FW:

Aroa awake and looking cute!

I'm awake!!

Here's baby Aroa, awake and checking out the world.

Aroa Lynn Strange was born last night at 11:04 pm Feb 12th.

20 1/2 in

7 lbs 8 oz

(from Jen) I spoke to Kim this morning and she sounds great. She said she was really tired (only got 2 hrs sleep last night) and that Aroa was awake most of the night. Aroa is sleeping now though. Kim expects to be at the hospital until tomorrow afternoon. Everyone is doing well.

**sorry for the small size of the picture. It was sent to my phone and then I forwarded it from my phone.

Finally we have new pictures of Austin up on our website. We have been really bad lately at keeping up with posts and updated pictures. But now, at long last, the pictures are up. Click HERE to see the new pics.

Austin is 10 mths old!

Can you believe it! He is growing up so fast. Tony and I will be putting more pictures up from the last couple of months on our website today so more picture to come!

Here is some pictures from a photoshoot I did with him this weekend. I love this shirt! He has a lot to love! The UP overalls are from Grandpa and Grandma Mimms and he looks so cute in them!

Austin is crawling

Austin started actually crawling forward today. He had been crawling a little but it was in reverse. He hasn't perfected it yet but he's moving forward though!

Only in Georgia

Yay for a 3 day weekend!!! (and a follow up on Austin)

After this week, I am so glad that we have one more day off tomorrow. As I posted before, on Tuesday Austin got tubes put in his ears. That was a rough day. Poor kid hadn't eaten since 7:45pm the night before, was tired and then trying to wake up from anesthesia. The combo did not make for a happy baby. As the day went on the effects of the anesthesia slowly wore off and by Wednesday morning he was back to himself. But....later that day was his 9 month checkup. That, in and of itself, wasn't such a bad thing. The bad part was that part of this checkup was his third round of shots plus he finally got his flu shot. So, again Austin was not a happy baby for the rest of the evening. But wait, there's more. Thursday was an appointment for him with a pulminary specialist to check out his wheezing and breathing issues. Luckily this was a pretty easy appointment. He had a chest xray taken and it turned out that his lungs are completely clear. Yay! The doctor is pretty sure his wheezing is being caused by reflux. Also discovered in the xray was that Austin is pretty constipated, which the doctor said can make the reflux worse. This is the other end of the spectrum from where he was at the beginning of the week. He had been sick with a stomach virus, throwing up and diarrhia. So from diarrhia to constipation. Anyway, she gave us a prescription stool softener to help get him regular again and then we are to see how that affects the reflux. If he still has it, she also gave us a prescription to fill for reflux medication. She took him off of the breathing treatments though (Yay!!) but said that if his wheezing returns, to put him back on it and to make an appointment to come back in. In three months, if he still has reflux, we have follow up appointment.

So, it's been a very long week. I want to thank everyone that had us in their thoughts and prayers, we definitely appreciate it.

We're home

We're back from getting the tubes put in Austin's ears. It went well, and fast. They took him in around 7:35 or so and it was before 8am when the doctor came back to talk to us after the procedure. Austin was pretty upset and hungry when he woke up. He's asleep now though and we'll see how he is when he wakes up.

Getting ready to get tubes

We're in the pre/post op room getting ready for Austin to get tubes put in his ears. He'll be going to sleep in a few minutes.

Austin got his nine month pictures taken today. He did too good of a job because we bought 8 different poses!
Here are the ones we got.

Testing phone posting

Just checking to see if I can post from my phone again with the new blogger upgrade.

Blogger recently made some changes to their service and I just did the upgrade so let's see if I can get picture uploading to work now. Here are a few pics from Christmas time. The rest of them you can see on our website HERE. (Actually a couple of the pictures, the ones of him with the big Santa hat on will actually be in his 8 month album that we will try to have up soon.)

New Pictures!

______________________

We have finally got new pictures up on our website (click the link to the left, 'Our website').

We are having difficulty posting pictures to this blog as soon as we figure it out we will post some!

Where O' where has the time gone! I feel I just went on Christmas vacation, and today I had to go back to work.

We are keeping very busy with our active almost 9 month old! Austin is growing out of his cubbiness, and every morning when I get him up he looks like he has grown. His face is thinning out and so are his legs. He loves to gabber on and wants to make sure everyone in the room knows that he is has something to say.

O' Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! The new photos will be on the website this week there are so many you will be busy for hours!

We had a very merry break from work and was able to enjoy spending the holidays with almost all of our family members. First we went to visit my family in Virginia and came home on Christmas Eve were Carol and John were waiting for us. They helped us celebrate Austins first Christmas. He had a lot of fun once I poked a whole in the paper. He would do most of the ripping. Following Christmas we visited my dad, his wife, and his parents in Buena Vista, GA. and wound the holiday with spending New Years Eve with the Allens in Woodstock, GA. Only for me to be in bed by 11pm! Its tough to stay up late when you have to get up at 5am with a hungry baby!

We have been very blessed this holiday and have thought of all of you and prayed for a wonderful new year for all.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Well we have been slacking off on the pictures I know!

Hope fully we can get Austin's 7 mth photos , Thanksgiving and levi's first basketball game up soon! Hopefully this will tie you over.

Austin is 8 mths old! and cuter than ever. His top two teeth have broken though they have been giving him a hard time.

We will be making a trip to my Mom's to visit family the earlier part of our Christmas break,
then we will be home for Christmas where John and Carol will be celebrating with us.

Happy hat!

Sorry we haven't posted in awhile. I hope you all had good Thanksgivings! We had a great time getting to see my mom and dad's new log cabin and getting to just hang out with family for a few days. Just wanted to make a quick post to give an update on Austin. We took him back to the doctor this past Monday and they decided that we should try a last round of anti biotics only these would be administered via injections.....three of them. One a day for three days. Poor guy had his last shot yesterday (Wednesday). In 10-14 days we will go back to see if this has cleared up his ear infections. If not we will go to an ENT specialist. Also while we were at the doctor's we got a phone number for a pulmonary (sp?) specialist to call and schedule an appt. to check into wheezing. They (not the specialist, just his normal doctor) had chest x-rays taken of Austin and said that there was nothing irregular showing up in the x-rays. Good news but still no closer to figuring out the problem. So we will get an appt with the specialist and go from there.

We are going to take Austin around to some Christmas tree lots to see if he reacts to the trees in order to see if we can get a real Christmas tree or not this year. We are anxious to celebrate Christmas with Austin this year. A quick thanks to Joni for being willing to embroider Austin's name into his new Christmas stocking!

Talk to you all again soon!

(This is basically a cross post of an entry that I made on the other blog I am running HERE. But I thought you guys may want to read it to if you don't check out that other blog.)

Austin has been fighting asthma/allergy problems for a couple months now. He is having to do nebulizer treatments for a second time, this time to last throughout the winter. Because he will be doing these treatments for so long, the doctor had our insurance buy us our own machine versus keeping their's for that long of a period. (very quickly to explain nebulizer treatments for those who don't know. The machine is basically a little electric air pump that has a plastic hose/tube connected to it. At the other end is a reservoir for the medicine and a mask that covers his mouth and nose. The air is forced through and vaporizes the medicine for him to breath in).He has gotten used to it though and is pretty good at sitting still during the treatment. It helps that we play him one of his Baby Einstein dvds during this time too. ;-) They also had him on a certain antibiotic, don't remember the name. Well, while on this antibiotic he developed an ear infection, which the antibiotic was supposed to prevent. So they then switched antibiotics. Well, he wasn't himself this past Sunday and we just thought that he was having a bad day. Then yesterday the daycare called my wife and said that Austin had a 102 degree temp. So Jen left work and took him back to the doctor. Turns out he now has an ear infection in both ears! (beginning to wonder if it is some dastardly plot and the doctor is really giving him infection inducing medicine!!! ;-)) Also his top two front teeth are just about to break through so they feel that the combination of the two is what caused his temperature to spike. So we are now on our third antibiotic. ($50! Is it just me or does it seem to be getting more and more expensive for medicine. I don't remember medicine being this expensive on a consistent basis.) As much as it sounds like it, this is not a woe is me post. It's more that I'm frustrated for him that it seems to be just one thing after another. Poor kid...I hate that he is having to deal with all of this. It's a lot for a 7 month old (breathing stuff started at 5 months) to deal with but he does it like a champ. Probably better than I would if I was having to deal with it all myself. I actually feel very lucky that Austin takes this all in stride as well as he does. Even with the ear infections and the breathing treatments he is still a very happy baby.

His temp was back down to normal this morning so hopefully this means the combination of antibiotic and the baby Tylenol we are giving him are working. I knew his teeth were probably going to be coming in soon since he's been gumming his bottom lip for a few days and drooling like crazy. So we'll have 2 on top and 2 on bottom...no more letting him gum/chew on dad's finger!! heh.

Well the rest of the pictures are up on our website. I changed Austin's 6 month pictures page back to a format where you can save the pictures if you want to. The other page I had up was neat in that you could let it do a slide show for you if you wanted but you couldn't right click on the pictures and save them. Along with the 6 month album are albums for the Fall Festival at Jen's school and Halloween, Austin's Parent/Child dedication, and just some fall pictures as well as Levi's soccer games.

Austin's 6 month pictures will be uploaded to our website later today, as well as just some other pictures taken during the month. To hold you guys over till then, here is a preview of some of the pictures that will be on the site:

**Update** Austin's pics are now up on our site. I still haven't gotten the rest of the pics from the month put up yet but they'll be there sometime this weekend. Click HERE to get to our photos page. You'll notice the page for this month is a different format than what we have used before. Just something I was trying out to see if I like. You can click on each pic to view a bigger sized one or you will also see a button that looks like the play button on a cd player. If you click that it will show the photos in a slideshow without you having to do anything else.

Austin is 7 months old!! Yesterday ;-)

Many of you already know but for those of you that don't, we had to put Austin back on breathing treatments this past week. His cough had never gone away and then his wheezing came back. The doctor thinks that it is asthma/allergy related. So back to using the nebulizer. We had been having to do 6 treatments a day. We are down to 5. Two different medications. One gradually decreases and the other we will have to give him all winter. So soon it will just be two a day. We also had to give him an oral steroid to help treat the asthma and also an antibiotic. The other day he began pulling on his left ear a lot so we took him back to the doctor and found out he had an ear infection......but in the right ear. The kid is already dyslexic...j/k. The antibiotic that he was on was supposed to keep that from happening so they took him off that antibiotic and have given him a different one. Even through all of this though he has stayed a happy baby. Still smiles and talks a lot so that's good. We will be getting his six month pictures posted on our website soon and will post here when they are ready.

Recently I was invited to join an online community called Vox. Basically it's another blogging community. So I went ahead and started another blog just for myself. You can find it at http://revan18.vox.com/. Don't worry, we will still be posting on this blog to keep everyone up to date our lives....namely Austin. I started this other blog though to just post about things that catch my interest or just interest me in general and that don't really fit in here since this is just a blog to stay in touch with family and friends. I'll also have a link to it over to the left with our other links. Since I'm not real original in coming up with names, it's called 'Pardon The Interruption.....again.' So check it out if you want. There won't be an email sign up for that one. Partly because I haven't figured out how to add it to that blog yet and partly because I'm just not sure I'm going to add it anyway, once I do figure it out.

Well, we got the email for the pictures that Austin had taken last week as training for a new photographer at Target. We used this sitting to get his Christmas pictures taken. We think they turned out really well. Check them out for yourself! When you get there, just type in Jennifer Mimms for the customer/guest name.

Here's a preview (this was after the Christmas poses):

Mr. Personality

Austin is growing so fast! Here are his 6 mth pictures taken at Target. You can view, download and order prints if you would like. Enjoy!

He did so well at the studio that they asked for him to come back to do training sessions! So we were able to take him last week for his Christmas pictures!

Jennifer Mimms has invited you to view portrait images online atTheSmileStation!
To get started click below and enter the Customer Name, jennifer mimms:
https://www.thesmilestation.com/home.asp?AC=LTT91901092003TARSHRor go to http://www.thesmilestation.com/ and enter the following:

Customer Name: jennifer mimms
Access Code: LTT91901092003TARSHR

Note: the Customer Name and Access Code should be entered exactly as it appears above.

AOL users please copy the above link and paste into the address bar.

In addition to viewing the portrait images, you will be able to order the poses you like in the sizes you need! TheSmileStation is exclusively created for you by The Studio at Target.
Enjoy!

Rub a dub dub, Austin in the tub!

Austin had his 6 month doctor's appointment yesterday. He's 27 inches long and 20lbs 2oz. His head is, I think he said, 47cm around. It was either 45 or 47, I can't remember right now. Austin is in the 75th percentile for length/height and the 90th percentiles for weight and head circumference. The doctor said that he is doing very well and that all of those percentiles are right in line with his past measurements. So while he may be a little big, he is growing normally for him. Austin also got three more shots but did really well with them. He cried at first but stopped pretty quickly after it was over. He doesn't have to go back now until his 9 month appointment.

Austin is 6 months old today!!!

Here are some pictures that Jen took of him today sitting up, on his own, in our papasan chair.

Austin's 5 month pictures are now up on our website. Below are a few pics from that group. You can click on any of those pictures and they will take you straight to our photos page.

Austin and I had a photo session the other day and he was sooo tolerant of me and my camera!
He is a happy baby and is learning how to do new things everyday! This weekend he figured out that if he pushes on his legs while on his belly he can get is bottom half off the floor. he is also getting good at holding himself up with his arms (in push-up postion) Now we need to get both working at the same time and we will have crawling!!! You can see all 160 or so pictures on our website, www.tjamimms.com this weekend. In the mean time here are a few of my favorites.


 

Its official!!
I have my Masters!

I received my diploma the other day for my Masters of Science in Educational Technology.
It is hard to beleive that I am done! I just want to thank all those who helped support Tony and I though the homework and the Saturday work sessions! I couldn't have made it without you!

Update on Austin

Austin is still really congested and coughs a lot. We are continuing nebulizer treatments 3 times a day. He wakes up more at night right now with coughing. On Friday one of the daycare workers were concerned that he was getting worse because he was weezing a lot more. So we called the Dr. and they wanted to see him before the weekend. Tony took him in Friday morning and the Dr. said that he was actually getting better rather than worse. and even though he sounded worse it ment the congestion was breaking up.
He still smiles and is a happy baby despite it all! We really feel blessed!!

We bought Austin's Halloween costume on Thursday and he is going to be ......... a pumpkin!!!He is going to look soooo cute! I call him pumpkin all the time so it will be quite appropriate.

Can't wait to take pictures!

Well, it has to come at some point. Austin is fighting his first illness. He's been coughing and congested for a couple days. Today Jen took him to the pediatrician. We have to administer nebulizer treatments 3 times a day to hopefully break up and clear out the stuff in his chest. They also are running some labs to see if he has something I think they called, RSV. The doctor doesn't think he has it but wanted to test for it anyway. It's supposedly highly contagious. We should get the results tomorrow. On top of all of that, I've been sick since Sunday as well. I'm starting to feel better. I have to say though that Austin is dealing with this like a trooper. As much as I know he has to be uncomfortable, he still gives big smiles and overall hasn't been that fussy. We'll keep you all updated.

Hey what are these?

Austin found his feet today!