An Early Easter

Last weekend we went to Maryland to visit with our family. It was great to get to see (most) everyone.

Will and Oma having fun!

Emma helped Omi to snap green beans for dinner. And Will came over every few minutes to beg another green bean snack. These kids sure do love their veggies!

We went to the playground briefly on Saturday; the weather was a little odd, either bright sun and warm or cloudy and cool. Unfortunately, the clouds rolled in as we got to the playground.

Molly mostly kept her distance from Will. But she did let him pet her and play together some. He is (as Emma likes to tell everyone) "so obsessed with dogs".

And what's in the Easter baskets? New shake and go cars!

Nope, no one liked that at all.

Emma was thrilled to finally get Finn McMissile, and the two of them sat in the hall and played with the cars for a while. Somehow I managed to not get any pictures of Pap-Pap, likely because he was kept busy running the trains!

We went to church with Grandma on Palm Sunday, and Emma and Will had a blast with the easter eggs.

We spent a lot of time outside hunting eggs over and over, and the weather was beautiful.

A picture of me! 

Love Will's dimple.

So many eggs!

Taking a break...

So much fun!

Happy (early) Easter! He is risen!

Ice Cream!

The warm weather and daylight savings time have given new life to our evenings! Since Martin has been getting home later, it seems like most nights we finish dinner and either have a few minutes to play or immediately give the kids baths and then head to bed because they are beat. 

But last night we decided to take advantage of the day light and the weather and take a trip to Friendly's for ice cream! We left the dinner dishes on the table and walked across the street to get our ice cream.

We were planning on getting 2 Reeses Pieces sundaes (with our BOGO coupon, of course), but while we were waiting in line someone handed us coupons for 2 free kids cones that expired that day. And its a good thing they had their own ice cream! Will especially hoovered his!

It was dark by the time we got home, but everyone had a great time!

Our Family is Growing!

This year will surely hold many new experiences for our family, and we hope that one of them will be adding to our family through adoption! We are planning to adopt through the Delaware Foster Care System. We have a lot to learn, so you can be praying for us as we go through this new and uncharted territory.

A few details:

-We still need to decide on an adoption agency - our goal is to finalize this so we can move forward by the end of January.

-We would like to have a child younger than Will, but would be willing to consider a child older than him as long as they were younger than Emma.

-Also, we do not want to be "foster parents" at this point in our lives - that is, we know we will have to be approved as foster parents, but want to be in a situation where any child that comes into our stays as part of our forever family.

The cost of a foster care adoption is usually minimal, but there will certainly be other things to consider like probably upgrading from our Accord to add room for another car seat. We'll be sure to post about any fundraising we do! In the mean time, do you shop on Amazon? If you click through any of the Amazon
links on this blog or Thrifty Living and make a purchase, we will earn a small commission. I've also added a banner on the sidebar. We are putting aside any money earned this way for future adoption expenses.

It's exciting to see how God is working in all of our lives right now. Emma asks us every day to pray for "another brother and another sister"!

Our Advent Calendar

We wanted to start doing an advent calendar this year now that Emma is old enough to really understand what is going on at Christmas. There are so many options out there, but I really wanted to make something that would emphasize Jesus, be full of fun Christmas-y activities, and (of course) have sweet treats. 

I found a couple that I would love to buy, but I am content to check them out after Christmas to see if I can get them on sale. So this year we are using glass jars to hold each day's advent activities...and I love how it turned out!

Here's a look at all 25 jars:

The most important thing I wanted was to have a Scripture to read every day. We'll be reading the Christmas story from Luke, and working on memorizing several verses. I started with Emma just a few days ago and she nearly has Luke 2:11 memorized already! Now we have to play catch-up.

I found a bunch of ideas online, but in the end came up with most of my own Christmas activities.

 The top jar of popcorn is "make a popcorn garland".

I'm pretty sure we won't have enough snow to build a snowman in Delaware in December, so we'll make snowmen out of toothpicks and marshmallows!

Mmmmm...Peppermint sticks!

I used a glass marker to write the number for each day on the jars.

Emma has been asking several times a day for the last week if its time to start opening the jars. We can't wait to get started tomorrow!

What a difference a year makes!

A year ago, just days before Will arrived, we did a pre-baby photo shoot. We thought it would be fun to get some pictures one year later of our big boy!

October 7, 2010

Emma was so little a year ago!

Now she can't imagine life without her little brother.

Mommy waiting for baby to arrive.

Mommy and big boy

Walking with Daddy.

Baseball!

We recently went to a Wilmington Blue Rocks game with several friends from church. The Blue Rocks are the local minor league team in the Kansas City farm system and the same league as the Frederick Keys.

We sported our Orioles gear, naturally.

Emma gave the Blue Rocks' mascot a high five!

And she loved getting to bring her glove along to the stadium. That glove has been to a ton of ball games in its lifetime; it was my first glove too!

Will and Daddy...same smile? I think so!

Looking forward to many more ball games as a family!

Outtakes

Sometimes Emma and Will are totally photogenic and we end up with tons of adorable pictures. And then other times...well, here's some recent outtakes!

Don't get me wrong, they're still cute...

But I'm probably not sticking any of these up on the wall!

Our Easter

We went away over Easter weekend to visit with the majority of our families. It was wonderful to celebrate the resurrection together!

Sunday afternoon we had wonderful weather in Hagerstown and were able to update our family pictures!

Omi and Pap Pap with Emma and Will.

Emma, Grandma, and Will

Oma with her great grandchildren!

Great Uncle Bill and Great Aunt Chris!