davejenbarnes

Here are the kiddos!

2006

2005

We just got home from taking James to see the Trail of Lights. Yes, it’s late. 10:39 pm to be exact. We skipped bathtime and put him straight into his pajamas without so much as even warming up his toes. Hopefully the warm bottle of milk will help with the chilly toes.

James seemed to love the lights. He calls them “pretty” instead of lights, I suppose, because they are pretty. I had packed up three cameras for the evening (2 cameras and 1 camcorder) but preggo-brain that I have, I forgot to charge batteries during the day today and we arrived at Zilker park with three dead cameras and no spare batteries. Oh. I did get 2 pictures of James bundled up and asleep on the drive there. He rode just about the whole trail on David’s shoulders while I pushed the empty stroller, and yes, we had a hat, mittens, and winter coat on him. He did still manage to get cold hands and feet though. I suppose letting him run around would have helped keep him warm but neither of us wanted to risk losing him in the huge crowd.

I’m hoping that he goes to sleep tonight because he was up last night with a fever, took two naps today, and skipped dinner. Odds are that he’ll wake up hungry with another fever again tonight but we did give him some children’s Motrin before bedtime. He can say “medicine” amazingly clearly for his age. Of course, it tastes like candy, so it’s no wonder he can say “medicine.” When he’s well, he usually sleeps 13 hours through so the middle of the night waking beats us up mentally. Yes, we’re spoiled with his normal sleep habits.

Click the pic for a dancing Dave.  We found this via the  North Austin Moms Meetup Group’s  Message board.  I made all three of us into elves but Dave’s was the funniest.

I’ve finally got most of the pictures from our Thanksgiving week collaged on our photos page. To save you the hassle of navigating yet another web page, here are the direct links if you wish to see them.

• Jay and Laura’s Wedding :: November 18, 2006
• Thanksgiving 2006
• Oklahoma City Zoo :: November 22, 2006
• Both Grandparents’ Houses :: November 2006

Our week started off with a trip to Plano for our friends’ Jay and Laura’s wedding. Jay is a fraternity brother of David’s in Kappa Kappa Psi and Laura is one of my sorority sisters in Tau Beta Sigma from Baylor. They’re actually people we knew (both organizations grew tremendously after we graduated and we’ve gotten invitations and the like from young ‘uns who we have no clue are except for the K-Psi, Tau Beta connection) and they’re actually people we had a blast with in Courtside and BUGWB (I refuse, absolutely refuse, to call it simply the Golden Wave - **shudders**)… Their wedding was gorgeous, the chocolate fondue fountain nothing short of divine, and it was oh-so-fun getting to dress up, having the grandparents watch James for an evening and hanging out with both Woods couples and Dan again.

Next, we drove up to Oklahoma and spent a day at the zoo and a day eating homemade chinese food. I missed the turkey terribly but what’s a girl to do? Thankfully, I did get turkey and gravy and mashed potatoes before the week was over but I think I still need the full meal deal with the cranberry sauce and green bean casserole and fluffy rolls dripping with butter. I guess the traditional Thanksgiving meal with the turkey and all that is one of my pregnant cravings this go around. I think I could eat it every night.

Before heading home, we stopped by both Grandparents’ houses and spent some time just relaxing and giving James a good dose of the outdoors. All in all, it was a great week despite the lack of sleep and lack of turkey on turkey day. We are thankful to have family and to have had the opportunity for James to meet all 4 of his cousins up in Oklahoma.

We are finally home from our week of travelling (read: driving). *sigh* It is good to be home. David and I are both exhausted and catching colds and James has a bum of a diaper rash (we both think from a week in paper diapers and a funky travelling diet combined)… All our pictures (well, the ones we managed to download off the camera) are still on David’s work laptop so it will be awhile before any of those get posted.

I won’t give a play-by-play but rest assured that none of us rested well the entire week. James does not bode well in a pack-n-play and we do not bode well staying in the same room as James. He seems to know what a pack-n-play is called and that play means play, even at all hours of the night. I am hoping we are all able to get a full nights’ rest in our own beds and rooms tonight and that these sore throats go away. Very far away.

It was awesome seeing family and having all the Barnes cousins together and the food was tremendous. We are hoping to be able to visit up there again after Lowell arrives and see e’eryone again. I’ll post again once the pictures are off the lappy and post processed, uploaded, and collages are made. Until then, Happy [belated] Thanksgiving everybody.

We drove up to Plano with my parents on Wednesday and when we got to David’s parents’ house, I noticed that the 1 GB memory card I have in my camera only had room for 30 pictures left. This was even after I had manually deleted the blurry, messed up shots. I don’t know about you, but I will take 30 pictures in 2 minutes these days so that just wouldn’t do with the visit to Plano lasting 4 more days! So my bro uploaded them to his iBook via his USB2.0 CF card reader. I then deleted all the pictures off the camera (which was painful to do… I always erase them using the mac, so to press the OK button on the actual camera itself was hard) and I had a clean gig to start filling again. The point of this is… I have over 100 pictures on my brother’s iBook that I can’t wait to upload to flickr! (Yes, only about 100 files… now that I’m shooting 100% RAW mode, the pics take up more memory…) I also learned how to up the saturation on the camera. That may save me a little time on each file in my post-processing if it works since I found myself boosting the saturation levels on every single picture I’ve taken. I am anxious to get the photos on the mac and see how that setting changes the pictures. They looked great on the LCD viewer on the back of the camera, but that doesn’t say much.

Today was nice. We had a visit from David’s Aunt Carol and Uncle Mark and they got to meet James. David’s brother Philip was here as well with his wife, Kimberly, and their kids: Ransom, Tait, and Kambry. Ransom is 7, Tait is an adorable 4, and Kambry is almost 1.5 - I can’t believe how big they are! I know James won’t rememeber this visit but eventually he’s gonna have so much fun with his cousins when we meet up again.

The year 2005 will go down as a year forever etched in our minds as a great year. Why? Need you even ask? I’ll tell you in three simple words: Jesus rose again. I bet you were expecting something like “James was born,” or “James Michael Barnes,” or “we became parents,” which, I’m not denying is true, but knowing that Jesus rose again makes every year a great year and every day a great day.

I know you looked at the picture of James first. Don’t we all go for the picture, first thing? But I want you to look at that picture again and think about how the Bible says in Genesis 1:27 that we are created in the image of God himself. What better reflection of God’s image than that of a baby?

The thing about babies, you see, is their total lack of worldliness. Don’t worry. I won’t turn this into a debate about the inherent goodness or badness of mankind. That’s not my place or purpose in this letter. But I will ask you to pause and think about the last time you trusted someone as wholeheartedly as a baby trusts his or her parents.

Having James, or more accurately, being blessed with James this past summer has been indescribably awesome. It is a huge responsibility to be trusted as much as James trusts us. For everything: food, shelter, cleanliness, warmth, entertainment, we are it for him. And being everything for him is more than worth the exhaustion you experience when you’re a parenting-newbie.

We are truly blessed to have a young baby and see God’s love reflected to us every day in the things James learns every day. Here’s where I can brag about James a little bit. He was born on July 19, 2005, which makes him between 4.5 to 5 months old, depending on when I get these mailed out. He’s just started rolling over without trapping his arms in awkward places and can sit up unassisted for about 45 seconds before he bites the blanket (I thought about typing the word dust and then figured you would think me a bad mom for letting him sit somewhere dusty), literally, yes, he bites the blanket. Everything he touches goes into his mouth. Babies are like that. He has no teeth yet, and even no sign of any forthcoming, so don’t go jumping to conclusions! And he weighs a hefty ~19 pounds, so we’re getting a workout just carrying him to and fro. Speaking of fro’s, it’s too bad his Santa hat is covering up his hair. The boy has hair! Lots of it! And curly, too!

Having a baby boy, especially with the quickly approaching Christmas season, I am constantly thinking about what Mary must have experienced with baby Jesus. This Christmas is likely to be our most intense Christmas ever as we reflect on Christ’s birth and divine purpose. I am praying that you will spend some time thinking about that as well. Jesus was born for you, just like He lived for you and died for you and rose again for you. All the other things I could write in a Christmas letter are trivial and selfish. Please take the time this holiday season to think about the reason for the celebration.