My loves.

These three make my heart so full!!

He is Risen!

We had a wonderful Easter celebrating our Savior and risen Lord!!

Our normal days.

Most days here, I am home with the kids.  

They are not going to any preschool or mothers day out program and other than going to Bible studies on Wednesdays and Thursdays, they are with me.  

We fill our days with all the usuals, errands, cleaning, cooking, eating, playing and what not, and we usually have a pretty good time doing it all.  

I've think I have mentioned before how much I adore motherhood.  

Not only do I believe that it is one of the greatest blessing that God gives us women, I also believe that this is what God called me specifically to do. 

I love to be with these three all day and try to impact their lives daily for the better by being fun, encouraging, loving, present and a good role model.  

I love the discussions that we have (although I could do with a little less "why" questions from a certain 4 year old) and the songs that we sing.  

And while it is annoying sometimes when they want me by their side for every little thing, 

I know that my presence is important and I love it. 

I love that we have so many days to play around without real agendas.  The days will be filled in the future with music and sports practices, school work and different friends but we love that those things don't have to take over this young.  We are in no rush to squeeze out our family time.  

I want them to remember that mom let them get dirty.   

I want them to remember that mom took time to cook their meals and also took time to sit and eat it with them.

I want to remember the afternoons when everyone wanted to play with me so badly we had to set a timer to rotate "mom time".

I want to remember that they loved to dress up and read. :)

Like every family, we fight and cry and yell and forgive.  We laugh and love and hug and kiss. 

Our normal days are filled with the ups and downs and we are so weary at the end of the day.

But no day is really normal.

Because each day is full of teachable moments.  

Each day is full of funny phrases or new words or silly songs.

Each day is full of new adventures through their eyes and a new chance to make a good choice.

And even through the tiredness and crazy moments, 

I love that my days are filled with these three.  

Settling into our house.

We have settled into our house and while there has been a lot of work to do, and still more to get done, we are enjoying it so much!  There are many little things about our new house that are advantages over our house in Waco, such as a better outside play area for the kids, a better driveway for riding bikes and sidewalk chalk, a playroom, and of course the great views.

One of the first things that Brenner did was add large hole chicken fencing around about 4 acres of our property.  There was a white fencing, but the dogs, chickens and kids could get out too easily for my liking.  And Brenner had the added fun of putting it in the weekend after 6 days of rain!  (insert sarcasm here!) 

Cole and Jake were happy to help him too :)

Having a great garage and driveway has been SUCH a blessing.  Part of the garage has become added play space for us, where we do our crafts, painting, play doh and markers.  I just don't have to care about what gets where and that makes it a more enjoyable time for all because messy activities should be messy!

The driveway is wide and flat so Cole rides his bike on and off ALL day long.  They also love sidewalk chalk now and in addition to the girls' requests write our names and draw pictures of Jake over and over, we also create racetracks, hopscotch, runways and battlefields.  Thankfully the Dollar Tree sells tubs of sidewalk chalk for only $1!

Here is a great example of how the kids clean up their playroom.

One other new change in our new house is that all the kids are sharing a room.  

The girls have always shared a room, but we felt strongly that all the kids begin to share a room when we were looking for houses.  Personally, we think that there are tons of benefits to kids sharing rooms that I will discuss on a later day.  It has been an adjustment and there have been some drawbacks as well, but overall it is going great.  The girls have been going back and forth sharing beds too.  They went through a phase of insisting on sleeping in the same crib together but are now back to separate cribs.  Silly girls!

And of course we love being in the country.  We are in a country neighborhood so there are plenty of house around, they each just sit on approximately 10-40 acres so the neighborhood is spread out.  Everyone has at least some sort of animal, be it chickens, horses, cows, sheep, goats, donkeys or turkeys.  And because we are across the street from a lake and there are ponds all over, there are tons of geese, ducks and even wild peacocks.  Neighborhood walk are really fun to listen to and hear all the animals.  It has given the girls a chance to perfect their animal sounds!

And here is the view from our front yard on a most gorgeous day!