Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday Keziah Rain!

Your first year has gone by too quickly. Where is the 7 pound cuddle-bug I used to snuggle skin-to-skin underneath my robe? You are walking and talking now. You act more like a little girl and less like a baby every day. Slow down. Mommy's heart can't keep up.

My Christmas Heart

I love having a Christmas baby. Many people resent being born around Christmas time. I will always do my best to make sure Keziah doesn't resent her birthday. I will do everything I can to make her birthday a separate celebration. Hopefully she will always love her birthday. As for me, I know I will always love the fact that she was born three days after Christmas. She was the best Christmas present I ever received.

Last Christmas, I was days away from birthing her. Last Christmas took on a whole new meaning for me. When I heard the Christmas story at church on Christmas Eve, I kept thinking about Mary. How uncomfortable she must have been to be traveling at nine months pregnant. How frustrating to go into labor and then find out there was no room for them in the inn. To face the fact that she was about to give birth and she would have to make do with the manger in front of her. I thought about these things as I rubbed my bulging nine-months-pregnant belly. When the song, "Mary Did You Know" was sung, I pretty much lost it and wept and wept.

This year my refections are very much the same. Only I am thinking more about that first year of Jesus' life. In the book of Luke, chapter 2, we go from Jesus being born to Him being 12 years old. The only glimpse of His babyhood is verse 40, "And the Child grew and became strong..." The first image that comes to my mind when I read that is Mary nursing Jesus. I guess it is because Keziah is such an enthusiastic nurser and is showing no signs of letting up any time soon. Besides sleeping, there is nothing that she has spent more time doing in her first year of life than nursing. To me this is a beautiful image. Apparently many artists throughout the last two centuries agree with me. I did a little art history research and learned that many artists painted the nursing Jesus to emphasize that although He was God, he was also fully human. He nursed on His mother just like any other baby. I was thrilled to stumble upon this video this morning. This is my Christmas heart this year.

Three Things

There are three huge events going on in our lives this month: Working on our new (to us) house; Advent/ Christmas traditions; and planning a totally awesome first birthday party for Keziah. I thought I would share a tiny glimpse on each of these big ongoing events.

The House:

Our house came with this totally awesome breakfast bar that separates the kitchen from the family room. It is made of the same stone that is on our fireplace and the outside of our house. It's a cool detail. Here was the problem. After the original wooden table top got scratched up, someone 'fixed' it by covering it with contact paper. When the contact paper looked bad someone 'fixed' that by painting it red. When the contact paper started to disintegrate into a sticky gooey substance and the red paint was peeling off it, someone 'fixed' it by buying a vinyl table cloth and stapling it the table. Of course I found out all this in reverse order by peeling off each layer in hopes of somehow salvaging the original table top. But alas, it was unsalvageable! Thankfully, my very handy husband decided he could build a nice new wooden table top. It turned out great. He is very talented.

His next project is a mantle for our fireplace.

Advent:

We have many Advent traditions in our family. We are trying our best to squeeze them in despite the fact that we just unpacked all our Holiday items a week ago. This year it is especially fun coming up with new traditions for Keziah. We decided she should get to put the star on the tree this year. (Pardon the tangent, but I just have to share that we got this totally awesome, beautiful, really tall Douglas Fur for only $20. It would have easily been a $70 tree in Tennessee. Oh the advantage of living in the mountains where these things grow everywhere and you aren't paying for someone to truck them in.)

Anyway, we also seem to have a tradition of our traditions turning into hilarious stories. Right after this picture was taken, Michael Paul decided one more branch needed to be clipped off the top and thought he could do so easily enough that he didn't put Keziah down. As a result of his somewhat awkward one-handed snipping of the branch, he accidently snipped the cord of lights and shorted them all out. So we had to un-decorate the tree, buy new lights and start over the next day.

Party Plans: Not much to say here, just making preparations. But I'll give you a hint about the theme of the party:

The House

The long awaited pictures of our new home. We didn't plan on having beautiful snow in our first house picture, but it sure does make the property look nice.

By the way, it is 10 degrees here with a windchill far below zero so I told Michael Paul to set up the tri-pod and he got three quick shots and we would just have to take what we got. Thankfully, Keziah looked great in all three pics, but this is the best one of us by the front door. I will probably use it for my Christmas card this year.

Going Quackers

We are slowly but surely unpacking boxes and setting up our new home. Tonight Michael Paul set up his record player. This was especially exciting because the record player is one of the things that has been in storage since July. So after Michael Paul listened to the records he has acquired in the last few months (Keziah was dancing and enjoying Led Zeppelin with him), I decided she needed to be introduced to my all time favorite childhood record, Disney's "Going Quackers". I'm posting this video for Aunt JuJu and my parents. (Hey Jules, doesn't this look familiar? - kinda takes you back to when we were two! Remember 'vacuum cleaner hoses coming out of our noses' hahaha - best record ever!)

Enjoy!

Update and Pictures

Keziah is 11 months old today and I am finally finding time to post some updated pictures. I hope you noticed my new title picture. That is actually the same tree that was in my old title picture which in case you forgot was this:

Keziah was 6 months old in this picture. She has changed so much - not quite as chunky and a lot more hair now! The tree behind her is her placenta tree. It is doing quite well thanks to that wonderful fertilizer. I just had to take some fall pictures of Keziah and her tree before the red leaves fall off. Here are some more shots from today's photo shoot.

I actually have a great excuse for why I haven't been blogging much lately. We finally sold our house in Tennessee and bought a house in North Carolina which we will close on this Wednesday. So the past month and a half has been spent dealing with all sorts of ups and downs dealing with that. I really don't want to go into it all but suffice it to say there were a lot of bumps in the road. But through it all God has been so good to us and blessed us with a wonderful house and property in the mountains that we love. We absolutely can't wait to get into our new home and feel settled. And it will be so nice not being away from my husband for several days each week! I can't believe he has been working and commuting there since July! It has definitely been a challenging fall for our family.

Of course there have been several wonderful moments in the past month. We had a fun Halloween and Keziah went trick-or-treating for the first time. OK, it was one house and that was Michael Paul's parents, but it still counts! She went as a giraffe and she was adorable! I kept meaning to post a Halloween picture and just never got around to it. Well, here it is:

Keziah surprised us last week by taking her first steps in the middle of Home Depot as we looked at carpet samples. I was so glad her Daddy happened to be there. We were so scared he was going to miss that milestone with as much time as he has to spend away from us working. She's still not really walking yet as crawling is much safer, but she will take a few steps with encouragement. It actually appears as though she did not get her Daddy's dare-devil personality. She is so cautious about everything. I am actually quite thankful for this. However, she is still my little monkey and is very good at climbing anything and everything. She is such a neat little girl and I continue to fall more and more in love with her as her personality develops.

Hopefully, I will be back next week with pictures of our new house. And I really hope I can blog more than once in December. It's going to be a busy month trying to set up a new house, celebrate Christmas (I haven't even thought about shopping yet - yikes!) and planning that first birthday party!

I can't believe my baby is almost one! This year has flown by!

Packing Woes

I've always thought of myself as a minimalist. Well, not any more, at least not in reality, in theory maybe. Although I would very very much like to be a minimalist.

We are moving this Friday. I've been packing for two days now and realizing we have a TON of JUNK. The conclusion I have come to is that hobbies = stuff. Michael Paul and I have too many hobbies.

We've always thought we didn't have near as much junk as other people. We have a tiny house. We visit friends houses and notice most people have things like multiple tv's (we have one), multiple beds for their multiple bedrooms (we have one), and other random things like china cabinets, chests of drawers, and loads of toys and baby stuff (some of which we would like but haven't gotten around to buying). Needless to say we've been feeling pretty confident we could move to NC in one trip in the biggest U-haul one can rent. "We don't have near the stuff most people have and people move everyday!" is what we've been telling ourselves.

I'm starting to face reality. One trip would be a miracle.

Back to my hobbies = junk conclusion. We might not have a lot of the things that 90% of middle class Americans have in their homes. But we have soooooo much junk that no one else has due to our insane amount of hobbies.

In addition to packing the conventional stuff that everyone has -dishes, clothes, dvd's and cd's, random doodads, clocks, wall pictures etc. - I have packed several hobby-related boxes.

Here are my hobbies and the number of large boxes I packed of junk relating to said hobby:

Scrapbooking: 3

Crocheting: 3 (I can't throw out a half used ball of yarn)

Calligraphy/ Art stuff: 1

Sewing: 2

Michael Paul contributes the following:

Leather working: 1

Wood working: 2

Building and Painting Models: 1

Collecting and restoring antiques: 3

Not to mention, his big hobby: music. In addition to several guitars and amps, there are no less than 12 boxes of pedals, strings, soldering stuff, guitar tools, music books, and I don't even know what half of it is but it is somehow necessary for his guitar hobby.

Our combined hobby of outdoor playing/ camping equals a ton of space in the truck dedicated to sleeping bags, camp chairs, camping stoves and equipment, rock climbing gear, kayaking gear, hiking backpacks and hiking gear etc. etc. etc.

I am soooooo over our hobbies!

You can't be a well-rounded person and a minimalist as well.