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Ezra turns one on the 29th, but we had his party on Saturday.

My dad was the resident photographer, so check out other pictures here.

Here’s some pictures from my Dad’s Flickr of us at Balboa Park:

Ezra is 11 months old today! He’ll soon be transitioning to toddlerhood — wow. He now proudly says “mama” and “dada” and “Daaa” for dog. He’s also said “bana” for banana a few times and he’s attempting to say bird, as we generally go out to our back yard and observe the hummingbirds in the morning.

I put him on our bathroom scale and he’s somewhere between 18 and 19 pounds as best I can figure. We haven’t got our insurance all figured out yet, so hopefully he’ll get to go when he’s around 1 year. His first birthday party is coming up in a few weeks! Anyone have any great party ideas? I’m looking for an activity that little kids and their parents can do. Our friends did iron-ons and that was fun…so something like that.

Oh, and we’ll get some pictures taken and up soon! We’re just trying to keep getting our house picked up, the ants killed, and keep unpacking a few more boxes. One of these days we’ll get things more like home.

So, we have begun to start Ezra on solids. His first attempt was a banana; although he looks very interested in it, it came back up on both attempts. Next food: sweet potato!
Here’s the progression:

Then:

Now:

We are recovering over here at the Hales’ household. Bryce has been sick for more than a week and I’m nearing the week mark. Ezra got off easy with his first cold as it was over in a record 2 days. All of those antibodies in breast milk is doing his body good!

I wonder what one can do to make oneself slow down a bit. Life seems to be going at a pretty fast clip and some of that is inevitable (weekly church meetings, I’m working at home and out of the home, I still have a PhD to complete, etc.), but days just still feel busy. I hate feeling busy. I guess having a child makes life more busy (and he’s only 5 months old!) — not much time to sit around curled up in a chair with a mug of tea.

Here’s a list to leave you with. Things I’ve learned about myself since becoming a mother:
1. I need my own space.
2. A lot of mothering is just listening to your child and being confident that you know best how to meet his/her needs.
3. Many things that I used to stress out about I now stress out about less (I wouldn’t say that I don’t take things too seriously still…).
4. I appreciate Bryce so much more.
5. I don’t care too much when Ezra’s binky hits the floor.
6. I had no idea mothering took so much work and was so all-consuming.
7. Ezra’s smile can brighten my day even when I’ve had it.
8. A newborn’s (and infant’s) laughter makes everything pale in comparison.
9. I value my time away from Ezra at work on Wednesdays because it makes me that much more excited to see him.
10. I love experiencing the world through the eyes of my child.

We’ll be in Atlanta in a week for four days of being assessed for the possibility of planting a church. We’d appreciate your prayers — especially for Ezra as my mom will be caring for him for those four days (he’ll be with us during the nights). He really needs to sleep well for her and take the bottle well. I’m a bit nervous about how he’ll do away from me for 12-hour days.

We are alive, although we haven’t blogged in quite some time.
1. I finished teaching for the semester in the middle of December and since then we’ve been mostly out of town, which has been wonderful and completely needed to revive our sanity.
2. Ezra has now learned to roll over! (This happened at about 3.5 months)
3. Ezra is also quite advanced in that he’s cut his first tooth and is probably working on his second one. (This happened right around Christmas).
4. We’ve been dealing with all the fussiness that attends #s 3 and 4, coupled with a boy who often likes to fight sleep.
5. We are doing some work (I’m writing a book review and planning lectures for next week’s classes), but are also enjoying the chance to actually spend some leisurely time together.
6. We had our first family vacation, just the three of us. We rented a little cabin in the woods and enjoyed watching Studio 60 on DVD, reading, eating out and taking a few short walks in the cold. And my husband even built multiple log fires to keep us warm and toasty.
7. My goals for 2008 include: losing the baby weight and reading my Bible daily — oh, and getting a bit more time in for myself amidst the insanity of teaching, mothering, and trying to think abstractly still.

Happy New Year to you all!

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Originally uploaded by Hesed

We like to joke with our friends, Ken and Gillian, that their daughter, Eva, and Ezra are betrothed. Here they are in their green pj’s, with parental supervision of course.

Pictures from Ezra’s baptism last Sunday (click the pic to see the rest). I’ll post the video as soon as I find the power cord for the video camera.