the one for Lily

Sweet girl, this month you are 6 months old. I am so grateful to have held your life in my hands for half of a year. You have been a blessing to me. I am particularly blessed by your smiles and the lessons of patience, grace, and humility your life has taught me.

You have the most beautiful smile I have ever seen. You love to be held and cuddled. I think you have your mommy's temperament, because you are happiest when all of the attention in the room is focused on you. You love to be looked right in the eye. You sleep so well in your crib, although you have yet to master the art of sleeping through the night. At home you are generally a happy and content baby. Your favorite things are to be held and cuddled, to eat, and to lay on the floor rolling around and playing with your toys. Away from home you are not so happy, although you are getting better. You love to pull hair. Your grip is pretty strong; sometimes you pull your sissy's hair and she does not like that at all. You are finally getting old enough to interact and play with your sissy, and this has been a very good thing. She is falling in love with you again after a brief little period of jealousy.

You are beautiful. Everyone says so. You have a beautiful smile, have I mentioned that yet?

We are so grateful for your life. You have taught us many lessons in patience, grace, humility, and dependence on the Lord. Because of your life, Mommy and Daddy are more in love with each other than ever before. We're so glad you are in our family, sweet girl. We love you.

the one with a little more Halloween

the little pumpkin

happy sisters

buzz, pumpkin, spidey, ariel, and a little ladybug

the trick or treaters

happy halloween!

the one where I scream, THIS IS HALLOWEEN

the one where I had fun

So I wanted to post each day with my attempts at fun. Well, at least my intentions were good.

Monday night: coffee with my sweet friend Kristi after the kids went to bed. We talked babies, blogs, and Jesus. And I had a peppermint mocha. sweet.

Tuesday night: I did laundry. oh well.

Wednesday night: Worship + Study. A night with college students, worship, and the Word is always good times.

Thursday night: UMin Pumpkin Carving contest. Always one of my favorite nights of the year.

the winning pumpkin

two of my favorite girls. sweet Emily is a master pumpkin carver.

I love this one. I think Kara is seriously doubting my pumpkin.

Friday night: celebration dinner for my husband: steak, macncheese, edamame, and ooey gooey cake: all his favorites. Yay for getting into grad school!

Saturday: AK took CB to ToysRUs and bought her presents, perfect birthday party for sweet Abby Cossiboom, and took sweet pumpkin pictures of the girls. (pics to come)

super fun week!

the one with Sunday night's fun

I haven't done anything crafty in months. So, Sunday evening CB and I packed up and went to the store so I could make some Halloween fun. Who cares if Halloween's just a week away?

We bought a bunch of monster decorations a few years ago at Target. I made a monster banner to match. This first picture shows the little monsters I patterned the banner from:

I had to make it large to hang from the doorway and out of my own little monster's reach.

Here are two close up shots so hopefully you can see it more clearly:

boo! Happy Halloween!

the one with the week of fun

Sometimes I feel like we live life 100 miles an hour. The past two weekends have been great because we actually slowed down. Last weekend Adam and I went on a date, we went to the Pumpkin Patch, and we had a picnic at Aldridge Gardens. It was so refreshing. This weekend we spend Friday night with friends and babies, we went and got yogurt as a family and played on McAdory's football field.* These two weekends have done some serious good to my weary soul.

I've decided I'm going to continue having fun this week. Laundry is going to go undone. We'll have sandwiches for dinner. I won't clean anything. I'm just going to have fun-in the middle of the week!

Stay tuned: I'll post each week night of fun! Join me this week-ignore some responsibility and have some fun!!

*If you're not on facebook, here's a link to my fall album that has pictures of our past two fun weekends plus more!

the ones about Lily #5

Last week was Lily's last week at dayschool. It had been a really rough experience for her. I think little Lily just has a hard time away from Mommy and Daddy. My theory is that she was in so much pain the first few months of her life that despite her pleasant temperament, she's developed into a "difficult" baby. She doesn't really sleep anywhere but her crib, she has a hard time taking a bottle, and once she starts that crazy screaming it's hard to get her to calm down. At school she didn't sleep, didn't eat well, and yelled her head off.

So she's done with school. We're praying and trusting the Lord to provide for our family. Please pray with us. I'll keep you updated.