Buddies

Some friends of ours came to visit for a few days. They have two boys, Cooper (2 years) and Cory (9 months). Josiah really enjoyed having some kids here to play with.

Cory and Josiah


Isn't that smile great?! He's just so cute.






Here's a picture of all three boys. It was hard to get one with all of them since they're all so active. Cory was crawling, Josiah was walking and Cooper was running! We had a blast and miss them already!


And here are just a few pictures of Josiah from last week.

He started doing this now that he's walking. He'll be playing and then he lays down in the middle of the floor for a minute or so, then he gets back up and is ready to play again. I guess learning to walk wears you out!

Josiah's First Elephant Ride

Some friends came to visit this week and we decided to go with them to Amer Fort. The fun thing about Amer Fort is that you can ride elephants up to the fort just like the King used to when he would come home from battle. It was Josiah's first elephant ride.

You can see in this first picture that most of the ride Josiah was hanging on to the side bar.



Although Mark and Lela were scared at first...

they were professionals by the time we reached the top!


This was also Josiah's first time petting an elephant. As you can see he started out only touching him with his index finger...

but quickly became comfortable with his new friend, Radha. Everytime Josiah would pet his trunk, Radha would close his eyes like it felt so good. Josiah was really intrigued by the coarse, prickly hair on Radha's trunk.



A group shot at the fort.





And of course, a trip out wouldn't be complete without someone taking Josiah out of my arms and getting their picture taken with him.

Beef and Separation Anxiety

The trip to Thailand every six months is rough. We have to fly to Delhi in the morning, then wait around all day for our flight to take off at 11:30 PM. The flight to Bangkok is three and a half hours and then we have a three hour layover in the Bangkok airport before flying to Chiang Mai. Although it's rough (especially with Josiah) we do have something to look forward to. As soon as we get off the plane in Bangkok we head for BURGER KING!! Sure, it's 3:00 in the morning, but that doesn't keep us from ordering Whoppers! For those of you who may not know, we don't get beef here. Notice I said we "don't" not we "can't". You can get water buffalo meat and sometimes even actual beef if you know the right people. After you see what these animals have been "grazing" on, however, you probably don't want to eat them. We actually saw a cow pooping a plastic bag one time. Yum! If that isn't enough to make you stay away from beef in India, it's usually really tough...like you have to cook it in the pressure cooker for a few hours to make it edible tough. Anyway, what I'm saying is that eating beef is a big deal to us now. That's why we had to take pictures of Josiah eating red meat for the first time.



I think you can see that he liked it! That's my boy!!

We had meetings in Thailand and a church from the States came out to keep our children so we could attend the meetings. Other than being left with Nani and Pawpaw, Josiah has never been apart from us before so I was a little nervous about how he'd do. I didn't take him to his class until I absolutely had to because I was dreading it so much. I took him in, met his teachers and played in the floor with him for a few minutes. As much as I didn't want to leave, I had to go to my meeting. The moment I was dreading had come! I eased away from him playing in the middle of the floor and started to walk out. As I looked over my shoulder to see if he realized I was leaving, I saw him waving to me. What?!?! My child was waving "bye - bye" to me as I left him! He did great and really loved the time with the other babies. The separation anxiety was on my part...I had to come check on him every little while because I just couldn't get used to not having him with me. The teachers told me that he did great and never cried. They also said that Josiah wanted one of their sandwiches that they put on the table. He grabbed a bouncy seat, drug it over to the table and stood up on it to reach the sandwich! Can we say "mini Aaron"?!?!
The day I remembered to take the camera with me to pick him up, there was only one baby in there with him...his friend Aashini. Aashini has become quite famous recently and so Josiah's a little worried that all the fame will go to her head. :)

Josiah had a great time with all the other babies and especially with his sweet teachers! Thank you guys so much for taking such good care of our babies. You are a blessing!

Traditional Chiang Mai Pictures

We got back from Thailand on Wednesday and we've just finished unpacking and getting the house cleaned up. I don't have time to post or write much so I thought I would share our photo booth pictures. We decided to make it a tradition to do this every six months when we visit Thailand. I think they came out pretty well...at least we remembered to change the background each time! To see the old ones click here and here.

(You can click on the picture to enlarge it.)