Picking strawberries

Shuttle launch

Monday morning, after Easter, the space shuttle launched. It launched at 6:21am. Marty, Graham and I watched it from our backyard. You could see it perfectly and so well since the sun was just barely coming up. It made the smoke stream look like it was glowing! I took a few pictures of the smoke stream after the launch and when the sun was up even more. These pictures barely show how beautiful the sky looked! I love being so close to the space center:)


up close of the glowing part,


with some more smoke stream,

seeing the reflection in the water. So beautiful!

Easter

So after Abbie's birthday part of Easter, we sent the kids upstairs to play with Abbie's presents. Then Marty and I got an Easter egg hunt ready for them. We decided this year to combine the baskets and the egg hunt. So we put an initial on each of the eggs and then inside some of the eggs where numbers that went with their prizes. We put some candy and quarters in the other eggs. The kids thought it was fun to have to find their initial. We opened all the prizes and by that time, Marty had to be back at church and I had to start getting myself and the kids ready for church. Right when we were getting ready to leave I thought about taking a few pictures. This is the one that is right on front of our bushes that have pink flowers on them right now - what was I thinking? Actually, I was thinking I don't care I just need to make sure and take at least one picture of them in their Easter outfits and to do it quickly or we would be late!

Then after church I tried again, not much better! It was bedtime by now. I think my favorite though is the one where they almost look like Charlie's Angels:)

The kids were really cute when we were going to bed. They asked if we could have some more Easter tomorrow, since we didn't get to celebrate it all day. They ended up hiding their eggs for each other, it was really sweet.

Abbie's 5th birthday

Easter Sunday was Abbie's 5th Birthday. It was difficult to have another birthday on a holiday since Graham and Molly's are December 26th and 27th, but what a great day to celebrate. We got to celebrate Abbie and the fact that Jesus died for us and rose from the dead! What a way to celebrate our physical life and our spiritual life in Christ!

I had asked Abbie for a while what she wanted to do for her birthday. The only thing she kept telling me was that she wanted us to have balloons and to decorate for her birthday - that was easy enough. Saturday night she was so excited to go to bed. When she saw that it was dark outside she actually started jumping up and down! After she got in bed she told me that I needed to make sure that Graham, Molly and I (daddy was going to be at church) were awake before she was so that we could tell her "surprise" in the morning:) It was really cute. Here's the "surprise" she woke up to:

Her bedroom door, she was really surprised to have streamers and balloons in her face...

Then they were all the way down the stairs...

A "Happy Birthday" sign in the doorway to the kitchen...

and finally streamers and balloons in the kitchen. (Abbie is in the picture because at this time she was running circles under the streamers - she really liked them!)

Daddy had to be at church for the morning Easter services so we let her open her new Barbie movie so she wouldn't be asking mommy all morning long to open her presents:) It was a good distraction for a few hours at least. She was very patient and absolutely wanted her daddy to be there when she opened her presents. She loves her daddy that's for sure!

Hard to believe our princess is 5!

We used the candles where the flames are colored, the purple one was pretty cool, but they had a ton of smoke when she blew them out.

I have a cute video of her opening one of her presents that I will try to post.

After lunch, presents and cake we had our Easter day activities that I'll post about later. It was a fun filled day!