A Sweet Family

We took my parents over to meet my language tutor and her family one evening. They are such a sweet family. My language tutor is on the far right. I've gotten to know her other sisters (holding Asher and Urban) as well. They absolutely adore Asher and Urban! It was fun to have my parents meet our friends.

Mt. Ararat

We took a day trip with my parents to see the country side and Mt. Ararat. It took about 2 1/2 hours to get there. It was a beautiful day and very clear to see the peak of the mountain.


A small village with a view of Mt. Ararat in the background. These small little villages are a common site along the way.


My parents in front of Mt. Ararat:

We stopped for lunch and this man spotted the foreigners right away. He was a very sweet man and quite the character. He had a tourism business and claimed that he had a piece of wood from the ark that was about 6000 years old, if we wanted to come with him to see it. :) We didn't take the time to find out, but enjoyed talking with him.

Urban was a trooper on this trip. This is probably the 3rd time in his life that he has been in his car seat for a road trip. We don't have our own car, so this is not a familiar way to travel for him. He did really well up until the last 20 minutes of the trip and then he made it clear he had had enough!

It was a fun to get out of the city for the day.

Two of My Favorites

These are two of my favorite pictures. Urban's smile says it all! He is truly loved by his grandparents.

A New Park

So it has been about a month since my last post. This country that I live in has blocked blogspot for an uncertain amount of time so I haven't been able to update my blog or see other blogs that use blogspot. But my techie husband found a way to work around this so our computer thinks it is in America. :)

Anyways, my parents came for a visit last week. It was a lot of fun and we really miss them. We had a fun time visiting a new park in our city. This is a big deal for us. Most parks here have pretty old school equipment. This park is pretty fancy for here. It has many plastic slides and a rubbery ground surface. It is pretty tall and has many tall ladders that aren't suited for Asher at this point, but there were a few smaller slides that Asher went down by himself. The bigger ones Reed went down with him.



Asher loved it, even though we went on a very cold day!



A family photo with a random stranger who wanted to hold our children and be in the picture (slightly strange, yet common here!).


We are excited to go back on a warmer day to this park and try out some more slides. More pictures to come of our time with my parents.

Messy

Urban is loving his time at the table with us. It is an absolute mess, but he is thrilled. I don't like mess, but it is so fun to watch him try new things without me spoon feeding, so I've been willing to put up with it for now! Today he had some plain yogurt. He screamed when lunch time was over and I had to clean him up. He knows what he wants!

Happy Valentine's Day

We enjoyed decorating some Valentine's cookies. Asher liked decorating, but especially enjoyed the eating part!



The kids holding up their Valentine's suckers.


We had a Valentine's/Going Away party tonight for our friends, Dan, Lynn, and Amara. They leave for the States tomorrow. We made heart shaped pizzas. The kids got a picture with Dan and Lynn. They will be greatly missed!

Urban- 6 months old

Urban was 6 months old on January 25th. (I'm a little behind!) My friend, Sheryl, is a great photographer and was willing to take a few pictures of Urban. The pictures turned out great and I've had a really hard time picking out my favorites. Here are a few:

We got a couple with Asher and Urban together. This one makes me laugh. Urban looks so proper in this photo!

Love my boys! Thanks to Sheryl for all her work on these!

Enjoying a Banana

Urban is enjoying his first taste of banana. I'm reading a book called "Baby-Lead Weaning", which has a different philosophy on feeding your baby than the typical pureed food method. The idea is to start right away with table food (very simple, natural foods). Your baby will start off just experimenting with it, but start eating it on their timetable not the parents. I got kind of burnt out with pureeing Asher's baby food and find it may be easier for me to just incorporate Urban into our meal times with some simple things that he can try. We will see how it goes. I may still incorporate some purees. The book did say to plan for a mess in the beginning. I can attest that today was a mess! But Urban absolutely loved it! I wish I would have gotten a picture after he had finished. Banana everywhere!

Viking Outfit

This outfit has been passed down to us from the Wessmans. It is over 30 years old. Reed wore it when he was a baby. Each of our boys have gotten their picture in it.

This was Asher at 7 months:


Here is Urban with it on at 6 months old.


On the back is a patch with "Wessman" on it that was sewn on. The patch belongs to Reed's grandpa who was a soldier in WWII.

Urban

Urban is starting to sit up on his own. We put pillows around him today just in case he fell. He sat there a long time today contentedly playing with toys. It is a whole new world for him now!