growing up...

Ok, well most of you have undoubtedly given up on our blog, but in case anyone is out there, here is your reward.



These aren't technically his first steps. He took those last week. And this isn't even his best effort, but it is the best that we got on video. Hopefully more will be coming soon (don't hold your breath).

photo shoot

photo from lifecandids.com/blog

(we've been super quiet here—really sorry about that. but i read recently on some blog somewhere out there to not apologize when you don't blog for a while...so i guess i shouldn't. but then blogger went and changed their interface and now when we login we can see how many of you visit our site every day and on october 30th 28 of you went to our blog...and went away sad. so i am sorry, no matter what other bloggers say.) we recently had a family photo shoot with a friend of ours...and it's a m a z i n g. woah. she just posted it, but we just couldn't wait to tell the world (or at least our world). So go check it out over here, and feel free to comment there about how awesome her blog design is (...i did it...) and then go back in a little while and see how much awesomer it will be (...i'm updating it for her...)

if you're ever in portland/seattle (she now lives near seattle) and need a family/baby/wedding photographer, she's awesome.

more soon. promise.

Random pictures from home

As you may have noticed we are making a bigger effort to keep the blog updated a couple times a week. Hopefully we can keep it up. We will see...

That being said we leave for a trip to Texas on Tuesday to see lots of family which will be awesome. And hot. Very very hot. Very very very hot. But awesome. But don't expect a lot of blog updates the week we are gone. We should have tons of pictures for you when we get back!

So to hold you over here is a random smattering of things you might see while walking around our house


A sunflower in our garden! We have about 5 more growing, but this is the first one to bloom. What you can't see is that it is easily 4 and a half feet tall! It's pretty awesome!


Asher just chillin


My current favorite picture in the world.


A garden box off the deck. Our outside projects are almost finished for the summer. Or house looks great. On a very related note my back hurts a lot these days.

On that note...you should come see all this stuff! We love visitors!

yay jon!

thanks to our friend jon and his javascript magic, as a follow-up on our last "how to" post, there's now a "download" link under each picture we post here, so all you have to do is click that and that picture will be downloaded, in a printable size, onto your desktop! hooray for picture sharing!!!

(ps, still follow the instructions on the previous post to find and download any pictures we don't post here...)

thanks, jon!

A "How To" lesson: Downloading pictures from Flickr

As most of you know we use Flickr to store all of our pictures online. You can access our Flickr account by either clicking on one of the pictures in a post of by clicking the pictures icon somewhere over on the right hand side of the screen. That way you can see all our pictures, even the ones we don't post.

If you see pictures you like, you can actually download them off the flickr site and save them on your computer. Then you can print them, email them, or make them your wallpaper (obviously).

So here's how you do that. It is kinda complicated...

First from the main Flickr page go to our "Photostream". That is basically just what Flickr calls our group of pictures. The most recent pictures will show up first and get older the deeper you go. Find a picture you want and click on it. From that page near the top you should see a button that says "Actions". Click that to open a drop down menu. In that menu click "View All Sizes".

On the sizes page you can choose from a list of sizes. Select the size you want and then click the link above the sizes that says "Download _______ size of this photo".

Hopefully this works! Flickr doesn't make it easy, but it is possible. Let us know in the comments if this doesn't work or you find an easier way! Thanks!

More 6 month pictures...

6 months!

Gosh it is nearly impossible to believe that our son is 6 months old. Half a year! There are no words for how amazing the last 6 months have been so I won't even make an attempt. Here is what you really came to see!

Only 14 years and 6 months til he gets his permit

It's never to early to start practicing!

4th of July!!

Hey, at least it's still July... And better late than never.

So when you have only lived somewhere 3 years it's tough to have traditions (in the traditional sense - yea, I did) but I would say we have settled into a bit of a 4th of July tradition around here. So much so that we've blogged about it before. We go to an amazing small town parade in the morning and go see some pretty good small town fireworks at night. Some of the parade highlights this year include (but are not limited to):



Guy on a unicycle (following a tractor from circa 1904),



Girl on a pony. Actually pretty cute unless you are the woman walking the pony the entire parade route. And, my personal favorite...



This guy...on a Segway. Wow.

But obviously the highlight of this day (and every other day) is obviously Asher.












We opted to make sure Asher had the most obnoxiously patriotic outfit imaginable. So we went to Wal Mart, found a horrible shirt that says "Ride On Freedom" and has the Statue of Liberty riding a Harley. Then Kirsten made it into a onesie!

So we didn't get any pictures of the fireworks, which we were a little concerned to take Asher to, but as it turned out, he wasn't scared of them, he wasn't really interested in them at all. He was more convened with the fact that it was after 10pm and he wasn't in bed yet...

Oh well. Next year he will be old enough to stay up late!

Cuteness

I have been telling people lately that I'm not biased as a parent. There is nothing more annoying than that parent that goes on and on and on about how THEIR kid is the cutest kid ever. That parent is obviously biased. I am reasonable. And rational. And feel I have a very accurate and modest opinion of my son.

It just so happens that he IS the cutest kid ever. That is the only reason I call him that. If he were the 3rd or 4th cutest kid ever I would say that. It just wouldn't be true. Listen, someone has to be the cutest. It just so happens that kid is mine. So it isn't being biased or irrational when I state that fact. You need proof you say? Why I'm glad you asked!












...enough said.

dreaming

today some of our extended family is departing for here and as i'm knee-deep in work and it's been cloudy the last three days, i'm dreaming about being there with them.



unfortunately, work, finances, a sleep-finicky baby stand in the way. but i'm really dreaming about dropping everything, packing up the car today, and escaping to the great midwest.

...oh well. i'll keep dreaming. but i do hope our family has a fantastic time at the grand tetons...

Things are growing!

Ok time for a much needed brag on my wife post... Kirsten, as you know if you are reading this, is good at literally everything. It is gross. She is good at things you wish you were good at. She is also good at things you didn't even know existed.

This spring/summer we have been doing some much needed outside landscaping and such and have a new garden and flower bed on the side of our house. Just thought I'd share some pictures of what's coming up!

















We have already cut several flowers and brought them inside, and there are plenty more waiting as you can see. Those huge things in the flower bed are sunflowers and even though they don't have flowers yet they are easily 3 feet tall.
There is tons of lettuce, strawberries, and the makings of peppers, tomatoes, pumpkins (for Asher's first Halloween!) and watermelons (probably not until next summer). Pretty exciting!

**Note: I almost made it the entire post without mentioning Asher's name. That would have been the first time in quite some time. Oh well...

Asher's new talent

Here is a video of Asher's new thing. Sorry its sideways...just turn your head.

Months 3, 4 and 5

We may have fallen behind on posting lately (a trend that is changing right before your eyes) but we haven't fallen behind on taking our monthly "chair pictures"! So here are months 3, 4 and 5 and we will post both now so you can compare and contrast! Enjoy!!

3 months...


















4 months...













And just a few weeks ago. 5 months...



















Pretty crazy.
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Just a reminder...

...we still have a dog. Nickel got a lot more love on this blog before Asher was born. Actually before Kirsten got pregnant. But she's still here. Mostly she has accepted her new place in the family (she never was really very spoiled) and she gets along with her new "sibling" just fine. There has only been one instance where Nickel got excited and started running around while Asher was on the floor. It didn't end well for Asher, or Nickel after I got my hands on her...
But for the most part she and Asher are great together. Asher is starting to take more of an interest in her which is fun. No efforts to pet or intentionally touch yet, but he is definitely giving her plenty of attention when she is around.



Anyway, just an update on the fourth, often overlooked member of the family.

There are more posts to come! 4th of July, birthday "chair pictures" and more!!


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Summer is here!!

Finally! To celebrate the beginning of the greatest 3 months of weather we will see all year we decided to go on a hike...our first hike in two summers that was more than just a walk. Our amazing friends Phil and Angela gave us the hiking backpack they had for their daughter that she has since outgrown so we couldn't resist trying it out right away.

We found a hike we had never done before (even though Dan stole our hiking book when he moved out...) and headed out for some sunny adventure.


Asher did great! Seriously he did great. He just rode along checking stuff out the whole time. When we got to the waterfall at the end he spent a while just staring at it trying to figure it out. Understandable considering the only water he has ever seen is our bathtub.














We have more posts coming! We are determined to get some consistency. So keep checking!

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sleep

Pre-amendment: I started this post more than a week ago and worked on it for days but by the time I had gotten to the end that you'll see below, Asher's sleep had regressed basically back to where it was in the beginning. It's spotty now, goes back and forth, and I just don't have the stamina or enthusiasm to bring you up to speed in detail. Instead, we'll just say that the story's still to be continued...

Second pre-amendment: I wrote that a couple of days ago (yes I know, this is getting ridiculous) but couldn't post because Daniel had to change our blogger password after his email got hacked and apparently -- this is the shocker -- we haven't blogged since then. Yeah. I know. Maybe you involved in his email hacking, but if you weren't, you should know it was a long, long time ago. So we got that changed yesterday, but since daniel had a post that was timely (and since it was fathers day, after all), I let him go first :) so hope you followed all that. If not. Oh well.




What. The. Heck.

Is that what you've thought every time you've opened our blog for the last...whatever...month and a half? (amendment--basically two months.) It's kind of what I imagine people thinking.

And if you know what we've been doing, there was Easter, and we went home to Atlanta and Asher had his first taste of Georgia, and the first mother's day, and just plenty to be blogging about.

So let me try to give you a glimpse into our excuse. It involves a sleep-less baby.

So starting like two months ago, Asher decided that he really didn't need sleep. Oh, sleep at night, sure. He sleeps with us and it's cozy in our bed. But naps? Nah.

So he started being impossible to get to go to sleep for naps. He would get yawny. And then start rubbing his eyes. And then squirmy. And then fussy. And no matter how early we tried to catch it, or how late we'd let it drag out, he'd never crash. We'd make the room as dark as possible. We set up a pre-nap routine so that he'd know to expect it. Nothing. He'd fuss through the entire nap time until he got his second wind and then be "ready" to go again--except as the day went on, he was harder and harder to deal with. There were several times that he slept a total of 20 minutes over two days. Seriously. 20 minutes. 2 days.

Then one day we learned how to bounce. It was a very specific method of bouncing that he required. Conditions had to be perfect. Walking--don't even try to sit. And holding in a very particular way. And bounce. Hard. And I think the first time we bounced he fell asleep in maybe 10 minutes. Okay. We could take 10 minutes of that for a glorious 40 minute nap.

Well. It wasn't days before 10 minutes became 20 minutes became 40 minutes. So now we bounced. And bounced, and bounced, and bounced. And once he finally fell asleep let's not even talk about the acrobatics it required to lay him down. Then. (Yes, there's more.) He started not even always falling asleep after the 40 minutes of bouncing. He'd be getting calmer and quieter somewhere in the middle of it, and even close his eyes a bit, and Daniel and i would give each other the "success!" look, but then they'd pop back open and he'd start getting squirmy and then fussy, as if we'd somehow missed it. And he started fussing his way to his second wind again, even through all the bouncing.

Then the last part. About three weeks ago, he started, whenever he did sleep, only sleeping for 20 minute increments, max. I don't know. He'd just wake up after 20 minutes, and we'd rush to him (or oftentimes still be sitting there next to him) to replace a pacifier or gently shake/rock him, or quickly pick him up to start bouncing again. But nothing. So now we were talking about 40 minutes of bouncing for sometimes no reason at all, and at best 20 minutes of napping.

And we like our backs and think they're pretty necessary.

So of course while all this was going on I had read every sleep book I could. And I started with all the no-cry books. No cry sleep solutions. No-cry nap solutions. Dr. Sears' book. On and on. Nothing was helping.

So it came to the breaking point. And before you chastise me for letting it go so long without letting him cry, know the he was still pretty young for cry it out (CIO). Most books say you can start "ferberizing" as they call it in the biz at 6 months. But you can find a couple of places that say 3-4 months, and Asher had just turned 4 months. And I know, you did it to your child from day one and they're fine. I don't know. I just do what I'm told.

So I switched to reading all the let them cry sleep books. If we did this we were going to do it right. And it's not that I was completely against this, by the way. I mean, these days you can find about a million moral objections to it online, but that wasn't necessarily me. I just didn't want it to have to come to this. I mean, who wants to let their baby cry?

We did the method where you go in to comfort at progressively long intervals. So the first day you go in at three minutes then five then seven and so on. And the second day five then seven then ten and you get the idea. You go in the room and talk to him and comfort and touch him, but you don't pick him up. And for nighttime there's no time limit for how long he cries, but for naps if he cries for an hour, you go in and get him and he just skips that nap.

So we started and I'll spare you the gory play-by-play, but suffice it to say that for the first three days, at every nap (so three times a day) and then at bedtime, Asher cried for an average of 50 minutes. Four times a day. It was excruciating. I actually left most every time, and Daniel stayed to listen and comfort (which meant he had to endure the terribly sad face and pitiful cry).

There were times when he cried for 75 minutes and several naps that he just cried through. And I wish I could say that it was just fussiness, but no. It was all out screaming. Excruciating. I feel l like most of the people I had talked to who had done this had done it together their child to sleep through the night. And I know it's got to be terrible to listen to your child cry all night--Which I know has to be worse than what we endured in a lot of ways--but it was terrible to feel like Asher cried all. Day. Long. By the time he had stopped crying at night we would just lay out on the couch physically and emotionally exhausted and drained.

The only thing that carried me through those days was that the one thing that every sleep books agrees on is how crucial sleep is. That it's as important to a baby's development as eating. And that naps are the holy grail of sleeping. Half way through that week, I was carefully searching for encouragement online (and trying to avoid all the condemners--I had read all that before I started) and found the single most encouraging thing I could find. It said something to the effect of "I think you're a good mother for doing this. If your baby weren't eating you'd do whatever it took to get him to eat. And this is just as important."

So that carried me. That, and the fact that Asher woke up happy. Happier, even. And while he was awake he was happy. And we didn't have to work real hard to keep him that way.

During those first few days there were certainly times when it didn't feel natural at all. I often try to think about Asher the way God thinks about us, and it just didn't feel like what he does. But I knew it was necessary. And a lot of times it really did feel right. But by Wednesday when it wasn't really seemingly working we about had a break down. There wasn't really a steady decrease in crying and I knew if it didn't get better soon we'd have to stop.

Then one night he cried for 35 minutes.

Then the next morning at his nap he cried for 25.

Then 10.

Ten minutes. We felt like we'd won the lottery.

...
...

Happy Father's Day!

Today I celebrated my first Father's Day. Being a dad is a crazy, awesome, humbling thing. The problem with being a dad is that it's such a big responsibility that you don't have time to stop and think about what a huge eternally significant responsibility it is.

Donald Miller, author and fellow Portlander, posted something on his blog yesterday that I thought I would share. It's kinda long, but hey, we posted something! You shouldn't be complaining about how long it is!
_________________________________________
If you’re a dad who is working hard to love his kids and their mom, today we celebrate you. A father is a position created by God that only a man can fulfill, and God created your role to bring order into chaos. Without you, your kids wouldn’t have somebody to read them a story at night, to give them a sense of security. Without you, your daughters might doubt there could be a man out there who could love them the way you love their mom. Without you, there would be a wound in the soul of your children, and a wound in the soul of your wife, too.

I hope you take some time today to think about how much better you are making the world around you. I know it can be tough sometimes, and I know the world goes out of its way to celebrate lesser men, but stick it out and do the hard work because the truly rich blessings in this life go to the ones who endure in quiet goodness.

Here’s a verse that comes to mind as I think about the responsibility of fathers. It’s from Genesis 4:

“The Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.”

So that’s the call of a Father, to do well, and to rule over the sin that, without you, would no doubt rule over your family. May God give you the strength and endurance necessary to create a better world for those you love. It’s a noble calling, to be a dad. Way to go, Dads!
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Lately I've been reminded how grateful I am that I will always have Kirsten and Asher in my life. They make it easy to want to be a great dad.

And luckily for me, both of our dads have been great role models for me to follow and have given me something to live up to. Happy Father's Day guys!










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