Christmastime Is Here

I've been collecting photos and thoughts for a Christmas blog post for a week or so. Rob is at band practice and Liam is finally sleeping for the night (I hope!) and I'm ready to share.

I've been reading through Isaiah in preparation for the Christmas season. Every time I read the parts of Isaiah that predict Jesus' birth and proclaim him by so many wonderful names I am reminded anew of how awesome is our God. How awesome he is to send his only son as a baby, a helpless, weak infant to a mother who was just a child herself and to a father who was a righteous man, but desperately poor and uneducated.

Emmanuel, Wonderful Counselor, Prince of Peace.

Christmas has taken on new meaning for me now that I have my own son. True, it is much harder to get things done (I'm not even close to finished putting gifts together and forget baking cookies), but holding him in my arms I think of Mary, holding Jesus. I think of Jesus as a baby - did he fuss and spit up and coo to his mother and father? He was completely God and completely a helpless baby at the same time so I think he must have. It is so humbling to think that the Savior of the world came in such a miserable, meager way. So often we think we must come to Him with gifts to give and flashy trinkets like a Target ad. But no, he wants us to come to him in the humbleness of a child, an infant, helpless and weak, desperate for Him. We can bring nothing and yet He gives us all of him freely.

This Christmas feels different to me. I am tired. I am distracted and disorganized, a place I do not like to be. I feel behind on everything. I miss my husband and often the life we had before Liam. I feel guilty at times for thinking of our old life when I have this beautiful baby I love so dearly. I am stressed about traveling with him (to both Ohio and Pennsylvania!) even though I know we will have much help along the way. It's just harder to travel with a baby.

And then I think of Mary, traveling on a donkey, escaping with Joseph and Jesus to Egypt, knowing the king behind them wanted to kill her son. I think of Mary, humbly submitting to God's plan for her. She didn't seek excellence through the things she did with her life; she worked hard to love her child and husband and God.

Thinking of Mary makes me thankful this Christmas season. I'm thankful for the Lord's plan in my own life. I'm thankful that he gave me a righteous man who is both strong and tender as a husband. I am thankful I have a beautiful, healthy baby boy who was given to me to raise and is a gift to our family. I'm thankful for a Savior who came as a baby, not as a king, to save me and love me in spite of myself.

I pray you will recognize this Christmas what you have in your life to be thankful for.

And on a less serious note, here are some photos from Christmastime at the Bedinghaus home!

Going to get our Christmas tree. It was very uneventful as we didn't get to cut one down this year. Liam slept through the whole process in his bear coat.

Before decorating...

After decorating!

Rob drinking our new favorite holiday drink, hot buttered rum. Delicious!

Daddy and Liam

Nothing as sweet as a sleeping baby under the Christmas tree

So I decided to make this cake for our friends Conor and Kerri. Every Sunday we watch Amazing Race with them and this past week was the season finale. This was definitely a season finale cake! This is a Peppermint Fudge Torte from the Taste of Home magazine. Most definitely the biggest cake I've ever made! We had to take photos because it was so big. It was really, really good too.

If I don't post again before Christmas I hope yours is wonderful! Thanks for reading my blog and being my friend. :) Merry Christmas!

A Very Merry Shutterfly to You! (And Me :)

When I visited my parents at Thanksgiving I noticed my mom had a catalog of products from Shutterfly (a photo website that allows you to make all kinds of cool gifts and cards) that looked really pretty and fresh. Since we do an annual Christmas card, and since this year we have a new family member, I got really excited about doing our cards again.

Shutterfly came to my rescue by offering free Christmas cards to bloggers. It's a great deal and it's really not hard at all to talk about how great Shutterfly is. (Sorry though fellow bloggers, the deal expired on Dec. 10). They have such beautiful Christmas card designs this year that I'm having a hard time picking my favorites! I'm loving this one though:

One tradition that I would love to start doing with Shutterfly is a family photo book every year. My cousin Heidi does this with her kids so I can't claim it to be an original idea, but it is so fun. Instead of having random photos everywhere or attempting to scrapbook everything (not my idea of a good time) she uploads photos from their adventures all year and puts them in one book. Then, each year they literally have a "yearbook" they can keep going back to look at

This year I'm also wishing we had money to send out birth announcements for Liam's birth because they have such cute designs for those too. I mean, how sweet is this?

Maybe our next baby? Oh wait, Rob will probably still be in school then too and therefore we will probably still be poor...

Oh well! At least this year we will have a lovely Christmas card from Shutterfly. Check your mailboxes for ours soon!

Two Months Old!

Liam is two months old today. It seems like time is going by so fast! I can't believe it has been two months already since he was born, but at the same time it does feel like we've known him for a longer time than that.

He is a healthy, happy (most of the time) baby and we are so thankful for that. He is well over 13 pounds by now and growing more everyday. He loves his blind friends still and gives them big smiles every time he sees them. He also loves his bathtub (as you saw in the video in my last post). He is becoming more interactive with us by smiling and cooing more and more. Slowly he seems to be mellowing out and can sit by himself in his bouncy seat and not need to be held all the time. So far his longest stretch of sleeping at night was 7 and a half hours, but usually I am still up feeding him once a night. He is slowly learning how to fall asleep by himself and doesn't need to fuss very much anymore when we put him down for a nap.

He still does not like his carseat or getting bundled up to go outside. He still fusses to be held and would absolutely take every nap on mama if he could!

He truly is a joy to us and we love watching him grow and become his own little person. Here are some photos from the past week or so...enjoy!

"I'm two months old today!" He would give me these huge smiles whenever the camera wasn't on him so this is as close as we got to capturing one of them.

My sweet chunky monkey

Trying to capture the elusive smile again

I could not resist posting this photo. Somehow I captured this crazy look on his face...priceless!

Bathtime Baby

At Thanksgiving my mom started sitting in the bathtub with Liam in the evening, something she used to do with me as a baby. When we got home we started doing the same thing as part of his bedtime routine and it really helps Liam calm down. We think he really likes his tub too, as you can see from this video. It is so fun to watch him kick and kick but keep his face so steady. This actually wasn't the funniest video of him, but in an effort to be modest...well, the washcloth video won out. I hope you enjoy my baby as much as we do!

Top Ten of the Past Month

It's been a bit of a rough day today with a baby who was up half the night because he slept all evening, (and then refused to sleep this morning), a busy daddy and a cranky momma. So I thought I'd do a quick summary of our past month focusing on the good moments to cheer myself up.

10. Fall. I felt like I missed most of the beautiful parts of fall because of having Liam, but I still got in some walks on the semi-warm days and got to enjoy the change of seasons during November.

9. Poop. Dare I say I'm thankful for poop? I just did. Yes, Liam has a constipation problem that makes him fussy about every three days until he poops. I actually find myself looking forward to those poops because they make a happier baby!

8. A healthy baby. I am so thankful that God has been merciful to give us a healthy baby. He continues to grow and sometimes I think he is already growing up too fast! We weighed him on my dad's scale in PA and he is 13 healthy, chunky pounds already.

7. New baby announcements. I've had several friends tell me this month they are expecting little ones. What a joy it is to find that out from people and look forward to meeting their sweet babies.

6. Cheese. I tried a dairy free diet for two weeks to see if it helped Liam settle down when he was nursing. Wow, it gave me such an appreciation for dairy products! I really missed cheese especially. I reincorporated dairy a week or so ago and it hasn't seemed to change him so I'm back to eating dairy, thank goodness! Life is hard without cheese and chocolate.

5. Reforween. Basically Reforween is an excuse to have a party with lots of friends from church. No really, it's actually a celebration of Reformation Day when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Whittenberg Chapel. And when you combine it with Halloween you get Reforween and you get to wear costumes and sing Reforween songs. It's loads of fun. We went as the classic question -- which came first, the chicken or the egg? Rob was the rastifarian (sp?) who asked deep questions about life. I was an egg. The chicken is self-explainable.

We ran into some nerdy friends while we were there

4. The end of the semester is closer today than it was yesterday. This is a huge thing to be thankful for! The end of the semester for Rob is always major crunch time and it's so hard for me because he works constantly. Add to it this year are lots of practices for our church's Christmas concert and....yea....let's just say December 15th can't come soon enough!

3. Baby smiles. Liam has started smiling at us a lot more and it just melts my heart. There's nothing like it. He still likes to smile at inanimate objects which is weird, but he does smile at us when we smile at him and talk to him. I love it.

2. Thanksgiving. We had a great week in PA with my family celebrating Thanksgiving. Liam did pretty well in the car and it only took us 12 hours to get there. I was so thankful to be there and finally have my dad and Ben and Heidi meet Liam. It's different doing family stuff with a baby, but we managed and lots of extra hands to hold him definitely helped.

Hanging with future Aunt Heidi

The family at Thanksgiving

Introducing Liam to Pops and the open house Pops has every Thanksgiving weekend

We couldn't resist putting Liam in one of dad's big bowls

1. New mercies every morning. Praise our great God that his mercies are new every morning! There's always tomorrow and a new day coming. And that over all is something to be very thankful for.

What's your best things from this month? I'd love to hear!