Mom's Day, Good Friends, and Teeth

We had a fun, but busy Mother's Day. It wasn't all that relaxing for me, but I enjoyed having some friends over to celebrate. Our good friends, the Paden's (including their five kids), Sarah W. (Luke was hunting), Sarah's mom who was in town visiting, Owen (baby Oh-oh), and Chris all came over for a BBQ lunch. It was busy, but fun.
I had Shawn take this picture of me with the kids to commemorate the day.


On Tuesday, we went to Kevin and Janet's to celebrate Sarah's 21st birthday. Sarah is a very special friend who is always helping us out somehow. Usually every Wednesday she comes over after her job working as a preschool aide and picks up Carly for a few hours of playtime. Then she brings her to Bible class. Sometimes, they have little adventures like last week when they went to the beach, and other times they just go to the store together. Carly always enjoys her Wednesday afternoons with Sarah. This is the two of them at the party Tuesday.
Over the weekend Isaac got two more teeth. On Saturday the front top left tooth broke through, and on Sunday, the partner front top right broke through. At Sarah's birthday party Tuesday night, Isaac was getting a good dose of tickling from Geoffrey. I didn't notice until I got home and saw it on the computer, but this picture shows them pretty well. Click on it to enlarge the photo and you should be able to see the little white slivers poking through.

Hope you all had a great Mother's Day, too!

Backyard Zoo--not the petting kind!

We had quite the surprise this morning. Sometime around 11am, Carly, Isaac, and I came out into the kitchen from the bedrooms and I was just about to pour some juice for Carly when I looked up and realized there was a porcupine in our backyard. And I mean right there. It was just on the other side of our grill! It was also pretty large, definitely an adult.

Carly was pretty impressed. She was so excited to tell Shawn about it. It also gave a good opportunity to talk with her about how to treat wild animals. I stressed to her that porcupines don't like to play, and that when dogs try to play with them they get a lot of needles and owies on their noses. Carly even thanked God for seeing the porcupine when she prayed before bed tonight. Enjoy the pictures.

Ready, Set, Go!

Well here it is, the family blog. I've been talking about starting one for over a month now, but Shawn wasn't so excited. He said we wouldn't be able to keep up with it. I hope he's wrong. I feel like I truly do have the desire to keep this going and keep our family and friends updated on our adventures. I'm sure there will be plenty of you who will let us know if we're getting distracted and you're not seeing pictures or hearing stories.
I finally got two "kick starts" of motivation that I needed. The first came last night when I discovered the mom of quads blog through Ben and Kelly's blog. This is a young mom, member of the church, who lives in Texas, and has FOUR nine month olds. And this chick keeps her blog up-to-date! I thought, "Hey, if she can do it, so can I."
Then this morning, I got an email saying that my cousin, Marilyn had just started a blog. I told Shawn that I was definitely going to start one, but he still wasn't so excited. So tonight, I logged in to get started and found that we already had one that he created over a year ago! I was surprised that he wasn't excited now, when he actually started one last year. He must have forgotten. Now that I think about it, I vaguely remember asking him what he was doing, and after he told me, responding with something like, "Oh, great. Now we have something else to keep up with." Ha, isn't it funny how perceptions can change.
Ok, so here you are. My first post on my new blog. (Even though Shawn technically started it back in March 07, I edited just about everything.) And I know it wouldn't be the same if I didn't include a picture. So here's some of the kids from the other day.

This was Isaac on Saturday just a few days shy of 7 months. He had his first taste of peas and fed himself almost an entire baby biscuit. So he went directly from the high chair into the bathtub. Love those blue eyes!

And this is sweet Carly on Monday. She was having a great time playing by herself. Then we heard her call out, "Bye, I'm going to the airport to see Grandma!" Notice the teddy bear is situated as if he's riding in a front pack. And notice the shoes--she constantly gets them on the wrong feet. What a silly kid and experienced traveler!

Welcome to the Blog

We are in Bila Tserkva. We will soon be heading back. Hope the jet lag is not too bad. We will find out. More posts to follow.