A new (online) home

I have been having issues of late with uploading pictures to Blogger/Blogspot, so this family blog has a new home. Come visit us at bloomingtonmcneillys.wordpress.com - a long url, I know. :)

A 4-year Jubilee

Way back at the end of June, our Jubilee Kate turned four years old. Four years!

I have zero pictures of her birthday in Florida. But I do have these shots of my beautiful girl. What a sweet blessing of the Lord she is!

So far, age four has been lots of fun. Jubilee's imagination has exploded, we can carry on real back-and-forth conversations, and she's more and more helpful all the time. There's still plenty of training and discipline going on - we're praying God uses her strong will for His purposes as she gains self-control - but there are more sweet times now than there were just a few months ago.

Children's Museum adventure

Last week, the kids and I ventured up to Indianapolis to visit the Children's Museum with my mother-in-law, sister-in-law and three kids, and her sister and son. 4 adults, 7 kids 6&under.

In truth, except for the few minutes when we lost Whit ("I went to find the cars!" How can you blame him?) we all had a blast. An exhausting, stimulating blast.

I could caption all the pictures following, but since there are children not napping upstairs, I better just upload them and make this brief. Enjoy!

One-year-old Zeal Josiah

On May 24, Zeal Josiah turned one year old! As you can see from the pictures below, he's a mover, though he's just starting to get into pulling up and standing. In the two weeks since his birthday, he has gotten much stronger, but I think walking is still a while away. Thankfully, he's not too heavy!

Birthday cake: hummingbird cake with browned butter cream cheese frosting

 
Besides the facts on the chalkboard, here are some other tidbits about Zeal.
- He's our snuggliest baby yet and our most mischievous.
- He says mama and dada, and imitates nahnah (no-no).
- He and Whit share a room; they will often keep each other awake, laughing and shouting. They each find the other hilarious.
- There is a special sweetness between Zeal and Jubilee. They two have a similar look, a little different from Whitaker.
- Sneaky kid that he is, Zeal will often manage to get his hands on a book with paper pages. Amazingly, he has only torn one book (Edith Hamilton's Mythology) and it wasn't even a library book.
- He still army crawls everywhere. His army crawling is even and fast, so he doesn't see a reason to change!

And now, to the pictures. He wasn't so interested in the camera. :)

And for some comparison, here are Whitaker's birthday and one-year pictures. They are very different, these two brothers!

Bibliomania

bibliomania: excessive fondness for acquiring and possessing books

I discovered a few weeks ago that our local library (which is fantastic) allows a maximum of thirty hold requests. And I discovered that because I had thirty hold requests - mostly kids' books, plus a few books for me. Our library has a beautiful invention called the drive-up window, which means I can put books on hold, and when they're ready, I drive up to a window and they hand the books to me. It's wonderful. (As the kids get older, I plan to physically go in the library and look for books, but at this stage, the drive-up window is my favorite thing.)

July 2014

My most recent craze for book-requesting started with a talk from Andrew Pudewa called Nurturing Competent Communicators. (Spoiler alert: Read aloud to them.) Since then, I've listened to several episodes of the Read Aloud Revival podcast and joined a Read Aloud Revival group on Facebook, both of which just feed me more ideas for books to check out.

September 2014

When I get books from the library, we'll read through them once or twice. If I don't like it, it goes back to the library as soon as I can get there - why keep a book around if it's no good? If we do like it, it gets added to our growing kids' book wish list. If I get the chance to stop by the Half Price Books Outlet or the Red Cross book fair, I'll hunt for some there; otherwise, I find good, used copies on AbeBooks for birthdays and Christmas. I've just started putting all our books into LibraryThing so I can keep track of what we already own.

February 2015

Sending the kids to the couch with a book is one of my most useful parenting tools. While I prep a meal or unload groceries, or when the crazy has gotten a little too high, looking at books quietly is very helpful. When I first started doing that, I was afraid they would see reading books as punishment, but thankfully, it's only grown their own love for books. I'll often find a kid or two sitting quietly with a book, and Jubilee loves telling her brothers stories loosely based on whatever book she's looking at.

March 2015

Baby names

If you haven't heard, we love baby names. Alex and I put a lot of time and discussion into the meanings of our children's names; we actually have to stop ourselves from planning more names for future children (Lord willing that we have more).

Jubilee Kate, June 2011 - pure joy

This week, the Social Security Administration released the statistics on 2014 baby names. I'm never terribly interested in the top names. Although the top names are all nice this year - I really like Noah - we tend to go more obscure than that.

Whitaker Andrew, November 2012 - man of the white fields

Each year, when the new data are released, I check this page. From there I download information about every name given to at least five new babies each year. And that's where I found this info:

• In 2011, there were 104 baby girls named Jubilee.
• In 2012, there were 18 baby boys named Whitaker.*
• In 2014, there were 10 baby boys named Zeal. 

In 2013, there were fewer than five boys named Zeal. More than doubled in one year - we might be riding a wave, all the way to the top ten!

Zeal Josiah, May 2014 - zealous fire of the Lord

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*Just for kicks, there were also 14 boys named Whittaker.