New pictures!

Last month (before I broke my ankle) I finally got around to doing some individual pictures of the kids for the living room wall. It had been over a year, so it was definately time.

(The last time I did a real photo shoot with the kids was when Noah was only a month old). So we found a couple of partly cloudy days and took about a thousand pictures! :-)

These are the ones that made it up onto the wall!

Here are a few of the other pictures that I really liked (for one reason or another)!

I love how beautiful Jeffrey's eyes look in this picture . . . too bad his mouth is just hanging open :-)

Announcement

Here is Jeffrey's adoption announcement! It is a little small on the blog, but the top line reads: Lindsay, Emma, Nathan, and Noah are thrilled to announce the official adoption of their brother

I just have to say how happy I am with how this turned out!! My friend from highschool, Kaela Fisher, made it for us and she did such a great job on it. This is her bog site if you would like to contact her http://www.freshdesignsstudio.blogspot.com/ .

Allied Insurance trip to Florida!

April 11th - 17th Jerry and I left were able to spend a week in Marco Island, Florida without any kids!! It was WONDERFUL, of course!! Here are just some of the highlights of the trip. . .

Our hotel was right on the Gulf of Mexico. So we got lots of beach time!

This is the view from our balcony.
We spent hours just reading on the beach! So relaxing!

One of our VERY favorite parts of the trip was parasailing!! So fun, and not at all like we had pictured.

We spent 1/2 a day at the Naples Zoo. Here we are riding the camel at the Zoo.

One of the evening events that Allied put on was a dinner at the NGALA wildlife reserve. This turned out to be SO fun! Here we are posing with one of the stilt dancers.

The fire dancer

One of the coolest things about the wildlife reserve was that they let you get up-close-and-personal with the animals. Here we are feeding carrots to the camel and giraffe

The rhinoceros

One of the days we took an airboat tour of the Everglades National Park. Those boats are seriously loud and they go REALLY fast. Turned out to be so fun.

Here are some pics of the wildlife we saw in the Everglades

This bird rode on the front of our airboat for a while.

This picture is a kind of hard to see, but if you look really closely you can see the pinkish outline of a Manatee in the water. We had to track her for about 20 minutes before we got close enough to get this shot.
After the airboat ride, we got to hold a baby alligator. (I don't mind telling you this was not one of my favorite parts of the adventure).


For our final night in Marco Island, Allied put on a beautiful dinner and dance. Here we are before dinner

Here is everyone dancing up a storm!

Now, I can hear what you are thinking. "That looks like lots of fun, but WHERE are your FIVE kids while you are in Florida relaxing and having your adventures?"

They were having a blast in Fresno playing with Grandma and Grandpa Coleman!

Jim and Carol, you were such good sports to take on all five kids for a whole week. Thank you, thank you, thank you!! :-)

Quick Update

Our big news is that I broke my ankle last weekend, and unfortunately I'm too tired and my ankle is too sore to sit at the computer for very long. I am on crutches for another week, and then hopefully I will get a walking cast which will make life a little more doable (we’re crossing our fingers anyway).

That's the bad news. The good news is that Jeffrey's adoption has finally been scheduled. YYYYEEEEAAAHHH!! We signed the adoption papers last Friday, and we will finalize on the 22nd of June at 4:00pm. We weren't expecting it to be so far away (it's supposed to only be a two week wait on the courts), but evidently the courts are backed up for all of May . . . . grrrrrr.

Anyway, hopefully I'll get the adoption announcements out in the mail soon . . . once I'm feeling a little more energetic! And, once I get the sealing date set I'll post the announcement on here. My friend from highschool made them for us and they turned out SSSOOOO cute!

One of those perfect Saturdays

In between Conference sessions 3 weeks ago (while Noah was napping), the rest of us went outside to play football. :-) It turned out to be such a beautiful, perfect afternoon. So, I snapped some pictures. I have to put in a disclaimer here though. This is not how the girls usually dress; they were playing dress-up and didn't want to change when we went outside. :-)

Lindsay

Emma

Nathan

Jeffrey

Daddy and Jeffrey taking a break after the game!!

*Be sure to scroll down if you want to see Emma's school play