Caught!

Late last night we heard stirring from Atalie's room. We peered in the door, and found her playing in her jumperoo!! Boy, oh boy was she surprised!! Okay, so not really. She was playing in the living room in the afternoon, and I tried to block the flash just a bit, and ended up with this picture by accident. I think it turned out pretty darn cute, for an accident. :)
Ben has been sick for a few days now, and I've been coming down with it. Atalie's still doing well, we're praying that she doesn't catch it. Poor thing has been so bored with us sick. We tried to get her to make us some soup, but that didn't turn out too well. :D

The Comment Gallery

I love comments. It is so fun to get feedback from everyone who logs on & reads about us. Gina has a Facebook account that has a little 'wall' where people can leave comments, and I have always thought that was really fun. I haven't been able to bring myself to make my own account, though, because there is just way too much other hassle.Anyway, I want my own place for anyone to comment anything! So if you're reading this, say hey :)

She can sit by herself!

Atalie has been getting really close to being able to do this for weeks now, but she has just been a little off in the balance department. Gina heard from a friend that a little bit of playtime in a laundry basket can help them to put the pieces in place. We tried it, and she loved it because she had easy access to a pile of toys that were always in reach. Now, after about two or three days in the basket, she has totally mastered sitting up on her own! We obviously hover very close by in case she does pitch herself backwards, but she goes for stretches of about 20 minutes with no problem! We are so happy!! I think she feels like she's accomplished something too :)

What is this blog about?

So we just realized that being part of the newly formed LPBF (LifePoint Blogging Family), our blog posts show up on the main LifePoint website. Sorry to all of you who logged on over there wanting to find out about doctrine or something, & suddenly you're reading about Atalie's poop, haha. :) Anyway, I thought it might be nice for any hapless visitor to know what kind of stuff we post here, so here goes. The basics you should know:

1. We've only been doing the blog thing for about a year, and at first we used it mainly as family updates for friends & family that weren't directly nearby. We still occasionally post updates about what's going on with us, but as many of you know, about 6 months ago (at the time of this writing) we added a member of the Brendle family, thus basic thing you should know #2:

2. Atalie. We have loved every minute of being Atalie's parents and we just can't help it when she does something new. I think we have recently reached the bazillionth baby picture milestone on the computer and there's no stopping. Anyway the point is I hope we don't look like obsessive "you must look at all my baby pictures" people, but here's the simple reason for all the baby posts - it's easy! I mean, when you don't feel like coming up with a bunch of things to write about, she's an easy target...just snap a picture or twenty and voila! (viola? waalaah?) A blog post.

3. Photography. Both of us are pretty creative people, I (Ben) am the computer nerd so I love image editing and all the digital fun stuff, and Gina has shown me an artsy side that just blows me away sometimes. This most commonly manifests itself in pictures... oh do we love to take pictures. Sometimes we will post either about photography, or just with a bunch of pictures that we think are fun.

4. Actual meaningful thoughts. Yes this is fourth in the list because, let's face it...putting thought into what we write takes time, and time is something that we usually tend to spend on other stuff, leaving the poor blog to sit for days or weeks on end untouched. This is a trend that I would like to stop, because I'm beginning to find the value in writing down thoughts daily, however it's anyone's guess what will really happen. For now, you may occasionally find some insight into our brains.

5. Who writes each post? Well this is a good question. We are terrible about identifying who in the heck is writing. Will we get better? Doubt it. We each have pretty identifiable writing styles I think, so if you want, we challenge you to figure out who wrote what. Who posts the most? I'd say that we probably split the posting 50/50, but we tend to run it past each other for proofreading and 'should I post this?' type editing.

Hope that was helpful :) Hooray LifePoint!

6 month shots

We can't believe that Atalie is 6 months old already. She went in on Wednesday to get her immunizations and she always HATES the shots. We always feel bad for her so we went to Target to buy a little toy to cheer her up. While we were there we saw about a gajillion little tiny babies! When did Atalie grow?? We both still look at her as a newborn, it's so weird to realize that somehow in the last 6 months she has gotten so huge!

At the pediatrician we found out that she's old enough to start learning how to eat little 'puffs.' They are like little cereal bits that dissolve almost as soon as you put them in your mouth, so she's figuring out how to use her hands to grab things and put them in her mouth ... it's so cute!

High on Mount Sinai. Sometimes the odd news catches my eye because it's just that off the wall, and this one really made me laugh. We'll go to any lengths to not believe what God has said won't we. . . More interesting is the debate about the actual location of Mt. Sinai - it's probably not anywhere near where the maps in the back of our Bibles are. There is evidence supporting Hala-'l Badr and Jabal al-Lawz as possible locations of the true Mt. Sinai. I wonder if there are hallucenogenic plants over there, too.

Baby update

Atalie pooped.

Alot.

So in order to clean her up without getting it all over her, we had to cut the bottom half of her undershirt off. She tends to have explosive diapers but this is the first piece of clothing we've had to destroy. Oh well it was worth it to not have to clean it up! Plus the belly shirt looked pretty cute.