Six Months Old!

Matthew is six months old today!!  He has grown so fast in the last six months.  Seems like it was just last week that Gramma Smith flew out here at the last minute to be with us and the kids before he was born.  

Now he's crawling all over and standing up at the chairs and couch.  It's a full-time job for all of us watching him and such fun seeing him discover everything!  

He's such a blessing!

Here are a few recent pictures of Matthew.

Saturday

Today is Saturday and we're busy.  Couldn't have guessed that huh?  

After a slightly stressful couple of days at school (the joys of doing your Calc assignments on a web-based program tainted with bugs)  James is heading off this morning to somewhere in Mississippi again. He went about a month ago for a children's revival with the worship team from church.  The pastor there  invited them back for a youth rally this weekend.  I guess he's a travelling musician now :)!  He enjoys playing so much and he's excited to be going.  

While he's gone we are going to be picking up our "Apple Truck" one last time to get the remaining shelf unit out of the larger storage garage.  Then we'll be taking it to the smaller one and rearranging everything.  

We'll also be working on getting things organized in our storage room at home.  We cut down a lot of the brush that was against the outside wall of our storage room.  We also have some more painting to do on the outside. Hopefully it will all be done soon.  

Meanwhile, I will leave you with two videos of Matthew.  Don't play them at the same time though, you might get dizzy.  Unless you like that sort of thing - go ahead then.  

The first one is him crawling toward me.  Tummy off the floor now - no more army crawl for this guy.  

This second one is him pulling up on the couch to play with toys.  

Last night he was 'creeping' along the couch while standing.  Can't believe he's not even six months old yet. 

LSU Explained (a little) . . .

It's time to tell you all about James and his adventures at college so far.  No, I don't have the quintessential first-day-of-school photo.  I just didn't take it.  Even though Brian had planned to take him, I dropped him off on his first day because I wanted to go to the financial aid office to ask some questions.  That didn't happen because when I got there the line was out the door.  My questions have since been answered already.  

Anyway, James and I were sitting in the car on his first day going over some things and generally trying to relax.  I think we were all so nervous that I didn't really take the time for pictures and things like that.  I just about lost it when he left the car and headed toward his first class.  I prayed for his safety and that things would go well for him that day.  Throughout the morning I asked the kids to pray for him too.  

When it was finally time to pick him up we drove to campus and waited impatiently.  When we saw him walking towards us, he had a huge smile on his face.  The first day had gone well!  

We've been in the same pattern ever since.  Yesterday I got to drop him off again and thought I would take some pictures to help tell the story.  

Wednesday

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays (in general) James has three classes.  Biology, Calculus and Computer Science in that order.  

On the way to school.

He gets dropped off in the commuter lot closest to his classes - in the shadow of Tiger Stadium.

A stow-away!

This is as close as we can get him because central campus has gates.  

He heads this way to his first class.  It's about a five minute (or less) walk.  

When Brian drops him off he usually heads straight to work.  The kids and I go about our normal routine until just before we need to leave to get James.  It takes about 15 minutes to get to campus from home.  

Yesterday we decided to see if Mike the Tiger was out and about in his enclosure.  Yes, there is a tiger living on campus.  The enclosure is also across the street from Tiger Stadium so it was very convenient for us to check it out.

Duh!

We couldn't find Mike so we took a picture by the tiger statue instead.

Then we found him.

He was taking a nap in the shade.  Who could blame him?

The kids sat on a bench to wait for James.  

There he is!  

Then we typically head home for lunch and homework all around!  

Tuesdays and Thursdays are different in that he only has one class - Calculus.  He also has Biology Lab on Thursday evenings.  

That's about it for this semester.  Next semester will be quite similar I think.

SA - TUR - DAY

 Moving Day!!  Time to move out of our over-priced storage garage.  We borrowed our reasonably-priced storage garage's truck for free!

The Apple Truck as Peter likes to call it!

We loaded it up and drove it home to unload it.  We made three piles.  Give, Store, Keep at Home.  Then we had less than an hour to bring the truck back and take James to LSU for a workshop about studying or something like that.  I left Brian and Faith at the storage garage.  

They were fine though.  The place just happens to be right next to SONIC.  When we got back to meet them they were sitting in the shade enjoying a slush and some food. 

It was happy hour after all!

So we pulled up a table to join them.  It was fun having slushies and burgers while listening to some tunes in the shade with the breeze discussing our storage options.  

James really missed out!  

Cupcakes!

I mentioned before that we had picked up some cupcakes for a treat while Grampa was here.  Well, I took Alyssa and Jon back there the other day.  

We sat at the bar in the window and watched people shopping on the mall.  It was fun!  

Gramma's World

Happy Birthday Gramma!  In honor of your 60th birthday, I thought I would chronicle some of the interesting things that took place during some of the Septembers of your life.  

Three days after you were born, Tennessee Williams' adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire premiered.  

When you turned one, in 1952, the first open-heart surgery was performed at the UofM.

In 1954 the Miss America Pageant was televised for the first time.  Evelyn Ay (pictured above) was the winner.

In 1955 Gunsmoke premiered on television.

In 1956 Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time.  You were 5 years old!

In 1957 The Little Rock Nine were escorted to school by the National Guard.

When you were 10, in 1961, Tom and Jerry made a comeback after being gone for a few years.


When you were 15, in 1966, The Metropolitan Opera House opened in NYC with the premier of Antony and Cloepatra.




When you were 20, in 1971,  (October 1) Walt Disney World opened.

When you were 25, in 1976, you had three kids and the Viking 2 landed on Mars.



When you were 30, in 1981,  Belize became independent.  (You're older than Belize!  Grampa is too!)



When you were 40, in 1991, (Again October) The Twins beat Atlanta in the World Series.



When you were 50, in 2001, our country was under attack.

(I didn't want to mention anything tragic that has been in the news, but couldn't help it with this one.)




In 2011, the year you're turning 60, NASA has decided to retire the Space Shuttle program.


These are just some of the things you've lived to see in your short 60 years.  Some of the things that have been in the news.

What's not in the news?

Your childhood
school days
meeting Grampa
getting married
having one
two
three kids  
balancing kids and career (and dogs)
working hard at a job that none of us could comprehend (what does Mom do anyway?)
sending your kids off into the world
moving from the suburbs to the city
world travel
welcoming grandchildren
moving from the city to the country
raising animals
etc.
etc.
etc.

It's been an amazing 60 years.  I hope you have many more amazing years!

Lots of love from Louisiana!

ACK!! It's been over a week already . . .

It's been awhile since I last blogged.  We've been busy - as usual - but some of the kids have been sick and now Matthew and I are sick.  Not fun.  Just a bad head cold but Matthew also had a fever.  Poor little guy.  

Matthew is growing by leaps and bounds!

I snapped these pictures of him a few days ago.

In case you couldn't tell, it is a series of photos of Matthew pulling up on a chair in the living room.  He had done it earlier in the day so we put some toys up there to see if we could catch him to take pictures.  I guess he decided that sitting was overrated and he wants to head right to standing up.  Seriously, he shouldn't be doing this for a few months yet.  He crawls a little but mostly pulls himself around on his tummy and he doesn't sit on his own yet, but he's pulling up on everything!  

In other news . . . 

Our 10 yard roll-off came last Friday.  I had a couple of quotes $375 or $160.  Guess you can figure out which one I chose.  They were very prompt and courteous.  

Brian and James filled it up over the weekend with the scrap wood from the remodel.  They came yesterday and picked it up.  

I'm very glad to have it gone.  Now the kids can play in the yard again which is great because the weather has been cooler.