Abundant Recompense Copy

Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday, dear Asa, Happy birthday to you! Our baby is 2! Here are photos from his big day. New sand in the sandbox! And new toys to go with it. The boy was prepared. He knew just what to do with those candles, and was so excited for the birthday song. Addison accompanied us on the piano.

Well, last time we moved to a new house, back in 2008, our family looked like this: We grew a little bit in the almost 8 years we lived there, in a lot of ways. And here we were on our last day there. Our little dollhouse. We laughed and cried there, buried cats and chickens and flushed fish there, broke arms, had surgery, sweated, fretted, relied on the Lord and the ward, and grew. Our final act before leaving to live in our friends' basement for a week between houses was to tour the house together, and then all crowd into one of the loft closets and immortalize ourselves and the time we spent in our first real home. After a week of life in a graciously offered basement apartment, we were so pumped to finally move in! We've lost all sense of shame since we moved into our first house, obviously. The two of us showed up at 2:30 on a Monday. Nate's first act, if you must know, was to go #1 in the master bathroom. (We have a master bathroom!!!) The #1 part is important to note...

 We had a snowy winter this year and tried our best to embrace it. Playing out in the snow requires a huge expenditure of effort. Simply putting on everyone's snow clothes is quite a feat, not to mention dealing with them once they're dripping wet and trailed all over the house. But if you can forget about the before and after, the during of snow play has a certain magic about it that shouldn't be missed. Our biggest snowman of the year, Waldo. Man were those snowballs heavy! A snow fort. Nate and I went snowshoeing with our friend Mike. The snow was unbelievably deep and really, for me, it was more of an exercise in extracting myself from huge snow drifts once I fell over in them. But the scenery and company couldn't be beat. It started out in a wooded area, then suddenly got pretty exposed and icy and we were getting pounded by snow. At about that point, Mike got swept at least 35 feet down the mountain in a mini-avalanche. It was terrifying. So we turned around and w...