Christ is Risen!

He is risen, indeed! What a glorious thing to be able to celebrate! We have been reading through the Jesus Storybook Bible with Tripp (if you do not have it, you need to get it. right away!). I can not read the chapters on the crucifixion and resurrection with out tearing up. It is also a pretty awesome thing to get to read it with Tripp and watch and listen as he tries to understand and grasp what it means to be loved with a "never stopping, never giving up, unbreaking, always and forever" (to quote from the Storybook Bible) by God. While Christmas is a pretty great holiday to celebrate with kids, I am pretty sure Easter is my favorite. Answering questions like "what does it mean that Jesus's body broke for me?" and "well, why do we not have lamb's blood to put on our door cause I love God?" will never get old. And although Santa is pretty cool, we made sure the Easter bunny did a good job with the eggs and Easter baskets! I also loved watching Tripp help his sister find eggs and watching Lily totally get what she was supposed to do after finding a few eggs with Tripp's help.

We attempted to get some good ones of the kiddies together, but that did not really happen. Oh well, that is why we will need to get some professional ones done soon (hint, hint Katy :) ). 

Happy Easter everyone!!

The hardest part of the year

I am pretty sure that the time of mid-January till the beginning of April is pretty much the worst. Ok, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but not really. It is cold, dreary, sometimes snowy, sometimes just miserable, and really nothing to look forward to. We have had some hard times- disappointments for Nelson and work stuff, news that my job is a little bit in jeopardy (not because I slack off or anything but because my job is grant funded and when that money runs out and if we do not get anymore in...), family health troubles, etc. But tomorrow is April 1st, and I feel like things are already looking better! In the mean time though, we have managed to stay busy and not get into too much trouble. Well, most of us anyway. One thing that kept us busy was my desire to redecorate our room. See, when we decided to take our house off the market, Lily kinda needed a place to sleep. So the kiddies now share our old bedroom (the bigger of the two) and we moved into Tripp's old room. They love it (and I actually can not imagine when the day will come and they will have to be separated because of gender) but I was feeling a little weird sleeping in a very blue room that just did not feel like our space. It felt more like "we just threw everything into this room and have ignored it for almost a year" and that is not really the atmosphere you want your bedroom to have. So thanks to Target, Ace hardware, a sewing machine saga, and my dad who babysat both kiddies solo while we did some serious painting, we now have a fully re-done bedroom (and it was all done on the cheap).

So here's the before (complete with a small child):

And the after (small child is not awake):

Of course you have to say you like it a lot better in the after, cause otherwise, all my hard work would be for naught!!
As for other house projects, we have a new fence going up! I absolutely can not wait for it to be done! It was another decision that we made a while back once we decided to stay- we wanted our backyard to be more useable. We are on a corner and without a fenced in yard, there is no way it would be safe for the kids. Then when we got Padme, we knew we had to get the fence. So it is being built as we speak. Hopefully it will be finished sometime this week, and we can start working on our new backyard space!