Ava's Creative side - medium Playdoh

Here's a fun shot of Ava's creative side sprouting out. She created all the detail: hair, fingers, the face.

Eli finds his fingers

Here's a great shot of Eli going to town on his middle fingers.

We love our swing set!

The backyard was leveled and then I spent the day on Black Friday putting up the swing set or "Play structure" as Ava likes to call it. Its such a fun addition to our family. Also included is one more picture front yard. Nice and flat.

A visit with the Great-Grandparents

Four Generations: Sara, Eli, Ava, Jillian, Great-Grandma "Gigi" Howard and Grandma "B"

Great-Grandpa "GPa" Howard, Jillian, Ava, Great-Grandma "Gigi" Howard and Eli

We had a great time visiting with the very great Great-Grandparents. Sara's grandparents came down from Roseville to meet little Eli. The girls were excited to see their Gigi and GPa and I know the Howards were excited to see their great-granddaughters and their newest great-grandson. We had a fun time and its always really special to be able to take pictures like these. We are so blessed to not only have such wonderful grandparents to our kids but for the kids to have two sets of wonderful great-grandparents!

Eli at two months

Eli had his 8 week checkup last week and he is a big boy! He weighed in at 12lbs (55 percentile) and was 23.5" (75%). WOW! He is a good pound bigger than either Ava or Jillian was at that age! Otherwise he was healthy as could be. We're enjoying him so much. He's starting to talk a lot more and you can even get a bit of a giggle out of him during diaper changes. He is getting to his side now when laying down and just yesterday grabbed at a toy and held on. Amazing how quickly they grow!

Watch out Elton John...here comes Jillian!

Just for a good laugh.

Ava's Brachial Plexus Procedure

We are so fortunate to have found a new procedure to address Ava's brachial plexus injury! We saw Dr. Hentz this summer who told us they were doing something new: injecting the pec muscle with botox to temporarily paralyze it then casting the affected arm. The idea is it will allow her arm to have a slow, deep stretch in underused tissue, muscle and joints. Once its removed her arm should be stretched out but her super strong pec muscle (which has overcompensated for years now) will have no ability to move. Her now stretched arm will have the chance to move in ways it never has!

Step two will involve putting a constraint cast on her non-affected arm. This cast will be on for around six weeks and will restrict her from using her non-affected arm and force her to use her newly stretched left arm.

We're especially excited as this "Constraint Therapy" is a research project out of Stanford meaning it is being fully sponsored and paid for: cast, specialists, therapy, everything! God is so good!

We'll keep you posted on the results!

Home Improvement - Back yard

Before

Loads and loads of gravel - (three plus pickup truck loads full)

After #1 - no more gravel

Preparing for a swing set!

Home improvement - Front yard revisisted

Well, with all this fine California weather, we needed to continue on our home improvement projects. The front yard was first. Last post showed the removal of the faux river. Now we had to scrap and scoop up layers and layers of tan bark(two truck loads). Remove old sprinkler system pipes. Remove hidden cement paths and the rototill it all flat. Lots of back breaking work. But its nice to do it yourself. Thanks to Dad and Dad for all the help.

J&S

Game on!

A follow up to our soccer star post. Ava really got into the game aspect of soccer and had a blast on her last day. She scored the first goal with a keeper dribble down the field and shooting it in. Then she volunteered for Goalie! She made a great stop. In the end, everybody got a medal.

J&S

Our brief sports experience

Well seems our little Ava may have inherited her mother's mad sports skills. Which really just means that she tried it out and decided it wasn't much for her. We signed Ava up at the YMCA for their soccer "experience" and have so far completed exactly 2 out of 4 of the Saturday skills trainings. She wasn't too impressed with it and, along with her friend Grace, decided putting the soccer balls in their shirts and pretending to birth babies was much more entertaining. We got an adorable picture out of her though!

Family Resemblance

We were looking through some family pictures and found these two. Often people ask me where Jillian gets her round face. The pictures to the right are of Jon's maternal grandmother. One is of her at five weeks of age and the other is of her on her wedding day. The five week old picture looks so similar to Eli and the wedding day picture reminds us an awful lot of little Jillian! We think so far that Jillian and Eli really resemble one another. Hope you enjoy them!

The Apple Butter Festival

Every year we head down to Watsonville for the Apple Butter Festival at the Gizdich Ranch. The "Amish" (quotes mine as these Amish come complete with cell phones and Blackberries) come and demonstrate the making of apple butter. The ranch has music and apple tastings and hayrides. Very fun! The kids love it and we enjoy getting outside for the day. The girls chose their pumpkins for carving including a little pumpkin for Eli. This year our friend Aletha and her son Walter joined us. Ava and Walter had a great time together. I'll be honest, taking our three kids is a lot more work than two was, but we still had some fun and got to take home a DELICIOUS apple raspberry pie!

Mommy and Jillian on the Hayride. / the old apple corer/peeler

Jillian in the hay tunnel/Ava on top of the hay tunnel

Eli in the Pumpkins / Aletha and Walter - 1st timers

Jillian Dancing to the banjo pluckers


Happy Apple Butter Festival!

AT Cure Tour - Tim Borland and inspiration

For all of those that don't know, about 1 year ago a friend from church, Tim Borland, told me about his thoughts to run a bunch of marathons back-to-back to help support a foundation. The Foundation was the A-T Children's Project. A family friend of his has a child afflicted with the disease and Tim wanted to help. The crazy thing was as he started to develop the concept, the number of marathons back-to-back kept growing. Then it was a tour across the US while running, finally it was decided to run 63 marathons from the bay area to the east cost! Basically the number of days between the Anaheim Disneyland Half-marathon and the NYC marathon. He is currently running hard at day 51! this is truly amazing. His determination for trainning inspired me to start exercising again. He gave me a bunch of pointers and I started running and hitting the gym every morning before work (5am). Since I started last Nov, I've lost 20 lbs and feel way better. I can consistently run 4-5 miles non-stop( I started out running for only 3min at a time). through my training, I was able to run with Tim in Los Gatos on Day 3 of his journey. Please check out his video blog at the link below. I wanted to preference my blog post with personal info b/c they asked all bloggers to post a link to the video diary regarding his running tour. I hope everyone who reads our little blog will be inspired to start moving again. Good luck Tim!

Jon
http://atcuretour.com/atcuretourontheroad/archives/8

Ultra-runner Tim Borland is running 63 marathons in 63 days in order to raise funds and awareness for the A-T Children’s Project in their quest for a cure or life-improving therapies for ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T). A-T is a rare, neurodegenerative disease that affects children, giving them the combined symptoms of cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, and cancer. Children with A-T — born seemingly healthy — are usually dependent upon wheelchairs by the age of 10 and often do not survive their teens.

To run with Tim, join a tailgate party, or make a donation, please visit the A-T CureTour website. There, you can also view the daily video blog produced by filmmakers who are making an independent documentary on the A-T CureTour and enter a contest to Win a Nintendo Wii.

Golden Gate Bridge - SF

Hey All,

We took a trip up to the city of San Francisco on Saturday. While up there we went and walked on the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a beautiful Day! you could see everything. Jillian was fascinated by the size of the towers and Ava found that there were some holes in the bridge which she could see straight down to the water below. Eli got his first family adventure, slept right through.

Look at him grow!

Eli is three weeks today and he has grown so much! Here are some pictures of his first real bath and mama holding him. He's working on smiling at us and is much more wakeful during the day now. He's got a bit of fuzzy hair and so far its darker than the girl's hair was. He's still an incredible sleeper and eater and the rest of the time he just looks around and watches our faces. What a little love!



Eli relaxing



Eli's first bath in the sink. He loved the water!


All wrapped up and staring at mama

SJ Childrens Museum

Thought I'd put up some pics of Jillian, Ava and I heading enjoying SJ's Children's Museum. We took light rail, which they LOVE! Then hung out playing with the water features, garden area, new circle section. It was nice time, just me and the girls.

Train ride.


Jillian in the Garden LOOK! Fish!



Trapping the fog under the water! Letting it go!

Fun around the house

We found so time to be active this week and the results are really good. We've been thinking about what to do with our drought tolerant landscape in the front yard. And after some discussion, the fence we had was really the eyesore that had to go. So sure enough, out came the hammer, saws-all, shovel, pick ax and with some manual labor, the results are looking really good so far.
Starting with this:

First was removal of the fence:


Next was moving the fake river rocks over to our parking strip, and removal of a bunch of the ugly plants:



As we continue the process, more updates will follow.

Jon