Abundant Recompense Copy

I can hardly believe it, but last week, our little Brynny-Bryn turned 2! Where does the time go? To celebrate, the kids and I went to the park in the morning and we met Daddy at the pool that afternoon where we all had a BLAST! Bryn and Addison wanted to go down the huge twisty water slide again and again. After the pool we headed home and had a birthday supper consisting of some of Bryn's very favorite foods, pasta (with pesto sauce) and fruit. She had 4ths on the pesto. I'd say we chose well. After dinner we did a quick clean-up and pulled out her little scrapbook to look at as a family. Nate and I told the kids about the day she was born while we looked at pictures of our teeny little 5 pound 7 ounce angel that surprised us by showing up a month early. We followed that up with the cake! A few of my young women helped me bake it the day before and Addison and I had a great time frosting and decorating it on her birthday. I found the caterpillar idea online and I think it turn...

Saturday night Ogden's minor league baseball team, the Raptors, had a free game, followed by fireworks (which neither of our children have ever seen). Lindsey and Micah were in town so we brought them along to check it out. Addison was so  excited, and picked a special outfit just for the occasion.  Yeah. Our kid rocks. And not only was it amazingly fashionable, but it was also functional. Who can lose a kid wearing plaid pants, a Spiderman shirt, Thomas the Train sunglasses and Lightning McQueen/Mickey Mouse ears? We had a good time and were in the general seating area, so the kids had some freedom to run around and throw their complimentary "quit smoking" baseballs around. A couple foul balls came really close to taking some people out right by us, but luckily everyone survived to tell the tale.  One of the major highlights for me was watching Addison break it down every time the music came on. He doesn't dance very often - who knew he had such sweet moves? The kids...

"Bless that we can keep the big meat-eaters away from our house so we can be safe."

We have become avid gardeners around here. That does not mean that we're experts by any means, or even good at it, but we do enjoy spending quiet evenings out there weeding and hunting for squash bugs. The kids insisted that they each needed their own gloves, and they (Addison especially) really like to go out and weed with us and dump buckets of water in random places. We've been at it since late January when we started our seeds inside, and we planted outside right around Mother's Day. We replanted several things that died within days of the transfer, and I am proud to say that this is our biggest and most promising garden to date. We'll see how it all turns out with weather, etc. One of the very best things we've done is to take my parents' advice to set up a drip irrigation system. It is so nice not to spend an hour and a half standing out watering each individual plant every other day and instead to just run out and turn on the hose and let it run for an ho...

Well heck. It's been awhile. We've been traveling all over the place - Nate went to Indiana and came home for a day before I headed to girls camp, which I left a day early so we could fly to Georgia to see my family for a week and a half. It was all a great time and we came home ready to get back to normal life. We'll post GA pics soon, but since they're on Nate's computer and these are not, we'll start at the end of the story. Sunday night we went to the airport to head home from vacation and between the plane getting there late, being tiny (so the big guys took precedent over us) and being rerouted for weather, we missed our connecting flight in Houston. And the best they could do was give us two toothbrushes to split between the four of us and reschedule our flight for 9:00 the following night. Luckily, Nate sweet-talked the lady into putting us up at the  Sheraton (with a little help from our toddlers whose bedtime had come and gone hours before but who had ...