As requested...

Video of Noah crawling...

Lately his nickname has been "little Marwan" after the terrorist in season 4 of 24. :) The terrorist in 24 launches a nuclear missle towards LA, and Noah has this "missle lock" crawl where he locks on something he wants to crawl to (usually something he can't touch, ironically) and he gets all excited and bee-lines for the object. Even if I'm not looking I can tell if hes changed into "little Marwan" or our little terrorist cause he crawls lightning fast and says "bwah bwah bwah" as his missle takes off. :)
I can now say "go get Tobi!" and he looks for her, smiles, and crawls toward her and gets ever so happy if he can catch her. He also loves chasing me around the room when I say "come get me!" I love our little crawler.

Hi!

Noah waves "hi" to us all the time now. He's done it for a while now, but now he initiates it. When we walk into the room, he waves "hi." He even waves "hi" to Tobi our cat. He is understanding alot more now. When I say things like "come here" or "shake your ball" or "don't touch" he totally understands and will comply. It's super cute.

Since Clint's office isn't ready yet he's been using the coffee table as a work area. Noah's fixated on his MacArthur commentary. He loves opening and closing the cover. If he sees it he can't wait to crawl over and stand just to open and close it.
Future seminarian/MacArthurite? :) Tee hee.

Do It Yourself

Anyone who knows Clint knows that he's not really "Mr. Handy." I think its rather cute! But this weekend Clint and a friend of ours David made bookshelves from scratch for Clint's office! We are turning half of our garage into an office for Clint so that its off of the house for noise etc. There is no office at the church, (since we used to live at the church, it was kind of dual purpose). So he will be working from home.

They took raw superwood (glorified chipboard) and stained it & varnished it. This took two days on its own cuase you had to wait for it to dry, and then sand it and varnish it again.

All the stained wood:
And TADA! 3 days of solid work, and here it is! Custom made bookshelving! We just have to put one last shelf in once they move the electric points. Next comes drywall, wood floors, windows, doors, and viola! An office.

Now its time to move his millions of books from our old house, and then we are officially done moving!

First Easter, First Chocolate

Noah's new favorite thing is to stand at our fence which is the perfect height for him to grab onto, and to look out on the trees. The weather has finally changed to Autumn (my favorite!) so its so clear and dry and pretty, we've been hanging out outside everyday this week.

Gazing at the trees

So a family in our church gave us 3 Cadbury Chocolate eggs for Easter. One for Noah as well of course. So I put it way in front of him to make him crawl for it. His first Easter egg "hunt". I like the little smirk on his face.

He liked the sound of the aluminum and LOVED the egg, and then discovered what was inside. I've never ever given him chocolate before, but because of the occasion, I thought, why not? It's Easter....and it IS his egg right?
Yikes, big mistake! After his first bite, and his second, he cried and cried for more! (By the way I craved Cadbury chocolate when I was pregnant, he must have liked it then too!) But then 2 hours later, he wouldn't sleep his afternoon nap cause of the sugar. He's never skipped an afternoon nap. Normally I just put him down and he gets cozy and falls straight asleep. But after an hour, he was still doing this:

Everytime I'd walk in he'd be cracking up standing in his crib! He was laughing so hard! And I really really needed him to sleep cause I was having someone babysit him later that day so I could play guitar for worship during evening service. It took some convincing, and some stern voices, but he finally took a quick nap before church! :) Whew! No more chocolate for Noah!

The big move

These are the amazing people who helped us move. Because of them it took us only one day to move all of our stuff into our new home! Marlene cleaned like a maniac, and Kyle & Anthony helped us drill all of our curtain rods up, while everyone else moved all of our heavy stuff into trucks and viola! We were all moved in in less than one day! Thanks guys! And Liz babysat Noah while we moved. Thank you!
And our house was still looking like a construction sight from the outside (it was a bunch of rocks and dirt with construction trash everywhere!). But thanks to a fellow believer who owns a grass farm and donated grass to us, we now have awesome grass all around our whole house! It looks amazing. Here is when they laid it....

And some photos of our house!

Kitchen. I love how much space it has.

My favorite part is the huge pantry on the right. And the new stove! The stove in the old house only boiled water on one hot plate :) And of course the red walls. It's so warm and cheery.

Looking through the kitchen into the livingroom over the counter. (Above is the lintel that divides the two rooms).

Livingroom looking out onto the patio. Clint's mom made custom made our curtains for us!

Livingroom/entrance hall standing at the TV looking down the hall and at our front door/entrance hall.

Entrance hall

Guest bathroom/shower.

I'll take photos of the back end of the house tomorrow. :)


And Noah has officially started crawling/pulling himself up on furniture. I was so excited that it happened in the new house cause the old one had so many "danger zones" I wasn't prepared for so it was ok that Noah was just army crawling. But this one is easy to childproof. His favorite thing to do in our new house is crawl over to and look out the new windows that are just his height to look out of :) He's hearing alot of "no touch!" but is quick to stop and look at me like "what, I wasn't going to touch it!" and then crawl the other way. It's so cute to see him obey.

Hangout time on our patio. The coolest part of our house is at night sitting on the patio and seeing the lights of Durban twinkle below us. Or in the day seeing the ships on the ocean. It feels like we are on holiday, but we live here! I just can't believe it yet.

We are just so grateful to the Lord for everyone who has helped make this house and move possible. Thank you!

And I am so grateful that our internet works here, yippee!

Our new house is ready!

Our new house is finally finally finally ready! (Well, ready enough to move in). Its been quite a saga since it was supposed to be ready in September...and every week there have been tons of mistakes and drama....but its finally worth it cause we are moving in tomorrow! Yipee! We are just so excited for our new house! Yesterday they were finishing our patio and ran out of tiles and needed ONE tile. So Clint went to the tile place only to find...they were discontinued!! After several phone calls, and talking to a million people, we found, you got it...ONE tile. The Lord was so good in providing the last tile! Take that story times 500...and you've got the picture of what its like to build.

It's hard to take photos of the room since my camera doesn't have a wideangle lens. But here we go

Master bedroom (door leads to patio)

Kitchen

Front door/window

Livingroom (I love the wood floors, I spent all day mopping them today)

Noahs room! (Guestroom photo looks the same, just not blue!)

The bathrooms aren't quite finished yet. But I'll post more later.

And for a Grandma Noah fix....I take Noah every day to swing next door on the preschool playyard. He LOVES it and babbles and sings away as he swings. The one thing I'll miss about moving is taking him everyday. He LOVES it sooo much!

We are moving tomorrow....ahhhh!

10 Months Old!

Noah turned 10 months today! Here are some photos from the monthly photo shoots :)

I was just thinking today how much fun it is having a baby. I always thought the fun came later when they could talk and interact with you more, and the baby stage was just work. But its sooo much fun. I love him to bits!

At 10 months old Noah holds up his hand for "hi" (like in the above photo). He sometimes does it on his own if we walk into the room which makes my heart melt. He often holds up toys for me to "take" and he puts them in my hand very gently. He laughs alot when he is standing. He loves to swing on the little swing next door to us. He loves our dog Spurgeon, and laughs really loud when ever the dog comes running near him. His favorite toys are anything that light up or have music. He doesn't like chicken (the only food so far). He loves finger foods, especially cut up mango or cheese. He has 6 teeth. He takes 2 naps a day, ranging from one to two hours each. He's very ticklish, especially his feet and his neck, and he loves bouncing on our knees. :)

On our feet again

So after a week of being down, Noah and I are back on our feet again. We didn't go hear daddy preach today for one last day of recovery, and so we don't infect the entire church with this bug! But Noah seemed way happier today, was eating again, and I managed to actually clean up my house after a few days of doing nothing but sleep and take care of Noah. Yikes this was a difficult week, I'm glad its over! But now Granny and Grandpa were infected! Nuts! Clint's the lucky one, he still feels fine!

So Noah's been LOVING standing. He can't get there on his own if the table is too high, but once he's up, he loves it. He crys when he sits down on his bum only because....its not standing anymore.

Here's his "I'm about to be mischievous" look

And his "mischievousness" accomplished look (pulling down my table runner!)

The bath height seems to be the perfect height for him to want to stand. Now its a battle to get him to sit so I can wash his hair. But he loves it so much. He says his "happy sounds" which are these cute whispers with constantant sounds soft little "pft, ba, da, ta" in the softest voice. Its my favorite Noah language at the moment. He usually only says it when he stands in his bath. It was nice seeing tons of smiles today. You sort of forget when your child is sick that they are usually such a bundle of joy.

And this upside down daddy hug shows his top 4 teeth! Don't they look so sore?

I lost....

So I'm usually one of those people who when they get a cold, treat it as if it doesn't exist. If it exists, then the cold has won, and the cold must NEVER win. I always win. If anything I'll sleep it off and take a few extra vitamins etc. but the one thing I never do is go to the doctor. In my opinion doctors are there to make money off of poor saps who have colds and who think they are in need of antibiotics...which don't actually work if you have a virus, but doctors prescribe it anyway so the patient feels like he/she has gotten their moneys worth. I've always thought that antibiotics were from the devil cause they are the ultimate doctor's lie. I've never been to the doctor for a cold in like 15 years. Really.

Well this time, the cold one. Hands down. I fought it. I pretended it didn't exist. But when you're a mom of a sick baby as well, that really doesn't work. Noah had 5 whammies at once. All in the top 10 list of baby's worst nightmare:
1. Cutting all 4 top teeth at once
2. A crazy ear infection
3. A 104 degree fever with his cold
4. A nursing strike, due to the ear infection. Everytime he came near me he cried cause it hurt to drink. He also didn't want to eat.
5. No sleep (one night he woke up every 20 minutes, naps usually were a half hour at best)

So having to take care of a little sicky guy, you forget that you should try and take care of yourself too. And today I broke down after a week of fighting, and because of my sinus infection, I had to swallow my pride and go to the doctor. What did he prescribe? Antibiotics. But he insured me its the only thing that will stop this crazy pain in my sinuses. So......I fell for it. Hopefully it works. I thought my cheeks were going to explode today from the pain! :)

I think the Lord just knocks us flat sometimes so that we remember that we are to be dependent on Him for everything!