The newest member of our family...

Minnie is officially a member of the family.
She does everything with us, eats, sleeps, takes baths, goes potty,
you get the idea.
Leah is in love with her - and all her dolls.
I sometimes find her in her room talking to her them, kissing them,
and saying "I yov you".

Birthday Girl

Everything was perfect...



The Cake (handmade by Aunt Lisa...perfection as usual)



The gifts (wrapped in Mickey Mouse paper...perfect)



The pure childhood joy!

My Recovery Center...

For the past 2 years I have,
as most of you know,
been running around
(quite literally)
doing grad school
AND motherhood.

And now I have been given a sanctuary,
a recovery center...


a beach cottage




Here are a few glimpses of my little haven








How grateful I am for these moments of calm I've been given after the storm.
It has given me time to recognize how the Lord
was constantly steadying the ship.

Halloween at our place

Meeting Mickey for the first time..

Our Little Nemo

...and our little pumpkin

I thought this was supposed to be really hard...

Last week I bought all of our
Potty Training Supplies
and settled in for a
long
hard
week or two
of cleaning up messes

but then...

she was perfect!


Thanks to these:

A very bad idea

Yesterday, for some reason, I decided that it would be

a good idea to take the girls to a studio to get their pictures taken.

We had a gift card, they seemed even-tempered enough, and I was feeling adventurous.

This is how it went:

Leah was done, completely finished,

after she said "cheese" once.

Great.

Jenna was only slightly pleasant,

and that was IF she was sucking her binki.

But binki's don't look great in pictures now do they...

The photographer was new

and, I swear,

has never really worked with kids before.

The candy, toys, anything-you-want bribes

went totally unnoticed

after the first 3 mins.

Leah interpreted my statement:

"can you put your arms around Jenna...yeah, that's right,

give her a hug,"

as squish her so tight her eyes bulge.

Jenna just felt like crying, loud and long, instead of smiling.

We didn't get one usable picture of the two of them...

I think we can safely say my good idea was

utterly,

completely,

un-believably

a very bad idea

So much for the new "picture taking" outfits...

and they were so cute.

Look what I spent the morning doing...

I love
being a mom
of
girls
and using all my
crafty capacity
to
accessorize!!