Nathaniel's First Birthday

Nathaniel turned one on Saturday, the 26th. We had a small celebration with Jaired's family on Sunday. It was definitely a new experience for Edmund, that Nathaniel was getting toys.

This picture was taken upside down, Edmund wanted to look at the firetruck first.

Jaired loves taking self portraits, so we never have to worry about him not being in the picture when he is the one with the camera.
Nathaniel is looking at himself in the mirror in Pat the Bunny.

Nathaniel's birthday apple pie

It was yummy!

A New Kidney Bean

This is a picture of the ultrasound picture. I forgot to ask Jaired to scan the ultrasound pictures at work, but I wanted to show you all our new baby now, so didn't want to wait until tomorrow for him to do it!

This is the same picture as above, but I opened it in Paintbrush to mark the baby so you all would know what to look at. The bottom word on the left says "spine" and is referring to the white line.

I am 13 weeks and 5 days along. The Baby's due date is March 19. :)

High Tea and Whiskey

That might not sound like a likely combination, but this past weekend they went together beautifully! Jaired and I, along with Jaired's sisters, spent the weekend at a dance workshop in St. Louis. The weekend was a whirlwind combination of English Country Dancing (the high tea?) and Contra (the whiskey?). This weekend was the first of what I believe is to be an annual workshop. We had music played by live by some great musicians, one of whom was Martha Edwards, whose music we use at our own dances. (Martha was also one of the organizers of the workshop.) The calling was done by a famous caller, Joseph Pimentel, who came up from Austin, Texas. As for dancers, we had people come from Texas, California, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, to name a few.

Jaired and Kimberly have both danced Contra in the past, but it was the first time for the rest of us. Our dance group, here in Salem, The Jovial Beggars, up until now has been English Country only, but we had so much fun with Contra that we might introduce it into our regular dances!

While Kimberly lived up in St. Louis this past winter she attended several of the local dances. Because so many people had heard about our dance group, and because we have wanted to make t-shirts for awhile now, we quickly made some to wear to the workshop. Soon, we hope to have a big batch of shirts made so that all our dancers can have one.

Here we are with our JB shirts.

As you can see we had a great time.

There was a ball on Saturday night and we girls dressed up in Regency style dresses and beautiful hairdos. Ellie, on the left, made her own dress, but Kimberly, on the right, made her own dress as well as mine and Chava's. Kimberly also did our hair.

Unfortunately there are no pictures of Kimberly, but her hair and dancing were quite beautiful. And Jaired, well he wasn't in costume with his hair up, so there wasn't any reason to get a picture of him I guess. ;)

Nathaniel is not old enough to know that he can get along fine without Mama for a weekend, so he came along for the ride. Besides the fact that he wasn't too keen on the late nights, he had a blast. People were talking to him and holding him all weekend. Everyone loved him and he got to practice his waving a lot. He even got to dance!