Tender Moments

Gavin and I were both extra cranky today. He's been lacking some sleep lately and was hungry without my realizing it several times. I seem to have a little extra dose of pregnancy hormones helping me to be moody and irritable for a few days (well, hopefully it's just for a few days!). So putting our two ornery selves together made for a rather frustrating day for both of us. But God gently reminded me tonight what a rewarding and wonderful experience this being-a-mother thing is, even including the daily grind of discipline and teething, sleeping and eating.

When Gavin was a baby (maybe a month or two old) I made up a simple song to sing to him while he nursed before taking a nap or sleeping for the night. Whenever he got old enough to have and express a preference, he started telling me not to sing the song (probably because he knew it meant he had to go to sleep!), so I got out of the habit of singing it to him. Tonight as I was rocking him (for the second time) I decided to try it again, and to my surprise he listened closely and looked up at me while I sang. He asked me to sing it again another 3 or 4 times (it's kind of long!) and then pulled my face down to his and gave me kisses for a minute or two. Then when I put him in his bed he pulled my hand to his mouth and kissed it, too. It was so touching for him to spontaneously express such love to me in the ways I usually express it to him. (I have to say I'm also relieved to know that my song doesn't seem to bring tortuous memories to him since he almost always cried before going to sleep!)

Thank you, Jesus, for these beautiful gifts in the midst of the daily struggles of being a mother that help me remember to be thankful for the amazing blessing my child is to me.

Halloween

Yesterday we took Gavin trick-or-treating to friends' houses in our neighborhood and then to Grandma's house, where we spent the night (so Gavin could potentially get some sleep, which didn't happen since he was up from 1-4am - thankfully the second 1am and not the first, so *just* 3 hours. However, we didn't find out about this until morning thanks to a very kind Grandma who stayed up with him and probably majorly needed a nap today). Anyway, a few weeks ago we went looking for costumes a couple times and finally found a tow truck costume at Goodwill, which Gavin was quite thrilled about. He was also pretty thrilled to actually wear the costume (at least after we were out the door) and quickly got the hang of knocking, saying "trick-or-treat" and picking a piece of candy. This morning as we got into the van to come home, he asked "where are we going to trick-or-treat?" It was fun to watch Gavin enjoy himself, and we enjoyed getting to see friends and family (several of Chad's aunts and uncles were at his parents' house).

Sugar and Spice...

... and everything nice, that's what little girls are made of!

Absence explained

You might have been wondering why my blog posts suddenly and (almost) completely stopped. Well, a very tiny little baby suddenly caused a dramatic change in my daily life - tiny, meaning, at the time about the size of a lentil, and now something like the size of a turnip. We anticipate meeting this little one at the end of February :). I've been feeling baby movements since about 13 1/2 weeks and Chad got to feel the baby for the first time today (17 1/2 weeks).

Unlike my pregnancy with Gavin, this pregnancy has pretty much knocked me out of the normally-functioning world for a good 2 1/2 months, so blogging was one of the first things to go (soon after were washing the dishes, menu planning, cooking, pretty much anything involving food or the thought of it, cleaning the house, etc. etc.). Perhaps I'll be back to it soon, although the bathrooms are a little higher priority than the blog at the moment...

Random Events

Here are a few things from the past week or so that I found funny and didn't want to forget:

On Wednesday, Gavin was in his crib for "nap time" (though it was really just "alone time" that day since he was not interested in sleeping, which is a fairly common occurrance) talking and playing for about an hour or a little more. Suddenly I heard his bedroom door open and he walked into where I was saying, "I got it!" (meaning, he finally figured out how to get out of his crib). Thankfully he didn't hurt himself climbing out! On Thursday, he climbed out again after about half an hour and managed to bruise his chin (mildly). I was firm that time about getting back in the crib and staying there (the first time I couldn't quit laughing), so hopefully he won't keep up the trend. (We were away for the weekend so he hasn't had the opportunity to try it again.)

Early Thursday morning, Gavin climbed into his high chair, so I asked him if he was hungry. "What would you like for breakfast? Pancakes?" The reply, in a most serious voice: "jellybeans." (We ended up settling on grapes and avocado instead.)

Today Gavin was, again, asking for "trail mik" for a snack as we drove home from eastern Oregon. Although we have pronounced "trail mix" for him so he could easily hear the last sound and he usually pronounces nearly everything extremely clearly, we've not been able to help him understand that the sound is "ks" instead of "k" at the end of "mix". Chad told me he finally figured out that when Gavin says "trail mik", he's not stubbornly mispronouncing it - Gavin actually thinks he's saying the singular form of "trail mix" (and that "trail mix" is plural).

Speaking of mispronouncing, Gavin saves his stubborn mispronunciation for the word "jar." His little "computer" has a game on it where it asks you to press a letter on the keyboard, and when you get it right it says something like "Wow, cool! A is for apple!". In this case, J is for jar. Gavin first repeated the word as "yar," and because we know he is perfectly capable of correctly pronouncing J (like in "jump" and "jellybean") and actually likes to get the pronunciation right, we said, "actually, it's jar. Can you say jar?" Somehow he found the mispronounciation funny and now finds great pleasure in saying "yar!" loudly every time the game asks for J, looking around to make sure we are paying attention.

Georgia/Tennessee Trip in May, Part 1

We visited my parents and grandfather the first week of May in Georgia and Tennessee and had a great time with plenty of adventures.

Our first adventure was getting to Atlanta, or really, getting to Dallas (our layover city).

This beauty and quite of few of his siblings caused us first to divert to Austin to sit on the tarmac for 4 hours and then, trying once again to land in Dallas, to divert to San Antonio, this time for only an hour or so of tarmac-sitting. When we finally arrived at the Dallas airport, we had been on the same airplane for 14 hours, not including the one 45-minute break when we got off to find some food in the Austin airport. Thankfully Gavin was absolutely content the whole entire time to play, sleep, eat, look out the window and generally be a happy toddler. What a blessing! If he had been cranky I think we would have really hated the experience, but since he was happy, we were pretty happy too. We weren't as happy the next day going on about an hour of sleep in the Dallas airport the night before, but the airport had brought out cots for the many stranded travelers so at least we were able to let Gavin get some rest (one of us laid beside him on the cot).

Once we made it to Atlanta, my parents picked us up and we drove to Springfield, Tennessee, where my grandfather and a few other relatives live. We enjoyed visiting with them, spent the night and then headed to Pigeon Mountain (in north Georgia) for a short camping trip. It was Gavin's first camping trip and my first in several years, and we all had a great time. (And Gavin slept just fine in his pack-n-play in the tent, at least at night, which I had been concerned about seeing as he had just started consistently sleeping through the night and was teething right before the trip, which usually means night-waking and generally bad sleep for him. Again, a blessing!)

We hiked to a beautiful waterfall

and then went to Rocktown, where Gavin (and the rest of us) got to climb some really cool rocks (see other people's photos of the rock formations here).

Chad Climbing

Gavin Climbing

Gavin Having a Generally Great Time

Afterwards, we packed up our campsite and headed to my parents house in Warner Robins. (And of course had to stop by a Chick-Fil-A on the way home. Hmm... I think that might have been the second Chick-Fil-A stop we had made in 3 days of being in the south... what can I say? Eat Mor Chikin!)
More to come...

Berry Picking

We went raspberry and marionberry picking today at Chad's Aunt's house and at Thompson Farms, respectively. The raspberries are on their way out (but still tasty, and free - thanks Boyles!) but the marionberries are huge, sweet (well, mostly, if you pick the right ones!), plentiful and cheap ($1/pound)! Gavin certainly preferred picking raspberries to picking marionberries - it's much easier and more fun to get tasty fruit if it's thorn-free, at your eye level and doesn't leave you puckering if you accidentally get a not-quite-ripe one.

Here are a few photos from the raspberry goodness (sorry, we didn't carry our camera out into the marionberry fields):

Picking

Showing

Chomping

Still to come: We went to visit my parents at the beginning of May and had a great time. I have lots of photographs and things to write about. Also I'm sure you're dying to hear about Gavin's latest antics, so I'll try to get to that soon, too.