Independence Day Celebrations

Well we celebrated the 4th very well in the Mayo household. We started last Sunday (6/28) with our God and Country Day celebration at our church followed by a churchwide luncheon. We did not have evening services that night so we decided to go out to Bellevue Baptist in Memphis where they were having their Starlight Spectacular. This was an outdoor family event with music, food, and fireworks! It was so much fun. Several families from our church went and we all sat together. We took our picnic dinner and enjoyed some wonderful fellowship with friends while listening to some great Christian music. The fireworks were awesome at the end of the night! Drew loved it and was able to expel some of his constant energy! JC did what he does best, slept through the entire thing! It was a tiring night and we all had to work the next day but it was worth it. The following is a slide show of the night.

On the actual 4th of July we celebrated with my family out at my moms. We swam and the guys fished and we enjoyed some ribs that Lou cooked for us along with all kinds of fixings and some incredibly good homemade ice cream! YUMMO!! It was a great day of relaxing with the family. I am so thankful to have a loving family that wants to get together whenever we can and just enjoy one another. It was a wonderful celebration of our nations independence. I tried to keep a mindset of thankfulness to our Lord for the freedom that He gives to us because of Jesus' willingness to give His life for each of us. We are so unworthy of that sacrifice but He did it willingly, because He loves each of us that much!

JC 5 Weeks Old

Well he is now 5 weeks old! Hard to believe that much time has seriously gone by. He is getting big. He will now stay awake for several hours throughout the morning time. He is still getting up every 4 hours to eat, even at night, so no sleeping through the night just yet. He is now officially wearing 3-6 month clothing! He actually wore an outfit on Sunday that Drew wore when he was over 6 months old!! He is still wearing size 1 diapers but we will soon run out of all that we had in that size from shower gifts and he will no longer need them by then b/c we are getting big enough for size 2! He is definitely bigger that his big brother was at his age. He isn't a fat baby really, just long and filling out. Here are some pics of the big boy!

Drew the Photographer

Drew has developed a new love for using my camera. He does pretty good at it sometimes, others are questionable. I put together a slide show of some of the pics he has taken in the last few days.

Drew performing VBS songs

For those of you who are VBS'd out you probably won't care anything about seeing this post! Drew has loved VBS this year, mostly because the theme has to do with trains which are his favorite thing! He has been to 2 VBS's already and has one more to go, our churches is July 13-17. This year he has ask many questions about Jesus and salvation. He is not ready to make a decision yet but it has been so exciting to see that he is beginning to focus in on his need for a Savior. This is exciting and scary all at the same time. As parents we feel so burdened with the responsibility of modeling Christ likeness for him and showing him his need for Jesus. I look forward to being able to disciple our son in his walk with the Lord.

Tonight we had our first "family devotion" time with the 4 of us. We used Drew's new "big boy" Bible that has brief devotion lessons in it. The one we did was about holding grudges and forgiveness. It was really good because we were able to talk about Jesus forgiving us and dieing on the cross for our sins. At the end of the devotion I ask him who he wanted to pray tonight, usually he will not do it but wants me or Jim to do it. Well he ask me to, so I prayed. When I got done he said it was his turn and he prayed the sweetest little prayer thanking God for his mommy, daddy, and for his brother JC. It just about made me cry! He is growing up so fast! He then told Jim it was his turn to pray, so he made everyone pray, except JC but I am thinking since he cannot talk yet that got him off the hook!

Now please understand that while he performs for the camera he most certainly will not do this live at church! He gets such stage fright and just refuses to do it when he thinks people may be watching him, but he sure doesn't mind hamming it up for the camera or showing everyone his videos!
Yes to VBS

Boomerang Express
video to come soon

Today's post is really just another update of what has gone on in the Mayo household in the last few days. The first pic I will share is of JC getting his first real tub bath. We had just been bathing him off with a rag while he sat on the counter on a small mesh bath seat thing. I tried bathing him in the big tub about a week ago and did not have great success so we decided to just go ahead and buy a baby bath tub. This worked much better! Mom likes it but as you can see from the pic JC does not really care for it just yet. I think this is in part because he has had a terrible diaper rash almost since the day he was born. I am happy to say that it seems that if we keep powder on his bottom after every diaper change the diaper rash goes away. So that is the game plan! Thankfully we received several containers of baby powder as shower gifts so we will not be having to buy any for a while. Tonight will be his second time to get in the tub, so we will see if he enjoys it some better with a more healed up bottom.

Last night we went out for my friend Stephanie's birthday. We ate at the Olive Garden which is one of my most favorite places! We had a great time being with friends. We originally planned to leave both boys at home with our favorite babysitter Katie. One of Stephanie's girls was going to be here for her to keep also. Well I backed out of leaving JC. I completely trust Katie and know that she would have done a fine job of keeping him but I just could not bring myself to leave him yet. She did stay and keep Drew and Becca though. They had a great time with her and must have played very hard while we were gone because when we arrived home we found them both asleep on the couch!! These two are usually still going strong like the energizer bunny, so whatever Katie did to accomplish this I am jealous that we don't seem to be able to reproduce it! They were so cute laying there together that I had to get a picture.

Today has been a good day. We did not have anywhere to go today and I wanted to keep it that way! Jim did the yard work this morning, that was quite a chore in this heat! I stayed in the house and worked on a special project of making homemade baby food. This is something I have decided to do this time to help save money. I cooked 3 bags of carrots and got over 40 serving sizes frozen! Now that is an incredible savings over buying baby food! I cannot say that I will do this exclusively, maybe just on veggies and we will buy fruits. We will see how it goes. I am pleased with myself for doing it and it really was not that big of a job.

This morning before I started all the cooking the boys and I were just hanging out in the living room. JC had just finished a bottle and was having some good awake time and smiling so I did some picture taking and videoing of him. Drew wanted in on the act too, so I took some of both of them. Here they are...

Drew kissing JC on the head


My sweet boys!

A lot to blog about...

Let's start with last Saturday. This was a very busy day for us. We had some house and yard work to get done that morning and then we had an Anniversary Party to attend as well as a Going Away Party. We also ended up going out to dinner with the Hanks. They had just returned from vacation and since Stephanie and I had gone an entire week without seeing one another we had to get together!!! Drew ended up going over to the Brooker's house to swim while we went out to eat. Amazingly he began jumping off the diving board, doing flips in the water, letting Monty throw him in the air, and basically showing no fear at all! I just cannot believe that this is the same boy who 1 year ago would cling to mine or Jim's neck for dear life. I am so thankful for this progress that he has made but I do not know that I am ready for a dare devil!


HAPPY FATHER'S DAY!
We celebrated a beautiful Father's Day. I made Jim a special lunch of homemade chicken salad served with croissants and a salad. We also enjoyed some cupcakes and ice cream for dessert. I took a pic of our lunch because I tried to do my Food Network best at making the plate look perfect and pretty! We let Jim just kick back and enjoy the day. I think he appreciated it. He does so much for his family. He is a wonderful dad and he is totally hands on. He changes the diapers, bathes them, plays with them, keeps them while mom has to work and run errands. I am so thankful that God has blessed me with a husband and father to my children who loves me and them unconditionally and will do anything for us. WE LOVE YOU!


JC Update
Well he is now 4 weeks old, will be one month on Friday. He is growing to be quite a big boy. He is taking 6oz of formula every 4 ours now. I actually gave him about 2tbsp of cereal in his bottle last night to see if we could sleep longer, that only bought me an extra hour and a half! He is still an incredibly good baby, we cannot complain, I would just like to sleep all night! Here is a slide show of several pics from the last week.

Umbilical Cord Finally Gone

Well today JC's umbilical cord FINALLY fell off. I am convinced that this is one of the incredibly gross memories of your newborn infant's life that God graciously deletes from your memory because otherwise you would never want to have another child and deal with this again! For 2 days now this icky stub has been oozy and smelling horribly! This morning we inspected it and could see that it was hanging on by one tiny strand in there. So we started the day off hoping that it would go ahead and fall off today. Now here is the story of how it actually came off. We got all ready for our 1pm afternoon feeding, with not electricity in the house again! Apparently they are turning us off periodically as they are working and repairing other lines because this has now happened several times. But back to the cord story, so we got him up from his nap and finally took him out of his pajamas and put him in just a t-shirt and diaper. I dressed him this way because it was getting hot in the house and also I knew that the cord needed to be exposed to the air to help it dry on up. I was giving him the bottle and as usual he did not want to burp for me so I passed him off to Jim to try to get a burp out. Jim worked on him for a while and we were talking about how gross and smelly the cord was and then Jim pulls him back and I saw immediately that the cord was gone! So I pointed this out to Jim and then he freaked out a bit not knowing if it had gotten on him! Fortunately it was on the burp cloth!! It was funny though to see Jim panic just a bit. We cleansed the area really good and now he smells like a sweet baby again and not a bag of smelly garbage!