Paul Herald Risk II, III, and IV
The past few weeks have been truly amazing ones. Rawley had his baby blessing on Sunday (Sept. 11) and we had a ton of family come in for it. It was awesome to see everyone and spend time with them. The baby blessing happened in church and was beautiful - Paul blessed Rawley with a desire to be a missionary throughout his life and that he'd be a special good example in his family and love his parents (and be a special blessing for me, his mother.) The following are some of the pictures we took with family while everyone was in town visiting. We had a fun pot-luck dinner after church that was also enjoyed by all. We rigged up a camera we had checked out from the BYU library to take these.
All the blessing attendees (except for my cousin Rachelle - we feel so bad, she wasn't able to find us after the blessing!)
A family photo... Rawley was not impressed.
A 4 generation picture of Hill decendents (and one bonus Larsen decendent.)
4 generations of Larsens (although technically with two Risks.)
All the great grandparents!
Hills decendents all together.
Rawley (A.K.A. Paul IV) with Paul II and Rosalie Risk
We had such a good time having family in, and letting them get a chance to hold Rawley. Generally, Rawley seemed to enjoy it too. As far as we can tell, he does quite well with strangers so far. We've also been highly impressed that out of the 3 times he's been to church so far, he has not had to be taken out of a meeting for crying yet (and LDS church lasts 3 hours.) He's gotten a little fussy at times, but by simply bouncing him or feeding him with a bottle he's been happy enough. We're very glad he's so generally happy (when we're holding him, at least.)
Paul Herald Risk II and IV
With the Risk grandparents while we interviewed Grandpa Risk about his family history.
Rawley with Paul's mom Suzanne, who kindly watched him a few times for us while we went on dates.
My dad with Rawley - we're so glad he was able to fly in for the weekend.
My mom was out here with us since Rawley was born (so quite a good chunk of time!) but my dad only flew in for the weekend. We went to a fancy restaurant at Utah Valley University where their culinary students practice cooking cuisine from all over the world. They serve it in a very fancy 5 course meal, and this night they were doing all "Asian Pacific" food. The courses consisted of soup (mine was coconut milk based) and bread (including some bread that was like a Filipino rice cake called puto, one of my very favorite things), an appetizer (Paul got mussels, I had a weird omelet thing), salad (the best one was called "beef waterfall" - normally I don't think of beef on salad but this was super tasty beef), the main dish (I had curried beef and rice), and some really fun desserts. The tiny servings were pretty entertaining, but we liked it and it was a fun experience to go somewhere fancy and exclusive with the family.
The menu at "The Forte" restaurant at UVU. They had a few options for each course and we each got to order which one looked best to us. (That's huckleberry soda, by the way, not wine!)
Paul's fancy mussel appetizer (yes, this place was legit so the servings were of course tiny.)
Paul's "salad" was literally some french-fried shaped papaya slices, a few peanuts, and like 3 green beans. He was not super impressed with that one, but it was certainly "fancy."
This was Paul's dessert. It was a doughnut made from some sort of asian squash - but we referred to it as the "roadkill doughnut" although it was indeed beautifully presented. It also tasted a lot like a pumpkin spice
I had three sorbets that were really good - a guava one, a passion fruit one, and a coconut one. I thought they were super delicious!
Rawley has been making a lot of progress - some real smiles with increasing frequency and some new noises and coos. He's also becoming more content for longer with not being held, which he was unable to do very well previously. He loves bath time quite a bit as well now - Paul saw him smile for the first time after giving him a bath this week. He's come a long way from the screaming he used to do when we first gave him baths!
Happy after bath time!
A not very good picture of Rawley being happy in the morning, which is generally his favorite part of the day it seems. He likes to dance to music, and particularly likes this song (and other swing related songs) it seems:
"Tummy time" for both Pauls.
This past Saturday we went to another event at UVU, called the "electric maze." I found discount tickets for it online and it turned out to be interesting, but not exactly a "maze." It was really just a bunch of paths that were all lit up in various ways with some interesting music throughout. There were inflatables I suppose it was supposed to be an art piece of some sort since it was sponsored by the art department at the college. Interesting, but probably not something we'll be doing again.
Paul and Rawley in one of the lit up tunnels at the maze.
Near one of the light displays with Rawley.
Naturally, he slept through the whole thing even though half the reason we went is because we thought he's like the lights!
Here's some bloopers from the family photo shoot:
Rawley enjoys wriggling around - he's earned himself a number of nicknames. The Squiggler, Lil' Bub, and Munchie are a few of them.
Classic!
Rawley quickly decided he was pretty done taking pictures that day, and apparently Paul wanted to imitate his disgruntledness.
We had so much fun with family, and we're looking forward to going back to Virginia around Christmas to see the rest of Paul's family and let them meet Rawley. We're having fun with our little guy, in spite of the sleepless nights, and look forward to more adventures with him.
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