Noah at the Boy Scout Olympics

Noah joined the Boy Scouts this year and has been enjoying his Den. It mostly consists of friends from his class last year. A couple months ago they had a pack night full of races and games and Noah was selected from that to represent his Den at the Regional Olympics competition. Here is a montage of videos we took that day. Set to the song "Barbara Streisand' by Duck Sauce (selected by Noah).




So, even though Noah only came home with a participation ribbon (in case you could not read it as it scrolled past the camera), we had a great time cheering him on. He says he wants to start training for next year.

Jonah (9 Months)

Times flies when you're having fun... or when you're not sleeping since you really have no idea what day it is anyway. Jonah's changing fast now. Seems like only a couple weeks ago we could set him down and come back to find him in the same spot. Not anymore! Check out some crawling from our little "Toad".





We call him "Toad" becasue 1) he needed a nickname, 2) A lot of people say he looks like me and "Toad" was my nickname, 3) because he has long skinny froggy legs and 4) he loves to jump (with some help).




His first words are Mama, Dada (might mean Dad, Brother or Dog depending on what he's looking at), Night Night and No No. And he doesn't say it but he finally signs "more" and "all done".

So there you go! You're all caught up. You know him so well it's like you've been living with us for the past 9 months! Can't beleive he's almost 1 already.

We Need Names

Maybe it's that Jonah is the 3rd kid and we've run out of creative names for stuffed animals (by the time we got to Mandy, "White Bear" was the best we could do). Or maybe it's because "Champ" turned out to be about the best name we could have given Micah's still-favorite animal. But for whatever reason we don't have a lot of good names for Jonah's potential favorite stuffed animals.

So I'm using you're desire to look at cute pictures of Jonah to enlist your help naming these potential friends! Add your name suggestions via a comment to this post or send me an e-mail.

His new name: Bruce the Moose
Name he came with: Bloose
What we've been calling him: Blue Moose

His new name: Ribbit
Name he came with: Ponds
What we've been calling him: the Frog

His new name: Stretch
Name he came with: Tiptop
What we've been calling him: the Giraffe

First Snow

After the first real snow of winter Noah, Micah and I went outside to play in the backyard. They had a great time getting all bundled up. They made snow angels, we built a snow wall, made snow balls, had a snowball fight and tackled each other all over the yard.

They also enjoyed the slide once it was covered in snow.

The snow all melted after Christmas and we took our decorations down. Then when it snowed again Micah asked if we would be putting the decorations back up since it was Christmas time again. =)

Jonah: 5 weeks

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Jonah is 5 weeks old now. His newborn baby puffiness is gone and he looks a lot more like himself now then when he was born (That sounds like something Dad would say!). He's a good sleeper and often lets us put him in bed while he's wide awake without any complaining. Tamara got him to sleep in his own room today for naps instead of in the cradle in our room which is a great step.

It hasn't been all perfect though, he's been slow to regain his weight, which had us worried at first. But he's very happy and smiles a lot. He's got a head full of hair which I want to cut, but Tamara says I can't. =)

All I have today are pictures, but I'll try to capture some of his personality in video form next time.

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The "Lego Build Everything"

Growing up I remember we used to try to build every puzzle we had around New Years Eve. I have no idea if we ever finished it in one night (though I doubt it), but I do recall a picture of the ping pong table all covered in completed puzzles. It was in that spirit that I initiated the "Lego Build Everything" plan (to build all our Lego sets). Jonah was also taking forever to arrive and we needed something to distract ourselves.

The sets are rarely built the way they were meant to be. Most of the time they've constructed an R2D2 or a dog or some kind of car/ship, or they've asked me to build something crazy for them. But that's the beauty of Legos.

When we finished Noah was pretty proud of our accomplishment. However after this picture I think we started messing them up almost immediately and a couple weeks later only the big Star Wars ship Noah is holding remains intact.

The "Lego Build Everything" also had the added benefit of letting me take inventory on all our Legos. I went through every single piece and found that we are only missing 3 Legos (red flower, gray cone & yellow steering wheel). I'm pretty happy with that considering we've had some sets for 2+ years and we have them dumped in a pile on the floor for most of the year.

Jonah Robert Keller

Jonah Robert Keller
11/13/2010
born @ 2:55pm

Welcome to your family Jonah! We're excited to welcome a 3rd boy into our family, though Tamara is seriously outnumbered and her chances of "the girls" ever catching up are now slim to none. But we love our boys and it's great to add yet another brother into the mix.

Jonah was born here at home as we had planned and hoped. And while not everything (or much) went according to our plans, Tamara's Mom was here to help deliver the baby and I had the honor of catching and announcing my own son. It was an amazing experience. One of the big pluses was how quickly Noah and Micah could be involved.

Here's Noah holding Jonah on our bed a couple hours after he was born.


Micah got his chance too, but this one from a couple days later was the cutest. It's classic Micah goofiness, but I especially love the pause in the middle where he studies Jonah for a minute.

As I'm writing this it has been two weeks since Jonah was born. It's been a challenge to get him on our schedule, but I think we're just about there. Next week I'll go back to work and we'll see what its like trying to return to our normal life with this new addition. Here's a few more pictures of Jonah so far (You can click on any picture to see it larger).