Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Cheese-Ball


Brooks loves saying "cheese" for the camera.

As soon as he knows you have taken his picture, he rushes over to look at it.

I think Amy Jo and I have ruined him with excessive photo takage.

Play Dough


If you are on Facebook, you probably saw the not so psyched picture of Brooks when he was clearly done playing with his play dough.

Here are a few of him actually enjoying it...which lasted less than five minutes...to his defense, he was ready for nap time (a duh moment for me, and he was coming down with a high fever, which I discovered after his four hour nap)...oops.

Lesson learned.

Sunset Over Aspen


This was the view of the sunset over Aspen Mountain from our back porch last week. It was truly magnificent. In six years, I have never seen anything like it. God is so good.

Blue Eyes


He gets away with a lot when he flashes those baby blues...

Discovering...Ornaments



Brooks was so helpful putting up the tree. He made a lot of new discoveries. It was pretty cute.

Let's just say the glass and "special" ornaments are at the top of the tree this year.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

What's in a Name?


One of the tougher decisions parents need to make is naming their babies. There is a lot of pressure when picking a name. We always picture our child as an adult either playing sports or running a major company (hey a parent can dream), and say their name in association with a profession to see if we find it too trendy or something that will go out of style and sound unprofessional some day.

With Brooks, we actually picked his name while driving down the road and listening to Sirius radio. A Garth Brooks song came on the radio, Bryant looked down and said, "Brooks! That's a cool name!" And I instantly loved it too... so it stuck. We came up with Liam as Bryant wanted our first son to have an Irish name, and Liam is the last half of William (Bryant's first name). So, we went with Liam Brooks Ragan, and we call him Brooks, and it suits him so well.

When it came to choosing a name for boy number 2, I decided to pray about it and see what God wanted us to name him. Within days we were sitting at a Sunday night service at our church and Brent preached about courage and mentioned the stories of Joshua (also the name of his son born in August), and Caleb from the Old Testament. I quietly stored that in the back of my head as a possible name, but wasn't totally sold...yet.

That night we were laying in bed, and Bryant randomly said, "what about Caleb?" I excitedly replied back, "I knew you were going to say that!" So, we decided to try it out for a while, and decided we really liked the name.

Then Bryant went on his trip to South Africa. While there, the group spent a lot of time at Northpoint Church in Johannesburg. During a Wednesday night prayer meeting, the members of the church prayed over the guys from Aspen. A random stranger came to pray over Bryant and part of what she said was, "...And I just felt God say that you are like Caleb..." When Bryant told me this story, we knew that was the name God had for our second son.

Now to pick a middle name. As I mentioned in a previous post, this will probably be a game time decision.

Friday, December 3, 2010

It has been a while...again

We have had a great fall and beginning to winter. We have record amounts of snow (123% above average on the slopes) which would be so awesome...if I were skiing this year.

Bryant went to South Africa for two weeks and while he was away, my mama came to help me out...and it was such a blessing to have her here! She took great care of us and Brooks warmed right up to his Mema!

Bryant's trip was life changing. The things they learned and experienced were incredible!

Brooks is already 19+ months, and time couldn't seem to be going any faster. It feels like he should be six months old...but then I wouldn't be 30+ weeks pregnant with Caleb _____ Ragan, due in February! (we are still going back and forth on middle names... it might be a game time decision based on the direction of or "discussions"). Brooks is saying so many words (most of which we only understand because we know what he is trying to say). My favorites are of course, please and thank you, and he is saying "good girl" to Mali, and pretty much any other animal is a hoooooooooooorse! Oh and any food he wants is a "cook-ie." He forgot to learn how to walk and went straight to running. That is pretty much all he does to get around now. I am having a harder time keeping up as my belly gets bigger by the day!

He is quite a risky guy...one of his favorite activities is climbing up on our headboard and doing superman dives into our pillows. Oh and the laughter! He has the best, most contagious laugh I have ever heard. It is awesome.

We are so thankful for every smile and laugh (and there are a lot) we get from him. He is truly a blessing.

We had a great ultra sound appointment today and got wonderful pictures of Caleb. I have been preparing myself to meet a totally opposite boy from Brooks, just in case Caleb is born with dark features, small brown eyes and hair, (still adorable but different than our big blue eyed blondy) but based on the pictures, he looks just like Brooks did, at least the features, we obviously won't be able to see the colors until his arrival.

So, in addition to being in my third trimester, our house is under contract and due to close either in the beginning of January, OR February, days after my due date. We are praying for extreme favor and the earlier closing so we can move into another house before we go into the hospital...we should know in a matter of hours or days when it should happen. You just never know with the banks these days.

I am excited to move into a new house (new to us) and have a little more space for when our families and friends visit. Plus there is something refreshing about purging and moving. The house we love is a lot closer to the Everetts and the grocery store, both places we visit on a regular basis... in fact, I could load the boys in the Chariott and walk to the grocery store on a sunny day. Now that is enticing!

Below are pictures of our boys, within two weeks gestational age...Brooks at 32 weeks and Caleb at 30.5 weeks.

Liam Brooks

Caleb (Schmaleb)