Before and Afters

Here's what a photographer did. The style with the black background reminds me of the '80s photography













This is a pic of Luke happily dreaming in the Dr.'s office.














Here's Luke after the Doctor gave him 4 shots in his legs!
The poor poor thing has been hurt! How could they do that to him? He never hurt ANYONE! We're so mad at those mean doctors.












Here he's trying to sleep away the pain caused by the shots.













We went on a fun Choo choo train ride... But at the end a big scary Shark jumps out and almost eats the train!!!





















Here's what we looked like After the shark attack

They're good brothers. We love our boys!

The Nintendo years have begun

Here's Luke! He's wearing his old man's blessing outfit! He lukes so good!

And here's Isaac. Awesome at doing number 1 in the toilet but still very constipated at doing number 2 there.

Precious!

And here's our pride and joy Isaac learning to play and love Nintendo for the first time in his live! He's a natural!

See here he's playing Zelda Ocarina of Time and he's already the grown up version of Link

Notice the proper handling of the controller.

He's such a natural. All concentration is going into his technique! And look! Luke is peeking over his shoulder! It won't be long before they're both playing each other!!!

I love my boys!

Growing!

Luke has now officially out-grown all of his newborn clothes.

He wears 3 month old clothes very well mostly because he fills them out perfectly from toe to neck due to his enormously long body.

Isaac was so much more of a squatty tubby child. Luke is wearing outfits that Isaac never wore until he was more than 3 or 4 months old.

Luke is so funny. He is a grunty baby. He grunts when he stretches, when he wakes up, when he's angry, or uncomfortable, or happy or hungry. When most babies cry or whine, Luke will grunt. But also, just to test his gruniness today, I watched him grunt-stretch his long arms out. And when he was all done, I took his arms and he let me move them around without struggling against me. Whenever I would put his arms in an extended up position he grunted. I dunno but this kids is just hilarious with his cute looks combined with this habbit of his to sound like an old man.

At the doctors yesterday we found out a few things. First they told us that at birth Luke was healthy, then at 2 weeks he tested positive for CAH (Hyper-adrenal gland). So they tested again and we found out yesterday that he is negative for that disease. So it was a false positive and he's still healthy. Luke weighs 10 lbs and 15 oz now!

I was looking at Isaac's height measured by marks on our wall. When we first moved into Houston, Isaac was 15 months old. Every month for 3 months in a row, Isaac grew at least one entire inch taller! Then from 18 months till 2 years old he only grew 2 inches. Now that he's two years and 2 months old today we've found he's grown another inch. I think Isaac is a little over 35 inches tall now!

But just to give perspective on Luke... He's grown 2 and a half inches in the last 5 weeks. (It's taken Isaac since last Halloween to grown that much) So that puts Luke at 22 and somthing inches!

Christ said that we must become like little children in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. These two kids are really giving us some spectacular examples of growth! How much growth have you accomplished in the last 5 weeks?

Love you all. We'll see you in Utah soon enough!

Summer Time

As you can see, we've been enjoying our summer with Luke and painting with Isaac. For those of you without little children because your kids are too old, well you have very much forgotten how difficult it is to care for a newborn! I mean WE FORGOT and it's only been 2 years since Isaac was born. I mean it's one thing to remember the fact that you didn't sleep for more than 3 hours without a cry in your ears for 3 months straight and NO BREAKS, but it's another to have to live thru it all over again.

Gospelly we're taught that part of the atonement was to give Christ the physical knowlege of suffering although he already perfectly understood all suffering. Living thru pain is essential different than understanding it. This is the real deal here. Having a baby is difficult, even if they're perfect angels who hold your heart in their little fists.

I didn't realize that having kids was like a mission so much. I thought God tells us to multiply so that we can replenish the Earth, but it's much more than that. In the same way God doesn't just send out missionaries to bring souls to the truth of the Gospel. That is barely half of the reason.

Missionaries go out and work their butts off, and parents have children and work their butts off for the same reason: necessary personal growth.

Now I'll admit that serving a mission was so far the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, but if we have any more kids I'm going to be willing to make being a father the hardest thing i've ever done, and at the top of my difficulty list. Even though I'm home all the time sharing the load with Amy, I don't have the ability to nurse the baby and so thanks to nature Amy does have to do more work than me and she's doing a great job. (some days she'll have to take a nap until 5pm... but that's ok) We can't wait for Luke to learn how to sleep more, but at the same time we must appreciate these times that we're pushed to our limits and force us to grow personally as our love grows with another child in our lives.

Luke is so so precious, we can't describe it. Just ask Rhone or Janet or Grandma Kay or Valerie or Tracy. Try and get them to adequately describe this baby. He's just so so precious and perfect and adorable times a billion.

Oh and Isaac is getting smart, he's growing his brain. I think he's pretty much human now.