Enjoying the afternoon...

The kids and I went to the park near our house the other afternoon and enjoyed playing in the sand and blowing dandelions. Here are a few pictures. While many of my days are so similar and cyclical, I realize how short the time is when they are young and then I remember how thankful I am to spend my days with them...Trying to blow a dandelion...

Videos of Silas

I am posting these two videos of Silas specifically for my mom and step-dad who are taking care of the two older ones while we are away with Silas. Thank you so much! They missed seeing Silas this weekend as they were anticipating, so I thought I would let them see a little bit of him here.

Some favorites of Silas....

Our little guy is over 10 months old now! He is getting everywhere in the house and is really enjoying exploring. Fortunately, he is really understanding when I tell him not to touch something and he stays away. Last week I put him out on the back porch during lengthy dinner preparations and he was content out there on his own crawling around for an hour. He may have eaten some dirt, leaves, bugs, but it was great. (There is a video of him crawling below in an earlier post).

He really loves his sister and brother and the excitement about "Siley" and has not wavered from them either. They really watch out and take care of him and celebrate with every new thing he does. He is doing some signing - mostly just dog, more and all done. I am almost convinced he is saying "mama" and working on "Ella", "fish" and "dog". His favorite things are swinging, going for walks, baths or playing in water, our dog "Laci" and wrestling/tickle time. He is really such a pleasant, easy-going baby - I am truly whipped on him! Here are a few of our favorites of him over the past few months. The first two were from today....

"We love because he first loved us." I John 4:19

Happy Valentines Day!

Here is how we spent our day....We talked a lot about this verse and made some valentine heart decorations. Actually, only Ella did...Caleb preferred to do dot-painting. He is obsessed with this...and goes through my dot-art books like water. I have to limit him to only 2 pictures each day. I highly recommend these for ages 3-5. We made chocolate covered strawberries and pretzels. This was super fun, easy and yummy! Our kids had a complete sugar overload today.
Love to you all!

Birthdays - 3 & 5

I have been meaning to post about Ella's 5th birthday, but if I do, I need to post about Caleb's 3rd birthday party too, since I never got to that either last July. So here is a little post about their special days...

Caleb has always been completely into cars, so we did a cars birthday theme. We had a bouncy house inside (borrowed from a friend), played "pin the car on the racetrack", swam in our blow-up pool and painted some little wooden cars. He had a great time... He also received the movie "Cars" on his birthday...that was a whole new world for him!









Ella had a princess tea party birthday. I had intended to actually use two different tea sets I have, but for lack of time and the breakable chance, we didn't do a real tea party. But, the kids did not seem to notice. The little guests wore princess dresses to the party or borrowed Ella's. We painted fingernails, decorated princess crowns and they danced. We played pass the slipper (like hot potato), did a princess memory game and painted princess magnets. We read a book about being "God's princess" and had our tea party. We had fruit wands, crackers and cheese cut into the shape of hearts, iced animal cookies, cranberry/orange scones with whipped cream, raspberry lemonade "tea" and of course a princess cake. It was so much fun and the girls were so cute!

Thank you to my family for helping so much on that day. It was a lot of work taking care of all
those princesses!

Thankful for snow

We got snow in February again this year! We were all very excited this morning and thankful because we had prayed for snow...

Here are a few pictures from our morning. The kids did not last too long outside since we do not really have the best clothes for snow and I didn't have time to double layer them. But, they did make snow angels, play on the play-scape, throw snowballs and enjoy snow ice cream. We even found some yummy caramel sauce in the pantry to top off our snow ice cream. Very yummy!