Her first doll

My good (and talented) friend Kristin made Eden her first doll and gave it to her as an early birthday present.

Isn't she so cute?

Gabe says, "Ms. Kristin can make anything you can imagine."

I think that this baby might have a hard life,

but I'm sure she will be very well loved.

Two of a kind

We had a beautiful pair of butterflies on our Forsythia bushes this afternoon.

Overheard

At lunch time today, Alena was "reading" through the Bible story book, "And the wise men went to see Jesus and then on the way home they went by Walmart..."

Mya: "Alena, there is no such thing as Walmart in the Bible!"

Glad we got that cleared up.

From the backyard...

So, lots going on around here but not many pictures to document the happenings. I made myself take the camera outside after dinner tonight so we could get some new pictures on the 'ole blog.

Here's a little game that our kids call, "Oops, my nose!" The rules are very simple.

Everyone attempts to slide down the slide at the same time with much laughing and screaming.

Usually ending up like this at the bottom. The name, "Oops, my nose!" apparently comes from all the crashing and hitting each other including in the nose. I know, pretty ingenious, huh?

After all that excitement, Gabe wanted me to put the camera on action and take some pictures of him spinning on the swing.

Eden getting ready to go down the slide. Which she loves.

Alena - I just love her little smile.

Mya with a very chocolate mouth cracking up at Gabe.

Gabe has a chocolate mouth as well.

And that is an evening spent in our backyard.

Better late than never

Wanted to make sure I got a few more pictures from the 4th of July celebrating on here even though they're almost a week late.

It is not easy to get 11 kids seated and looking at the camera - you can see we weren't too successful. Here they are, though all 8 grandchildren and 3 cousins together for the first time.

We still use the styrofoam cup method to keep the kids from getting burned on the sparklers. It works pretty well as long as they don't try to pull the sparkler out of the cup like Mya did. In the middle is Simon sporting a cute new haircut.

A partial kids shot with Pathu right before we sang "Happy Birthday " to Pathu. Keep in mind that this picture was taken at about 10 o'clock at night after all the fireworks were gone.

Lastly, a sibling pick: Na, Nae, Nee, Bing and Noi in order by age. Yes, it does look like Nae has a halo over his head. Ironic isn't it?

11 months

In all the excitement yesterday, I forgot to post these picture.

Our Eden is now 11 months old and is crawling everywhere,

and pulling up to stand a lot as well.

Just in the last 2 weeks or so she has decided table food is much better than the baby food. She's enjoyed everything from peaches and watermelon to turkey and spaghetti.

It's very fitting that I held off on this post until today because it was exactly one year ago today that I went into the hospital with pre-term labor and then spent the rest of July on bedrest. It was a very difficult month but certainly well worth it to get this sweet baby.

So thankful for the way God worked everything out.

Celebrating the 4th

Sorry I'm replacing water pictures with more water pictures, but we seem to be spending a lot of time at the splash pad lately. Here's some of our time spent there yesterday with Nae's family.





This is Nae's nephew Bingston. They are visiting from Minnesota making it the first time in almost 3 years that the whole immediate family is together.
And one picture of the water-loving Henry who is also in visiting from Arkansas.
I'll try to have some more non water related pictures of our celebrating up tomorrow.
Hope everyone has a happy and safe July 4th!