Our VERY FIRST family photo!

Leah and I have been really busy with photography work and teaching. My classes at Eastern are going well, but as many of you know, grading thirty-four essays can be a long and tedious process. The students are great, though, and they are learning to write better. That's the goal, I guess.

Click to enlargeWe've been doing a lot of family photography this season, as our clients prepare for Christmas cards, gifts, etc. It's always fun to see these families year after year, and to meet new ones who get referred to us by our regular clients. This has definitely been the busiest year we've had for our photography business. Lots of weddings, lots of families, and more nonprofit clients than previous years. Business is good.

But working from home and caring for a baby is not easy! To help keep us sane, we've hired a babysitter, Grace, to come for at least ten hours per week. And a friend of ours watches Emery on Thursdays for a while. That gives us time to catch up a little. We've definitely become more efficient workers. Every minute counts!

Day 1 of Operation Tooth SproutThe biggest news in Emery's life is that he's got two new teeth sprouting! They were born early this past week, and he's trying them out on anything that he can grab and lift and squeeze into his little mouth.

On Fridays, we sometimes go to Art After Five at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Turns out Emery likes jazz! Here's some video of our trip from last night:

Emery attends Art After Five, the Museum of Art's weekly jazz concert.

In other news, Emery learned to roll over last week. It's so funny to see him add these little skills to his arsenal. At three months, it seemed like he was so far away from rolling over. Then by three-and-a-half months, he had it figured out. Now we can't just plop him on the couch while we make dinner or run to the store.

Here's a VERY short video of his somewhat new skill in action.

Emery rolls over. Yes, at one point it was a big deal in your life, too.

Most of you know that four days ago (Thursday), Emery was diagnosed with H1N1. He was spitting up a lot and suffering from a high fever. Especially at night, with temps up to 104. Then early Sunday morning, we woke up to find him throwing up pretty badly and working on a temperature of 106!

We rushed him to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia emergency room, where doctors began running some not-so-comfortable tests. That's when they discovered that his fever was caused by a urinary tract infection. The poor guy has had blood drawn, a catheter, a chest x-ray, and several other tests that were not fun even though they helped solve the riddle of his never-ending fever.

They began some antibiotics, and his fever has settled back to normal for the first time in days. He's happy and healing. Check out these videos and photos if you have time!

CHECK OUT THE PHOTOS HERE...

This first video was taken when Emery had a temperature of 103:

This second video shows Emery's hospital room. He's got a brace on his arm to keep his IV needle safely in place. He's got a sock on the brace because he was rubbing his face on the velcro straps, scratching his skin pretty badly.

The day before halloween, we went to NYC for a photo shoot.

Click here to see photos from NYC, Halloween and Emery's first trip to an apple orchard!

Emery enjoyed spending time with his Grandma and Grandpa Martz, and meeting Great Grandma for the first time. The drive was rainy both ways, but it was sunny for most of our time there. Even though it was cold.

Emery forgot to bring his winter hat, so we had to get him one at Target. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your tastes), the only hat they had was this pointy-eared thing with puff balls on the ears. Leah thought it was cute, but I had some reservations. What do you think?

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE WISCONSIN PHOTOS!

Or if you have time, scroll down to see a couple of videos.

This is Emery with his Great Grandma Ackatz:

On Saturday, we had a shoot at the beach in Avalon, NJ. So emery got to hang out with Grandpa and Mimi at the beach while Leah and I photographed a family with four beautiful children.

my lovely sis

Leah in the rental car, with our dead car next to her. Unfortunately, about two hours into our drive our car broke! Transmission. We limped it to a repair shop (thank you GPS!) that just happened to be owned by two guys who had retired from working at the Ford plant down the road. They did a free diagnosis for us and said we'd be looking at a couple thousand dollars for all the work that would be needed to get the car running safely again.

So we rented a car, left our car with them and headed to Ohio!

my lovely nearphew. the smartest, funniest, most fun-to-be-ound sixth grader in the worldWe had a great weekend with my sister and family. Jason and Genelle's children are so sweet and smart and happy. They were super excited to meet their cousin, Emery, and we all had a great time together. It's really nice that Emery will have three cousins who live so close (relatively speaking)! Hopefully they will have many fun weekends together over the years.

When we got back, our friends who live in NJ let us borrow their van (thank you Koerwers!) until we could get a car. Which we did pretty quickly. We had already researched which car we'd want, so we knew that we were looking for a 2009 Toyota Matrix with low miles.

it's called nautical blueHere's a photo of what our car looks like when it's driving and being photographed by a professional photographer. It looks good, but this photo makes it sparkle a bit more than what you'd see in real life. Anyway, it's an All Wheel Drive model, which is nice.

Also, Emery has learned to smile! It's pretty darn cute. Click the picture below to see more photos from our Ohio trip!

click to see more photos!