Grandma Terri's Visit to Texas

Seth loves Grandma Terri! Since Steve's mom has been gone, Seth has called many women "Grandma Terri". Women love to be called Grandma by their grandchildren...maybe not so much by unfamiliar children who think they look like grandmas? Here is a list of some of the women that Seth has called Grandma Terri...
1.) A blonde woman in her 30's whose son takes guitar lessons from Steve
2.) A random woman passing us at the grocery store
3.) A woman in a business suit and the flight attendant on Steve and Seth's plane to California

Steve's Grandpa (Grandpa Steve) is not well, so Steve and Seth are in California for a 4-day visit. Here are the 3 handsome Steve's (my Steve, his Grandpa Steve, and his Dad Steve) at Christmas last year. Yes, it does get confusing when we are talking about the Steve's!


I have declared this time a vacation for myself as well, so I have been scrapbooking and watching movies. I have been able to focus more attention on Caleb, and as he has been sick for the past week, he is a bit more receptive to cuddling than he normally is. Here is a scrapbook page that I made for Seth.


And this is how Caleb likes to spend his mini-vacation...


Back to Grandma Terri's visit...Terri decided to get the boys a "manly" kitchen for Christmas while she was in town. First, we went to Toys R Us to take a look, and did you know that some play kitchens now cost in the $250 range? Amazing. And they are made of plastic! We were trying to steer away from the pink and lavender varieties, and they do cater to the male chefs of the future now by offering kitchen in neutrals and even blues. So the more we looked, we realized that a wooden kitchen was a better quality toy, especially for two rough little boys. We found the cutest kitchen at Target. It came in a suspiciously small, yet heavy, box. When we got home, I realized that the box was so small because they had broken the toy down into 1,236 pieces that we now had to assemble.

Well, maybe not 1,236, but there were over 150 screws and wood dowels in the assembly kit. So it took Steve and I over 2 hours to put it together, but I have to say, we had good teamwork and it was not that painful.

Seth was taking a nap while we put it together, so we took it out and set it up in the living room so he could see it and be surprised.

Seth loves the kitchen, and his favorite part is that it has a microwave. He is fascinated by microwaves. He had so much fun checking everything out:


Caleb gets to play with it mostly when Seth is at school. When Seth is playing with it, he guards it and is like a really intense defensive player in basketball. Caleb even tries to just run up really fast, grab a dish or a utensil, and run away because he knows that there is no playing side by side with his brother in the kitchen yet.

Thanks Grandma Terri! We love our kitchen! Love, Seth and Caleb



This is just a shot of Seth riding in the basket of our stroller. We took a really long walk at the park one day, and Seth got tired and wanted to be carried. So we put him the basket underneath the stroller (which lasted about 3 minutes) but made for a good picture!

Two Posts in 24 Hours

It is a record. I am usually lucky to get in two posts per month! But I forgot I wanted to share Seth's first school picture with you. He is only 3 and in his first year of preschool, but we still shelled out $36 for a school picture package. Don't you remember when school pictures were like....$10? We were actually quite pleased with the quality of the photography. He is growing up so fast!

Rockin' the Suburbs

Seth loves music. The band Coldplay has a song called The Scientist, and there is a bunch of falsetto crooning at the end. Seth LOVES this song. Our band played it at church one Sunday, and so we had it playing around the house quite a bit. Seth can now hit all the right notes on the falsetto part. Pretty great stuff. This is Seth practicing his falsetto...

Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We have so many reasons to be thankful, so I thought I would take a moment to list 5 things I am thankful for today:
1. We watched the movie "A Mighty Heart" about the Daniel Pearl kidnapping and murder in Pakistan, and I am thankful that I was born into a Christian family in the good ol' US of A.
2. Unexpected little gifts. Steve came home yesterday with a new CD for me. Colbie Caillat, and the CD is called "Coco", which is what my nephews call me.
3. Heat on demand! It is cold here (currently 37 degrees), and I am thankful that we have heat in our house.
4. Old friends. I spent some time with Beth (Roark) Stewart this week. Beth and I were roommates in college, and she married a guy named Mike that I grew up with. They live in Oregon and have 2 boys that are very close in age to Seth and Caleb. So we had one girls night and had a cup of this and saw this movie. Such a fun movie! And then we got the boys together to play one morning. It is always fun to spend time with people that you go way back with and have time to catch up.
5. Hand-me-downs. A friend at church gave me 3 huge bags of boys clothes last Sunday, and I was just going through them tonight. It is such a blessing to have clothes given to us for the boys, and everything that she gave us is so cute, too! Bonus! I have enough that I am taking one big bag with me to church tomorrow to pass along to my friend Leah that is in the process of adopting 4 boys. Yes, you read that right. She is in the process of adopting 4 boys, all at the same time, all 4 years old and under. Here is a picture that Steve took recently of her family:

Aren't they all precious! God has truly blessed them with some amazing boys, and they are being the hands and feet of Jesus to some little ones who needed a place to belong and be loved.


Steve is still in a "photography" mood. Yay!




This next series is of our busy bee Caleb. He is a climber! He loves this ride-on-toy Tow Mator from the Cars movie that Grammi and Grandpa gave to Seth. His favorite thing to do is stand on top of the seat and bob up and down to show us his balancing skills!



A rare smile caught on camera.

I love this picture. I have been trying to capture what Caleb's hair does when he gets on the trampoline, but my camera was not doing it justice. His hair goes CRAZY with static.


Next up...pictures from Grandma Terri's (Steve's Mom) visit to Texas!

A Good Friend

A good friend is the kind that, no matter how often you see each other or how long it has been since you last spoke, you pick right back up where you left off. The kind of friend that speaks life into your heart, makes your dreams seem like realities rather than pipe dreams, and truly rejoices with you in your victories, both tangible and emotional. Everyone should have these types of friends in their lives, hopefully more than one!

We recently had a visit from one of these types of friends for Steve. His name is Jonathan Reuel, and he lives in Charlottesville, VA. He is an artist and musician, and he is on the road quite a bit sharing his music in all sorts of venues...coffee houses, bars, churches. Lucky for us, his travels bring him through our town once or twice per year.


He came this past January, and Steve and some of the guys from the band at New Hope played in a concert with him at the Curtain Club in Deep Ellum and also at an evening concert at New Hope. He was back this month, and Steve & some of the guys from our band played another evening concert at New Hope. All the music that they played was Jonathan's original music, and I am always amazed how well they can pull everything together in one practice and play a pretty amazing show together when they only get together twice per year as musicians. I think one of Jonathan's best qualities is that he is a "showcaser". What I mean by that is that he loves to showcase other people's talents. In every song that they played, he was letting the spotlight fall on the bass player, the djembe player, the drummer, or the really hot electric guitarist (aka my husband).


Jonathan is a great encouragement to Steve...in a world of discouraged and depressed artists, he always offers Steve a new way to look at a situation, asks him difficult questions that lead to new revelations, and truly desires to see people around him succeed. A good friend is rare indeed.


Go here to check out more about Jonathan and to listen to a sample of his music. Make sure and listen to "Better Days", it is my personal favorite of all of Jonathan's songs. For those of us who had a serious heart connection with Waterdeep's music in college (you know who you are...) I think Jonathan's music evokes those same feelings of getting to a deep place and surrendering to the dreams that God has placed inside you.

***Side Note*** A shout out goes to one of these kind of friends in MY life. Sarah and Dave welcomed Jackson David into their family. Congratulations guys!


Shout out to myself...photographs of Steve and Jonathan taken by Courtney Horvath. See babe, I have learned a thing or two from you!

Boys will be Boys

Two Boys + Adventurous Spirits + Risky Climbing= Falling & Frequent Injuries

Seth first...this happened when he was about the same age as Caleb is now, a little over 1. We thought his nose was broken. He had no bridge of his nose left because it was so swollen.


Fast forward 2 years....Caleb is even MORE risky than Seth was. He is constantly standing on top of the coffee table, standing in chairs, running too fast for his legs to keep up and hurdling forward to land on his face. He fell face first into Steve's camera bag and cut the bridge of his nose on a camera lens.


Steve goes through stages where his passion for photography is shelved for one of two reasons. A) We have too many photography jobs and it becomes just a job or B) He is too busy with other things. Lucky for me, we are back in a season where he is enjoying it! So here are some great shots he took of the boys playing outside.






One day the boys were restless, so I put up our tent in the living room. The loved it, and then they snuggled down to watch a movie. Here is Caleb kicked back...

and here is a rare moment of Seth and Caleb being in very close proximity and not wrestling or fighting over a toy!