My Little Houdini

Look Mom, no legs! (Calum in the air vent)
Calum stuck in the kitchen cabinet.

Yesterday, Calum got behind the kitchen trashcan and had the best time pushing and pulling it out. I have no idea how he got in there, because he is so quiet, but it was very hard getting him out!

I can't believe Calum will be 10 months old tomorrow! He is so different than Cooper and Shelby

were as babies. He is quiet like Cooper was, but unlike Cooper he somehow gets into everything possible that I don't want him to. Almost everyday he plays in the toilet water. I don't know how long my nerves can take it! Pray that he won't get hurt and I will stay sane!

Thanksgiving Feast

Shelby had a great time at her big Thanksgiving Feast at school.

All my family plus Great Uncle Ed and Aunt Kae from Kansas gathered at Uncle Kenny's the day after Thanksgiving. Shelby and Anna's Aunt Lesley let them play dress up with her old accessories. Then they did a comedy show for us. Cooper joined in as the Guitar Hero (Cooper got to play xBox for the first time). Cooper read some Thanksgiving poems for Mimi. The kids had an unforgettable time!

Craft Girl

Mimi, these are some of the things Shelby made out of your shells. She spent all afternoon a couple Sundays ago making things with shells, yarn, foam and glue. She says she wants to have her own craft show on TV. She is so happy when she is creating things (as long as I don't tell her how to do it!)

Fall!

We just got our new Cannon Powershot yesterday from butterflyphoto.com (our other camera accidentally swam with the fishes when we were at the lake.) It was about $50 cheaper than Walmart and free shipping! The video quality is much better than our old camera. Calum is 9 months old now and into everything! He pulled everything out of one of the kitchen cabinets the other day, then climbed in and got stuck. It was so funny! He is starting to stand without holding on and says Dada, baba and Ha for Hi. He is just so fun to watch!

There is nothing like a beautiful Sugar Maple in the Fall. (The leaves all fell off our huge Sugar Maple before our camera arrived.) Cooper, Shelby and the neighborhood gang have had so much fun raking piles of leaves, hiding in them, making forts, etc., everyday lately.

Swim Team!

The kids had a blast being on our neighborhood swim team this summer! The final meet was last night at Warner Park, between our team, Hidden Harbor, Holly Hills and Mountain Shadows. It was a very exciting night with a lot of great, close races to watch. It was the kids favorite meet of the year because it was at night (it was cooler and they got to stay up way past their bedtime) and it had the best concession stand. Shelby has amazed me this year. She went from doing the kickboard races at the beginning of the season to racing freestyle the whole length of the pool without stopping! We have Alyssa, one of the sweetest teenagers in our neighborhood to thank. She was so good at teaching Shelby this summer. I just love how our neighborhood comes together and helps each other out during practices. Cooper has learned all the strokes this year and says his favorite is butterfly and second fav is freestyle (just like his Mommy). Cooper almost beat an 8 year old in freestyle last night. He has a great dive! He just needs to work on his technique. He doesn't swim all the way in to the wall. He stops a few strokes before he should, then glides in to the wall. He has learned so much this year thanks to an awesome coach who volunteers at our pool, Coach Bart. Cooper loves him! We left early at around 9:30 after Cooper's final event, the freestyle relay, so we still haven't found out who won. Apparently our team has won for years and years, but Holly Hills got very close to beating us a couple times this year. At the break time in the middle of the meet, Head Coach Joe got the team together and chewed them out (but with a lot of very deliberate self-control) for not trying their hardest and being more concerned with the concession stand and playing with friends than swimming their best. He gave a great pep talk. Cooper thought it was very cool and he got his act together after that. I can't wait to hear what the final score was!

P.S. Our family had so much fun watching the U.S. Olympic swim trials. I especially loved seeing Dara Torres the 41 year old Mom of a two year old, win her race. She is the oldest female swimmer to qualify for the Olympics. She didn't just barely qualify either. She got first place and an American record in the 50 free! I can't wait to watch her race again! This is her fifth Olympics, and she even missed one Olympics. I am so inspired by her. It makes me want to get back into swimming! Hey, I'm just 35!

Shelby, with Coach Joe, getting ready to dive in for the free relay.

Shelby doing a great job swimming in the relay. She has learned to get her arms way up out of the water and keep her head in! She has great form! By the end of the year she was racing 6 year olds.

Cooper, Daniel and Rylie with their Hidden Harbor power dots!

Cooper doing his great dive in the free relay!

Cooper swimming freestyle against Jakey and Daniel.

Shelby's first race (at Hidden Harbor) when she went all the way across the pool without stopping. She was so excited she won her heat!

Calum's Baptism and Father's Day

Calum was baptized by Pastor Robert on Father's Day. It was so sweet! Calum was his usual laid back self and didn't fuss a bit when Robert took him and put the water on his head. My Mom and Dad, Kenny and Lesley, and Scott's Mom and Dad came over for lunch afterwards. I made some of Scott's favorite things: deviled eggs, bean salad, pork loin roast, and homemade coconut cake. Scott had taken the kids to the Greenway to ride bikes then swimming on Saturday, so he just wanted me to let him take a nap after everyone went home. He was very happy!

Calum's First Overnight Trip

We had a great time at my parent's this weekend. It was Calum's first overnight trip. We had lots of fun at Dollywood. Cooper rode the Mystery Mine with Scott, and Scott and I rode the Tennessee Tornado. Cooper was so proud of a basketball that he won from one of the games. Shelby's favorite rides were the River Rampage and the Slidewinder. She also loved the bird show. The kids are at Elkmont camping with my parents right now. They are supposed to stay up at my parents until Saturday (a week), which is the longest they have ever been away from Mom and Dad.

While I was writing this Calum rolled from back to front for the first time!

Look Out World, Here I Come!

After a couple days of coasting on their bikes without pedals at the Greenway, Cooper and Shelby both learned to ride their bikes without training wheels on Memorial Day. (Cooper learned very reluctantly and Shelby very eagerly!) They had so much fun riding bikes all day in the cul-de-sac at Nana and Gramp's house. Shelby still needs a little push to get started, which makes her very mad, because she wants to be able to ride as good as Cooper. Cooper is doing so good on his bike, I let him ride down to the stop sign at the end of our street and back (only when I am outside watching because it is a pretty busy road.) The neighbors across the road let him take a detour through their driveway, which is one of those that is a half circle and you can go in one end and out the other.

Shelby In Spring

Shelby has been enjoying God's creation this Spring! She loves to pick strawberries out of our strawberry patch.

Shelby was so excited when she saw that a moth came out of the cocoon of one of the seven caterpillers she put in her bug jar two weeks earlier!
Shelby was also very excited about graduating from Preschool. She had a great year and loved her teacher, Ms. Suzanne!

Cooper's Baseball and Piano

Cooper had a good baseball season with the Blue Jays, although his team only won two games. He learned a lot about the game and hit very well.

Cooper had his very first piano recital right after a baseball game. He played London Bridge and Little Playmates. He did very well, but we have learned that we are going to try our hardest to limit activities to one per child. I think I almost had a nervous breakdown trying to fit everything we needed to get done into one day. When Cooper got home from school, it was a mad rush to get homework and piano practice done in time to eat dinner and get to baseball practice or a game in the evening. Poor Cooper! I had him take piano because I wanted him to be well rounded, but I learned that it is just way too much to do both baseball and piano.
Cooper got an award for perfect attendance and his first piano recital.

Shelby's Dance Recital

Shelby had a very special night last night! She danced to the song, Alleluia, in the beautiful Worship Through Dance recital. She was so precious!

Yes, Children Have Changed My Reading Habits!

I read djinny's Murmurs and Mutterings this morning, and since I had just put Calum down for a nap and Shelby was not awake yet, I decided to go through the list of books she has on her blog. I used to be a voracious reader. Scott always hates when I get into a good book because I pretty much ignore him, housework, and kids until I finish it. I realized this morning, though, that that hasn't happened in quite some time. Often, when I start to read at night in bed, my eyes are so tired that the words seem to float around on the page. So, yes, I agree with Alpha Mummy, my taste in books has (hopefully only temporarily) been ruined by kids. This list has inspired me to read at least one of these books that I haven't read before this summer. Love in the Time of Cholera looks interesting.

From djinny's blog: "What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you read for school, underline the ones you started but didn't finish (or are on the shelf waiting for a free week)." Since I can't underline I made these red.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

He's a Twiddler!

Neither Cooper nor Shelby twiddled their hair when they were little like I did. My Mom tells me I twiddled my hair so bad that I made knots in my hair, which she had to cut off. I think I inherited the habit from my parents, who are twiddlers too! For the past week Calum has been twiddling his hair when he is tired. It seems to make him happy when he does it. It is so funny! Today, he even sucked his fingers and twiddled his hair at the same time, just like I used to.

Here is a video for you to watch Mom and Dad, and my favorite pictures from the week.

My little Cal Cal

I finally took the time to capture one of Calum's adorable smiles yesterday. He is growing so fast! He is already 11 weeks old and about 13 lbs. 9 oz. He looks just like Cooper with darker hair. He is a little longer than Cooper and not quite as heavy. Calum's latest things he has learned are chewing on his hands and saying what sounds like 'mama' when he is crying.

Bitter Sweet

Yesterday was the dreaded first round of shots for Calum. I did not want to take my sweet little boy to get those mean nasty shots! (Then I thought about the people I heard about in San Diego that have died from Measles, and knew I needed to.) He did not feel good yesterday with all that nasty stuff in his body. He slept like a little angel, though. I fed him last night at 8:30, and he slept from 9pm to 3:30am. I fed him and he went right back to sleep until 7:30. This morning he seems to be back to his normal happy self!

Play Time

After talking about it for the past almost 2 years, we finally bought a playset. Scott finished setting it up this weekend. The kids and our neighbor, Rachel, had lots of fun playing on it! They even ate dinner together in the fort. Cosmo has already learned how to climb up the ladder by himself!

Cooper wanted me to take this picture of him and Cosmo resting on the couch. A rare moment of calm. Cute!

Easter Pictures

We had a wonderful time celebrating Easter and my parents 40th Anniversary on March 23rd. We all went to the early service at Kirt and Kimberly's church, Hickory Valley Christian. It was an amazing worship service. Then everyone came over to our house for lunch and an Easter egg hunt with the real eggs. Cosmo ate about 5 of them before we realized he likes eggs. We made my parents a plate at Fire it Up with all the grandkids handprints or footprints for their Anniversary.

Mimi dying eggs with the kids.

My parents, Scott's parents, Kirt, Kimberly, Anna, Ian, Kenny and Lesley at the dinner table.
My parents and their 40th Anniversary plate.
Cousin Anna looking for eggs in the strawberry patch.

More Firsts!

Each of the kids have had a big 'first' lately. Shelby was very excited to learn how to blow bubbles (with gum) for the first time on March 6. She is having lots of fun showing everybody a bubble!

Cooper's big first came the next day on March 7. He went to his first sleepover party and actually stayed the whole night without Mom or Dad! It was for his friend, Daniel, who lives across the street. He had so much fun and was so proud of himself for staying the whole night! He stayed up until midnight and was very tired the next day.

Calum's first real bath was on March 9. I had been just sponge bathing him because it took a long time for all his umbilical cord to come off.

Calum's first day at church was yesterday. I fed him before we left for church and he slept the whole time during church. Towards the end of church, he started to cry, but by the time I got back to the nursery he was quiet and stayed asleep. So, I left him in the nursery in his car seat while I went back in church to take communion.

This is the best picture we have been able to get of Calum about to smile so far. His Daddy is holding him in this picture. I can tell he loves his Daddy so much. He already seems to get excited when Daddy comes home. Daddy does the fun stuff with him like flying him around like Super Baby.

Calum's Latest Trick!

Calum turned 3 weeks old on Saturday, and Sunday he rolled over from his tummy to his back for the first time. The next day he entertained us all by flipping over every time Scott put him down on the ground to let him have some tummy time. I think he did it about 15 times. So last night we took a video of his latest trick. It has been so fun to see Calum's sweet smiles this week, too. We haven't been able to catch it on camera yet, though.

Daylight Saving Time and Easter

I'm very thankful that my Mom is here this week to help me out. It has been a big help! But, I'm getting a little bored being at home so much lately. I can start driving on Saturday. I will be glad when I can start getting out of the house more often. Anyhow, last night was a good night. I fed Calum at 9:30 pm and he didn't wake up until 2:30am, then he slept until 6 am! Yeah! It felt so good to get that much sleep.

This morning I learned 2 things: how DST and Easter are determined. We spring forward on March 9 and have Easter on March 23rd, which is very early this year. Here are the links I read: http://people.howstuffworks.com/easter.htm and http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/index.html

Time to feed Calum!

Welcome Calum!

Our beautiful, sweet baby, Calum James, was born on February 2 at 8:38 am. He was 8 lbs. 13 oz. and 21 inches long. He is healthy and strong! Praise God! We may call him Cal, CJ, or Calum. We aren't sure yet. Calum was a common name for early Scottish Christians to name their sons. We heard the name while watching the BBC series, All Creatures Great and Small, based on the book by James Herriot. So far Cooper and Shelby have adjusted very well to the new addition. They love to do anything they can to help Mommy with the baby. They think it is so cool that Mommy has the perfect 'things' for the baby to drink from. Cooper wanted Calum to lay in his bed next to him last night while Daddy read the Bible. Cooper just loved having his little brother next to him. It was precious. So far, Calum's crying at night hasn't bothered the kids. I'm so thankful! Here are some pictures! I love the one of all three of our children together at the hospital!

Calum's first picture in the operating room.

Calum with clothes on for the first time.

Calum's first bath that my wonderful nurse, Charly, gave him in my room. She had just put shampoo on his hair.

Calum with his first suds on his hair. He loved having his hair washed!

Calum and his proud big sister, Shelby.

Cooper and his little brother.

Our three wonderful children!

Scott's parent's, Nana and Gramps, with Calum

My parents, Mimi and Papa, with Calum.

Scott getting Calum ready for the ride home from the hospital on Monday afternoon. Isn't he cute in his little hoodie!