The three "M"s

Mom
My mom came out to visit this past weekend with my cousins, we had a grand time together. The girls just loved to help with Max. I'll post when I get all the pictures of the camera and into a slide show.

Max
Today we saw our new pediatrician. I really liked her. Adam got to go along as well.

I was a little concerned about Max because he's still so skinny. I expected him to chunk up, and he really has since he's been on formula, but he really hasn't gained a lot of weight. Today he only weighed 11lbs7oz and so the doctor said to continue feeding him all the formula we have been (32oz a day) and to start him on cereal and solids. There's really no explanation for him to be so skinny, he loves to eat, and doesn't vomit or have diarrhea, and doesn't have anything wrong with his heart. So we'll just keep feeding him and she wants to see him again in a month for a weight check.

He also had his first set of immunizations today. He wasn't happy about that, but was a trooper and just cried for a couple of minutes. It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be.

The ped is also a big fan of self soothing and the child putting himself to sleep (so am I, to tell you the truth) and so she suggested we start letting Max put himself to sleep. We have some guidelines and I'm sitting here listening to the poor thing crying while he's going down for his nap. I commonly put him down while he's still groggy anyway so hopefully the transition won't be so hard. I'm glad to start this now because Max has been waking up earlier and earlier in the middle of the night. It used to be 5 and now it's more commonly 3 am. So the hope is that self soothing will cause him to sleep better through the night, I think that along with having cereal will be a great mix for him. (Hopefully)

As I'm writing this I'm thinking of all my close friends and family who have had children recently and how funny it is how we all raise our babies a little bit differently and it makes me laugh. I'm sure they will all turn out just fine in the end and we all just do what we can handle.

Ministry
Nobody said ministry would be easy. I knew it wouldn't be, and besides we've done a lot of ministry in the past, just not full time, even if it felt that way.

We've completely enjoyed our new position in life but of course something are more fun than others.

School started last week or the week before and so along with the rest of the world we are adjusting to new schedules.

We do havea couple of things that we never figured we'd be doing but are excited about the prospects. Tonight begins AWANA. Adam and I were never exposed to this as kids (Adam was in Grace Brethren Boys and I was a Girl Scout, but that's as close as we get) but we are going to be leaders this year and we have Sparks, luckily all of our kids are second graders (the oldest of the Sparks group) and are veterans, so we'll see how that goes .

Second, we are temporarily leading the senior high youth group. This will start the 21st of September and we're not quite sure yet exactly what it will look like as we just were official about it last night. We're hounding our youth pastor friends big time though as we never thought we'd be in this capacity.

We are looking to the Lord and hoping that all of this is most of all honoring to Him. He knows the plans He has for us even if we don't understand it at the time.