garden planting

we're off to plant our garden....

here's the run down.

16 roma tomatoes
4 grape tomatoes
12 green pepper
4 banana pepper
2 zucchini squash
2 yellow squash
2 buttercup squash
2 cantalope
4 broccoli
4 cabbage
6 swiss chard
and lots of onion.

and we bought oregano and basil herb plants to put in a box and have here at the house....

garden, how we love you! it's probably one of our favorite things to do in the summer. today is plant day. and we get to hang out with some friends while we do it, what's better than that?


on a separate note. we cried it out last night. round one 50 minutes. we decided we wanted him to wait 8 hours to eat. he ate at 8, so 4 was the magic number. he cried from 2-2:50, fell asleep. i of course was so keyed up from the whole thing, i didn't fall asleep until 3:30, he woke up at 4.. so we went ahead and fed him, and he's back down. it's good for him, and it's good for us, but man, that kid can scream!
it'll get better. that's what i keep telling myself.

Rolling....

4 months

why hello there!



i'm 4 months old, did you know that?
i'm successfully rolling over all the time.
i love to try to grab at things that mom is holding

exibit A.


i'm still not sleeping through the night. i think it's fun to get up, but i think mom and dad are getting sick of it. but seriously, how can they not LOVE this face in the night? come now... i'm ridiculously cute and i always remind them of that at 2 in morning. it helps plead my case. i stare at them with these eyes..



see it kind of gets ya does it?


however my dr. said that i should be sleeping through the night so mom says she is going to try the cry it out method. i'm not so sure how i feel about that.



i love and by love, i mean love with everything within me, to chew and stuff everything i can into my mouth.



today at my dr. i weighed in at
14lbs 5 oz and 26 inches long. which explains why mom can't find any clothes that fit me well..

and she said i could start cereal... we already have. :)
thanks for stopping by to check on me!

rainy mornings

This morning we woke up to rain.
Per usual morning routine, I walked downstairs to put away some dishes, get coffee, you know the drill.

However, as soon as I walked downstairs, everything inside of me, said BARAKEL. A little odd, I thought, why was I thinking about camp at 6:30? Maybe because workshop starts this week?

Then it dawned on me.

We mulched our front porch area a couple of weeks ago. The smell of the rain, combined with the woodchips, triggered my many memories of camp, because you see, Barakel has woodchip paths EVERYWHERE. I really do mean everywhere. So apparantley everytime it rains this summer, I'll be thinking of Barakel. I guess it'll be nature's way of reminding us to pray for their summer of camping ministry.

Levi =.....

Right after Levi was born we were um... well sleep deprived.
When Levi wakes in the night to eat, Mike's job is to get said kid from crib and bring him to me to feed him. There were many funny moments, at least they are funny now, right after he was born. What we quickly discovered was that Mike does NOT do well on lack of sleep. You see, Levi has become several inanimate objects in the middle of the night.
He was a...
alarm clock
dvd remote
a pillow
a blanket
etc etc

Mike would always hand me things he thought was Levi, except said kid was screaming in the other room, meanwhile, Mike was gently, ever so gently, handing me the remote which of course I um... nicely, or rather not so nicely, informed him was NOT Levi. Mike hasn't handed me anything but Levi in a long time, except for last night.

Levi started crying, and I rolled over and nudged Mike to wake him up, and he got up... walked around the bed, turned off the baby monitor and walked back around and crawled into bed, as if to say.. I made it stop.. let's go back to sleep.
Yeah, that didn't fly for me or for the kid.

and speaking of Levi... he's awaking from the other room...
so today's lesson is this...

remember that your kid does not equal a remote!

first foods

alright fellow mamas.... i am at my wits end.

levi has been doing incredibly well at sleeping, but in the last few weeks we have seriously backtracked. he was basically down to waking up once a night, we would put him down around 7:30-8, he'd sleep til about 2-3, eat, and then sleep until around 8:30.

the last couple of weeks he has been getting up 2-3x a night. when he wakes up he is definitely hungry. he is up to eat, he sucks it down no question there. everything i read says when they start to backtrack it's time for cereal.

so.. we started cereal, it hasn't helped, but i dont' know how much to give him, or when to give it to him. i try to give it to him around 7ish. but i have NO clue how much to give him. the box is not helpful at all. i don't want to overstuff the kid, but i want him to be full. he seems to like the cereal and he gobbles it up with no problems.

maybe it's a growth spurt, i don't know. i just know that mike and i are exhausted. this morning he slept from 4-9. that was his longest stretch.. he was on his stomach when he woke up at 9, i don't know if perhaps he sleeps better that way?

any thoughts on what to do, or how much cereal to feed this kid?

and they all rolled over. part deux

we awoke as usual to levi at 3 this morning. mike staggered into his room in his groggy state... came back and said.. um... levi was on his stomach?

so, apparantley we're flipping both ways now, though i don't think he did it intentionally, he often sleeps on his side, and i'm guessing he did that, and then somehow flipped to his tummy in his sleep, but man oh man was he mad when he woke up and realized he was on his tummy.

levi does not equal tummy time love! :)

i did get a video of him rolling over, i'll post it soon. but for now, i need to get moving. we are heading to mike's parents for the weekend, a family reunion of sorts is in the works...

i promise to post videos of food and rolling soon!