Malachi is 5 months old…among other things

Here he is exactly 5 months old.

He loves his toes these days.

This is what our other children look like. 

This just cracks me up.

First solid food.  We started a little younger than I’d like with him, but we’re trying anything to help with the nightly screaming.

He spends a lot of time in this backpack.

Some other kids at 5 months old.

Other updates:
- not loving the gdiapers as much right now…I feel like they are always leaking.
- our homemade laundry detergent?  Not so much.  It’s really runny and it doesn’t seem to work too well, plus it stinks like crazy when you make it.
- I’m eating whatever I want these days.  It doesn’t seem to make any difference for Malachi.  We’re trying Zantac right now, but we don’t think it really does anything either.
- Malachi is doing well with being laid down and putting himself to sleep.  Whew!
- Thanks to our little hurricane last week…we were without electricity for about 80 hours.  Those were some long (and quiet and dark) hours.  We are so thankful for electricity these days.

Enough of pretending to be Amish

We have been offline for awhile, with hurricane Ike blasting through Ohio.  We lost power Sunday afternoon at around 5 and didn’t get it back until 4 am thursday.  We are sooo thankful for electricity.  Speaking of Amish, what is up with the group mentioned in this newslink.  I always thought they wouldn’t go in for something like that.

The Promised Pictures and a funny

First, the funny.  Tonight we went over too our friends, Nate and Suetta Miller’s new apartment in Rosedale to have supper and to teach them to play settlers.  They have just moved in and Nate will be teaching Pastoral and Prison Epistles at RBC this term.  While Nate was praying for the meal, I happened to notice that their son Elijah, who is five, was holding Kalvary’s hand.  In the middle of the prayer he leaned over to give her a kiss.  She noticed he was coming and in her eagerness to make it happen lunged forward.  He missed and she connected her forehead to his nose and caused a minor nosebleed.  Thus the budding romance may have died, although they still were holding hands on occasion.  Any way, here are the pictures I promised.  The first one is of Kalvary at the ER in Children’s hospital, showing her uncasted arm for the last time in many weeks.  Then you’ll see her new cast and finally a picture similar to the one over on Jeff and Kara’s Site of Kaelyn and Kalvary “pouting” over their arms.

Broken arm saga continues.

So I spent most of yesterday afternoon in the Children’s hospital ER, waiting to get Kalvary fitted with a cast.  Next time, we will just go straight to children’s for a broken bone.  We were told by our pediatricians nurse the soonest we could get a cast for Kalvary in London would be Thursday or Friday.  Way too long for an active 4 year old to have a splint.  I’ll put more pictures on later, but there is a good one over at Jeff and Kara’s Blog of Kalvary and Kaelyn’s casts as well as their detailed story of Kaelyn’s broken arm story.

Bad week to have Freed cousin genes

For those of you who don’t know, a week ago on Labor Day, my sister Kara’s daughter Kaelyn fell, broke her arm and dislocated her elbow.  She had to have surgery to put pins in it and now has a pretty full arm cast to her arm pit.  Old news for most of you. Well this morning I was making breakfast and Kalvary was sitting on top of the refrigerator.  I know it sounds bad, but she and Glory often do that, and there has never been a problem.  Until today.  Kalvary apparently scooted her bum forward a little, caused the freezer door to open and her to fall all the way to the floor.  She hit hard… and broke her arm.  It wasn’t easy to tell for sure because her arm looked fine.  She was crying, which is never a good sign with Kalvary.  She will often run full force into walls only to pause before changing directions.  We tried to have breakfast while keeping an eye on her, but it was soon apparent that something was not right, because she kept periodically bursting into tears.  I took her into the emergency room at Madison County Hospital, where I had to explain, yes, she fell off the fridge.  Fortunately, the workers there were very understanding of this.  I got a little worried that we were making a big deal over nothing, especially with Kalvary perking up over all the attention.  When the doctor came up to her, he held out his hand and said “Give me five”.  She promptly did, with the broken arm.  The X-rays did reveal, however, that she had broken both of her bones in her forearm.  She just has the pain tolerance of a bull.  She got a split, and will get a real cast when we get her in to see her pediatrician in the next couple of days.  We have already called my brother Shaun and his wife Joy to warn them that their daughter Elena is probably next.  Here is Kalvary in her splinted glory.