Thanksgiving

I didn't get very many pictures at our huge Thanksgiving celebration with all of Luke's Dad's family, but here is one of the guys eating cookie dough (which I personally think is disgusting, but they love it!) In the picture: Payton, Jon Ferguson, Luke, Dave Ferguson and Brian.

This was Sterling's favorite activity during our stay in St. Louis, wrestling with his cousin Payton!

The next few pictures are all from the City Museum in St. Louis. A bunch of us took all the kids and it was SO much fun! Everyone loved it, from the littlest to the oldest of us! Sterling's favorites were the area where you could touch the animals, and the room full of ramps and half pipes you could run or slide up and down.

Sterling and his aunt Lettie

Sterling with his cousin Zion and uncle Shane

Sterling with his Uncle Patrick and cousin Emma

Sterling with Payton again

We're Back!

Well, I have a lot of catching up to do after taking such a long break from blogging because we have taken lots of pictures since we moved back to the Midwest!

This was one of the last nights in California. We went to dinner with our neighbors in Hollywood. This Elmo was on the street and Sterling thought it was really fun because he loves elmo.

As soon as we got home Sterling immediately went for the little trike my parents have outside. His feet still aren't quite long enough to reach the pedals, so my dad got roped into pushing him around.

We went to the National Missionary Convention and lucky for Sterling,a New Orleans house building mission was two booths down from us. They had Mardi Gras beads they gave out to all the kids every day and they kept Sterling entertained for a long time!

While we were there we all stayed in hotels. Sterling decided one night to put on my brother's boots instead of going to bed. It was very funny to see him try to walk around in them.

He also thinks my brother's hats are really cool, so here he is in Kyle's hat. He actually wore it for an entire day.

The Zoo

Well, this will be my last post for about a week or so because we are disconnecting our internet today to get ready to leave! It's hard to believe that our time here is already over because it's gone so fast. We have been able to do so many fun things and we are grateful for the time we've had to train with our team.
This is the last fun Los Angeles thing we did- the LA zoo. It wasn't the best zoo we've ever been to, but it was still fun. Luke took pictures of every single animal we saw, but I will spare you of that and just put three pics we took that day. We love you all and we'll be seeing everyone soon!

Just Playing

Luke is really good at playing with Sterling and lately they've been playing "farm". They set out all the animals and the barns and it's really cute.

Sterling's newest favorite thing to do is to "fwy" (his way of saying, will you please put me on your feet and make me fly up in the air!) After he does this for a while, then Luke just tosses him onto the bed and Sterling laughs like crazy and wants to do it again.

Everyone on our team has realized that Sterling's love language is wrestling, or what I call "wollering" (which means him climbing all over you). In this picture he is wollering on Nick :)

Our neighbors (a different neighbor than the ones that gave us the Disney tickets) gave Sterling a new Scooby Doo stuffed animal the other day and he loves it! Every day when we get up we all have to give Scooby kisses- Sterling insists on it every morning.

And here he is giving scooby a ride on his bike.

I'm not sure who he was calling in this picture, but he thought he was pretty big stuff.

Owen's B-day/Halloween

Owen's birthday is Oct. 30, so we did a halloween/birthday costume party on Wednesday. Sterling refused to take a nap after lunch and the party was at 2:30, so at about 2 o'clock he was extremely cranky. He fell asleep, but I didn't want him to miss the whole party (b/c I had bought him a costume!) so I woke him up and took him to the party. It was going well at first because he got to eat a cupcake...

...and then there was a puppet show, which he thought was okay...

...and then we tried to put his costume on! He was NOT happy about that at all!



But once we got it on him he was the cutest little dinosaur ever. The tag said it was a dragon, but he has a book about dinosaurs that he loves, so we told him it was a dinosaur.

More Disney

So here are some more disney land pictures. The first is Sterling NOT loving the characters from Robin Hood. I thought it would be fun to get our picture taken but he obviously didn't! The next picture is from when we were on the Jungle Cruise, which he was mostly scared on, but he kind of liked it. The next picture is us walking through the line in the Bug's Life ride. We rode a little caterpillar and he really did love that ride. The next one is him waiting for the ice cream we were buying, and the last picture is one of the floats from the parade. Sterling got impatient waiting on the parade to start, but once it got started, he was mesmerized.





Here are 5 more pictures because we took SO many while we were there. The first picture was also from the parade- it was a guy on stilts (and notice how beautiful the sky is behind him- it was the perfect day to be at Disney- about 75 degrees and sunny!). The 2nd picture is Sterling watching the parade, isn't he making the funniest face? Then I tried to take a picture of luke and Sterling in front of the castle, although it's far away and hard to see. After that we went to the Mickey Town where they have all the characters. This 4th picture was Luke and Sterling in Daisy's boat. You can climb around and play in all the different houses/boats/treehouses. The last picture is Sterling with the new cup we got him. We had to buy him a little souvenir so that later on we'll be able to remind him of our trip together! Hope you enjoy the pictures, we certainly enjoyed our day.

Update on the Lip

24 hours after the big fall...

It's been quite a week...

Well, it's been such a busy week with going to Disney Land and we also have one of our advisory board members in this weekend to do training with us. Last night we decided to carve pumpkins and they turned out so well! Caitlin's is the amazing one with the Mustard Seed logo on it, and Luke's is the one near the middle that has the big eyes and big mouth. He even put ears in the side of it, which is funny.
So the other thing that happened is that Sterling fell tonight when we were playing outside. He fell on the concrete and busted his lip really bad. There was blood everywhere and I was worried he had broken his teeth or gone all the way through his lip, but it seems to be doing fine for now. It stopped bleeding and he's been pretty whiney all night, but I think some of that is that he's also starting to get a cold (poor guy!). Anyways, I will put more Disney pictures on tomorrow, but I just had so many from this weekend that I had to share too!




We did Sterling's hair like Luke's yesterday and it was so cute! He looks so old in this picture.

Sterling Laughing

Luke got Sterling to laughing this morning and I caught it on video...if only he was this happy all the time!

DisneyLand!!

Some of you might remember that our neighbors gave us free tickets to Disney Land, so yesterday we decided to use them! We had the best day, it was so much fun! I have so many pictures from our trip, so I will just put some up now, and continue to put them up over the next few days. These pictures are from when we first went in- riding the tram to the park, waiting in the entrance line, standing by the native american on "Main Street USA", Luke and Sterling sitting on Ariel's seashell :) and Sterling eating his crackers while we wait in line to ride the "Casey Jr. Railroad".

Recent Pictures

Carolyn got me a new purse for my birthday and Sterling decided it was just the accessory he needed with his outfit. It's almost bigger than he is!

We went to Santa Monica last Friday with Jay, Caitlin, Carolyn, Sterling, Luke and I. We went in to Lids to try to find a hat that fit Luke, and Sterling got way into trying them on. He was cracking us up because he would just go from one hat to the next and he wanted me to try this one on with him.

We took this a couple of weeks ago because Sterling wore his new shirt. It's not a great picture, but he's getting to that age where he definitely doesn't just stand around waiting patiently while you get the camera ready.

Like his cousin Ava, Sterling is really wanting to feed himself lately! Actually, I think since he's waited this long, his motor skills are actually pretty decent and his does a good job for the most part. And sometime he just loses patience with himself and hands the spoon back to me because I can get it in there faster and in bigger bites!

This was a night a couple of weeks ago that we went to dinner with our land lady Paula, (the white lady in the middle) and her friends Koji and Takako who were visiting from Japan. We were at the Bonaventure Westin Hotel, where they have filmed many famous movies like "True Lies", "Rain Man", and "In the Line of Fire" (along with many others!). Paula has been a wonderful person to us- she is letting us live in her condo rent free and has been so generous in many ways. This particular night she wanted to take us to the revolving cocktail lounge at the Bonaventure where you can see the entire city. The funny part of it was that we had Sterling...He was pretty good for the first hour or so, but then, not surprisingly, he got a little restless. So we let him get down and walk a little...Then he started to run, and we were embarrassed and made him stop. But Paula was quick to say,"Oh he's so cute! And he's having fun!" Then Koji and Takako got down and started chasing him around the lounge! This restaurant was filled with people having after dinner drinks (It was 9:30 before we left) and just trying to have a relaxing evening, and here is a one year old running circles around the place! I don't know when the last time a kid was probably even there! But Paula thought it was great and we all had fun, despite Sterling causing a scene :)