Five Good Reasons Why I Simply Cannot Look at the Camera Right Now

Mama, i know that you are trying to take a good picture of me in my cute outfit from Gammer and socks from Aunt Kay, but i simply cannot look at the camera right now because:

 Look! The kitties are walking by!

 I'm chewing on my zebra.

 

 

 Wow, there is a pattern on this blanket!

 

 

Woops, dropped my zebra. 

I'm contemplating something i see out the window.

You see Mama, babies are very busy people are we are not always available to be photographed just because the time is convenient for you.
 

Playtime Whodunit Solved!

We have a mystery on our hands. One minute Bright Eyes was lying on her playmat, minding her own business:

 

 

And the next minute she wasn't!

 

 

 

Who can guess what happened?

 

Laura is right, big sister was the perpetrator! Big surprise, i know. The thing i find funny about it was that she did it right under my nose! I was sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea and reading something while the girls were playing nicely on the floor. I remember overhearing the BabyGirl saying, "Excuse me! Excuse me, Bright Eyes!"

 

I am clearly not a multitasker, because the information did not penetrate deep enough into my consciousness to cause me to look up from what i was doing. By the time i did look up, the BabyGirl had moved on to play somewhere else, and poor Bright Eyes was left all alone on the hard kitchen floor with no sister in sight.

 

However, the BabyGirl's motives were true. At church they cover the nursery floor with interlocking foam mats like these, only bigger and multi-colored. When church is over, everyone pitches in to take the squares apart and stack them up. The little kids love to help. That is why the BabyGirl has been pre-programmed to take the squares apart. Hopefully next time she will learn to wait until Bright Eyes is finished using them!

 



She DID NOT WANT To Have Her Picture Taken

The BabyGirl and now Bright Eyes as well have both been so blessed by many wonderful gifts from friends and family members. I think the BabyGirl was a year old before i had to buy her any clothes. Gammer and Granny in particular have kept our girls very well dressed, and we are so thankful. It was especially helpful last fall, when money was so tight. The BabyGirl would not have had any clothes had we not received so many generous and loving gifts.

Early in the BabyGirl's life, i made a special effort to take pictures of her in the outfits that Gammer and Granny sent. They live far away and do not have opportunity to see how cute she is in their clothes. Well then i really dropped the ball while i was pregnant, and have been trying to get in the habit again. Except, now the BabyGirl has a mind of her own. She does not always want her picture taken:

It was really very tragic, because she liked that dress so much and really enjoyed wearing it. My photo efforts simply caught her at a bad time. We had gone to McDonald's with the Three Brothers after church. An hour of running around in the play place was a little more excitement than she could handle. She was none too thrilled when it was time to leave, and she was none too thrilled that it was naptime as soon as we got home. So we tried again:

Nope, still doesn't like it. Therefore i am instituting a new method. I'll take a picture of the clothes themselves so that we can all remember who sent them. And if i get a picture of the clothes actually being worn, the it's a huge bonus! But if not, oh well, c'est la vie. Here's our first batch:

 

Cute clothes from Granny! The gray shirt on the right, the one that says "Star," is her current favorite. She wears it every day. Fortunately, i got a picture! This is a bonus feature because she's wearing a shirt from Granny while opening a present from Aunt Kay:

 

 

Tune in next time for First Christmas Bib, and if we're lucky we'll also have some Christmas Minions!

 

Bright Eyes Speaks Her Mind

Bright Eyes is now four months old! Thankfully, she seems to be understanding life a lot better now. She has become more mellow and predictable during the day. However, she's still wild and crazy at night.

She had her four month checkup this week, and the verdict was: healthy with a touch of reflux. They said she was a very fine specimen of a baby girl. Her favorite activities currently are sucking on her hands, wiggling and watching her big sister. She devotes 100% of her wakeful moments to the pursuit of sucking her thumb. She's not quite there yet, and she will do nothing else until she masters it. This means that she's a big drooly mess all day long. She used to go through multiple outfits a day due to spitting up; now she goes through clothes because of the drool. Nonetheless, she's adorable and we're glad that she is ours!



Sucking on her hands, of course

 

Smiling, but with a finger in her mouth

 

Big smile

She's definitely been making herself heard recently. Being a person naturally given to extremes, she likes to be as loud and shrill as she can. It gives her great satisfaction to make a lot of high-pitched noise:

Making a Difference: The Professor

By now you have all seen this on facebook, but i want to preserve it for posterity so i'm posting it here too:

The Professor was featured in our local newspaper! A colleague jokingly commented to him, "When i saw your name and picture in the paper, i got really worried! It's usually a bad sign to have your picture in the news!"

Thankfully, The Professor has not become a mass murderer. Instead he is inspiring his students to change the world. Every semester he has his Ethics classes complete an assignment in which they perform an ethical deed. The results range from tear-jerking to pathetic. While one student spent a day helping a man with Multiple Sclerosis, another decided to smile at each person they saw while out walking.

When this article was published, The Professor was the big man on campus for a day. Tons of faculty and staff that he didn't even know gave him their congratulations. It generated a lot of dialogue about ethical actions. The janitor who cleans his office told him that she and her husband had a long discussion about the article and enjoyed coming up with ideas for good deeds they would do if they were in his class.

It really has been neat to see how this class project has changed the perspectives of many of his students. Now through the article, even more people have been challenged to meet the needs around them.


College ethics class asks students to test impact of acting ethically
Updated: 24 November 2012 | 4:23 pm

For three semesters, K***** College instructor "The Professor" has charged his ethics students to do something they would consider ethically right.

The Professor, a philosophy instructor on the Cornstalk campus, said he felt what he had been assigning in the past was too much memorization and “too much on the objective knowledge instead of really trying to see the impact, not just theoretically, but in their lives.”

The ethics project, which is 10 percent of the students’ grades, could be something large or small, but it had to be something they wouldn’t have done otherwise, without the assignment.

About 30 students in The Professor’s ethics classes last fall and last spring and about 25 students this fall semester took those parameters and returned with projects that inspired their teacher, with stories of helping elderly neighbors, picking up trash in the park and donating time to charities.

“I think much of what I see from the students is very encouraging, very inspiring,” he said. “It definitely confirms to me that there’s value in this kind of project.”

One student volunteered to help arrange 500 vases of flowers to be delivered to cancer patients. Another student reported she could see and hear how grateful an elderly couple was after she anonymously paid for their dinner at the Olive Garden. A Cornstalk City student last fall, Boussina, taught her friend, a Sudanese immigrant like herself, how to drive so she could find a job.

Heather wanted to do something long-lasting for her ethics project. Heather, 24, is a first-year K****** student studying horticulture.

She signed up for the bone marrow donor registry for her project this fall. And because getting on the donor list took a little longer than she expected, she also donated blood, which she wrote about for the class.

“I wanted to do something a little above and beyond,” Heather said. “Everyone is getting so apathetic. I think the ethics project is a great way to get people off their couches and off their stupid cellphones and into the community. I was pretty excited about it.”

Heather also had a cousin who had leukemia and needed a bone-marrow transplant, so she thought joining the donor list “was like paying it forward.”

For her project last spring semester, Stephanie found an elderly man seeking assistance with home chores on the website Craigslist, after his son was hospitalized and could no longer help him. She enlisted some of her friends and they helped the man with his yard, house cleaning and walking his dog. The man offered to pay them, which they declined. At the end of her paper, Stephanie wrote that the man was so happy and grateful.

“He said he was glad to see there were actually genuine, caring people left in the world, as he had almost given up hope,” she wrote.

The assignment, The Professor said, was inspired in part by Aristotle.

“I hope that this assignment helps students to live well and also, by extension, to benefit the surrounding community,” he said.
 

Posthumous Blogging: Who Wears the Crown?

Here is a story from sometime in July:

The BabyGirl's night-night song is "Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus." We have sung that song for her bedtime since she was about 4 months old. She knows it by heart. My dad even commented that she knows verses that he and my mom don't even know.

Back in April, the BabyGirl and i made a trip to visit my parents. She has a very difficult time sleeping in new environments. One night while we were there, i put her down for bed and then my mom and i needed to run out to the grocery. My dad was on BabyGirl duty. I told him that if she woke up, he should hold her with her head on his shoulder and sing Tis So Sweet.

Well sure enough, she woke up. He followed instructions and held her while singing her song. He tried to put her back in bed; it was a no-go. Like trying to put a cat in the bathtub, she resisted gravity. He sang it again; she still wouldn't go down. At this point he was bored of that song and decided to sing something else. She jerked her head up from his shoulder and glared at him with a look that said, "You are breaking protocol and i won't stand for it." He quickly resumed singing Tis So Sweet, and she rested her head back on his shoulder.

By the time she was two years and a few months old, however, she also got bored of Tis So Sweet. One day during naptime i decided to sing "What Wondrous Love Is This." She loved it! She's got quite a knack for picking up new songs. After two naptimes' worth of singing it, she knew most of the words to the first verse. (Even though she has no idea what a "soul" is.) Then she turned her attention to one of the other verses:

When I was sinking down, sinking down, sinking down
When I was sinking down, sinking down
When I ws sinking down, beneath God's righteous frown,
Christ laid aside His crown for my soul, for my soul.
Christ laid aside His crown for my soul.

When i got to the part about the crown, she lifted her head from my shoulder and said enthusiastically, "A crown like a princess wears!" She was so pleased to have picked up on a word she knew.

I said, "You're right; a princess does wear a crown! And Jesus has a crown also."

Whoa, whoa, wait a second there Mama. She looked at me with pity for my ignorance. You see, she knows A LOT about Jesus. She has her Jesus Storybook Bible practically memorized. There was a stretch of time when she refused to get out of bed in the morning until she'd read her Bible (pretty convicting for me, actually). She flips through the pages and names each character: that's Daniel! that's Zaccheus! that's Saul!

But her favorite picture by far is Jesus with the children. She frequently requests it. "Want to see Jesus and boy and girl!" After multiple experiences of flipping through the entire Bible to find that page (well okay, flipping through the gospels. It's obviously not in the Old Testament), we finally committed it to memory. Page 225.

Incidentally, she also knows a good deal about princesses, thanks to my sister's gift of the book The Princess Primer. It is filled with all sorts of useful information, from styles of ballgowns to how to tell a good prince from a bad prince to the proper way to curtsy.

As she looked at me, i could see her mentally filing through all the pictures of Jesus in her Bible and comparing them to the pictures in the princess book:

With her analysis complete, she felt qualified to inform me: "No Mama, Jesus has no crown."

There was no arguing with her. She had evidence.

One day we will spend a little more time reading Revelation, where Jesus kicks butt and takes names. But for now, she sees Jesus as a familiar friend who invites you to sit on His lap and play.

I think that's exactly how it should be.
 

Silly Songs With Mama

I love hearing the songs that other mamas invent for their babies. Making up baby songs is so much fun! My sister Kay and my friend Laura are real professionals when it comes to baby songs. Kay has a whole anthology of songs on YouTube. My favorites include "Bath Day" and "Miss Eliz She Is the Shiz".

I remember one year on a church women's retreat, a couple of people were sitting around chatting with Clare Adella about her singer\songwriter career. I chimed in, "Laura is a songwriter too!" Everyone gave a surprised facial expression, thinking, "Really? I know Laura pretty well, how did i not hear about this?"

Laura said enthusiastically, "Oh yes, i write songs all the time!"

I exclaimed, "Sing the one about 'He likes to burp and eat potatoes!'"

She then entertained us with a rousing rendition of "He Likes To Burp and Eat Potatoes".

Our family's songs may not be as exciting as Kay and Laura's, but i would like to record them for posterity, so here you have a few of our favorites:

Who's My Baby Muffin Pie
to the tune of Camptown Races

Who's my baby muffin pie?
BabyGirl, BabyGirl!
Who's my baby muffin pie?
BabyGirl Alaina!
She's my muffin pie,
She's so very sweet.
Who's my baby muffin pie?
BabyGirl Alaina!


Very Hungry Girl
to the tune of La Cucaracha

Oh my Bright Eyes, she is so pretty
She's a very hungry girl
Oh my Bright Eyes, she is so pretty
She's a very hungry girl
We need to feed her; we need to smooch her
She's a very hungry girl
We need to feed her; we need to smooch her
She's a very hungry girl!

Carseat Song
Written by The Professor and BabyGirl
To the tune of Rockabye Baby

Rockabye Bright Eyes in your carseat
We will go driving til you're asleep
Then you will wake up and you'll be fed
And then we will lay you down in your bed


Bright Eyes' Sleeping Song
to the tune of the chorus of Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus

Bright Eyes, Bright Eyes
Why do you wake up
Eightteen million times a night?
Bright Eyes, Bright Eyes
O! My Bright Eyes -
When will you start sleeping right?


When it comes to real songs, here is one of the best for little girls: