Powerful Baby

“When God wants a great work done in the world or a great wrong righted, he goes about it in a very unusual way.

He doesn’t stir up his earthquakes or send forth his thunderbolts. Instead, he has a helpless baby born, perhaps in a simple home and of some obscure mother.

And then God puts the idea into the mother’s heart, and she puts it into the baby’s mind. And then God waits.

The greatest forces in the world are not the earthquakes and the thunderbolts. The greatest forces in the world are babies.”

-E.T. Sullivan, quoted by President Hinckley

Carson, what will you do?

Blessed Baby

Whether you consider the word 'blessed' to be one syllable or two, Carson now typifies a blessed baby on both accounts. He was always the adjective form of blessed, i.e. divinely favored or fortunate, but now he can add the past tense form of the verb 'to bless' to his resume.

What I'm trying to say is that Carson received a priesthood blessing on Sunday! He slept peacefully through the event, allowing his dad to calmly and confidently give him a beautiful blessing. We were very grateful that family and friends sacrificed their time to come and be part of Carson's big day.


I later recorded in Carson's journal the events of the day and the words of the blessing. It will be a memorable day not only because of the blessing, but also because of President Hinckley's passing. It was a neat thing for me to write about the prophet in Carson's journal. I think it's kind of a symbol of a new generation; President Hinckley was the prophet that I will always associate with my growing-up years, and now another great and inspired leader will be there for Carson during his. I find great comfort in knowing that the church smoothly and strongly rolls forward despite changes in leadership. It's evidence that Christ is the true leader of the church.

I love this slide show about the prophet.

2 Month Checkup

Here is the report from Tuesday's appointment!

Weight: 10 lbs, 13.5 ounces: 25th percentile
Height: 22.5 inches: 25-50th percentile
Head: 15.3 inches: 25th percentile

And if you adjusted the values for his early birth, he'd be in the 50th percentile all around! It is so good to have a healthy baby. And it is so good to have a baby big enough to sleep long stretches at night. Last night he went from 10:00 pm til almost 4:00 am!

He was given 5 immunizations in 4 big shots. He held is breath and turned all sorts of colors, then cried hard for about 20 seconds, and then promptly fell into a deep sleep.

Good defense mechanism, Carson.

He slept it off all day and night with a little fever, and the next morning was as good as new!

Go Hoyas!

Rick got accepted to Georgetown's Medical School!!!!!

And now, the plot thickens as we weigh the pros and cons of each medical school... where we will end up is still a mystery.

P.S. We have Carson's 2 month appointment today. Every time I look at his little face I'm sad because he has no idea that he'll be subjected to the brutality of his first vaccinations.

P.P.S. We had a wonderful holiday weekend with Rick's sister Suzette and her family. Our nieces and nephews became quite proficient at making Carson smile. And Rick enjoyed playing football and rolling around in the snow with 3 fun nephews.

Ok, so one more thing. We got Carson the cutest blessing outfit ever!! Anyone who'd like to witness his blessing is invited to our church at noon this Sunday, January 27th.

Just some more movies and pictures of Carson

Like, a LOT more movies and pictures of Carson.

Carson feels no remorse. And this is just the mess that projected OUT of the diaper.

Sucking vigorously on mom's hand. Check out the definition in that arm.

Snoozing boys.

Smiles!

Merry (Belated) Christmas

Today we are finally sending out the last of our Christmas cards! I was a little too ambitious with my design of the cards, and they ended up taking wayyy too much time to make. Anyway, we'll send out what we have today and worry about it again next year! Since we didn't get to send them to a lot of people we wanted to, I'll post a picture of the card:






Front:


"2007 brought the Otto family a lot of JOY..."

Middle:

"Rick found joy...
Directing the Special Olympics of Utah's summer games,
Playing on 7 different intramural sports teams,
Studying hard, taking the MCAT, and being accepted to medical school,
Preparing a group of BYU students to teach English in Cambodia,
Loving his wife and new baby.

"Page found joy...
Graduating Magna Cum Laude from BYU with a BS in Nutritional Science,
Working as a research assistant to publish a paper with a BYU professor,
Serving in her church's women's organization,
Getting to know Rick's parents with a vacation to the Dominican Republic,
Giving birth to a sweet baby boy.

...and we are proud to announce the birth of our bundle of JOY!!"
(and the birth info.)

And this is the picture inserted.


There. Done. I am packing up my craft basket until next year, when I will pick a simpler card. Or just start earlier.

In Business

With the start of this new semester (Rick's last of undergrad!), we decided to collect all of the textbooks that we (foolishly) had thought we had wanted to keep forever and always. Turns out we had about 40 books between the two of us! The pic doesn't even show all of them. Realizing how expensive textbooks are, we found ourselves sitting on a pile of gold. So, we got to work posting the books for sale on BYU's website. It took us almost an entire day to post all of them. We used all the strategic business knowledge we could muster to set prices and write attractive advertisements like, "features helpful highlighting on almost every page!" We really felt like businesspeople when all the emails and phone calls started coming in. It was definitely worth it... to date, we've almost made enough money to pay for my plane ticket to accompany Rick to Cambodia this summer!

Speaking of being good businesspeople, maybe we should be in the business of producing cute children. We may be biased, but we think our baby is the cutest, most fun little person there ever was!

"Mommy, I warned you if you put me here I might fall over." Which he did, but intelligently used his hands to keep from suffocating on the couch. Good self defense, Carson.

Carson loves playing with daddy, for whom he has now smiled several times! He smiles for me occasionally, but not as much as for his look-alike.

...and, this kid now rolls over from tummy to back! It's a new way to get out of tummy time. He just whips that big head around, and the rest of the body follows. The only time I caught it on camera, I started taping halfway through the dramatic roll-over and he was crying, but here it is.

We love our baby!

Beautiful Lengths

Following the example of my eldest sister, I went ahead and chopped all my hair off to celebrate the birth of my baby. Ok, so that wasn't really the purpose of the haircut, but it sure is nice to be able to hold Carson without having my hair tickle his face. I can't compare to Reagan's 11 inches donated to Wigs for Kids, but I'll send my little 8-incher off to Beautiful Lengths on Monday. It takes them 6 ponytails to make one wig, so I'm supposed to try and refer 5 friends. If anyone wants to sign up, let me know. Since I've been in the mindset of donating hair, I can't help but think every time I see a girl with long, pretty hair, "Man, that would make a great wig." I definitely thought that when I saw this pic of some of my beautiful cousins. Yep, that's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 heads of hair! No pressure, girls.
(Can you tell I just figured out how to use the "link" feature?)



Anyway, the moment you've all been waiting for... the AFTER picture...


And a couple more "after" pictures, just for fun.