He Just Keeps Getting Older

Happy birthday Paul! We love you!

Forty Years of Marriage

As mentioned in the post below, our family took a quick trip to MN a few weekends ago to celebrate my parents' fortieth anniversary with them. We had such a wonderful weekend - sometimes the spontaneous visits are the best kind.

I want to look this good when I'm celebrating my fortieth!

How embarrassing! Haha! Really I think it's cute!
We enjoyed a nice meal out, then went back to my grandparents' house for more celebrating. This is four generations of girls.
The kiddos with their great-grandparents. Noah is holding up his special treasures - a starfish from great-grandma and a turtle whistle from grammy.

Scenes from the MN State Fair

A few weekends ago, we made a whirlwind trip to Minnesota to celebrate my parents' fortieth wedding anniversary with them (more pics to come of that). We also were able to go to the state fair, which was so exciting to me because I LOVE the fair! The last time we were there was the day before we moved to Indiana, which was four years ago. But not much has changed!

Olivia trying on a coonskin cap

Chloe is ready to ride!
This pic cracks me up. We had just arrived at the fair, and I'm thinking "Wow - cool big bottle of pop - I'll take your picture with it Noah!" Only to find out it's actually a garbage can. So here's Noah with a garbage can. :)
Proving to Shannon that I had a pronto pup! Yum...it was good! Notice the really cool big bottle of pop in the background.
We are here! Mom, me, Liv, and Noah.
Noah looking out on the fair from up in the sky ride.
Daddy and Chloe in the sky ride.

I'm sad to see that I didn't get any pictures of Grandpa. He was too busy granting all of the kiddos' requests! What a softie! :) We love you Grandpa!

First Day of School

When your kids are dressing up like this, you know it's time for school. :)

The first day of school was yesterday. They were both soooo excited to start. Noah is in first grade, and Olivia is in kindergarten.
Olivia and her special friend Bethany.

We celebrated with a special lunch at "the peanut place" - Logan's.

Spring Break

We enjoyed a nice little getaway earlier this week. The kiddos are on spring break from school, so we took advantage of the time off and headed to the Great Wolf Lodge in Wisconsin Dells. Paul made my day on Sunday when he said we could leave early (we were going to leave on Monday) and stay a night in Madison to visit Adam and Kelly Love! We had so much fun at their beautiful house. We even stayed up until about 4 am playing Settlers - these are people after our own hearts! :) The kids had so much fun that I even heard one of them say "Can we just stay here and not go to the waterpark?" Now that is high praise!

All the kiddos (except Chloe) had a slumber party

The marble run was a hit

We made it to the Great Wolf on Monday and enjoyed three days of swimming and water slides. My body was so sore from going down countless water slides with Noah. He is just tall enough to go down the big slides, and he had a blast! Noah and I went down one water slide about ten times in a row, and there were 79 steps to get to the top (Noah counted :) ), so I was one sore mama.

Accessories make the outfit

Olivia loved the wave pool

It was hard to get a clear picture of Noah because he was in constant motion!

Chloe especially loved the chairs. :)

Sharing a bedtime snack

Daddy and the kiddos

Easter At Our House

Happy Easter! These were some of the scenes at our house this past weekend...

After the egg hunt, surveying the loot
You can tell by Chloe's shirt that she had already been enjoying some Easter candy!
Love Olivia's face in this picture
A little more excited here...

The masterpieces - notice the egg shells in the bottom of the pic - we ate the ones we broke!

Olivia's favorite - pink, of course!

Sarah's Wedding

What a wonderful wedding Sarah and Jonathan had this past weekend! Sarah (Paul's sis) was a beautiful bride and the ceremony was so God-honoring. Paul was honored to sing in the wedding, Noah was a ring-bearer (actually a gift-bearer; he gave a gift to Mom Ice during the ceremony), and Olivia was a flower girl. I was so nervous on Saturday as I wound Olivia's hair on sponge rollers for only the second time ever! She went swimming with them in and, of course, they were completely wet when she was done swimming! So then I spent a frantic hour drying them with a hair dryer. Praise the Lord her hair came out just fine (although I'm sure the wedding would've gone all right if her hair hadn't turned out!).

We thank the Lord for bringing Jonathan to Sarah and to our family!

Happy New Year!

It feels good to put up a new post finally. The month of December has been so busy for us with lots of Christmas programs and piano recitals, etc. And we've been tossing some viruses back and forth in the family, so I haven't felt like blogging much. But I think we're back to normal now!

Noah was a wise man in the school Christmas program and Olivia was an angel. The sleeves on Olivia's costume provided her with constant entertainment throughout the whole program. :)

Olivia helped me make Christmas cookies this year, while Noah was home from school, sick on the couch. So that day was divided between making cookies and cleaning up Noah's sickness. NOT a pleasant day. I didn't eat too many of those cookies!

An area church has an annual "Bethlehem Walk". They give you Jewish names and you walk through the woods on the way to Bethlehem to be counted in the census. Every so often scenes are depicted - the angels singing "Gloria", the wise men on the way to see the baby King, the shepherds. Then you finally come to Bethlehem and the bustling town activities. Later you go to the inn looking for a place to stay, but of course there is none. But the innkeeper does let you go into the stable to see the baby born to Mary and Joseph. The whole evening was a wonderful experience for all of us.

The Friday before Christmas we just wanted to have fun, so we drove to the Navy Pier in Chicago for "Winter Wonderfest". It was a wonderful inside carnival with great activities for the kids. This was a roller coaster Noah and Olivia rode on.

This picture was taken near the indoor skating rink, which we want to try next time!

These are some of the kids' favorite gifts:

MP3 player for Chloe - just a play one, of course!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I look forward to catching up with all of you soon!