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I am the Gingerbread Baby,
Fresh from the pan.
If you want me,
Catch me if you can.

I love this book! We checked it out of the library, and when it was due back, I decided to just order it for the girls and pull it out every year with their Christmas books and bake gingerbread cookies.

It is Jan Brett’s version of the classic Gingerbread Boy tale, but with a much happier ending, one in which the Gingerbread Baby doesn’t get eaten up.

Our cookies, however, do. :)

Anna is quite the little baker! She loves to help I mean do it herself.

Mmmm… she likes to smell the spices: (more…)

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Sarah is 2 months old today! It was very cold today… a great day for a warm fleece snowman dress. Isn’t she cute? She’s been giving us lots of great smiles lately, but not usually when I have the camera out. Maybe I’ll capture some of them soon.

She is starting to get a lot more fun. She still mostly eats and sleeps and just lies there, but she is getting more responsive to us. She likes to lie on her back and kick her legs, and she’ll look us in the eyes and smile when we talk to her and play with her. She also reaches for things and grasps them whenever her hand happens to land in the right spot.

So how’s she sleeping? That’s a question people love to ask about newborns. She seems to be the opposite of Anna. Anna was a good daytime napper, but she remained a horrible nighttime sleeper until about 6 months of age. (Fortunately, she’s been great since then.) Sarah, on the other hand, does not nap well during the day, but at least she sleeps well at night! She’ll usually go to bed and sleep until her middle-of-the-night feeding (which is around 4:00 these days), then go back to sleep until morning, usually not requiring any intervention from us in between. So if I had to take my pick, I’d much prefer her to sleep well at night!

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I want to blog more often, really I do! It’s so hard to make it a priority right now. But here’s a picture; maybe it will get things rolling. Here are my girls with their blankets that my OB clinic gives to all the babies they deliver:

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It was not a Southern Living Thanksgiving. We sat around our small kitchen table atop our bare, concrete floor in our unfinished kitchen, eating off of scratched, chipped everyday dishes because our nice china is still packed, pouring tea from a cheap plastic pitcher, and admiring the only Thanksgiving decorations to be found—a pine cone turkey and a paper plate turkey made by Anna. :)

But we had bountiful blessings, including plenty of good food to eat, a warm cozy house, clean water, family, health, the grace of God, and three new friends.

A few weeks ago we decided to invite some international students to have Thanksgiving dinner with us. Did you know that 75% of international students never enter an American home? We have some friends who are part of an outreach to international students here in Conway, and one of the things they do is match students with American families so they can experience a Thanksgiving meal. This year we were honored to have Joanna from China and Ghadeer and Bassam from Saudi Arabia at our  table.

David smoked a turkey and it was delicious! We also had dressing, sweet potatoes, green beans, rolls, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and cranberry-apple pie. Ghadeer brought Basbousa, a traditional Middle Eastern dessert. My mom made about half of the other dishes, so I really didn’t have that much to cook.

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Sarah is 1 month old today! We can’t decide if it seems like it’s been a month or not. On one hand, it seems like she’s been a part of our family for a long time. On the other, it all still seems so new that we really haven’t gotten a grip on things yet!

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Sydney and Sarah checkin’ each other out:

First tub bath:

Settled down for a nap in Mommy’s bathrobe:

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David gave Sarah her first bottle today! And she gladly took it. Yea!

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We ventured out to church today with not-quite-2-week-old Sarah. It was great to see friends and get back into the swing of things a little bit. We got there a little early, knowing it would take several minutes to make it through the atrium and into the sanctuary with a new baby. :) Sarah was wide awake and alert when we got there, ready to greet everybody! She was great during church; she fussed a little bit when she got sleepy, but I just stepped out with her for a few minutes until she was asleep and then rejoined the service for the remainder.

She wore the same dress Anna wore for her first Sunday. Here we are, ready to go:

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