linda brought us lunch and a bunch of other food and gifts. It was awesome. Kaylee was super excited to see Esther and "hold" her.

Friday night our good friends Rick and Ashley came out and brought us dinner and stayed to hang out and watch a movie. It was fun to hang out with friends for a while like we did pre-Esther. And the big story of the night is Rick held Esther and I have the pictures to prove it. He has always said he would not hold a baby under 3 months because he was worried he would do something wrong. But with lots of peer pressure we got him to do it but only while he was sitting down.

Saturday was our big baby shower at our church. It was awesome. The girls did a great job getting it all set up. It was fun to get to see lots of friends and family and hang out with them. And Esther racked up the presents. Here we are at the shower. The awesome cake was made by one of our friends we go to church with.

Some really good friends of ours drove up from Mena for the shower and to meet Esther. They are really important people in our life so it meant a lot that they came up. We were able to go to dinner and hang out more after the shower which was fun. We are going to try and make a trip to Mena this weekend to see more of our friends down there.

This is a picture of Esther and I trying to recover from the busy weekend.