At Home in the Mountains

Here is a not very good quality, slightly odd picture of baby at 26 weeks. I keep forgetting Aaron to take a pic so had to do it while I was thinking of it. Sadly this is the first pic of this sort I've taken. I wasn't very good at remembering to do them with Maddy either, but I do have few more of her. Maybe I can get a few more shots in in the next 3 months so baby 2 won't feel too left out.

So, Aaron and I haven't finalized any names yet, but Maddy has a few suggestions. Here are her top three picks: 1. Sleeping Beauty  (or as she says it, "sleeping doody") 2. Cutie 3. Bethany Sleeping Beauty is by far the favorite, most often mentioned name choice. Once, I ventured to suggest that Sleeping Beauty could be the baby's nickname because she will be a beauty and it would be great if she slept all the time. Maddy quickly countered with, "No, her real name can be Sleeping Beauty and her nickname can be Cinderella."

Last weekend we went to York for homecoming. On the way home, we stopped at the rest stop with the memorial for Grandpa's army division in Gainesville. The memorial lists all the soldiers from that division that died. Maddy was asking why Grandpa's name wasn't on the memorial and then she wanted to know about WWII so we gave her a very brief overview. Ever since she has off and on been asking about Hitler, Grandpa fighting Hitler, why Hitler was a bad guy, etc. Well today she wanted to see a picture of Hitler so we looked it up on the internet. Then she wanted to see a picture of Grandpa so we looked him up on the internet too. If you Google images for Stephen D. Eckstein Jr. he is the first one that pops up. Pretty impressive! Then she wanted to see a picture of Grandpa and Hitler fighting. That made me laugh. Then she asked, "Mommy, why didn't God protect all of the soldiers that died? Why did he only protect Grandpa?" Wow! What a question. My answer: "...

Fall is zipping by. With the three of us all having different school schedules and all of the fun, random activities thrown in, I haven't had time to breath until this week, which is fall break at DBU. Aaron still has to go into the office everyday and Maddy still has school this week, so I'm the only one fully getting to enjoy the fall break benefits. I do have some grading waiting for me, but let's not ruin the day by talking about that. The Halls stayed with us from end of July until mid September as they worked out all of their transitions from the house in Denver to their new house here.  Maddy enjoyed having Bethany time everyday, but I know everyone was ready for their space by the time everything was over. We ran down to Mansfield a few times that weekend helping them get stuff moved. The next weekend was Bethany's birthday party. Cindy did a great job on the Mickey and Minnie Mouse cakes (which I have no pictures of because I forgot to take my camera. this wi...