Lydia's recital

 After a wonderful year of Monday morning ballet, Lydia had a recital.  Nana & Grandpa came to watch.  This photo was practicing during the dress rehearsal (the night we returned from the beach).  Lydia did wonderful!  She gracefully performed all the moves.

 Final bow with the other groups.

 Downtown theater

The family all dressed up for the show!

Beach 2012

We had a wonderful and short beach vacation in Port A.  We arrived and headed straight for the beach which was covered in seaweed-rather disappointing but didn't stop our fun.  Including the seaweed it was a very nature-ful trip!

Caleb used a cast net to catch mullet and Gloria loved inspecting them.

We also found a starfish and enjoyed watch the clam bury themselves in the sand.  One evening millions of tiny clams would pop themselves up out of the sand all at the same time!

We checked into our hotel (King Fish Courts) to clean up (four showers in 48 hours!) and did the obligatory shark stop!  Then to IGA for chicken which we ate while watching dolphins by the ferry.  Then a quick trip to the Birding Center-not many birds but its a peaceful pleasant must stop.

Caleb and I watched The Help while the girls played and finally fell asleep!

The next morning we went to the new Charlie's pasture nature area-something new!  Something old-Climbing the dunes-this was the first year for Gloria to join us!

Then we used seine net to catch tons of tiny fish, a few crabs and other cool stuff like a sea hare.  We always had a bucket full, once it was dumped on the sand and the seagulls loved their easy to get meal.  

We spent the heat of the day off the beach, including lunch at Virginia's by the Bay.  The girls didn't eat anything but had a great time visiting the kids next to us, watching dolphins jump in front of a huge ship, seeing boats come and go, and seeing the Lydia Ann Lighthouse.  Caleb and I enjoyed all that and the food!

After resting at the hotel, we got our suits back on.  The girls loved the birds (Gloria keeps asking when can we go back to our hotel and see the birds?) and the peacocks even spread their tales some.

We made a sandcastle

Had a picnic that turned into feeding the seagulls (and yes that is a huge bulldozed pile of seaweed behind them)

Found a beautiful mermaid.

Lydia even helped daddy with the net.  We stayed until we watched the sunset behind the dunes and then back to the hotel for one more night.

Next morning we hurried to the beach for one more morning of fun in the sun (no sunburns for us!).  Lydia and I went out deep and fish were jumping every where.  Since the sun was rising behind them we could see their silhouettes in the cresting of the waves-super cool!  We found two more mermaids (Lydia said she wanted the people walking down the beach to think she was a real mermaid).  Then we cleaned up, checked out and stopped at Subway (of course and they wanted me to come back and work) for another picnic at the ferry dock.  Fabulous time!  And there is really nothing quite as wonderful as watching your children frolic in waves even if they are full of seaweed!

Gloria the Ballerina!

 Gloria in the 2 & 3 year old class had an in class recital.  Nana & Grandpa came to watch.!

 This was during the actually performance, so proud of those graceful moves.  After a wonderful start of the year in ballet, the last few weeks she had spent a great deal of the time laying on the ground (while the littler girls were still participating) so we bribed her by saying we would get ice cream if she did all the moves.  And she delivered!

 Some of her classmates-Mary, Lucy (who is her good friend) Gloria, Julia and Harper

 With Ms Cherami after they got medals for a great year.

With Nana & Grandpa at Amy's Ice Cream.
We learned about and earned money the week before and then took them to Terra Toys (Keep Austin Weird) where they picked between lots of great (and expensive) toys!

Rock Star!

 A friend from AWANA had a rock star birthday party and the girls got all decked out!  We walked in on a red carpet and got to get tattoos, and hair color.  Then there was tons of candy including a pinata (I love the picture of Gloria whacking it)

 They ate and ate, a few moments after this picture Gloria also picked up a cookie.  She had a bite of my piece of cake and then woke up that night crying in her sleep that she didn't get her own piece of cake-sugar induced nightmare I guess!  But after I cut her off the sweets she was fine and probably consumed half a watermelon!

The gang of 5 were all there and this is them striking a rock star pose!  Rachel, Abby, Nita, Lydia & Avery. Birthday parties for them will change this fall as they will all be in different KGs.

Lydia's Performances

 
Lydia has been a busy girl these past months!  This is her church choir end of the year performance.  They did three songs before the big kids did a play about Daniel.

 This is her AWANA awards and small performance

 She also had a pre-K graduation!  They sang a song for every month and spelled some words and were super cute.  We will miss her wonderful teachers-Ms. Muriel and Ms Jill.  It was a great year!

 Caroline, Ellie, Abraham, Emily, Lydia, Mitchell, Chase, Lucas, Lauren-all the girls got along wonderfully so we are going to try and do a summer playdate.

The day of Gloria's in class recital, Lydia's class also had a parent's watch time.  She did wonderful but was so serious while performing so we got to talk about smiling before the big on stage performance...

Summer Fun

I am behind about 10 things in blog posts.  We are still here but summer has been busy (in a good way) and I am watching a tv series called Merlin on Netflix and that is taking up my computer time :).  But the summer will slow down and I'll blog about the beach, camping, recitals and more!

Love & War book

I read John & Staci Eldredge's marriage book.
First of all, I didn't agree with every sentence they said, but I do agree with the big points.  Also it took me a while to get out of my cynical self and jump into their larger than life world (which is also explored in Wild at Heart & Captivating) of danger and romance and beauty.
The couple team wrote this book and tell stories and thoughts both in the first person.  Their biggest advice in marriage is:
1.  Find life in God.
2.  Deal with your brokenness.
3.  Learn to shut down the spiritual attacks that come against your marriage.
They are huge into spiritual warfare and there are two chapters on fighting (against the devil and not each other).  The subtitle of the copy I read is Find Your Way to Something Beautiful in your Marriage but it could be Fight, because if one does everything they recommend, it would be a lot of work and time and effort (of course).
My favorite chapter was on the Shared Adventure.  Our life and our story is about something bigger than ourselves and that mission is part of marriage, but a line I love is that you just can't jump into the huge stuff (of glorifying God and 'saving' the world) without 'practice' in just enjoying each other and navigating life together.  That is really freeing to me who feels guilty for any trip that isn't a mission trip.
I need to reread this one and discuss with Caleb what we really would like to incorporate into our lives.  I highly recommend it (and not just because I received this book free in agreement to review it on my blog from Blogging for Books - WaterBrook/Multmonah)