Visiting Santa

Last Saturday, Josh and I took Ellie to see Santa for the first time. He was visiting Phillip Foster farm, which is a historic farm that is kind of a low budget Oregon version of Colonial Williamsburg. They have a cider squeeze festival there every year that we go to and when we saw that Santa would be sitting in the parlor on Saturday for kids to visit, we decided to take Ellie. She was sleepy most of the time, but we enjoyed watching her sit on Santa's knee. She was the youngest to see him all day. Maybe next year she'll be more excited to tell him what she wants for Christmas.

Silent Night!!!

We had a big first last night ..... the first night Miss Ellie slept all the way through the night. A full 7 1/2 hours of sleeping bliss!! I don't expect this blissful experience to be repeated every night especially since she's only 5 1/2 weeks old, but it was wonderful. I actually called her pediatrician a couple of days ago to make sure it was ok for her to sleep that long without eating, but according to Dr. Crist it is perfectly fine, so last night I went to bed without my little alarm clock to wake us up to feed her and we all had a silent night. Yea!! It definitely gives us more energy to have fun with all the snow that's falling today.

Snowy pictures to be posted later!

One Month Old!!

I can't believe how fast time is flying by. It may be the lack of sleep that makes it all a blur, but little Miss Ellie is one month old already!! We've been having a great time with her. Here are some pictures of her first month.


Brand Spanking New!

Hanging out with Grandma


Hanging out with Grandpa


Hanging out with Mom


Hanging out with Dad


First Bath - utterly content



Just dedicated at church


First family walk


Chillin in my bouncer



So tired!

So unhappy!!

Cloth diaper, tie dye t-shirt: Can you tell I was made in Oregon?


Hanging out with Nana

Spending time with crazy Uncle Will

Oops I just wet PopPop's pants (actually what was happening!)

One Month Old and quite the little person!!

Christmas Tree Hunting!

This is the first year since we've moved to Oregon that we didn't hunt down our own Christmas tree up on Mt. Hood. However, I think having a 3 week old is a good reason not to trapse around in the forest looking for our typical spindly, Charlie Brown tree. So this year, Ellie and I went with Josh when he sighted his rifle in prep for his hunting trip and on the way back we stopped by one of the many U-Cut Christmas tree farms for our tree. It was still a really fun experience. A very sweet Russian man let us pick out our tree and then cut it for us. Poor Josh had to load the tree on the car himself. We had a great time and our little Reindeer looked so cute!

Ellie's Here!!!!!!

We welcomed Miss Eleanor Ann McMillon to the world on Saturday, November 8th at 7:55 AM. She came out with a precious wail and let everyone know that she was cold and not too happy that she was leaving Mommy's tummy just yet.

The facts:

Weight: 9lbs. 2.6oz

Length: 21"

Head Circumference: 13 1/4 cm

Chest Circumference: 14 cm

I went into labor naturally last Friday morning when I woke up. I even went to work until about 1 pm, when I decided that these were probably the real contractions. So, I met Josh at his clinic and we went to the hospital where I was admitted. Ellie came a week and a half early, so everyone was pretty shocked that I had a 9 lb baby in me, much less that I was able to have her naturally. We were very fortunate that she is a strong little one and tolerated over 24 hours of labor. She has beautiful dark blue eyes, a full head of dark hair that gets lighter every day and chubby sweet cheeks. Here are a couple of pictures for now. Josh will add his two cents once boards are over this weekend. Thanks for everyone's prayers. We are deliriously happy and completely in love with Ellie.

Major Catch-up blog

Well Everyone, we've been extremely delinquent in updating our blog. And to top it all off, we've had lots to blog about. I'm just going to hit the highlights and maybe Josh will write a more substantive post later.

In early September, we travelled to Raleigh to see the family and had a great time! It was great to catch a little bit of Indian Summer, see my parents and at least one brother and meet his very sweet girlfriend. Also, Josh experienced his first tropical storm.

When we came back to Portland, Josh took lots of tests including his last final exams EVER and of course, passed all of them with flying colors. The day he finished finals was his birthday and we celebrated the last finals/birthday just the two of us. (By this point, we're pretty tired!)

In October, we've been busy every weekend with something fun. So far, I've attended a Women of Faith conference, Josh has cut and chopped our wood for the winter (he actually hauled it down from Mt. Hood), Josh went fly fishing for a whole day, and we went to a pumpkin patch and corn maze. Josh has also managed to re-paint the entire upstairs of our house and move 3 rooms around. The office upstairs became Ellie's room, Ellie's old room became our bedroom and our old bedroom became a den/office. Can you say nesting?? Josh was a trooper and basically did all the work himself. I contributed to things that needed to get done by canning 30 pounds of green beans with a friend and having a garage sale. Oh and we helped a friend move too.

Below are some recent belly shots. This first one was taken before we went to dinner to celebrate Josh being completely done with all his required patient visits. Woo Hoo! Note the new living room paint color. We're not sure we love it yet, but it really needed to be painted again and we were sick of brown.

Sooo.... we've been a little busy getting things done and getting ready for Miss Ellie to make her arrival. Her new room is now ready and bags are packed and we completed our Childbirth prep class last week. At my last midwife appointment Josh was instructed on the fine art of catching a baby because we hope that he'll be the one to recieve her and hand her back to me. He did very well delivering the fake baby from the model, so I feel very confident that he'll do great if he has the opportunity. After all, the man will be a doctor in less than 2 months anyway and took the required Obstetrics and Pediatric classes. By the way, we have every intention of Ellie being born in a hospital with medical staff attending the birth, so this isn't some hippie free birth experience we're planning. :) We haven't lived in Oregon that long. As of tomorrow, I'll be 38 weeks pregnant and Ellie was considered full term last week, so just 2 weeks until she's due and hopefully she be here sooner. Stay tuned for updates.

More Pictures!!!

Josh did a great job of documenting Ellie's room transformation, but I wanted to post a few more pictures from when Mom was here and some pictures of Josh since he tends not to post any of himself.

Here is Josh after we finished all the work on the walls and the floor and he finally got to assemble the glider rocker. He's been looking forward to this Daddy task for some time now and he did an excellent job!

It was another late night (midnight probably), but we got the furniture assembled!!

Here are some great shots that Josh took of Mom and me. I think these are the only photos during her visit in which we were reasonably clean and were wearing clothing that wasn't covered in paint.





Josh took some great pictures of me at 27 weeks. Here are a couple of pictures.

Daddy kissing baby Ellie

Daddy sharing wise thoughts with Ellie

The left picture is me at 20 weeks and the right picture is at 27 weeks. If you look closely at the right picture, you can see my belly now has a nose on it from my outie belly button. Josh swears it's really a megaphone to talk to Ellie. :)

That's all for now. Hope y'all enjoy the pictures. Hopefully, we'll have some more to add to them in a couple of weeks.

PROJECT: BABY'S ROOM

PROJECT BABY'S ROOM:

The baby's room started as our spare bedroom downstairs in what used to be the basement. This room wasn't totally finished when we moved in several years ago. It had 4 walls, but two of the walls were painted concrete, while the other two were framed drywall. So the first step in creating the perfect baby environment was to frame and drywall the concrete walls. This required installing furring strips with a gun that shot nails into the concrete using gun powder. That was exciting. For anyone in the Portland area, Bob's Rental on Stark just west of 148th has great deals on rental equipment- everything from ski's, snowboards, and rafts, to any construction equipment needed.

Next step was to drywall. I'd like to give a special shout-out to Jesse Larimer and David Hendrix for the help. I couldn't have done it without them. Then it came time for mudding, now I see why it is such an art. We learned two things: mudding corner tools are fantastic, and drywall dust gets EVERYWHERE, including Elisabeth's closet full of nice clothes- oops. By the end of that week the basement windows were framed, the mudding was done, and the walls were ready to paint.

Then we decided to finish the ceiling too. Since the room was originally a basement, the ceiling is essentially the sub flooring. To top it all off, there is a heating duct that runs in the middle that fed both that room and the room above (seen in the far left picture below). So to make it look better we decided to enclose the whole thing. That sucked. Another few days, some cursing, two more pieces of drywall, two recess lights, and some not-so-fancy mudding later it was finished. We finished just in time for Elisabeth's mom, Ann to arrive two weeks ago.

Picture on the left shows the cement walls, unfinished roof, and heating duct. The boards on the floor are the firring strips used to frame for the drywall.








As the construction finished, the painting and clean up began. We painted the room "wicker", and the ceiling white. While waiting for the paint to dry we cleaned out Elisabeth's closet and washed ALL of her clothes. I say "we", I really mean Elisabeth and her mom.
After the room painting was finished it was time to do the trim. Baseboards along the bottom, quarter round along the top, and molding around the windows gave the room a finished look. Carpet shampooing completed that phase of the project.









In between coats of paint, clothes washing, sleeping, shopping, and meals, we were busy. We sanded, primed and painted the baby's furniture. This included the crib, changing table, side table, and a small chair.











Finally it was time to assemble the baby furniture (I was very excited- this is such a daddy thing to do). The glider rocker went together without a hitch- and may I say that I LOVE IT. We weren't so lucky when it came to crib assembly. We learned quickly that the craigslist crib we had been storing for over a year was missing a few parts- UGH! Thankfully home depot had some of what we needed. The rest of the furniture was placed inside the room. Elisabeth and Ann washed all the baby clothes that we have been accumulating from garage sales, organized, and stored them.

The room is now ready to receive it's occupant. In the meantime it's Magnums favorite place to hang out, and our favorite place to relax in the glider rocker. A great big thanks to Ann for her help.








So what's next?.... Well Elisabeth mentioned painting the rest of the house. I quickly vetoed that idea. Maybe we should turn our focus onto the huge pile of dirty laundry that has been accumulating, the dust bunnies all over the floor, and oh yes... school and work.

Josh