House in Lights

As promised, here is a picture of our house decorated with Christmas lights that Nae and Emma risked their lives to put up. It was so dark that the pictures didn't turn out that great, but at least you get the general idea.

Our week of Thanksgiving

We had a great past week since Emma (my sister) came up on Saturday and then Chrisa (another sister) and her roomate Megan came up on Wednesday. I guess we were so busy that I really didn't get any good pics of the kiddos. We all went over to the Soundara's for Thanksgiving dinner and boy was there a lot of food! I don't have one picture of the evening, though. Scroll down to see what I did get.
Mya has learned how to not only get tupperware out of the cabinet but also how to climb all the way in the cabinet. She can't get down, though so it wasn't long after these pictures that she was crying because she was stuck!
Here's Chrisa (holding Gabriel), me and Emma. They were so kind to help me get out all of our Christmas stuff and get everything up. Gabe was very confused, however, about when we were going to decorate for Thanksgiving.
The girls also helped with our tradition of building gumdrop trees. Here's Gabriel with his finished creation.
Also new to our Christmas decorating this year we have lights on the outside of our house. Thankfully, Nae didn't fall off the roof doing this and that is Emma up there helping him not me. I'll post pictures of the quite impressive finished product soon.
Hope all of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

And one more makes 5!!

Okay, you can't tell much from this picture but trust me there is a small bean shaped baby in this picture. Yes, for all of you who don't know, we are expecting again. I am about 12 weeks pregnant and due June 3rd.
We are all very excited, and Gabriel has been very helpful in picking out names. After assuring him that we could only have one Mya (he thought the new baby would be Mya too) he has come up with Hazel and just today Asthma. We are planning to not find out what we are having this time so I guess those are Gabe's girl and boy names. He also is always asking, "When will the new baby be here?"
Please pray for a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby.

New Format

Okay, I switched our blog over to this new Beta format (I don't really know what the means) and with that did some changing to the format. What does everyone think?

Painting and New Shoes

After all the birthday excitment around here, it's taken me a while to get back on track with pictures. Here are a few from the past week
Gabe loves his new easel, and these pictures are from his first painting experience on it. As you can tell from the first picture, he takes his work very seriously! Thanks Noi and Billy for the great birthday present.

Okay, and I know that I'm just a little biased, but are these not just the cutest little shoes? We went shopping on Saturday night and happened upon a good sale at Rack Room thus Mya has her first pair of "real" shoes. We are also getting to experience more and more of Miss Mya's personality. She is becoming much more vocal and has started screaming when she sees someone. (We think she learned this from her cousin RuthAnne.) She is learning to make several animal sounds to date she can do sheep (thanks Kristin!), cow and dog (sometimes) The days of crawling are long gone and she is now walking everywhere - even starting to climb up on things. The funniest thing to watch is how she reacts to Gabriel - walking quickly when she has something he wants and whinning and hollering when he does something she doesn't like. I think the fun is just beginning.

One more birthday post

Okay, so this is going to be the last post about birthdays for a while, but I just couldn't resist the opportunity to look back at how Gabe has grown. The first two pictures are of Gabriel on this day three years ago and the last one is of him today. Hard to believe what a big boy he is now. We love you little man!

Gabe's Party!!!

Sorry it's been a while since our last post. We've been busy around here, and last week we got to go to VA to visit my family so we've been trying to catch up this week. We celebrated Gabe's birthday last night with a small group of our friends. Scroll down to see some of the action. We had an arts and craft party (yes, I'm crazy) but everything went so well and the boys did great keeping the mess to a minum. Here's Gabe doing some vegetable painting.
The boys also painted t-shirts and I couldn't believe how creative they were. Here's Gabe with his on.
You can't tell from the picture, but Gabe loved this ice cream cake. We had to light the candles three different times because he would blow them out before we could sing or get a picture.
Gabe and all his buddies: David, Scott, Wills, and Gabriel
Parties, even small ones, are a lot of work. Do we look exhausted? I'm glad all our partying is over until next year.