Hooray! I've learned how to put in pictures! (Oddly enough, you hit the little button that looks like a picture. Huh.)

At any rate, meet Noah, everyone! It's taken me longer than anticipated to get these up, but here you go. This picture is from his birthday. He arrived December 28th just after 4:00 in the afternoon, after about an hour and fifteen minutes of pushing. He would have made it BEFORE the Aggies started playing if I hadn't had to wait for 15 minutes for the doctor to get there to catch. All things considered, labor and delivery went really well. The nurses were super, and the whole thing went just the way we wanted. It was an induction, so there was plenty of time to hang out with the different family members before things got too serious (Grandpa was adamant about not coming in the room since he had a bit of a cold...that changed shortly after Noah made his appearance- the kid is just irrestistible), and then we asked everyone for our space and Mom and Kyle helped me while I pushed. A lot. All 8 lbs. 10 oz. and 21 1/2 inches of him was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

His Daddy is very smitten, I am very smitten, and I don't think I have ever seen Kyle's parents so happy. Burton in particular is enamored with the little guy- Kyle and I went out two weeks after Noah got here and they volunteered to babysit for us. Burton took him out of the carseat when we dropped Noah off, and I don't think he put him down until we came back to pick him up four hours later. Mom is similarly in love- she got two new munchkins within six weeks of each other, so she is in Grandma heaven. We were very lucky to have a lot of family come by the hospital to meet the newest Parker- I think he'd met most of his aunts, uncles, and cousins by the time he was just a few hours old. There were also a bunch of folks from his church family that came by, so he got to meet them too.

We're learning and loving every minute of it (well, ALMOST every minute. The crying for hours in the wee small hours of the morning isn't my favorite part of new mommy-dom)- and there seem to be a lot of things that we can learn from this little guy.

You look into a baby's eyes and it's so easy to get lost in them. They've never seen anything bad, they just know that they're happy when they're warm and fed and taken care of. They do everything with their whole body- Noah stretches with his whole body, yawns with his whole body, sneezes with his whole body. And they love to be loved. Noah's happy with anyone who snuggles him, really. That's not to say he doesn't like his bouncer time, but still.

At any rate, I know this was rambly (and I'm about to do another post of pretty much just pictures, so whoo hoo), but I wanted to at least get it out there. I'll try to keep updating on a fairly regular basis, if just for those who are out of town and don't get to be around as much as we would like them to be.