Hermit Crab Behavior

Our family is growing out of its shell! After going back and forth FOREVER on whether to add on to our house or find a larger home, we've finally bit the bullet and have put our house on the market! We definitely have mixed feelings--we know it's the right thing to do, but it's so hard to leave this house that we've had so many great memories in. This week we've worked our tails off sorting, storing, and cleaning the house to get it ready to sell. Gracie was a big helper. :)


Yard work is so fun for Grace. She loves to see the doggies walk by on their leashes--she really does go spastic when dogs go by. I'll try to capture it on our video camera one of these days...


We just had cement edging put in around our flower beds--it looks fabulous! Our good friends Joel, Johnny, and Matt came over to help Jeff get the yard in ship-shape. If you live in town, you should drive by and see how fabulous it looks!


She refuses to crawl, but she's getting braver and braver on her feet. She was watching the men as they worked and talking to them the whole time. She's quite the jabber-box. She'll be able to point to this house someday as we drive by and tell everyone that it was the house that she was a baby in. Sigh. I'm finding that moving is hard work for your muscles AND your heart.

Five Little Gracie Tidbits

5. Gracie loves to stand. And walk--with help. She wraps her little hands around her daddy's fingers and takes him all over the house. This week she found that the screen door has a window right at her level--she stood there for 15 minutes, talking to the window...

4. Squealing. Ear-piercing screaming is her new trick. We are NOT very big fans. No megaphones for her birthday, please. She's got her own, built-in instrument. We're just trying to TRAIN her skills...

3. We have Gracie's blood drawn every month to keep an eye on her PKU levels. This month her scores went up considerably, so we found out that we have to take meat and eggs out of her diet for a while and give her special formula to bring her levels back down. She's not in any danger, we're just bummed that she's having to be restricted in her eating.

2. She loves the word BABY. She stretches her arm across the room to point at the picture of HERSELF on the mantle and says, "Baby! Baby!" and wiggles with excitement. She also looks at the chair and says BABY and looks at her toys and says BABY and looks at her food and says BABY...

1. We're starting to sing "Happy Birthday" to Gracie so that she'll be used to it when she hears it in May. She likes ANY music and starts clapping whenever she hears a tune. And she does a little bounce dance that is quite adorable.

Teeny Tiny Tub

Kalei and Alea came over to play this weekend and had to get in on bathing with Grace. Gracie wasn't in the tub for thirty seconds before both girls were asking to get in with her. She LOVED it. We've got to get this girl back in the pool! Thanks for playing, girls!

Happy Easter!

Why should I gain from his reward?
I cannot give an answer
But this I know with all my heart
His wounds have paid my ransom.

-Stuart Townend, How Deep the Father's Love

Southwest Spring Break, Part 2

Albuquerque proved to be the oasis in our vacation of deserts. It was so refreshing to have time with Nelson and Karina and Rebekah! I couldn't stop taking pictures of the two girls together--as you can see. Karina and Bekah took us to the zoo on one afternoon--Jeff's favorites were the monkeys swinging by their long arms and the almost-fight between two gorillas. My favorite was the orangoutang that was climbing about with a baby orangoutang clinging to its stomach.


Bekah is such a happy baby! She also has her parents' height--it was so fun to see that the girls are the same height when four months separate them!


Karina was our skilled tour guide. She took us all over the area--to Old Town for some shopping, the zoo, through UNM campus, to get breakfast burritos, through town on the historic Route 66, up to Santa Fe... We had the authentic NM experience! I let Jeff have the front seat, so these are the two faces that looked back at me in the ALL-GIRLS backseat.


Gracie and Jeff trying to behave themselves in the Georgia O'Keefe art gallery--right before we were scolded for using a camera in the building. Oops!


This is how we traveled! A couple of times people asked if they were twins and we told them, "Nope, just future college roommates."


Bekah has this smile DOWN. She really is the happiest baby...any time you smile at her she just curls up with excitement and grins right back. She'd whimper a little bit every once in a while and the Bells said that's as fussy as she gets. I think she's going to trick Karina and Nelson into having more babies--others would have to be as good-natured as her! :)


Jeff spent many hours playing the Wii with Nelson and Karina. He stayed up after we all went to bed just to become a master tennis player and to attempt to beat Karina's ski-jump record. He had us rolling on the ground in laughter as he attempted Wii Yoga--here he is showing off his Warrior pose in front of the white rhinoceroses.


I am very sad to say that this is the only shot of Nelson that I captured--see him WAY in the back? AND, I didn't get a family picture of them or a picture of their house. We'll have to go back to remedy this. You got away this time, Nelson, but next time...watch out! He was so good to deliver sopaipillas--a dessert served at Mexican restaurants in town--to the house one night for dessert. We also twisted his arm and got to hear his life story...beginning back when he was "a poor black boy born in Georgia." This guy is funny.




And a few colorful Southwest shots... What a great week we had! :) Thanks to the Bells for a great getaway--we treasured our time with you! :)

Southwest Spring Break, Part 1

We love Spring Break. We especially loved this one. The destination was Albuquerque to visit the Bell Family, and on our way, we got to see a few of the Southwest's treasures. Our first few days: Phoenix and palm trees, Sedona and red rock, Flagstaff and high desert altitudes, the Grand Canyon and FREEZING WEATHER. This first post shows just this first leg of our trip before we trekked across Arizona to the state of New Mexico. (stay tuned for future posts with cute Bell and Lochhead babies!)





Sedona's red rock was a great background for many pictures. We were ITCHING to hike some red dirt trails, but we found that vacationing with a 10-month-old causes parents to vacation differently than ever before...





The Grand Canyon was bigger than pictures allow. We drove the rim road and stopped at several of the dozen viewpoints--one of us stayed in the car with Sleeping Gracie while the other ran to check it out, take pics, and bring the report back to the other. (Didn't I say this was a different way to vacation?) Again we wanted to hike, but Grace only lasted TEN MINUTES in her pack before she caused us to turn back. It was incredibly cold that day, so we viewed the canyon through a museum window while feeding Gracie her bottle on a bench.


How many times must Dad stop the car for a baby in need of new digs? Jeff was quite good natured about it--he even started documenting each randomly placed stop on film. There are many more of these in our collection...


And after the big day of seeing National Landmarks, Gracie is happiest in the hotel's bathtub.