tummy time

This weekend I remembered about tummy time. I guess it just slipped my mind until I read on babycenter.com that "your baby may be able to prop himself up with his arms by now..." and I realized my neglect. So this morning Ivar had some time on his belly. He was a bit concerned, kept looking at me with a confussed look like surely I had made a mistake and gave little grunts and sighs as if to say, "I don't enjoy this, so whenever you'd like to flip me over, that would be great." And when I flipped him, he was much happier.

Today I put him in his new jeans! I had a gift card to gap kids and found these jeans on the clearance rack. They're still too big for him, but I couldn't help myself this morning (plus, he had nothing clean to wear...) I thought the John Deer blanket from my Uncle Carl was a good selection to go with his work pants.
I was with my Grandma last week and told her I got Ivar his first pair of jeans and she gave me a look of disgust like I have never seen. She even made an audible disapproving sound! This is unheard of from my agreeable Grandma. But she has always had a thing about babies wearing adult clothes. She believes baby clothes should be soft and cuddly. And I would say I absolutely agree Grandma!...until I found these jeans. Then I made my exception. Ivar will just be sure not to wear them in her presence.

He's so cute, isn't he?!! :)

Christmas and a baby

My friend Beth wrote a great blog post yesterday that I think you'll enjoy. It made me laugh hard as not only am I trying to right my habits after Christmas cookie season, but I'm also trying to get some sort of plan together in order to 1) work off this extra baby-love on my body, 2) get a shower in each day and 3) to change out of my pajama pants by suppertime.

Click here to read Beth's post entitled: Breaking Up is Hard to Do

a good kick in the pants

I read Beth Moore's blog and I love it. It continually encourages me, redirects my thinking, realigns my priorities and sometimes it just plain offers a kick in the hiney to get back in the Bible, to memorize God's word and to start talking to Jesus again.
Well, I just got a swift kick. I read on of her posts on Saturday night and it stopped me in my tracks, got me to open up my Bible before I went to bed and to pray again like I mean it.
I think you should read her post from Saturday night. It got me excited to be a part of God's family and made me want to dive deeper. One way to dive deeper is to memorize scripture. On her blog, Beth encourages her readers to memorize one verse every two weeks. This way, by 2012, we should have 26 verses memorized. Completely doable.
I have trouble figuring out what verse I should memorize, but in her comments each week people from all over the world write the verse that they are memorizing and somewhere in those comments I find the verse the stands out for me and my circumstances.
This is a New Years resolution that I feel really committed to. There could be nothing more fruitful than to meditate on God's word! And I'm so excited to grab hold of my personal walk with God again. So I'm starting with Isaiah 2:3. I hope you join me!

one little word

Some of you might remember how I chose one word to focus on for 2010. This is Ali Edward's idea, a favorite blogger/scrapbooker of mine. Last year my word was Trust and I thought about this word a lot throughout the year. When I picked it, I knew we were hoping to get pregnant and knew that if we did get pregnant we'd want to be closer to family. And I knew that this would affect my work and Rory's work. Rory had an office space leased out for three years so we had no intention to move back to Minnesota. There were a lot of unknowns and so the word I chose was chosen to keep me calm, at peace and remembering that God always has the bigger picture.

This year I have chosen the word Try. Truthfully, this year, my word picked me. Last year I had to read from the list of words to choose from and ended up selecting four words and then finally narrowing it down to one. But this year, I just had one word come to mind the very first time I thought about choosing a word.

There are a few things on my life list that I really want to pursue, but out of fear of failure, have yet to take even the first step towards the goal. I know that to not try is the actual failure. I get so worried about what others might think that I end up paralyzed. But in 2011 my word is Try. I'm just going to try, and if I fail then at least I tried which means I didn't actually fail.

I know this all sounds very vague and that I have nothing in this writing for you to actually sink your teeth into. But for now I'm going to keep the particulars to myself and let them unfold in real time. I'll keep you posted on how this one goes.

I would encourage you to pick a word too. There is something grounding about the process. It sort of helps you keep a continual focus for 365 days. I wrote about the process last year here. And Ali Edwards has written about the process here.

the holy family

I was so excited for our Halloween costumes this year. I had it all planned out. Rory would be Joseph, I would be Mary and we would drive all around to friends and family houses in a panic, with Rory pleading for room in their Inn, telling them that his wife was great with child. In my head, this was genius. I had my mom get costumes from church and I was ready for the drama to unfold.

In an odd twist, I actually was going into labor on Halloween, so I never got to live out this brilliant costume idea. Instead, about the time I was hoping to be going door to door, laughing about going into labor, I was actually in active labor, trying to survive from contraction to contraction. (It should be noted, however, that the picture above of me as Mary was taken moments before we went to the hospital the first time. As we were leaving the house I was lamenting the fact that such a perfect costume would not be used and so I put it on and had Rory take my picture. This might be added to my birth story: If you are trying on halloween costumes on your way to the hospital, you probably aren't in serious labor yet.)

Fast forward to a few weeks ago when Ivar was asked to be baby Jesus at my home church. Remember how we just weren't quite comfortable having a 5th grader carry our newborn up stairs while wearing a robe cinched up with a rope? Our baby just felt to fragile to hand over so soon...

So, imagine our great surprise when last weekend, as we were walking into church for the Christmas program, we were intercepted by the nativity coordinator and asked if the three of us would be Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus on Christmas Eve. Rory's reply was, "For crying out loud!" (I think he knew this holy family thing wasn't going to just go away) We agreed because this time we would be holding our baby and as Rory put it so eloquently, "well, we'll be there anyway..." Thank you, Joseph.

So on Christmas Eve, Ivar got to be Jesus. And he was fantastic. He kicked his bare feet and wiggled his hands the whole time. I'm afraid I looked more like Cousin Itt than Mary, as my hair covered my face the whole time I looked down to keep Ivar content. But it was great, and a truly sweet moment for our little family.