Creating memories with Grandma and Grandpa

Sarah's parents have been visiting for almost two weeks. They have been enjoying getting to know Lexi and spending time with her. They have been reading books to her (even attempting to read some of the French ones aloud), helping to change diapers, and generally being helpful in watching her, which has allowed Sarah and me to get a lot of things done.

One of the reasons Paula and Leroy came to visit was to be here for Lexi's baptism, which was yesterday at our church. Leroy, an ELCA pastor, helped perform the baptism with our pastor. It was a meaninful service of baptism and a special day for Lexi and the rest of us. Another baby boy, the son of some other members in the congregation, was baptized at the same time, so there were a lot of people around the font. I did some work to personalize and customize the service. Each family had obtained water from parts of the world that were somehow significant to them, so we had water from five different places:

• Puget Sound, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean that Seattle sits on, where Stephen grew up



• the Mississippi River, to represent Sarah's roots in the Midwest



• the Elbe River in Germany, birthplace of the other boy's mother



• Lake Geneva, the body of water that we all currently live by



• the Jordan River, which has significance to all Christians

As a gift to Lexi, I played the prelude on the organ, and Paula played a piece on the organ as well at the beginning of communion.

Lexi behaved quite well during the baptism. She cried a little when the water was placed on her head, but then she quickly calmed down. She looked so pretty in the long white dress she wore, which was the same dress that Stephen's maternal grandmother wore for her baptism 92 years ago and which subsequent generations, including Stephen himself, have worn for their baptisms.

Lexi's sponsors/godparents are Stephen's two older siblings, who live in Seattle and New York. Because each of them came to meet Lexi in September, they were not able to come back for the baptism. Therefore, we asked a third sponsor, a friend of ours from Chicago who is a member of our congregation here and whom we've known well since we arrived (Bill Strehlow, husband of Karen Bloomquist), to represent the other two. After the water was put on her head, Lexi sat in the arms of Sarah's mother and grinned for a minute or two at Bill, who was standing next to her.

(See pictures of the baptism by clicking on the link at the upper right of this page.)

Otherwise, Lexi is still a good-natured and happy baby. She is still smiling a lot and quite easily. When you look at her and talk to her, she'll smile back at you. She's also turning into quite the chatterbox. She's developing some additional sounds, although when I make the same sounds back to her, as if I'm talking to her in the same "language," she looks at me like I'm strange. She's doing a lot more of the sound that sounds much like a Geiger counter, a sort of continuous grunting. Tonight at dinner, while she was lying alone on the couch and the rest of us were two arms' lengths away at the table, she was taking long breaths and making this sound on and on and seemed able to entertain herself quite well doing this.

Grandma and Grandpa have been dividing their time between watching Lexi and doing a thorough cleaning of our apartment as we pack up all our things and get ready to move out of Geneva. At just a few months old, Lexi will be a well-traveled baby. She will visit most of her relatives in the U.S. before moving with us to our new home in Nairobi.