Nathan, Christy, and Ozias

Ozias and Stella; Cousins of 2008

2009-12-25T17:02:00.001-08:00

Turkey or Goose?

2009-12-10T13:45:00.000-08:00

With the holidays upon us, I wondered if Ozias was my silly goose or my little turkey. I think he's quite convincing as both.

Hide and Seek

2009-11-19T19:26:00.000-08:00

Our favorite time of day is when Daddy gets home!

Zias Wears Dad's Shirt

2009-08-12T14:34:00.000-07:00

Like a choir robe for the little guy!

Street Painting Day

2009-06-06T22:43:00.000-07:00

Grandpa and Oz

2009-05-21T22:27:00.001-07:00

Eating summer strawberries together at Grandma and Grandpa's. What a sharp little bow tie he's wearing! :)

Oz 11 Months

2009-04-24T23:15:00.000-07:00

Some fun pictures from April. Includes a tired baby from the zoo trip, bubble-beard, friends having a snack at Swap-n-play, a co-op at our church.

Spring Break In Redmond

2009-04-12T21:05:00.001-07:00

What a great time relaxing and playing with our kids. Meals together, prayer, walks in the rugged landscape, and sincere grateful hearts for God's creation and community.

2009-04-12T20:44:00.000-07:00

Ozias at 10 Months

2009-04-12T20:42:00.001-07:00

I have the cutest baby ever!

2009-02-21T21:48:00.000-08:00

I'm not just saying that because I'm his mom either. I mean seriously. Get a load of this kid.

Nathan asked me if I posed this picture because it's just so darn cute, but I promise I didn't. I was actually trying to work and when I looked up, he was reading in his tent! (Well, actually, eating his book in his tent.)

I outgrew my jammies!

I vant to eat your beets! (No seriously, I love beets.)

My name is Baby O.

What in the world...? What's wrong with your face?

You've got to be kidding me.

Eat a Lime! (For those of you that don't live in Portland, this is a popular bumper sticker sold by a local pirate band. It's sound advice for those who are at risk for scurvy.)

Doubled our age

2009-01-31T15:00:00.000-08:00

In a few more days, Ozias will have been out of me for as long as he was in me. I'm not sure what that means, but it seems like it's a landmark that should be commemorated with some recent pictures and videos. Our new stage, "Mobilization" has progressed so quickly that when I was emptying the videos off the camera, I thought that he looked "so little" in the ones at the beginning of the file, when in reality, it was less than a month ago. For example, there was a video of him struggling to pick up a piece of noodle with his whole hand that is only a few weeks old, but now he can use his "pincer grasp" with the best of them.

My favorite part about this new stage is that he can play by himself while I get things done. Not that I actually accomplish much, since I have to put down whatever I'm doing and pick up the camera every 5 minutes! Here's a few of my favorites from this month

The ball is our all-time favorite toy!

I just fed myself some egg yolk!

I love this picture!

Christmas in Dundee and Idaho

2008-12-30T12:50:00.000-08:00

We spent a few days in Dundee with Nathan's parents and brothers having the traditional present giving time on the eve of Christmas. We also made rootbeer together and tried to carbonate it using dry ice. Snow of 18-20 inches made it hard to get out of Portland. We put on our chains and drove 25mph all the way to Grandma and Grandpas.

Noises

2008-12-17T22:03:00.000-08:00

I love snow days! I can finally get to all the things I've been wanting to do forever. I even managed to clean the bathroom! This is one of my favorite videos of all time. Watch for the following fun treats:

*The blank stare

*The travelling drool

*The spit bubble

*The monkey screech

We're at "that stage!"

2008-12-17T21:16:00.000-08:00

Ah, we've finally made it to the stage of playing in the tupperware drawer, sneezing out peas, making runs to the potty (ok, so it might be a little too early for that one, but it's so obvious when something's coming down the pipe and I don't want to see that in a diaper!), and well...danger. I just want to let everyone know that I (Christy) had nothing to do with the last picture. (FYI, I added a few more months to the monthly picture list under "Our Triannual Blupdate.")

Here are some of my favorite pictures from last month.

Sarah Comes to Visit

2008-12-17T12:03:00.000-08:00

So nice to have Sarah here for the day to play with Ozias and catch up with her "gypsy" life! Today it's snowing outside, we've had a couple days off of school and we're using it to clean the house and take "crawling lessons"! He's so close! In fact this morning I yelled for mom to come in after he'd taken 4 or 5 solid crawl-steps, but he hasn't tried it any more today!

These are a few of my favorite things

2008-12-04T18:02:00.000-08:00

I think I'm going to market this. I call it "Abs of Steel by Zias."

'Tis the Season

2008-11-09T19:06:00.000-08:00

I just spent 6 hours at church/church related activities today. It's the season of Christmas play practices, planning for Advent Conspiracy workshops and more baby showers...always the baby showers. Red Sea is, apparently, trying to set a churchdom record for most consecutive months/years in which someone in the church is pregnant. I'm pretty sure we haven't missed a month since we got here 3 years ago. Anyhow, the upcoming Christmas season promises to be a busy but happy one. We started out the holiday season with a bang by attending a friend's halloween/birthday party and winning the prize for the BEST COSTUMES!!! Not bad for 2 days work, if I do say so myself. In case you can't tell, Nathan is a garden gnome on a mushroom, Christy is a pink flamingo, and Ozias is the cutest garden gnome ever. We had a "lawn ornament" theme. Ozias is getting closer and closer to moving on his own, even though I'm doing nothing to encourage it. I have no idea how to babyproof our itty bitty little house so I'm just counting on him being immobile until the economy crisis is over and we can sell our house. Or maybe I'll put him in one of those hamster balls...kid size, of course.

Our birthday and a half was super fun with a surprise party planned by Nathan so well it was a complete surprise!! Although, after the party I found an e-mail in my mailbox from Nathan that said "Remember everyone, this is a surprise for Christy. She thinks I'll be at school, so no telling!" He had replied to all on an e-mail list and forgot to delete me. Lucky for him, I didn't check my e-mail that day. So now Ozias is not a newborn anymore (6 months seems to be the cutoff for that kind of thing) and I'm as old as my grandpa. (He just stopped getting older when he hit 29. We've been celebrating his 29th birthday every year as long as I can remember.)

Twice in 2 weeks!

2008-10-20T15:46:00.000-07:00

This nap trick is really working for me. It seems unheard of that I could post to the blog twice in 2 weeks! I just had to add this video of Ozias sitting for everyone's enjoyment.

Our Tri-Annual Blupdate

2008-10-14T15:02:00.000-07:00

Someone accused me a couple of months ago of not doing a very good job keeping our blog current and I thought, Well, maybe it can be our bi-monthly blupdate. (I know, it would technically be bupdate, but blupdate has such a nice ring to it.) Anyhow, I guess I need to change it to Tri-Annual at the rate we're going. I'm finally getting some time to sit down and add stuff to the blog because I just discovered that if I put Zias' binky back in his mouth when he starts waking up from his nap, I get a second bonus nap! What a fun trick! I hope it lasts.

So we're already past his 5 month birthday and the weeks are ticking down to our birthdays (my whole birthday, his half birthday.) I'm trying to think of a clever name for those two days of the year, like, birthday and a half or something, so if anyone has any good suggestions, please pass them on. This week Ozias started sitting up all by himself. He also started making some fantastic noises with his lips. He's always made great "raspberry" noises, but now they're loosing their sweet quality and starting to sound like major diaper blowouts. But (so far) the sounds have nothing to do with what's going on in his diaper.

To catch you up on the last couple of months, Nathan has started teaching music and the German American School of Portland (GASP! No, it's not surprising that he got the job, those are the school's initials.) I'm still working 20 hours at my job with a mentoring program, which is fabulously flexible, so I work about half of those hours from home. My productivity might just double now that I've discovered the bonus nap trick! And Zias has been growing. And growing. And getting cuter. And cuter. Here are some pictures to catch you up on the last five months:

Ozias and Rabby the Rabid Rabbit - One month

Ozias and Rabby - Two months

Ozias and Rabby - Three months

Ozias and Rabby - Four months

Ozias and Rabby - Five months

Ozias eats Rabby - Six months

Ozias and Rabby - Seven months

2008-10-11T18:51:00.000-07:00

2008-07-29T10:50:00.000-07:00

Learning to suck your thumb is a heck of a lesson. Christy captured some of Ozias' efforts while he flailed his limbs in a semi-coordinated game of "Thumb in my eye, nose, or mouth?"

Crying and Peering

2008-06-19T11:39:00.000-07:00

3 weeks down, 933 to go!

2008-05-29T15:12:00.000-07:00

Just kidding, I'm not really counting down the weeks until he moves out! But I am proud of us for how capably we've made it through the first three weeks. Nathan deserves the "Greatest Dad of the Year" award and so Christy and Ozias are happy and healthy. We even went to a fancy dinner AND a community event this week and made it through with our sanity intact!

To catch you up on how we got to where we are... you may have noticed that his due date was May 23rd and he was born on May 5th (Cinco de Mayo! Bueno, bueno bueno! Also my 1/2 birthday, incidentally.) This just goes to show how cooperative our baby is. We went to California for a good friend's wedding on May 2nd, and got home May 4th. When we left, I (Christy) told Ozias, "Just wait three more days and then we'll be ready for you" and when we got home, I said "Ok, feel free to come any time now!" After we got back from the airport, some friends came over and we went to play a couple of holes of frisbee golf and had a BBQ. I said "I don't feel like going to work tomorrow. Maybe I'll go into labor tonight." And I did. At 11:30 I started having contractions (which were coming really frequently), but by 1:30 I was really sleepy and I so I tried to relax enough to fall asleep. It worked and the contractions slowed down to every 20 or 30 minutes. In the morning I tried to get up and get them started again, but I was still too tired and just kept falling asleep. Finally by 8:30 I had woken up enough to start walking around and that got them going a little bit more. I was supposed to have a Dr's appt at 10am, so at 9:30 I called to see if I should come in or just go to the hospital. (I wasn't sure if I had pretty much stopped the labor by sleeping through it.) I really didn't want to go to the hospital and get sent home because I wasn't far enough along, so I decided to go to my Dr's appt, but right before we left I decided I didn't really want to labor in the waiting room, so we should just go to the hospital. Good thing. We got to the hospital around 10 or 10:30, and at 12:30 we had a baby in our arms! Ta-da! I had quite an extensive birth plan prepared and had packed enough cd's, books, and movies to get us through at least 36 hours of labor, but we didn't manage to get any of it out, including the birth plan. Fortunately, everything happened so fast that the birth plan was followed to a T. (No drugs, no extra people in the room, etc.) Nobody had time to do anything contrary to it! We had to pull the emergency cord to get someone in the room to tell them the baby was coming and I don't think they believed us even then. I was pretty amazed at how obvious it was that my body was created to do this and I was able to spend my whole labor relaxing (as much as possible) and letting it do its thing. Thanks to some great books that our brother's girlfriend gave me from her midwifery classes, I was able to educate myself and learned that, if I let it, my body would know what to do and get the job done. This was a good experience for me because before I had my doubts about the intelligence of God's design when it came to the birthing experience. (I thought it would be better if he'd made us like kangaroos so it came out when it was really tiny and I could peek in and check on him every once in a while.) But now I'm convinced that God's design is flawless and I'm glad I got to experience it so (relatively) naturally.
Thanks for all the prayers that have gone up in our behalf. God has truly blessed us with an amazing baby boy. Feel free to drop us a line or give us a call if you're in the area!

2008-05-20T18:59:00.000-07:00

Baby Pictures!

2008-05-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

We're having lots of fun, but not sleeping much. We try to get naps in when he does, and are trying to take good care of each other. This baby thing is simply amazing, I feel like I have a well of love in my heart and it's overflowing for him and my friends and family. It's an unusual and good feeling. Write us a note and when we get some time away from the changing table we'll try to write back! :)

Groundhogs Day Letter

2008-01-20T13:41:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends and Family,

In the spirit of following in the Whitley’s footsteps, we’re putting out our “Christmas” letter in plenty of time to make sure it gets to you before Groundhog’s Day.

While 2007 was full of adventure for us, it was also relatively calm. Since Xenos closed in August of ’06 when the church was given a new building, we have scaled back our involvement with Red Sea to a mere combined 15-20 hours per week instead of the 100 -120 (combined) we were putting in before. Though we went through some rough patches in the transition, the outcome is a very healthy relationship with the pastors and congregation of Red Sea that has been strengthened by facing conflict and working through it together. We consider Red Sea our Portland family and have been able to learn and grow in leaps in bounds with them.

What have we been doing with all our new-found “free-time” you may ask? We’ve had a couple of great vacations this year, including visiting friends in California, and going camping with friends outside of Ashland, OR. We spent one of the rainy nights in the cheap seats (which happen to be the ones with a roof over them) at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the other one huddled under a tarp next to the campfire. We were also able to spend time with both of our families at Christmas and wrapped up the Christmas season with just the two of us at a beautiful vacation home in Redmond.

Back in real life…Nathan has been teaching piano lessons both in his private studio at the church, and at Ethos, a local non-profit music center in North Portland. This past summer he was the coordinator of Ethos’ week long music camps, one of which was a Rock Band Camp where one of the bands (made up of three 8 year olds) called themselves the Food Fighters. Nathan also enrolled in Concordia University’s MATE (Masters of art in Teaching) program so in the summer of 2009, he will have his teacher’s certificate!

In December of ’06, Christy got a job working for a mentoring program through a mental health agency. After working there for one full year, she still loves her job! (This isn’t something that happens every time.) She recruits, trains, and matches adult mentors with kids who are receiving mental health services in the area. Because she has to train mentors how to work with struggling kids, she has lots of opportunities to attend trainings on the subject herself. In many ways, her job has been like a parenting class and both Christy and Nathan have been able to learn a lot about how to help kids succeed. Which brings us to our last subject…

Have you been able to catch the theme of what God is teaching us this year? Growing with our church family, getting some time to relax, Nathan is learning how to educate kids; Christy’s job is like a parenting class. Yep, you got it! God has been working all year at preparing us to be good parents, which is a good thing because on or around May 23rd, we’re going to have a baby boy! After 5 ½ years of spontaneous freedom in marriage, we’re getting ready to start down an entirely different path. Nathan (with the help of both of our dads, friends from church, and neighbors) has been working on turning the garage into an office/craft room/guest bedroom so that the room in the house that has been functioning in those capacities can now be a nursery. Christy has been purging the house of all unnecessary items in an effort to make room for something so small that comes with so much stuff. Stay tuned to this blog for pictures and stories from the Conants.

It’s been a great year of growing and change and we are so grateful for the part that each of you has played in our lives.