Toby's baptism and first smiles

Today we celebrated Toby's baptism. We were all excited, especially Nathan! Apparently he talked all about it through Sunday school, too. :)

Even though there are widely differing views of baptism, I have no intention of trying to flesh out the entire paedobaptist (infant-baptizing) position. But I do want to take a minute to explain why I am most convinced of paedobaptism. (Understand that I am no theologian and that there are other, much more theologically advanced reasons for paedobaptism. I'm only explaining one part of what convinced me personally.) In the Christian church we baptize people when they become part of the church. For credobaptists (people who don't baptize babies), baptism comes only after a profession of faith in Jesus Christ. Paedobaptists believe that babies are part of the church, just as professing adults are part of the church. Toby goes to church with us and though right now he sleeps through most of it, he will be just as much a part of the church as Jimmy or I. (The same is true for Nathan and Isaac in a way that is more meaningful than for Toby because they're more interactive, however they have not yet professed a personal faith in Christ.) We paedobaptists believe that we can't know a person's heart, so why wait until a profession of faith to welcome a person into the church community who has been there all along? It seems like credobaptists are trying to "weed out" the believers from the nonbelievers and only baptize the believers. That's just not possible; there are plenty of examples of people who were baptized upon profession of faith in Christ who are certainly not doing anything to make anyone believe they actually meant it. One of the arguments against paedobaptism is that you might be baptizing people who aren't actually believers, but then I would counter that plenty of people who have professed faith in Christ aren't actually believers, either. There's no way to accurately know a person's heart, so why try to figure it out? What we can know for sure, however, is if the person is part of the visible Church. If the point of baptism is to welcome someone into the community of believers, well, Toby is certainly part of that community. For us, baptism is much less about the individual and much more about God's promise to fulfill the promises of His covenant with us. It's not so much about the individual and his decision, but it's a tangible sign of God and His work in the church. We baptized Toby because he is part of the church and that's the sign of welcome into the church.

Anyway, whether you agree with me or not, you can still enjoy the pictures :) (Oh, and pay no attention to the incredibly short haircut on the Mama. I cheated on my hair stylist, got a terrible haircut by someone else, went back to him to beg forgiveness and to ask him to fix it and along with evening it up, he got a little revenge of his own apparently!)

And now some pictures of the cutest baby this side of 4/28/08 (that's Isaac's birthday, btw)!!

A first smile! Well, maybe a third or fourth, but it was while I was talking to him and holding him he smiled at me for the first time, about three minutes before I took that picture! Those dimples are going to be the death of my sternness as a mother...

Toby's birth story...5.5 weeks later :)

Since I hadn't gotten my blogging second wind when Toby was born, I'll have to update you on his arrival now. Here's a brief recap of May 17, 2010.

6:00--I get up because I can't sleep since I know what's coming. (I had asked to be induced that day.)

8:00--Jimmy and I arrive at the hospital

8:00-11:00--Check in, listen to our nurse talk, and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk.....

11:00--Doctor checks me, I'm not in labor but am very far along, and breaks my water.

Nothing happens for a while and then....

1:10--Contractions start and I go straight into transition (that's the most painful part of labor, right at the end)

2:30--Toby is born after only 1 hour 20 minutes of labor and only one real push. (Side note--my children like to be born on the 1/2 hour...Nathan was 7:30 pm, Isaac was 4:28 pm, and Toby was 2:30 pm.)

It was a great experience, at a great hospital, with a great doctor. Jimmy and I chose to stay on the hospital for the full 48 hours after the birth and that was possible thanks to his mom who stayed with Nathan and Isaac.

Here are some hospital & going home pictures for your viewing pleasure :)

love these boys

Restarting with a BANG--more pictures!

HA! Well that didn't take as long as I thought it would. New computer and faster internet connection was helpful I guess :) Anyway, here are some recent pictures. (Captions go to the pictures above them.)

Mommy takes all three boys to the zoo alone. Toby is strapped to my chest, hence not in the picture. I think I overdid it--I came down with strep throat the next day!

Everyone enjoys reading. Never too young to start off right :)

The cutest baby in the land!

GranGran and 3/4 of her handsome grandsons.

Visit to the Botanical Gardens. The boys are very focused on playing in the sand!

Toby was happy for the photo shoot....

....momentarily.

Nathan teaching Isaac how to play on the iPod.

Maybe I'll keep it up this time...?

I was thinking about how much I enjoyed looking back on what I wrote about Nathan his first three years of life and that I'm sad I haven't chronicled the past year in the same way. So I'd like to keep up the blog better. I think what holds me back is the uploading of pictures. So there may not be tons, but I will at least try to put up some and keep on updating about our lives. I don't have long periods of free time these days to upload lots of pictures and make them all cute with nice captions, so it may be a little slap-happy for a while :) Anyway, here are some updates on our little boys.

Nathan will be four in just over two weeks. He is currently obsessed with dinosaurs. We're having a dinosaur birthday party for him! He also loves Toy Story and I plan to take him to see Toy Story 3 in the theater sometime this summer. Nathan finished his first year of preschool this past year. I was his teacher! He (and I) went three mornings a week. Nathan really loved it. Though we're still wondering what our long-term plan is for schooling the boys, we know that at least for next year he'll be going five mornings a week at our church's school, The Freedom School (where he went this past year). Oh, and Nathan is obsessed with the color orange. We have orange bunk beds in the boys' room. They look like a gigantic, bunk-bed-shaped traffic cone.

Isaac turned two at the end of April. Here's a conversation Isaac and I have several times a day. He does this out of the blue:
Isaac: "Mommy, Mommy."
Me: "Yes, Isaac?"
Isaac: "I not hot."
Me: "Oh, good!"
Isaac: "I not cold, too."
Me: "Oh, I'm glad."
Isaac: "I just right!"
Me: "You're just right for me!"

Isaac likes everything Nathan does. They have A TON of fun together, and it's always loud. Sometimes that gets on my nerves, but I do love the fact. Isaac loves trains and cars and trucks and animals. When we go to the zoo he wants to see the "tangs" (orangutans), bears and "unts" (elephants). His favorite colors are green and purple. He really likes to talk a lot. When we're driving along we get lots of commentary about the stoplight colors. He likes to tell me when to stop and that we have to stop at red lights and that we need to go at green lights. Sometimes he gets angry because he thinks we should have turned; that we're going the wrong way. He is a very opinionated child, who has incredibly large, beautifully blue eyes.

Toby was born on May 17. He is a wonderful baby! He really likes to eat and he sleeps pretty well at night (and during the day), thankfully. He likes baths, and he gets loved on by his big brothers. He has dimples and I'm so excited when he starts socially smiling so we can see them all the time :)

As for our family in general, we're still in St. Louis and Jimmy has two years left at Covenant Seminary before he completes his M.Div. I will be staying home full-time this coming school year, and I'm stoked about that. I'm glad that the school hired a full-time teacher for my job, and I'm glad it means I can stay home next year! Jimmy got a job teaching the GMAT (business school entrance exam) so he'll be doing that a few hours a week. This summer we will spend most of our time in St. Louis, but we'll go to California for almost two weeks in July to visit Jimmy's family and spend a weekend in Long Beach, and we'll go to Virginia for about two weeks in August to visit my family. We haven't traveled out of St. Louis as a family since August of last year except to go about two hours away on a church retreat back in October. We're hoping that the older boys travel as well as they used to, and that Toby is also an easy traveler :)

Well, I'm really hoping that this is the beginning of a blog resurrection. It really seemed to die just after I started teaching preschool nearly three semesters ago, so maybe now I can bring it back to life. Keep checking and we'll see :) For now, here are some random pictures.

Happy Birthday Grandpa!

Happy birthday, Grandpa! If you listen very closely, you can recognize the song as "Happy Birthday," but Nathan and Isaac were a little too giddy to do it in a calm manner! Isaac is just saying "Happy! Happy!" over and over again :)

Nathan dances

I know it's been forever since I've posted. Well, not literally FOREVER but definitely a really REALLY long time. I thought I might give up on the blog since it is so much faster to upload pictures to Facebook, especially now that we have a Mac and there's a nifty little icon in iPhoto that allows you to do a bunch at a time. But....I'm reconsidering. We'll see! In the meantime, I have no intention of trying to update on here everything that has happened since August but you do get a cute little video of Nathan dancing to Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean." My favorite part is when he pauses to adjust his shorts, but it looks like he's trying to add a little booty action. :) Enjoy!