Okay, so I've been promising my mom that I would be loading some really cute videos of Ezra these last couple days, and she's been staying up "really late" and checking for my undelivered promises, so I've been feeling a little guilty. Well, here they are! I hope it's enough to tide everyone over, at least for the next week or so! :)
September 25
Ezra is ticklish! One day I will get a video of him laughing but this is the best I can do for now.
September 28
Ezra's funny face
September 30
***WARNING: This video may break your heart. Do not watch if you are overly sensitive or love this baby too much!*** This was taken after getting out of the bath, his least favorite thing to do (not the bath itself, but getting out of it). Here he is recovering from the crying.Make sure your sound is up!
is
October 10
Smiley and talkative
October 10
I found out that Ezra loves when I read to him! It doesn't matter what I read--he just sits there and smiles.
October 12
Here is my smiley sweetheart waking up. He was especially talkative that morning.
October 14
Here he is playing with his toys. He loves his mobile, especially when it's playing music. He is learning to grab for his toys and always is batting at the keys (We think he's gonna be a leftie!). And as you can see, he LOVES watching that yellow thing.
October 14
He coos all the time! He usually stops when he sees the camera, and I didn't want to risk it, so I recorded his voice with my phone.
October 15
Tummy time! Another thing Ezra doesn't like is tummy time. It's hard. What in the world is he supposed to do, anyway?! (That's the question he's asking here.)
October 16
I used Tanner's camera for this one, and I didn't realize it was on time lapse. It's too bad, because he was so cute! Still cute though!
October 16
He loves sucking on his fingers. They are a nice substitute for a pacifier.
I promised a post on Miami. Here it is! I will try to cover at least our apartment today.
First of all, we live on a small island--this island! We live just to the right of where it says "North" on North Bay Rd.
Here is a picture of our island. It really is that cool.
This is the apartment building we live in. It is ten stories tall. We live in an apartment behind those trees on the left.
I like this picture of our building (on the left) because it shows how close the beach is--about a block.
Our building has a couple nice things about it, like a gym and this pool and spa. It also has wireless access by the office. (I've never lived in a place with a gym or wireless before, not to mention a pool this nice.)
And this is our apartment! This is the view as you come in from the front door. (Yes, we are currently using the box our lamps came in as an end table.)
a better picture of our living room
(Can I just say I love our floor to ceiling windows in this room and in the bedroom, and the curtains as well? I think they look really nice. I also love our plant that my mom got for us while she was here, our rocking chair that Tanner's amazing sister Brittney refurbished and gave to us, and the rug that Tanner and I chose to give the room more color. This room makes me happy. :) )
and looking back at the front door
(I plan on putting pictures up on that wall above the couch, by the way. I made the frames and just printed out all the pictures for them so we are getting close! When I put them up I will post a picture of the finished product.)
Here is the area to your right when you come in. It's not really important, but I just figured I might as well include it as long as I was showing everything else.
This is our guest bathroom to the left of the front door.
our dining area (You can see our bedroom door to the left and the kitchen door to the right.)
Here's to give you an idea of how the dining room is connected to the living room.
our bedroom
(And again, yes, we are using boxes as an end table here as well. We are still working on getting nightstands.)
looking back the other way
our bathroom
the rest of our bathroom
And finally, our kitchen! There isn't much storage space in the cupboards so we bought a bookcase for our dishes and small appliances.
looking the other way in the kitchen
the view from the kitchen--mostly the tops of a bunch of palm trees
There is a big green iguana that lives in them and I see him all the time. Here is a video I took of him yesterday. I felt like a real-life Nat Geo photographer! If only that had come through in the video.
the view from our living room window
the view from our bedroom window (The city is working on turning that empty lot into a park.)
Also, I didn't tell you before, but some things about our apartment building are really ghetto. Like these stalactites and stalagmites growing in our parking garage. There is a problem with water dripping through each level when it rains, and the drips are full of gunk that has built up over the years. There are probably hundreds of these deposits throughout the garage. Other ghetto things are the management and the construction going on. They are working on taking off all of the little balconies for some reason (which makes no sense to me since all of the living room windows are big sliding doors). This means they are using jackhammers in the cement of the walls from 8 to 5 every day, and the noise goes throughout the whole building. Sometimes (like today) the noise is so loud that it shakes our apartment. When it's loud like that, I can't really recover from staying up with Ezra, so that's been challenging; I'm sleep deprived a lot of the time. Ezra does better than I do at taking naps, which I am happy about. Today he slept like a baby. :)
As for everything (well, almost everything) else about Miami, I love it! It's hot, but I love the heat and I much prefer the worst days of heat in Miami to the best days of cold in Utah. Our ward is amazing but I don't want to talk too much about it here because it really deserves a post of its own. A few things about it though are that of the 10 wards in our stake, 8 are Spanish-speaking, which means that in addition to the English speakers, our ward gets all of the Haitian creole and ASL speakers, which creates a super fun and interesting dynamic. There are also a lot of podiatry students and their wives (9 couples total) as well as some PA students and wives, dental students and wives, etc. Anyways, it's fun.
I'm learning my way around--Tanner and I switch off with the car--and know by heart how to get to some essential places like the grocery store, the post office, the library, and Target. The beach is just across the street so I can take Ezra there at any time, or I can walk to the park which is even closer and is good to make loops of when I am trying to get exercise and put Ezra to sleep.
I went to the farmer's market with my new friends Star, Kendra, and Lyndsay (all wives of other 1st year podiatry students in the ward) on Saturday before General Conference, and found some cool things. This was one of them:
It's called a delicious monster. Once the green hexagons flake off, you can eat the inside, which tastes like a mix between a pineapple and a banana. It's super acidic so although it's sweet and good, you can't eat too much at one time, or it will sting your mouth like too much candy.
Well, that's all for now! More posts and videos of Ezra coming up! In the meantime, here's a picture of him studying the dinosaurs on his arm. Love to all!
Can I just say that I love life? I was thinking that today after I came home from me and Ezra's first trip out to the beach and the apartment pool alone together--I LOVE my life here. All the most important things are in place--I have a wonderful, caring husband and a sweet baby, and all three of us are happy and healthy and blessed to be so. Our extended families are also so wonderful and we love them so much. We are praying for the health of some, especially Tanner's uncle Wes who is going through some very difficult operations on his brain at this time, but we have faith in the Lord that this is His plan and that everything is going to be okay. We are blessed with wonderful friends. And we are blessed to be where we are right now, with Tanner going to a good podiatry school and doing so well so far. Miami is such a fun place to be, and our location couldn't be better. Our apartment is literally across the street from the beach (and I really mean "literally"), it's the perfect apartment for us as far as how big it is, how nice it is, and how much it costs (I will post pictures soon but I am waiting for us to get our pictures on the wall. I may just have to post before everything is finished.), and the complex is nice in that it has amenities like a pool and hot tub.
Anyways, I ran out of data on my phone, which is how I usually use the internet, so I am downstairs by the pool where they have wireless as I work on this post. Tanner and I traded off watching the baby and using the computer while the other one used the workout room, and now Tanner is done, so I will just finish up with some pictures of the little guy that everyone really wants to see. He is doing so well and growing up so fast! The hardest part of being here alone is that we have no family to share him with, thus the blog. For now, this is the one way you can all see how adorable he is. We love him so much.
Here is a link to a video I took on the 16th. Ezra loves the camera so it is hard to get pictures or video of him smiling, even if he is almost giggling right before you pull it out. As soon as he sees it he gets serious. But this is my attempt to get a video: http://youtu.be/69PU9ZXHOr0
Smiling at Momma:
Playing with his daddy:
Talking to Daddy:
And getting serious:
How he spends most of his time:
Telling Mom she is mean (Sometimes carseats are just no fun!):
Being adorable:
This is what he does, without fail, if you touch between his mouth and nose. We will have to post a video sometime of us touching and letting go. It is really funny. He squints, and lets go, squints, and lets go. It's like a little button.
And Tanner's birthday cake. Triple layer--chocolate chip cookie on the bottom, Oreos in the middle, Ghiradelli brownie on top. Terrible for you but absolutely delicious! I worked out three times to day to make up for it.
Ezra is such a sweet baby. He has been wonderful since
birth, sleeping 3 to 6 hours at a time during the night and crying very little.
He has always liked to wiggle and grunt. And lately he has been smiling and
cooing all the time. He is so fun. We spend a lot of time talking about how
lucky we are to have him.
He was 9 lbs. 1 oz. when he was born. He had a lot of hair,
and two very distinctive cowlicks. One is in the front by his forehead and the
other is in the back on the crown of his head. There is so much hair growing on
the back cowlick that sometimes he will grab it with his little fingers, pull,
and cry as hard as he can for us to stop the mysterious painful thing that is
happening to him.
He has a little birthmark/stork bite/angel kiss on his forehead.
If you squint, you can kinda see how it could be a lightning bolt. We are still
wondering if he might be “the chosen one.”
His eyes don’t have a color yet. At least not one that has a
name. When he was born, they were brown-green. Now they are gold, purple, gray,
and green. I’m guessing they’ll eventually be green like his dad’s. Tanner’s
eyes were brown when he was a kid though, until they turned green sometime in
his teenage years, so I could see that happening to this little guy as well.
Other funny things—he has super long toes. Those, I’m
afraid, he got from both of us. Tanner and I argued for a little about where
they came from, but when we took off our shoes to prove he got the other
person’s freakishly long toes, we realized that maybe we were both a little
freakish and in the wrong. Also he has super hairy ears. Those of course came
from Tanner.
He is almost 12 pounds now, at 6 weeks old, and 23 ½ inches
long. He eats a lot and all the time. He likes to be held and loves to sleep
tummy down on your chest. He calms down listening to classical music. He loves
looking out the window and looking at lights. He especially likes going on
walks in his baby carrier and looking up at all the lights of the city. And he
still grunts all the time. We love our little guy!
Here are some pics from his first six weeks:
These 4 were taken at the hospital fewer than 24 hours after he was born.
10 days old
5 weeks
I wonder if this blog will still be accessible when he's in his teens. If he's really good, I'll take this picture off. But I just love this little squishy body.
