Waving

Ruth is starting to wave! You have to know to watch for it, but she's learning!

Ruth - Tooth!

Ruth got a third tooth in this week!  It's on the top and she likes to play with it.  She chomps her teeth together so we can hear them and she'll rub them together too.  It makes our skin crawl, but I'm so glad my girl is growing and hitting milestones!  Hopefully that doesn't become a habit and she's just checking out her new tooth!

Flips

Elinore has learned how to do a forward somersault and she's loving it.  She calls them flips and loves to flip around the family room banging into stuff and nearly hitting her sister often. 

Crawling

This past week or so Ruth has mastered crawling on her hands and knees!  Sometimes she still prefers the army crawl, but I see her crawling on her knees more and more.  She's more methodical about it and not quite as fast, but she's doing it! 

She's been such a pleasure to watch grow and learn.  I'm loving learning more about her!

Ruth - 9 Months

Table

Ruth likes to crawl under the table. Sometimes when we aren't sitting at our she gets stuck and cries for someone to come move a chair for her to get out. She will crawl over the chair rungs now sometimes too. When were there sitting it's like she is a dog begging for food!

Roller Coaster

Look mom; I'm on a roller coaster!

Or driving with the window down...

Driver

Such a serious baby driver.

We love this girl!

Rite of Passage

It's a childhood rite of passage to wear your underwear on your head at least once right?

Train

Caden and Caleb got tired of Ruth messing up their train tracks repeatedly, so they built one just for her!

Children

Tired

Someone was tired after a day at Idlewild without a nap. She was awesome though. All the kids were so well behaved! She loves being a "big kid."

That face!

This kid, love! Great sense of humor!

Pretending to be like Scooby Doo.

Hotel lobby, early mornings

What do you do when the baby wakes at 6 and the 6 other family members are asleep in the hotel room? Mom and baby go hang out in the lobby together.

I liked the extra snuggles I got with my girl.

Crash

This weekend 8 of us stayed in a hotel in PA the go to Idlewild. On night two, Caleb fell out of the pull out couch bed and scraped up his face! Poor kid!

Wonder what he'll tell the kids at school?

Tounge

Look mom; I can turn my tounge upside down!

Cleveland Art Museum and Botanical Gardens

While Keith was away on business, I took a vacation day and with the kids and a friend of Caleb's we went to Cleveland for the day.

Columbus Zoo

The weekend before school started this year we spent in Columbus hanging out with some friends. Our adventures started at the Zoo. The Columbus Zoo is awesome. It's now our favorite over Cleveland and Akron!

We were there from 10-5 and didn't see all the Zoo! We did see some pirates though!

Mansfield Carousel Park

The day before school started we made a stop on the way home from a weekend in Columbus for some fun!  Fun carousel, unique animals and a great break!

Cloth Diapers

With Elinore being potty trained, I bleached my stash of diapers and snapped them down to the smallest setting for miss Ruthie.  However, the first weekend we tried it, them broke out with terrible diaper rash.  It was diaper rash everywhere the diaper was against here.  We quickly switched backed to disposables, washed some more diapers and got her cleared up.  Since then I've occasioanlly put her in cloth just to see what happens and we've been doing better since that first time.  I think now I need to get back on the cloth diaper bandwagon and start saving some money by not buying so many disposables!

First Day of School - 205

Potty Trained!

Elinore has been officially potty trained for over a month now!  She's very good about it, and we've had very few accidents since she's gone to underwear.  I think we've had less accidents than we can count on one hand.  She's proud of herself and she's wearing big girl undies!  Princesses, Minnie and Frozen of course. 

That frees up the cloth diapers for our little Ruthie!

Journal

I haven't written much lately about what my lovely kiddos are up to.  My desire is there, but my energy and time haven't been.  It's hard to sit down and just write, but there are times I really want to.  When I was school shopping for the boys a month or so ago, I picked myself up a pretty new composition notebook. 



I've been keeping it in my purse with a pen handing and writing when things move me or I have something I want to remember.  And when I say something I want to remember, I don't mean my grocery list.  I mean real life changing, God spoken messages I need to remember and reflect on. 

I don't write in it regularly, but when I find something I like or want to reflect on, I jot it down, sometimes it's a sentance, sometimes a paragraph and even a page or two!  It's been useful for me, and something I hope draws me closer to God. 

Surprised by Motherhood

This book had been on my radar for awhile.  I read good things about it, but never clicked the buy now from my amazon wish list.  Then one day while shopping on dayspring.com I found it on sale for $5.  It made it into a shopping cart!  I had a few books in front of it, so it sat for awhile before I picked it up. 

I started reading it not too long ago; it was an easy read and the first few chapters I noticed Lisa-Jo Baker talks a lot about her home in South Africa, you got the idea she misses.  I kept reading, but I also though as I read that I wasn't really getting much from it personally for me, but that I was reading her story. 

I've been reading a lot lately and trying to choose things that make me think deeper and challenge the ways I think or live.  I didn't feel like I was doing that the first few chapers here, but I still think there is value in reading other people's stories.  People need to share their stories and their lives, and I was happy to read hers and others storires.  It's a collection of people that you a connected to once you've shared stories. 

However, as I continued reading, I realized this book was impacting me and challenging me and identifiying with me, and I didn't even realize it!  It was making me think about my life without me even realizing how profoud some of her stories were.  The book felt like a warm hug in the world of motherhood.