shameless-hunbaba mei tai givaway

but this would be great for baby #3. i love carriers with a hip strap!
go here and enter yourself if you like!

marit likes to pretend she's pregnant

morning at the park

met some sweet friends at the park yesterday. i happened to have my camera along (a rarity it seems) and we had a lovely time! thanks for the invite tara!
tara brought a book along and then the girls and graham had fun looking for living things. marit found a cricket, butterfly, spider, caterpillar (i think it died after it got passed around so many times)


i think graham just ate something that was 'alive'

all looking and 3/5 smiles!


she loved the hydrangeas the size of her head

rikki and charlie joined us!

slow-moving with all those little people

they were talking to the lady

note: 7-yr old t-shirt and the badly-in-need-of-washing hair

tuckered out!

cheaper than a pool membership

this might be the best $7.99 i spend this summer. we have been alternating sprinkler with kiddie pool this week and it has been FUN!


pax loves water play too.
graham usually takes his wet body and sits in the man-hole pax dug to get boyishly muddy...so different from my daughter who wants to wash her hands if they get remotely dirty!

oh project

since baby # 3 is due in october (by the way, we didn't find out what we are having last week at our ultrasound...a fun surprise is in store!), we have embarked on this ginormous project to make better use of our upstairs space. our house is 3 bedroom right now, but the 3rd bdr is downstairs and was added on 90 years after the rest of the house was built. thus, from the back bdr, you can hear nothing, see nothing, know nothing about what is going on upstairs. with leeetle children, we just feel better about all being upstairs when this babe comes along. graham and marit do a great job sharing their room and we have this unnecessarily large bathroom and had a lot of wasted space in the laundry room as well, so we set out to more efficiently use the space.
will be the nursery:

we are combining the laundry room (stacking washer and drier) and bathroom. once adam pulled up the floor in here, we discovered all the necessary plumbing for a bathroom so it seems we are converting it back to the original plan. we were so thankful to see those pipes since that meant we would not have to hire a plumber! adam has been plugging away at this project in his limited spare time with a little help from our dads on occasion.
my dad did most of the wiring!

though having bunches of power tools, lumber, pipes, sawdust, bathtubs etc kind of take over the upstairs can be annoying, adam has been so sweet about trying to keep it fairly tidy and i am so thankful he is able to do most of the work himself... even if it takes a little longer. my mother-in-law and some sweet friends have allowed me to borrow their washer/drier every once in a while and we are just learning to be more flexible in general. i've been napping marit back in the crib as there are many hazards around now...
pipes and joists (the floor had to be built up so it would be flat...you know old house crookedness)

shower stall built: we plan to do subway tiles around the tub, sagey green wall, terracotta tiled floors, maybe leave some of the old beams exposed...many more pictures to come as we progress...

i have kind of struggled over how to blog about this. my blog is not intended to stir up controversy, to preach to anyone (though i hope the Gospel is evident in our lives), but simply to take note of life as it quickly passes by and to also note God's faithfulness in small and big ways. i will include the email we sent out when we decided to baptize our small children. if you are totally opposed to infant baptism, please don't be quick to judge that we think our kids are safely going to heaven now or anything, but more importantly as our pastor eloquently put it "they are being baptized into discipleship," which is so much of parenting. we would love to more thoroughly explain ourselves to you if you think we have fallen of the deep end or something...we invite in-person discussion. my family falls on both sides of this discussion, but many of them came to support us and there were no major fits, squeals, or meltdowns that distracted from the sweetness of the day.

from the email we sent out:
we finally decided to have marit and graham baptized! we have been off and on stewing over this decision since ellen was pregnant with marit 3 years ago...read a lot of Piper, Grudem, Keller, Driscoll, and other people mixed in. basically we feel like there is scriptural support for both believers and infant baptism, but the thing is that we are raising our kids to know about Jesus and pleading with the Lord daily to give each of them a love for Him that they might not ever remember not knowing Him. Of course, it is our hope that they will one day make the Christian faith their own, but it may not be a specific moment in time that they can point to because we are raising them Christianly. The baptism is simply a symbol of that commitment to teach them about Jesus and to try to get to their little hearts and the sin that is there and their desperate need for the Gospel in every area of life. We do not believe it "saves" them, and we will not teach them that they are going to heaven because they are baptized...rather it is a symbol of our covenant with God to raise them in the faith and of His faithfulness to call people to Himself that they might come to depend on Jesus for their salvation. we like the case that this guys makes for it.


in addition, after the funeral of the 4yr old daughter of our dear friends, things began to click a little clearer for us in this area (covenant theology speaking). and because we go to a pca church that baptizes both believers/converts and infants and children, we feel like this is an important step in our submission to the church leadership. we feel like there is a lot of mystery surrounding the sacrament of baptism and so feel that there is much room for grace. we hope if you disagree with our decision, that you can offer us that grace

adam's belated update from ellen's abscence

Dear readers of Ellen's Blog,

Well, I must first apologize that I did not come through as promised with a daily play-by-play of all our mishaps and adventures. The truth is that by the time I got the kids down for bed in the evening I was so mentally and physically exhausted that all I could do was devote my last puff of energy to something mindless and entertaining; for me that was watching episodes of 24 on Netflix. To be honest I expected to post a bunch of light-hearted and humorous stories of all the mistakes I made trying to be a mommy-daddy for the first time ever. I kind of pictured it like one of those movies featuring Vin Diesel trying to babysit kids for a weekend. Well, by the end of the day I wasn't laughing anymore...the job was tough, much tougher than I expected. Not so much because of all the demands of being a parent (though those challenges were taxing) but even moreso because I realized that being a full-time parent carried the added responsibility of getting through to your child's heart, and that indeed is a weighty and difficult task.


Ellen left the house just before 6am two Saturdays ago; no more than 10 hours later we were already in the emergency room after Marit snuck out of her room during her nap and ingested a bunch of tooth paste and a small amount of plumbers putty and then puked all over the car on our way to my parent's house. I knew almost everyone in the MCG emergency room and I didn't have to wait even 30 seconds to get into a room. The attending physician was Dr. Kuhn whose son Josh is long time friend of mine and a previous college roomate. He has also led several mission trips that Ellen and I have gone on over the years. When he found out that this was the first of four days that Ellen would be gone he filled me in on which hours he would be working the rest of the week anticipating my need for his services in the near future. I can't say I blamed him. One of the nurses kindly gave each of my children a purple Popsicle and within fifteen minutes they both looked like walking purple crayons. Oh and did I mention that Marit wasn't wearing any pants and graham had no shoes. I think we looked like we had just fallen off the wagon. I guess I should have anticipated a tough day. After arriving home from dropping Ellen off at the airport I was toasting the kids waffles in our toaster oven and for no apparent reason the glass door shattered into a million pieces; I took that as a bad sign. Fortunately there were no other major catastrophes during Ellen's absence but rest assured that it did not get any easier. Taking care of kids, especially young kids is incredibly draining. I had no idea how much patience and self-control is required in order to lovingly shepherd two little tornadoes all day, every day. Toward the end as my patience was really waning I began to lose my composure. I resorted to solving problems by whatever way was easiest, not what was necessarily best for training my children's hearts. Feeling entititled to their obedience and a to a few moment's of peace I fell into the lowest forms of behavior modification; on occasion even yelling at Marit. I would feel terrible each time I yelled at her and tell myself I will never do this again but within minutes she was pushing me to my limit again and my anger and frustration would come out. This trial eventually drove me to repent of my self-confidence, self-confidence that I could shepherd my children without frequent and fervent prayer and without frequent repentance of my own sinful attitudes.

On Tuesday Marit and Graham and I went to pick Ellen up at the airport. I had bought Ellen a dozen roses and Marit ran up to her with them as Ellen came out of the terminal. She said, “here mommy (referring to the roses), can I have my present now?” Isn't that the life of a mother. A brief moment of kindness followed by a need, a want, a desire, sometimes selfish, sometimes not, but always disproportionately little thanks along the way. To all you mothers out there let me just say, how tough it is tough to raise children. It is much easier for me to go to work every day and work hard for many hours and then come home and be your children's greatest hero just simply for coming home. Dearest Ellen, I admire you more than ever and am grateful for your joyful service to our family. And you know what else? I am really glad you are home.