Dedicated

On Sunday we celebrated our sweet Gus with his baby dedication at our church. It was a fun occassion and we loved having an excuse to have most of our family here to celebrate with us. Our pastor has just finished a series on the book of James and steming from that God has moved our hearts as a church family for the poor. Last Sunday when we arrived at worship we found a real shanty town built on the stage. Apparently they had been raiding dumpsters all over the city to find the right pieces of scrap wood and metal to build a real life slum right up there on the stage with every detail complete all the way down to the broken bottles along the top of the wall for security (which, if you've been in many shanty towns, you know is quite the norm). This shanty will remain for a year as a constant reminder to us each Sunday of the reality of the poor. I thought it was an interesting backdrop for our baby dedication! Actually, quite fitting for our little Gus who is on his way to Africa!

Our newest hobby as a family are some pretty heated games of t-ball in our yard! Claire is actually really good and when she gets up there at bat she gets in the stance and shakes her little hiney - too cute. Ford takes a whack and runs in a big loop from home to second and back again a few times as fast as he can. Gus is mostly a spectator at this point but he is taking notes and . . .

sitting up! What in the world! He also got his first tooth yesterday! He is the youngest of all three to sit or get a tooth! What is up with that? He also grabbed a hand full of rice of my plate the other day at P.F. Chang and shoved it in his mouth! He has reached all the criteria for solids at our house (sitting up unsupported, doubling birth weight -he was 18 lbs 8oz yesterday . . . way more than double!, and grabbing food off our plates) so he has earned the right to take on a new challenge however he will have to wait for Kenya because I really don't want to deal with toting all the feeding gear on our journey across the pond! Besides he needs to keep practicing because sometimes he ends up like this . . .

We are packing, packing, packing here. We have about 5 more boxes to go then everything will be all packed up. Some of our wonderful friends are descending on our house early Saturday morning and between cups of hot chocolate and Krispy Kreme doughnuts will be loading our stuff in a truck and unloading it in our storage unit. Move out day :( We are both a little nostalgic thinking of when we first moved in this house almost 5 1/2 years ago. We were newlyweds and this house seemed to have way more space than we needed - we had a guest room and an office! Now we've got a kid in each of those rooms in addition to the one we have stowed in our room because we have run out! We have LOVED our first little home but just as our realtor reminded us - it is just sticks and bricks - we take the memories with us and that is what is important. This house has been a wonderful little nest for the birth of our family and we will always have the fondest memories of our time here. We are ready to move on though. We are ready for the next chapter . . .