Early Christmas present!

I got my first Christmas present this weekend... a fire pit! Love it! Noah has had "camp-fires" quite often over at Papa and Grandma's and it is always the highlight of the evening. So now we are able to have our very own camp-fires in our backyard. We had one last night and it was so much fun - there is just something special about sitting around a campfire! I think my next Christmas present needs to be an ax though - because we can only borrow Papa's for so long!

She has teeth!

Watch our Grammie - she has teeth! (She has her bottom 2, and she has had them for a good month now - makes for a super cute smile!)




Noah showing Daddy how to shoot the deer - or whatever it was they were shooting??

Grammie had the week off, so she came to Fresno and we got to go to dinner and visit.

How to tell when a baby has a burp

Abigail is just about to get out of the "burping" stage, but I wanted to pass on this little bit of wisdom to all of you new mommies, before I forget! When Abigail was in the NICU in Modesto our favorite nurse Toni would often say "Oh, I think she swallowed wind" (Her Australian way of saying she has a burp). Sure enough, we would pat her back and up a burp would come and the fussing would stop. Finally I asked her how she knew - because she wouldn't say it every time she fussed, just some of the time. She told me that you look right above their upper lip, and if that area is darker, they likely have a burp. It will just look slightly darker - not the lip, but right above the lip. It looks almost like a very light 5 o clock shadow of a mustache. I would have never noticed it if she hadn't said it, but once we brought Abigail home I would always check the skin above her lip and it was a sure-fire way to tell if she had a burp. (Small print - Not making any medical claims, if their lips are blue or purple definitely take them in, and I am not sure if this will work on all babies). I hope that helps one new mommy!

Political Activists

Abigail checking out the lawn sign.


Noah helping Abigail with her bow.


Chanting: "Yes on 8, yes on 8" as the cars drove by! :-) Just kidding.

In case you didn't know where we stand/stood on the issue, now you do! If you ask Noah he can tell you about it too - next time you see him ask him who can get married and he will tell you "One man, one woman". For a while there before he got it down he would come up with all kinds of wrong combinations, like: One man, 8 women - or One woman, 2 men. But now he knows the right answer! And he would always point out the prop 8 signs when we would drive by them.

The Saturday before the election we felt led to go and show our support for prop 8. and hopefully encourage others to vote, so we took our sign and walked to the main intersection by our house and held up the sign. We prayed and sang and waved to people as they drove by. It was pretty neat to see peoples responses. We got a lot of honks, waves, and thumbs-ups. It was interesting, we only got one car of thumbs-downs and that was by the kids in the back seat of a car. (I guess their parents are teaching them just like we are teaching ours).

Praise God Prop 8 passed! The little exercise in freedom of speech that we did as a family was really a blessing to us, and a lot of fun too.

In honor of Doug

Doug loves Star Wars. We even walked into our wedding reception to the Imperial March... so in honor of him, please enjoy this video - it is pretty cool, even for non star wars fans!!!

Chinese babies and swinging

Princess power


Chinese baby - my mom brought their outfits back from China.




Dazed and confused - hanging on to the swing and her pacifier for dear life. :-)

Bounce house

King of dark, but here is Noah showing off his bouncing skills in the bounce house!

Cake walk video

Here is Noah going around the "cake walk" by himself - so cute, and he won!!! We got to take home 3 yummy cupcakes thanks to Noah! :-)

Fall Festival

We went to a little Fall Festival at Bethany church right by our house yesterday. Noah had a lot of fun in the bounce house!


He is wearing a little China boy outfit that my parents brought him back - all the way from China.


Checking out my little pouch baby.


She is becoming a thumb sucker!


Peek-a-boo!


Here is Noah doing the cake walk - it was pretty cute. I tried to upload the next even cuter one, but it didn't work - I will try again.

Enjoys!

FIRE!!! :-)

Tonight "the boys" were all over here playing board games in victory of Doug passing his exam. (Yes, he passed - yeah!!!) Anyways, Jessica came with her husband David, and we decided to bake the boys some cookies. So we got busy putting everything together and I turned the oven on to preheat it. Only thing was I had forgotten that Doug had put the last pizza box in the oven to keep it warm. A minute or so later I was melting the butter in the microwave and I smelled something really funny. I peered in at the butter, and then it hit me - "Oh no! The pizza box!!" So I got Doug's attention and he came and got the box that was on fire and carried it outside. It was still on fire but Doug had gone back in to open the windows etc. so the fire alarm wouldn't go off. Darren heroically came out to... rescue the pizza, he scooped up the slices and took them inside. I was left outside with the burning box. Then Jessica came out with a big glass of water that we poured on the burning pizza box. Yeah Jessica! Phew! All that happened was my pride got hurt (especially since this is the 2nd fire I have caused in an oven), and we had "smoked pizza" - I guess that could be a specialty item?? Well, praise the Lord it wasn't any worse! Jessica said it was pretty funny how I calmly asked Doug "Doug, can you please come in here? - the oven is on fire".