Spring Break and a Date

Yay for Spring Break!

Emmett's parents spent a week with us. They played tons of games with the kids, sat in on therapists' visits and doctors' appointments, babysat so that Emmett and I could go out, and took all the kids to the museum. It was great.

About a month ago, Emmett and I attended a video conference hosted by our church. It was called "Marriage on the Rock," led by Jimmy and Karen Evans. One of the recommendations from the conference was that couples should take a marriage vision retreat once a year. We've never really done that, so we thought this would be a good time to try it. We downloaded the kindle version of this guidebook, and took it with us on our overnight date. Our review: we liked it! The guidebook had some good questions, and definitely sparked some interesting conversation. We spent a lot of time talking about what we value, why God put us together, and what we *hope* our kids are learning. There are a couple of things that we say we value (like living simply), but practically, I don't know if we live it out. Or at least, we don't do it intentionally. :)

We are planning to have a follow-up date sometime, because we didn't get to talk about everything. If anyone wants to borrow the kindle book, I will gladly loan it to you! (I think I can loan it out for 2 weeks at a time).

Here's a quick look at Spring Break:

Papa loves to exercise with babies. :) When my other kids were little, Papa would take it upon himself to teach them whatever was coming up next - peekaboo, rolling, sitting, climbing stairs - whatever. So I had Papa sit in on Ben's PT session, and turned him loose with Ben. Papa helped Ben practice sitting up, crawling position, bearing weight on his legs, reaching, holding his bottle, and probably more.

Here's Ben trying to hold his bottle. Check out that hair!

Corrie is playing with some toys from a Burger King kid's meal. We ate out a lot while the in-laws were here. :)

Evan has played A TON of games this week. This is Pokemon. We've also played Tetris-Link, Hanafuda (highly recommend), Crazy Eights, Battleship, Sorry, Old Maid, Hullabaloo, etc.

Here's Emmett being an awesome dad. Pokemon is a LONG game and I refuse to play it. Emmett, on the other hand, actually bought some of the cards for himself so he can play with Evan. That's love.

We're planning some more fun family stuff for the next few days. Hopefully, I'll remember to take pictures and report back.