Adventures In Woods

Yes, we braved the cold this morning and took our 17 day old baby girl to her and Memere’s first balloon fiesta.  It was a blast!  Sarah slept through most of it, and the boys had a great time - minus some cold hands at times.  Bernice took a fun family picture of the 5 of us:

Woods Family at the 2008 Balloon Fiesta

Thankfully, we were able to get some breakfast and warm up inside the Intel corporate tent.  For anyone who’s never been to the balloon fiesta, it’s quite an experience - especially with young children who are enthralled with all the sights and sounds and action! I took around 145 pictures in less than 2 hours, but I only uploaded 74 of them :)  It’s hard to take a bad picture.  If you’re interested, they’re online at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jcwoods1/BalloonFiesta2008.  Most of the ones with some of us in them are toward the beginning.

Even Jonathan took a good shot:

Jonathan's picture

Bernice arrived at the end of the balloon fiesta 5 years ago, but since Jonathan had been born the day before, she didn’t make it out to the fiesta.  That was remedied today:

Memere and Jonathan

I got a fun one of Jess, Benjamin, and Sarah after we got home too.  Ben delights in his little sister and frequently kisses her on the head:

Ben Kissing His Little Sister

The boys and I rode the Rail Runner down to Los Lunas yesterday.  Mark Essenmacher picked us up at the train station, and we had a fun time with his family for a few hours before returning home.  The Rail Runner is scheduled to connect to Santa Fe by the end of this year.  That will be a huge win for commuters - and tourists.  The boys loved that we could go faster than the vehicles on the road - at least part of the time.  It was $3 for all of us for the day.

Riding the Train

The day before that we went geocaching and chased each other and jack rabbits around for a couple hours.

Our 14th find

This is what a sabbatical is all about :)  Praise God for this amazing time with my family!!!  Anyway, after getting up at 4:45 AM this morning, I’m ready to hit the hay.

Tres Ninos

Our little girl is 2 weeks old today!  As you can see, she has some proud big brothers who sure love her.  We went to church as a family of 5 this morning for the first time.  Our church is our family, and it was wonderful to be there!  We left our house early since we figured there might be a few people who would want to meet Sarah.  Good thing we did as it took over 20 minutes to get from our minivan to the sanctuary and find some seats; there were so many people who stopped to say hi and congrats.

Now for a quick lesson on blogs (short for “web log”).  If you’re interested in knowing how you can find out when our blog and others are updated without having to visit the individual web sites, keep reading.  Aunt Sarah, this one is dedicated to you based on your fun comment: “Yeaaah!! Thanks!! I’ve often wondered what a ‘blog’ is.”  I know I have some veteran blogging friends like Mark Horlbeck and Alan Ray who who been blogging for many years, and on the other end of the spectrum, we have friends and family who probably fit more appropriately into the “Aunt Sarah” category.  Mark, Alan, and Ross, you can stop reading now

For anyone else who’s still reading, one of the cool things about most blogs is that you can have them “pushed” to you rather than having to go to the website and see if and when there are updates - a “pull”.  This is most commonly done through an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed which you subscribe to with an RSS reader.  There are both web-based and client-based readers.  There are readers in Outlook now and in many email sites like Yahoo, but my preferred method is through Google Reader (www.google.com/reader - requires a Google/Gmail account):

To add a new subscription/blog to your reader, all you need is the URL of the site with an RSS feed (i.e. www.woodsonline.net/blog).  The blog subscriptions are managed in the bottom left panel, and a summary of unread postings is visible on the right.  If you click on one of the summary headings, it pulls up the whole article.  The highlighted feeds on the left are sites with new postings, and the number in parenthesis is the number of new postings.  I caught up on all my friends’ blogs when we were in the hospital with Sarah two weeks ago, but I haven’t done so since then - so I have multiple unread postings.  You can setup folders and filters and other things, but those are the basics.  You go to one site, and you can read the new postings from all your favorite blogs.

If you’re interested in setting up your own blog, that’s relatively simple too, and you don’t have to be a computer nerd like me to do it.  There are probably hundreds of blogging platforms or more, but I’ll mention a few popular ones.  If you want more details, I’d suggest checking out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog_software and http://www.weblogmatrix.org.  One of the easiest and most commonly used platforms is Google’s Blogger.  If you want an easy to setup and use system, not to mention free, it’s a nice option.  The features are somewhat limited (i.e. no tags or categories), but it’s about as easy as they come and will enable you to start blogging quickly.  WordPress also offers a free blogging option (www.wordpress.com) where they provide the hosting, but it is financially supported through ads and paid upgrades.  I happen to use the open source, self-hosted version available at www.wordpress.org - partly because I want to learn PHP and MySQL.  It’s packed with features, comes with lots of online support and forums, and is fully extensible.  However, you have to pay for and use your own web hosting provider, and it definitely helps to have some computer and web programming skills.  I happen to use the Professional ($10/month) web hosting package from Brinkster.

Time for bed now

Aunt Cammy, Uncle TJ, and Kenny - this one’s for you :)  We love you!!!

I’d like to dedicate this blog to David and Jordan Eiffert who were just married on the 26th - Sarah’s due date.  Yes, they stole our date, but Sarah, being the thoughtful person she already is, decided to come 5 days early so as not to steal the spotlight from them yesterday.  Congrats David and Jordan!  And way to go for doing it right and honoring God, each other, and your families.

The pictures below and others are all online at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jcwoods1/AtHomeWithSarah

We’ve had a wonderful few days at home with our little angel:

Smiling Angel

Ahh... the life of an infant

Sleeping beauty

We had a great overnight visit with Jess’ uncle Rick, Bernice’s brother.  Thanks for making the drive down from Denver to see us while en route to the east coast - a slightly indirect path!

Uncle Rick and Memere with Sarah

Thanks for visiting and bring the fresh roses from your garden Uncle Andy and Aunt Leslie!  May the next announcement be yours my friends

Uncle Andy and Aunt Leslie meet Sarah

Precious!

The wonderful meals from friends from church have been a huge blessing too, so thank you Deb, Dawn, Heidi, and Dave/Court!

Aunty Courtney meets Sarah

We love you Aunty Corn Corn!

Lovely ladies!

Dawn and her kids meet Sarah and bring dinner - thank you!

Chris and Heidi meet Sarah. And thanks for the WONDERFUL homemade chicken dinner!

The boys have been very sweet (and helpful) with her:

Jonathan holding Sarah all by himself

 And we’ve just been having fun together:

Reading in the hammock with my boys

Play dough!

Thank you for your promises God!

Well here goes entry #2.  I went to bed around 2:30 AM early Sunday morning after writing the first entry.  Less than 6 hours later, we had a baby girl :)  Wow!  Jess’ water broke around 3:10, and she decided to let me sleep knowing I hadn’t slept much and that I would need my strength to help her a few hours later in the day - bless her!  Her first strong contraction was at 4:15, and she called my dad a few minutes later asking them to come over to our house so they could be there for our boys when they woke up.  She woke up her mom up at 4:50.  Remember, she had just arrived at 1 PM on Saturday afternoon.  She woke me up at 5:20, and I guess I asked her, “Did you eat breakfast with your mom?” since I had heard them talking.  Her reply went something like this, “No. Your parents are here. My water broke, and I’m in labor.”  Hello!  That’s an interesting way to wake up after less than 3 hours of sleep.  I laid there for about 5 minutes since it took a little while for the reality of the situation to sink in.  When I was coherant enough to realize there was no stopping this train, I got up and started gather a few things to take.  Jess had already packed the “hospital bag” over a week earlier, so it didn’t take much.  We asked my parents to feed the cats and left around 6:20.  As we pulled onto Paseo Del Norte, we both remembered an early morning very much like that one but five years earlier.  Kyle had driven us to the hospital on that full moon night in the same white Corolla that Bernice was now driving us in.  Jonathan had been born 15 minutes after we arrived on that morning of October 10, 2003, but Sarah gave us an hour and a half in Labor & Delivery before arriving at 8:10 AM on Sunday, September 21, 2008.  She weighed 7 pounds 5 ounces, and was 20 inches long.  It was an amazing blessing, and both Jess and I cried when we heard Sarah cry for the first time.  Delivering a baby is never easy, but the birth of our daughter was as good as it gets.  We had been praying for a short labor, and she came in just under 4 hours.  Praise God!

Speaking of times, I was holding her at 9:08 AM when she sneezed for the first time as I turned her into the light coming through the window.  Silly parents - we remember funny things like that :)  She’s sneezed quite a bit and had the hiccups several times also - which is pretty cute since she sounds like a little frog or squeaky pigeon.

So Bernice made it for the birth of her third grandchild and cut her cord.  Jess had the privilege of cutting the cord when Bernice gave birth to her third child, Jess’ sister Denise, almost 17 years ago.  How cool is that!

Most of this entry was written from the 4th floor of the Lovelace Women’s Hospital where we spent two days after Sarah was born.  We had wonderful service there and enjoyed the time bonding with our little girl.  But it’s nice to be home now.

Now for the pictures!  I’m still figuring out what the best way is to insert photos into these blog entries, but if you click on one of the pictures below, you can see a slightly larger version of it.  And all these pictures and lots of others are online at the following site and can be viewed as a slideshow where they all appear larger:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jcwoods1/IntroducingSarahMichelle

I would like to start this new blog with words from a man named Asaph as recorded in Psalm 78:

1 O my people, hear my teaching; listen to the words of my mouth. 2 I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter hidden things, things from of old- 3 what we have heard and known, what our fathers have told us. 4 We will not hide them from their children; we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the LORD, his power, and the wonders he has done. 5 He decreed statutes for Jacob and established the law in Israel, which he commanded our forefathers to teach their children, 6 so the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children. 7 Then they would put their trust in God and would not forget his deeds but would keep his commands.

The primary purpose of this blog is to share some of the good things God has done in our family both for others and for our own kids and grandkids to be able to read someday!  We have family members (AKA proud grandparents and uncles and aunts) in various parts of the country and friends spread around the world (Chile, China, italy, Thailand, Russia, Bosnia, Germany, New Zealand, and Mozambique - to name the ones that come to mind), and we’d like to be able to share more of our lives with them as well.  Our lives are full of adventure and fun, not to mention plenty of challenges too, so here goes…

I’d like to dedicate this blog to my wonderful wife of six and a half years - Jessica.  We were engaged 7 years ago on September 9, 2001.  I still remember driving back from Colorado with her that Sunday, pulling off I-25 in northern New Mexico, and proposing to her while we watched the sun set over the mountains to the west.  That was one of the best days of my life, trumped only by a special day that followed six months later.

Right before we were engaged. I used a Cadbury egg picnic as the excuse to get her out of the car.

Right after I put the ring on her finger and kissed her for the first time :)

 And here we are seven years later - about to have our third child.  Jess’ mom, Bernice, just flew into town from Virginia today, and she’ll be with us until October 14th.  We’re thankful she’s here and that baby Sarah is still in the oven - an answer to prayer.  Bernice was here two weeks for both of our boys’ births but arrived one day after Jonathan was born and left a few days before Benjamin was born.  We told her this is probably our lost shot, so she’s here for three and a half weeks this time
September 9th was also the wedding anniversary of two different couples that are good friends of ours.  Cody and Jennifer Phipps celebrated eight years (and just moved to Italy as missionaries - you guys rock!), and Courtney and Dave Lynch hit number two (if you ever need a good photographer for anything…).  Both weddings were a blast to be at, and we’re thankful for these quality friendships which began during our years at UNM and have grown since then.

This year I happened to commemorate the 7th anniversary of that fateful day with something much more pleasant - the beginning of my sabbatical from Intel.  This eight week vacation (which employees are eligible to take after every multiple of 7 years of working there) is one of the best benefits in the world, and I’m thankful for the huge blessing of being able to spend it with my family during this exciting time of transition in our lives.  My friend Milt pointed out the interesting similarities between the sabbath rests in the Bible (people resting on the 7th day of the week based on the model God established of resting on the 7th day of creation and the land having a year of rest every 7 years) and the sabbatical from Intel.  It’s a bit more than coincidental, and I like it

When I got home from my last day of work Wednesday evening, Jess had prepared a wonderful celebration dinner.  She and the boys had also made a fun cake for me - also worth celebrating:

Sabbatical Cake Makers

I got to spend a good portion of my first day off hanging out with family during the morning and evening.  Thanks TJ - the boys sure had fun playing with Kenny that evening:

The 3 Amigos

“Whatever may be our experience of failure and barrenness, [Jesus] is never defeated.  His power is boundless.  And we, on our part, have only to get into a right relationship with Him and we shall see His power being demonstrated in our hearts and lives and service, and His victorious life will fill us and overflow through us to others.”