Man's Best Friend

As much as I gripe and groan about Trueman most of the time, we really do love having him in our family. He can be a pest, but he really is lovable and fun to have around. To be honest, I was pretty nervous about how Trueman would handle and interact with Joey when he was born. I just wasn't exactly positive that Trueman wouldn't confuse Joey for one of his many chew toys. Thankfully, Trueman has not only been good with Joey, but he's been great. He is patient and calm and (though he probably doesn't know it) even encouraging to Joey. They really have bonded and I'm so glad that Joey has a best buddy to play with at home. I (and I'm sure Trueman, too) can't wait until Joey is a bit bigger and can do more with Trueman than chase after him and try to eat his ears or play with his snout.

Here are some of the classics of our dynamic duo...









Just a few days ago the boys were playing together on my bed. I couldn't help but laugh how it started out as this, with Trueman thinking he was going to get a good back scratch...



quickly progressing to Joey opting for something much more appealing...




Thank goodness Trueman is so patient with him.

Joey's 7 Month Stats

Good grief, this kid is growing faster than I would ever hope for. Everyone warns you that this happens with every baby, but you really have no idea how real it is until it's your baby. I remember when Kim brought my nephew, Bennett, out with her to visit for Joey's baby blessing when Joey was about 2 months old. Bennett was 7 1/2 months old and, in my opinion, HUGE (despite his oober low percentile ranking in weight) yet Kim kept saying all of these ridiculous things like "I still see Bennett as if he were still Joey's size" and "I can't believe he is so big compared to Joey!" Dan, my brother-in-law, said similar things about Lucy when we visited over the summer, which was even more ridiculous because Lucy is like mondo-huge baby AND she's a year old. How could they have possibly viewed their children as little babies when they were so HUGE compared to my little Joey? Well, I get it. Joey is now the age that Bennett was when he visited and I'm constantly saying to myself "Joey is NOT as big as Bennett was when he visited. He's still my little baby." The fact of the matter, though, is that he's not. He's even bigger than Bennett was. He's growing up too fast and it's just going to get faster. Sarah, my sister, offered no consolation when she told me about Lucy eating a full grilled cheese sandwich all by herself the other day and it made Sarah cry. It doesn't end. Great. Therefore, I've officially decided: I'm going to have one baby per year for the next 20 years so that it's not such a hard adjustment. I'll be able to get over it with one baby because the next baby will still be small. And then, when I'm done having babies, I can hand over the baby-making duties to my older children so that I can be the grandmother and watch THEM go through the process. It's a fool proof plan, right? Right....

Back to Joey. So this is where the little tyke is with his development as of today:

- He is definitely sleeping through the night. This is pretty much old news, but definitely a good thing that I try to remind myself of on a regular basis. He sleeps a good 12 hours, usually, from 7-7.

- Naps are in a weird transition right now. He was doing three naps a day, then he made it clear that he only wanted two. We did two for a week or so and he loved it, then he changed his mind and decided he wanted FOUR short naps per day. Whatever.

- Joey still has no teeth. I could probably write an entire blog post about my frustration with teething, but I'll just summarize my thoughts here. I hate teething. Nobody warned me that teeth come in like prairie dogs. They pop their little heads out long enough to make my baby scream for days on end, AND THEN THEY GO BACK IN!!! What in the world? I can literally see those little buggers swelling Joey's gums and ready to burst out any second and then they turn all scaredy-cat on me and burrow themselves back into his gums! What gives? This poor kid is stuck with months of teething with nothing to show for it. Poor little guy. Despite all this frustration,

- He is a champ with eating! He obviously isn't doing much finger foods because he has no teeth to chew them up with but he has conquered pureed foods. Green beans are our only foe. I can't really blame the kid though. When his menu is decorated with sweet potatoes, sweet peas, carrots, squash, peaches, and pears, green beans definitely stand out in flavor. We have two saving graces, though, and they are cereal and cinnamon. We add these two things to all his foods and it even gets him to eat the bitter green beans! Hooray. It's funny, though, because he eats so much cinnamon that each of his BMs leave him with a bum speckled with the stuff! Joey has thereby been nicknamed cinnabun.

- The commando crawl is in full force. Hes's not quite crawling normally but he certainly has the commando crawl down to an art.

- He's pulling himself up to sitting.

- He started pulling himself up to standing against the couch this week. I cried.

- I hate to say it but my son is a quitter but I love it. He gives up on things SO quickly that I'm shocked he's as developed as he is. When trying to crawl or pull up or reach for a toy, he starts screaming almost immediately and gives up. This doesn't really bother me because he's so strong that I genuinely believe that if he's wasn't such a quitter, he's be walking by now and I DEFINITELY am not ready for that.

- His darned charm and gummy smile still adds at least 10 minutes to each errand I run due to all of the people stopping us and talking to him. Seriously, this kid stops every person that walks by, even mothers with babies younger and smaller than him! Sweet, but kind of obnoxious. I never really know what to do with these people or know when it's socially acceptable to walk away. They're not talking to ME, but I think they would stand there and talk to Joey all day if I let them. Joey isn't quite able to say goodbye yet and he'll smile for hours so I'm left to be the bad guy and end the smile-fest to finish my shopping. One man gave Joey a penny for his college fund. If we got a penny for EVERY person who stopped us in the store, that kid's college fund would be very well stocked.

Joey really is such a joy and light in our lives. We sure do love that kid. Our camera recently died so our pictures of him are limited. Okay, let's be honest. I don't take pictures so my camera being broken isn't a good excuse even though it's true. So we've taken a few photos with our phones and that will have to suffice for now. Sorry for the granulation and such.

Summer Visits Part 2: California

In August, we had the opportunity to go visit both sets of grandparents in California. We started our trip in Morgan Hill with the whole Arnett family (minus Kelsey, but she wasn't technically family yet).



Joey and Bennett got some good cousin bonding time. While on this walk, they ended up using each other as pillows for a nice little nap, but we unfortunately didn't get a picture of that.



We then headed to my neck of the woods to spend some time with Nana, Papa, and Mamaw before we headed even further south to attend Scott and Kelsey's wedding.




Because Tom and I are terrible about remember to pull out our camera at any event that we attend, we got zero pictures of Scott and Kelsey. WHOOPS. Thank goodness for facebook, huh? We'll take what we can get.

To end our trip to California, Joey and I headed back to Camarillo for a week while Tom headed home to Missouri. Sarah and Lucy came out for a few days so we got another few days of cousin bonding time squeezed in. Precious.

Summer Visits Part 1: Maryland

Despite the fact that it's already October, I figured it would still be worthwhile to include some updates from our summer travels.

Our adventures kicked off with a trip to the DC/Maryland area to celebrate cousin Lucy's 1st birthday. Some of the highlights include....



A trip into DC, complete with blazing hot sun, subway frustrations, quick museum visits, Ghanan food, and an awesome concert performed by the President's Own Marine Corps Band. While at the performance, look who we ran into!



Good ol' Tony Horton. Tom was about halfway through the P90X regiment at the time (I'd given up on it a few weeks prior) so I made Tom go take a picture with him. Too bad Tom X-nayed the program within a week of meeting Tony. Apparently it wasn't that moving enough of an introduction to keep him devoted for the rest of the summer.

And of course, we had plenty of Zuback family time.

Back in the Habit

Well, this is certainly embarrassing. How easily time flies without a blog post in sight! The most regrettable part is that I read blogs on a daily basis yet I don't manage to create the time to update my own. So silly. This is probably more of a personal journal now since it's been so long and the few that once read my blog have likely given up on me. If I've still managed to stay on your Google Reader, thank you for your confidence (or at least your laziness)! I hope to not let you down. Since the blogging standard seems to be to have one blog entry per update in life, I suppose I will follow the status quo and break all of my updates into a few categorically separated posts; Hopefully you don't mind. We'll start with my reason for coming back into the blogging world

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to watch the General Relief Society Broadcast for my church. This is an annual opportunity for all of the women in the church to listen to the words of our prophet and of the General Relief Society Presidency.

To be entirely honest, I usually attend such broadcasts with a bit of a grumble in the back of my throat (if I even go at all). You see, I have been known to avoid gatherings involving large masses of women. I just don't tend to mesh well with the high pitched squeals, catty conversation, and elaborate centerpieces that are inevitable at such events. Nevertheless, I went. And you know what? I'm SO glad that I did. Not only was the broadcast itself amazing (which I will address later), but the feared pre-broadcast dinner was wonderful too. I was able to get to know some of the sisters in my ward much better and though there were indeed obnoxiously large centerpieces, the women were much more real and less catty than anticipated. Who knew!

On to the broadcast. When watching church addresses, I feel like I ought to take notes because that's just what you do when you listen to leaders of the church! These notes, in the past, have been helpful for me to focus on the talks, but I might as well throw them away when I get home because 1) I never look back at them again and 2) they only include quotes or ideas that I liked. I never included my own commentary or thoughts provoked from such talks. If I did ever choose to look back at my notes, I was essentially just looking at an abridged version of the talk - I might as well just look up the talk itself! So in a nutshell: my notes were useless and not worth keeping.

This experience, this conference, was different. As the leaders spoke, my pen moved across the page as usual but one vital thing changed: the content. Gone were the quotes and regurgitation of the prophet's words. What replaced them were words that will be held sacred to me for the rest of my life. As I wrote, I noticed that not a word that I was recording was being said by the speakers. Very little of what I wrote even had anything to do with the topics addressed in the broadcast. Yet despite all this, my hand was constantly moving and the thoughts flowed continuously. I can testify to each of you that the words I was hearing and recording were not merely the words spoken by the leaders of the church, but were the whisperings of the Holy Ghost speaking to my heart and to my heart alone. These were the things that I needed to learn and this tender mercy from my Heavenly Father allowed me the opportunity to hear them. I know that personal revelation is real and possible. I know that the words I recorded are as sacred and imperative to my spiritual growth as the scriptures. I know that if we live worthily and if we stand in holy places, we each can have the opportunity to have such personal revelation in our lives every single day.

I invite you to watch the broadcast here: http://new.lds.org/general-conference/watch/2010/10?lang=eng&vid=618047726001

P.S. I never quite got around to saying this earlier, but this experience is connected to my return to blogging for one reason: one of the impressions that came to me clearly during this broadcast was the importance of recording my thoughts and experiences not only for me, but for my posterity. I'm terrible with a hand-written journal so I figured that returning to blogging was the next best thing.