alex's baby book

for each of my children i have been very careful in keeping a baby book where month by month i print a photo of them in the same place in the same outfit so we can watch how much they grow. a lovely friend of my mothers called chris, made joseph a book when he was born, so after i made his i felt obligated to do one for madeline because i knew one day she'd be asking too. i asked chris to make madeline one, which she did, then delivered it with a third book, saying oh here's one more, just in case. haha.

so here is my just in case book, made for baby alexander, made over two days, doing nothing else! luckily doug was home, so i actually got it done. i am super proud, because the whole time i am making them i haaaaaaate doing it, but when it's done, i am obsessed.

i am loving flicking through it and reading back over everything i wrote down while we were in hospital when he was freshly born and the weeks that followed. i am so glad i have taken the time to make all three of them.

see! how cute is it?!

we are all up to date, ready to add more pages in as he grows and i couldn't be more excited about it. the big kids love looking back through theirs and hopefully one day alex will too. ♥

baby book

we have been so lucky... when mum and dad decided to go to samoa to serve a mission teaching at church college we were so worried about who would live in their house, of course we wanted to make sure their home and their things were safe... but time started to creep up on us and still we had no idea who there could possibly be that wanted to live in a house in clackline! 

but god works in mysterious ways and one day i received an email from a friend - who knew i had attended northam branch when i was younger - asking if i might know of anywhere near there for rent, as people from his home branch in new zealand were moving over for work... boom. obviously it still all depended on whether or not the people were happy with the house and wanted to live there but it was a start.

greg and his wife chris turned up to have a look, they got along with my parents like a house on fire and a few weeks later they moved in - and are taking fabulous care of the place.

much like my mother, chris is into all kinds of art and crafts - and a few weeks ago gave me this beautiful book she had made, as a gift for baby joseph. i ummed and ahhed for some time about what to do with it and then had an amazing idea... when i was pregnant with madeline and in her first year and a bit of life i wrote in a journal for her to have, with all her milestones and the likes, but it always struck me as a little boring. it was all writing and no pictures - and although beautiful was not something she would probably want to share with anyone, as it was very personal, being full of her mothers thoughts and feelings.

so i decided to make the book full of the photos i had taken and to handwrite his milestones into the book alongside them. here is the beginning! our first look at our little boy - at my half way ultrasound...

photos of my growing bump as time went on throughout my pregnancy...

then his birth announcement and little bits and pieces, like a small paragraph about jourdin our student midwife who helped throughout my appointments etc...

and then... each month i'll add josephs month shot on his chair (see here for the ones i took of maddie) and write a little something about what's going on. i am so super excited about it and can't wait to keep adding to it. thank you so much chris, you're the best!!!