- A 5 month old baby, who JUST today graduated to the play-station! This baby likes to be tickled and likes to 'wrestle'. I LOVE when they enter that stage!

-Our first year (journey/endeavor/adventure!) home schooling, pretty much DONE! What a perfect fit for our family.

-Specific ways God continues to reveal His hand upon our lives and our family. We are blessed. And it has nothing to do with us.

-Gabe. Mowing the grass. 4 TIMES ALREADY! SPRING ISN'T EVEN OVER!

-Our first stay at a B&B! I'm not sure we ever would have chosen to do this on our own. We are not really the B&B type. Thanks to my in laws and their X-mas gift to all the couples with an over night stay at a local to them B&B provided with watching our kids, we teamed up with Gabe's sister and her husband and made a double date out of it. It was HILARIOUS! Not the B&B. It was perfectly quaint just like a B&B is supposed to be? She obviously liked birds! Fake ones. Not real. Time with J & Z is always a treat. We laugh A LOT! How fun that they plan to come visit us this weekend where we can do more of that!

-A Mother's Day Weekend (as Gabe termed it!) that left me feeling entirely blessed. I even have a couple new 'things' for my perennial garden to show for it and the energy this spring/summer to tend to them! Last spring I spent it on the couch with a baby Bo growing inside. That was OK. I'm so glad I have that baby! He's sleeping all squishy up on my bed right now and the thought of him makes me smile.

-The start of needing a bath or at least some sort of 'sponge bath' every night for little ones. You can guess what our days look like!

-A tick on the back of Asher's neck. Note to self: Next time don't scream. It's really hard to work your way out of that one! I'll rephrase that. It's IMPOSSIBLE!

-Talk about a first 'real' family vacation. Just the 6 of us. For us that means other than a "stay-cation" (time off going nowhere other than...HOME!) as well as something besides a night or two at a hotel (with a pool of course!), which honestly up until this point has been absolutely fabulous! I know it still would be. What this really means is we are feeling ready to brave the storm and do what our parents did. A time of utter chaos (hopefully somewhat organized)! Dealing with bad attitudes other than the comforts of your own home. Probably poor sleep. But memories that will last a LIFETIME! Where are we going you ask? We have no idea. If you have any good ideas please pass them along! We want to go camping and we want to be by the water. The shorter the car trip the better. One-two 'real' nights of camping will suffice, and then something to offer some modern amenities but still the private wooded feel is all we are looking for. Camping is something we enjoyed doing growing up. Some of my first memories are of my family's camping adventures. We even spent a large portion of our honeymoon doing so in order to hike several High Peaks in the Adk's. I look forward to time away together doing nothing but enjoying each other and the great outdoors.

-Enjoying life as it is. Crazy. Busy. Ready for bed when the kids go down but needing time to just unwind and sit in the quiet (usually a recipe for staying up too late, but enjoyed nonetheless!) Blessed. Challenged. Stretched. "These 'little ones' won't be little all the time" is something I have to continually tell myself. They will be men. She will be a woman. What a humbling and daunting at times responsibility to be their mom. I will always be their mom. I will remember nights spent up with them. I will remember how they played so hard all day long only to fall asleep moments after heads hit their pillows. I will remember lunches made and served outside on the picnic table, our own little oasis in the back yard. Glimpses of who these men and this woman will be are enough to form that lump in the back of my throat accompanied by the whole water thing in my eyes as well. Just as quickly as I'm struck to depths of my core of time gone by, of how big this task really is, I'm comforted. I'm told to, "Just enjoy them!". "They are mine. You can relax a bit and JUST ENJOY." And so...I do. I really really do!