Thanksgiving Thoughts

I AM THANKFUL!

It is early this morning and I am watching Jill and Bella get ready for a delightful day in Branson. I have a litany of blessings that I am grateful for this morning, but my heart desires to express gratitude far beyond simply "counting my blessings." I hope this morning that my God knows the gratitude of my heart towards Him. My gratefulness to my Heavenly Father is beyond expressions. I do not love Him only because He has given us so many good things. I love Him because He has made us to be new people that are no longer blinded and deceived by our own sinful ways. We are free. Freedom is what I am most grateful for this morning. We know that times get tough and everyone experiences sorrow and grief in this life, but freedom in Christ is available at all times. We recently were able to see someone place their faith in Christ who knows what it feels like to have many pressures and many burdens. We look forward to seeing how the power of God will transform her life. This is what we are grateful for this morning...the power of transformed life. Jesus said that He came that we might have life and have it abundantly. The house is stirring and so I'm off to enjoy this abundant day. Blessings to all!
Scott

Eating part 2

So Bella may eat good like a Schilb, but you can definitely see her Atkinson genes by looking at her messy face. For some reason we (at least my dad and I) have difficulties keeping the food only in our mouth.

She sure is a cute eater!!

This is the excitement in our lives for the time being so you may see several posts of the eating. More videos will be coming soon!

Update on Luke

Thank you for praying for little Luke. The surgery went well overall and here is what Josh and Cassie's reported on this morning:

He is extubated as of 2:00 pm yesterday and is doing pretty well with it. His pain needs to be under a little better control for him to begin doing things, but Josh made him sit up a bit last night and talk to people. the chest tubes are still draining, pray for those to stop even when he really strats eating. His bottle was the first thing he asked for when he came out of the anestesia; he has begun to drink from it and is loving getting back to eating. Pray for his oxygen levels to begin coming up (they will stay low for a while due to the operation and what they did) but pray for his oxygen level so that he can get rid of the nasal oxygen. I think that is about it...he is doing pretty well and is starting to be luke again. keep praying and giving glory to God for everything he has done in Luke's life!

Thank you for the fun weekend!

Scott & I failed to take any pictures of Bella's weekend with Gpa Rusty & Nana Cheryl, but Bella had a great time. This is the 3rd or 4th trip that they have made up here to see Bella and it makes us wish we were a little closer to family so we wouldn't have to wear the road so thin and compound any gas shortage problems.



Highlights of the weekend:



Yummy Food!!!! Italian, seafood, ruby tuesday's, and for my first time WAFFLE HOUSE!



Bookstore - Bella got two adorable books - Counting Kisses & Christmas Peek-a-boo!



Learning to play the little piano, she gets so excited when it makes noise.



Eating rice cereal for the first time!! - As seen in one of the earlier posts.



But the best part of all.... Getting to smile, laugh, & play with grandpa rusty and nana cheryl!



So thank you for making the trip down here!! We look forward to getting to see more family as Thanksgiving and Christmas are approaching. And for anyone else that wants to come visit - the guest bed is ready and made!!

Prayer Requests - Uncle Steve & Baby Luke

Hi friends and family

I have two urgent prayer requests:

1. Please prayer for Scott's uncle, Steve. Yesterday he suffered from severe heart problems and his blood pressure dropped to almost non existent. Thankfully, he came out of it, but now he has damage to his heart. I do not know all the details, but ask that you would please pray for him and the family. Here is one picture we have of him at the shower that he and Teresa threw for Bella.

2. Please also pray for Luke Landrum. He is such a precious little boy! We are good friends with his parents, Josh and Cassie. Today at 11:30 he will be going through his 4th open heart surgery. He was born with half of a heart and so they have been doing reconstruction so that it will supply blood to the body properly. This is hopefully the last surgery he will need, but it is also the hardest to recover from. Please pray for Luke and his family.

If you'd like to know more on Luke and see updates go to: http://www.carepages.com/carepages/LukeLandrum

Bella's first bites

And so the eating begins... Bella proved her "Schilbness" by showing us how well she could eat. I had been debating whether to wait until the 6 month mark to feed Bella, but she has seemed extra hungry lately, so we decided to feed her some rice cereal. She impressed us by slurping it up as if she had been doing it her whole life. It was messy, but we were so proud!

Before her first bite:

**Bella thinking: oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, food food food food! Bring it on!


1st spoonful on its way:

**Bella thinking: Daddy are you watching, here it comes!


The first bite:

**Bella thinking: Grandpa Rusty, make sure you get this picture!

We soon learned after this first bite that she needed a bib.. live and learn!! :)

Now check out the video and see the whole thing in live action!

Joe the Plumber

Bella is going to love this picture when she is older....

10 Random Thoughts

There are a bunch of things that I have wanted to blog about lately.. so I thought I would combine it all into one blog. I labeled this 10 random thoughts.

1. Will our dog ever behave? Last night we were watching an infomercial on television and it just so happened to be about training your dog. The results were amazing and I got sucked in. Libby runs our house. If she wants something she will bark until she gets it. If she gets out the front door, we will chase her for 15-30 minutes before getting her back. I just hope Bella turns out nothing like Libby. So anyway, I saw this infomercial and decided to give it a try. Let's see if Libby is able to actual be trained using this theperfectdog.com techinque.

2. Fake plants/flowers are so much better than the real thing! I know that my friend Bonnie can relate to this story. Scott bought some mums about two weeks ago and now they are completely shriveled. Apparently nuturing is not completely instinctual with me. I think the mums should water themselves or slow down on their intake. But nope, instead they died! On the other hand, I have some beautful fake flowers from pier one, and they haven't wilted a bit in our 4 1/2 years of marriage!

3. Warrenties are great when you need them! I was happily surprised to learn that I was 12 days short of my 1 yr warrentyexpiring on my computer when my wireless system broke. They shipped a prepaid box to me that I packed my computer in, I shipped it to them, and now they are fixing it. Super!!! I didn't even know that I had a warrenty to begin with! When asked if I wanted to extend my warrenty again.. I said no.. I still have the gift/downfall of optimism thinking that nothing will go wrong again. So hopefully after november 20th, my computer will be super and never again need help!

4. Digiorno frozen pizza costs more than Little Caesars pizza.. what a shame! But I do love Little Caesars!

5. I need to get a picture taken for Christmas cards.

6. I would love to know my friends/family's favorite books. We have been going to barnes and noble several nights a week for an outing with Bella. She naps for 30 minutes while we read and then I take her to the kids section and show her all the cool kid books. Anyway, I would love to know any recommended fiction or nonfiction books that have meant something to you. Email me or leave a comment. I will be sure to check them out! I am loving this reading stuff! I only end up reading about 1 or 2 chapters a book though until I find something worth buying.

7. Do women who have babies ever get their stomachs back?

8. I love my baby's toothless smile and don't want her to grow teeth even though she'll need them to eat steak.

9. I think I am forgetting everything related to physical therapy now that I am out of school. Hopefully it will all come back to me when I start up again full time in August!

10. I have the best husband in the world! And I know Bella could not ask for a better Daddy! He is always working really hard to make sure the bills are paid or doing seminary class work, but he always makes sure Bella and I know that he loves us dearly. I don't know how he does it all.


Sorry, no pictures.. but maybe next time! I am waiting to get my computer back from hp!!

What will she look like?

For those of you wondering what Bella will look like when she is older...

We went to yearbookyourself.com and used one of her recent pictures along with a 1990 yearbook picture. What a cutie!

wig party

Our friend Kylie turned 30 on Friday and to celebrate we had a wig party! Kylie is super fun. The past two years we have had Murder Mystery parties during the Halloween weekend and now this. Here are some pics of a few of us dressed up..

Scott was a hobo man. You can't see it, but he stuffed his shirt to have a super big belly and put his gym shorts on the outside of sweatpants. He looked hot! And I've decided that the purple short hair might be my next hair do.. or maybe when I'm 60 I'll go with the short curly purple hair. And here are the Landrums. Nice mullet Josh.

And here is the birthday girl, Kylie, with her husband Joe. Love it! You can't see it but Kylie has a super cute small bump where she has twin babies growing. 14 weeks along! YEAH!!!

Thanks for a fun party Kylie!

Halloween fun!

We had a great time last night. With Bella dressed in her strawberry costume, we went to our friends Josh, Cassie, & Luke's house to celebrate. They live really close by and go to our church. Their neighborhood had lots of kids, so it was fun seeing all the fun costumes and then stopping at houses to get some candy. Bella was just enjoying being outside.. and Scott & I liked the candy!

Luke was dressed as a bumblebee and he enjoyed going to the houses and getting candy. It was funny because sometimes he would try to give candy back to them. He turn two in a couple of days! We love Luke.

We couldn't get any of her smiling because it was close to nap time and she just wanted to chill.

And here is some of the trick or treating we did... Scott kept getting in my basket (or Bella's..) and getting all the gummy candies out. There were also cool dogs dressed up. We didn't dress up Libby and she thanked us later for that.

And here was a baby the same age dressed as an egg. How fun!

Next year Bella might even get to walk door to door like Luke! Amazing how fast kids develop!