New Skills

These first pictures were actually taken over a week ago a few days before he was seven months (but who's really counting besides me?!), back when we were busy getting the house ready for Liam's baptism and doing all the preparations. Here is Liam learning to use his sippy cup. He wasn't able to get a lot of milk out, but seemed to have the right idea!
The Chinese girl in the video is "Angela" (Xu) who is a guest staying with us for 4 weeks while she is in an English as a Second Language (ESL) program. She loves Liam and helps entertain him sometimes while we are preparing dinner.


When we decided to host an international student in our home for 4 weeks, we didn't know if it was going to make our lives more stressful or not. Much to my surprise, it has brought out the best in both of us. It gives us the extra push needed to get up at 7:15 or so every morning (to help with breakfast), which is generally the time Liam has preferred. Since I have been trying to get Liam on a more consistent sleeping pattern, this has helped keep us on track. For the evenings we naturally have just split up roles and all has been so much smoother. We now also have kept our house completely nice and clean for one full week, with very minimal time. It has been easier to do since having a guest in our home keeps us both more personally accountable for cleaning up after ourselves, and we both are better about joining together to get the kitchen and other rooms back in order. This is a major accomplishment!! I'm hoping this will be a new habit, having the house in decent shape is a must now with Liam on the move. It also keeps my tension levels much lower.

Here are pictures and video I took of Liam on our way home from church today.

He's got a double chin now!

He's now sitting up better. He's much more interested in moving, than sitting, so he still is a bit wobbly on his own (part of why some of these are blurry...the other reason some are blurry is because of the vibrating cow!).

Will add baptism pictures soon, once I get them from family members!

Oh, Liam is also still loving being around the other kids and playing in the church nursery. Our church had a parents night out yesterday Michael and I finally were able to attend. While our date night did not go smoothly, after we ended up being too late to see the Star Trek movie as planned. We had fun just hanging out together, but ended up just mostly wandering around trying to come up with alternative ideas and find a place to eat. We really must be out of practice and just need to go out more often! Liam still had a blast. When Michael went to go pick him up, he watched Liam sneak up on an older kid and steal the toy airplane out of his hand. Michael told the kid sorry, we haven't taught him to share yet. I was at least humored by the story (not that I want him to go around stealing other kids toys all the time!). He was back in the nursery for his second Sunday this week and only fussed when we arrived to pick him up!