'Tis the Season

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!

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

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

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

3 weeks down, 933 to go!

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!