4 years

This month Steve and I celebrated our 4 year anniversary. With each year we continue to face new challenges in marriage, but with God's grace, we are able to work through them and our love for one another strengthens. This past year specifically has had the biggest change yet (even more so than living in Tanzania) - having our son Caleb.

Having 3 years without children was such a blessing and honestly, was needed. Those years we were able to learn how to communicate, how to resolve conflict, how to love the other one, and do things that aren't as easy with kids such as travel the world. But now that we have Caleb in our lives, we can't imagine life without him. Becoming parents definitely adds another depth to your marriage. It seems as though we are more of a team than ever before. Steve is more to me than a husband. Now he is a dad. And I'm a mom. And somehow we, together, are responsible for raising our children in a home where our kids see the grace and love of Christ in us. Talk about a challenge. But it's a challenge that we will work through together for the rest of our lives and I am so glad to have him by my side the entire way.

To celebrate, we went to Charlottesville where we visited Monticello, walked around the downtown mall, stayed in a bed and breakfast, and watched a free polo match at our favorite vineyard.

we took notes on monticello's veggie garden

enjoying breakfast on the porch.

the highlight of my weekend. polo is so fun to watch.

10 months

Caleb,

You've seemed so much more grown up to me this past month. I can see a few small changes in you that make me realize that you're beginning to transition to toddler-hood. For instance, if I take something away from you that you wanted, you immediately protest. You're a lot more vocal and are sounding out syllables instead of just babble. Your favorite is saying da-da even though you actually said ma-ma first :)

You're crawling now too, so goodbye to the good ol' days where I could just sit you down in a room and not have to worry about you getting into anything you shouldn't. Now I have to keep my eye on you every second, which honestly gets quite tiring. You've already gotten into everything that you shouldn't - all the house plants, dad's dirty shoes, the surge protector, etc. Needless to say, I have a lot more baby-proofing to do around the house.

Besides you learning how to crawl this month, you're working on pulling yourself up on things and how to get down from the standing position. You also have gotten 2 more teeth this month and are an eating machine. On your nine month birthday we finally got you down to just 2 naps a day, which has been great for me - a lot more freedom to go places and get things done.

You love being read to - your favorite book is any book that has a picture of animals. You are such an animal lover! You also love your ball and think it's so funny whenever I throw it up in the air and catch it.

This month your first cousin, David Andrew Krieger, was born and we look forward to you and him becoming best buds. You also experienced your first ever earthquake and will possibly experience your first hurricane in just a couple of days too! It's been quite a month!

We love you Caleb!

**As you can see, it's getting harder and harder to get him to stay still to take a picture

a place to work.

There are small projects going on in our house right now. The storage bench I posted about is still in the plan, but we are working on a sewing area for me to help organize all my stuff and mainly to have a place in the house where I can go to 'work'.

Browsing the internet has helped tremendously with finding some really great ideas on what I want my sewing area to look like and how to organize and store different things. Here are just a few pictures that have inspired me and I hope to use:

garden update

It's been a while since I posted anything about our garden. It's been a lot of fun keeping up this summer and we've enjoyed being able to walk outside and pick fresh vegetables for supper. If you have the littlest backyard (or even porch) I would totally recommend trying to plant a few things - it's worth the time and money and you learn so much!

We're still getting a ton of tomatoes (if the squirrels, birds or rats don't get them first), green and red peppers, cucumbers, toxic jalapeno peppers, and a few more squash and zucchini. We'll be harvesting the butter beans any day now too.

Just from this year I've learned so much and know what to do better for next year. I didn't plan out the placement of the vegetables too well. A couple of our cucumber and pepper plants got blocked from the sun because of some tomato plants. I also should have thinned out our zucchini and squash a lot more too.

In order to have a more continuous harvest, I now know to not plant all the seeds at the same time. For instance, our green beans and lettuce all came in at once and we just had way too much of both in a short amount of time. So next year I'll plant a few seeds in a 2-week interval, which should prevent an overabundance of veggies and we can enjoy eating fresh lettuce and green beans over a longer period of time.