Christmas in ABQ

It snowed in ABQ last night. Caleb, Jon, the dog, and I had a great time playing in it this morning.

Merek, my nephew, smiles for the camera.

A few family pictures before we headed out to El Pinto for our NEW Mexican food!

Sisters (15 months apart) and cousins (5 days apart)!

Question

Which do you like better #1 or #2? I am playing with cropping and wondering everyone's opinion.

From the Lips of Caleb

With Christmas coming up, each night we have been reading through a little advent book that our church gave out. After dinner Jon reads Caleb a short paragraph about a certain aspect of the Christmas story. Caleb has enjoyed it because after he listens to the short story, he gets a piece of chocolate candy from our advent calendar. Last night was about the wise men who brought gifts to Jesus. At the end, Jon asked Caleb what he could give to Jesus since it was his birthday. Caleb's adamantly responded, "I don't want Jesus to play with my trains." Soon after he included, "I don't want Jesus to play with my cars," Jon asked, "Well then what are you going to give Jesus?" Caleb said "a heart". I said, "That is right," excited and proud of our son's Sunday school answer, "you can give Jesus your heart." Caleb then interrupted, "No, not MY heart!" Abby has work to do if Caleb won't share with Jesus either, but obviously we have a ways to go on understanding how faith works! But, it made me think how often do we as adults hold back our most precious possessions from God, our "cars" and "trains" and even our "hearts"? This year, I hope to take some time to think about the "cars" and "trains" in my life that I need to give to Jesus. We can all benefit from remembering James 1:17:

"Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows."

We shouldn't hold back things in our life from God. It must appear rather ridiculous to Him. Everything we have is from God. I should be able to trust Him with these things!

More Pics from December

Working on the leaves...
Jon loved Where's Waldo when he was in the fourth grade. Do you see anything interesting in the bottom picture?

Abby "standing up" in her room.
Christmas at Baylor

Bathtime

Lots of smiles at 7pm at our casa each night...

Friends

Our friends, The Peschels, were in town last weekend, so the kids and I headed over to the Taylor's house to visit. We were all friends before any of us had kids while in the young married's Sunday school class ZWOC- young marrieds with out children. Things sure have changed since then. Look at the crew!

Sunday Happenings

Caleb rocks out in his favorite outfit- his jammies!Abby waves to Daddy while he mows the lawn (and the many leaves) in our yard.

Our Abby Girl: 10 months old

Abby is 10 months old today. She has had a lot of "firsts" this month. One of the big ones has been her language development. It seemed like all of a sudden she went from making very few sounds to babbling constantly. She also is saying some words including "mumumumum" ( for "more mama" or "mama" or "show me the food mama!"), "dada", and "uh, uh" (maybe for Heidi? She says it whenever Heidi is around.) Abby has started waving and clapping too. She also shakes her head when I tell her no or when she is done eating. The other night she kept crawling up to the Christmas tree and reaching up towards it. I would tell her no, and she would shake her head very adamantly, smile, and continue reaching for it. It was too cute. She does this with the dog food too. Isn't it funny how it is much cuter when a 10 month old disobeys than when a 2 1/2 year old does? Abby loves her brother very much and has been found laughing at something he is doing many times. I love these sweet sibling interactions. Abby especially likes toys that are Caleb's favorites and we've had a great deal of tears as a result. Caleb is eventually going to learn to share, but Abby sure knows how to sound the alarm when he takes a toy from her! Abby is eating lots of table foods now and seems to like most of them more than baby food. Abby is still waking up some at night... I know eeek! Sometimes I feel like it is something I have done, but it seems that every time we start to make some progress we go out of town or she is sick or teething or something. Then we are back to waking up to nurse several times a night. I haven't slept all night in a very long time! We are working on it and mostly just thankful that she is a great napper during the day. (I don't know why I feel the need to give the sleep report every month. I always say I am going to keep that to myself, but then end up writing about it. I don't want to sound like I am going on and on complaining, but I do want to document this stage. Sorry if I sound annoying!) Abby wants to be walking around holding our hands a great deal. She is pulling up on things, has stood unsupported a few times, and has perfected how to fall back down on her bottom. It will be interesting to see if she walks before or after Caleb did. This first year is flying past! Abby is growing up, and we are trying to cherish each stage!

My Boys

Thanksgiving in Sac-Town

We spent Thanksgiving with the whole Capron crew in Sacramento. Eight adults and six children all stayed at Jon's dad's house, which made for a lot of fun, more than several meltdowns (mostly from the 2 year olds), very little sleep, and some great family time. We tried to get the boys out of the house for some fun each day. One afternoon we drove to Sutter Mill, where gold was first discovered in CA. We had a nice picnic lunch.

Here Andrew is trying to make sounds with his root beer bottle just like Uncle Jon Jon.
Look at those beautiful blue Greek eyes on Nic.



The boys immensely enjoyed throwing rocks in the river. We were amazed that no one got hit with a rock because they kept walking in front of one another.
Mara and Nic :)

The boys follow Uncle Eric to a cave.
Owen, Caleb, and Andrew in a "cave". I had to assure them that no animals lived in the cave in order for Andrew and Caleb to go near it.Here are some pictures from the train museum in downtown Sacramento. It was full of beautifully restored trains that surely had a large amount of work and money put into them to make them look just perfect. Caleb's favorite part was the Thomas toy train set up. He didn't act too interested in the real trains!

Isn't this an interesting picture with all of our reflections in the top half?

The boys spent a lot of time playing soccer in the yard.

The long awaited Capron girls!
The whole family tries to take a picture.
What a great group of kids!

We are enjoying the great outdoors and fall weather by spending lots of time playing in our backyard.

Here's a smile!

Abby 9 Months Old

Abby is 9 months old- 3/4 of a year! Yah! This morning, I took 225 pictures of her, and there wasn't one smile. She does smile a lot, but just not for the camera! She is pretty in the pictures just the same. In the past month she has perfected her knee-foot crawling method with no indicators that she will start crawling the traditional way. She is pulling up a little bit and will stand in front of objects well. She is starting to explore the house, which makes me very happy because she is playing on her own some. I better double check all of our childproofing! Abby has started on table foods, which she loves. Just like Caleb at this age, Abby will eat and eat and eat until I stop giving her food. Lately she has tried rice, bits of beef stroganoff, chopped broccoli, and turkey lunch meat. We have been working on waving, and Abby had waved to us a few times. Then she very clearly waved to the clerk at Walmart the other day. I am such a mom, and that moment just made me so proud... gush... gush...gush! I am happy to report that Abby is making some progress as far as sleeping through the night. Just within the past several days, she has slept through the night a couple times. One thing I have learned from Abby is that all kids are different, and I can't really judge another mom for the way their kid sleeps, or eats, or whatever it may be. Abby has certainly been different than her brother about many things. At this age he pretty much weaned himself and would only be satisfied with a bottle. Abby has completely refused bottles and is very dependent on mom. I could have worked on this more early on, but my goal was to nurse for a year. I am fairly confident we will make it to that milestone. In fact I don't know how I will ever wean her! Here are her 9 month stats:
Weight- 16 pounds, 7th percentile (this has gone down a lot, but the doctor wasn't worried)
Height- 28 inches, 60th percentile (I'm not quite sure this was completely accurate, but Abby is long)
Head Circumference- I don't have the actual number, but she is in the 75th percentile.
Lastly here are some of our nicknames for Abigail at this age:
Abby
Abbaroo (Caleb adds -roo on to everything "Heidiroo" "bedaroo" "sunaroo"- it's quite comical!)
Absters
Abbs
Little Miss
Miss Priss
Little Roo (once again continuing the roo theme around here.

What a Boy!

After making it through two days of traveling from Waco to Albuquerque, I am stepping out there to call it official.... Caleb is potty trained! So maybe I am bragging on my child, but let me tell you we did this with a LOT of hard work and effort. Our carpet needs to be cleaned, and Caleb frequently asks me if he can go outside to pee. But, he is doing great. One funny story about our trip: on the plane ride from Dallas to Albuquerque, the flight crew had to secure the plane early because of a bumpy end of the flight which left us hunkered down in our seats for at least 30 minutes. It was completely cloudy, so I couldn't tell if we were close to the airport or not. That is when Caleb started yelling, "I need to PEEEEE!" over and over again. There I was with a baby on my lap and a two year old who was making it quite clear to everyone that he needed to go to the bathroom, and I couldn't do anything but tell him to wait. I don't know how I would have done it even if I was allowed to get up. A few minutes later he was yelling "I'm wet!". I was sitting there watching his pants slowly get wetter and wetter, but he managed to stop himself and none got on the seat. Not that anyone around us knew that. I am sure they thought that he had peed all over the place. Then after we landed, while we were waiting to get off of the plane, Caleb was looking on the floor and saw the large amount of Cheerios that Abby had dropped everywhere, and he started yelling "There's a mess!". I am all about not leaving my mess for someone else to clean up, but in this situation with two kids and our bag, there really was nothing I could do. I ended up telling Caleb to pick up as many as he could just to get him to quiet down about the huge mess we had made. Believe it or not the return flight was much worse! It was quite a trip, but we made it there and back safely. When it comes to potty training and to traveling with "Thing 1" and "Thing 2", I'm proud to say we did it!