Junia's strawberry party

In June, we finally got to celebrate Junia's 1st birthday with a strawberry party in our backyard. 🍓🍓 It was the kids' first time playing with their cousins since January, and everyone was overjoyed! We piled our plates high with hot dogs, barbecue chips, and strawberries, then later vanilla bean cake and ice cream. Junia was over the moon to have people over, lick the dairy-free frosting off her cake, and unwrap a few gifts. Oh, pretty girl, you are loved. 💕

Strawberry lemonade, and fresh strawberries that we picked the day before!

There went the cake to the ground!

She opened up a sweet board book, a baby doll, and a ball - perfect gifts for a one-year-old!

xo

Rachel

Junia is ONE!

Our sweet girl turned ONE on May 4th!

Happy 1st Birthday to our sweet Junia!! 🌻 This past year with her has been nothing short of a treasure. Though I've shed some tears over this milestone, we had a great quarantine celebration, and I'm so happy to spend my days with her. 🎉🎉

She ended this cake celebration
with marshmallow cream in her hair,
and red raspberries smashed on her romper.
More than the cake,
I think she enjoyed the attention,
and "singing" along to her own
happy birthday song
underneath her birthday tree -
a young crabapple 
that blooms with tiny white flowers

just in time for May fourth. 🌼🌼

12 month photos

I made a collage with Junia's month photos, and it's so fun to look back on all of her looks throughout this first year! I think one of the biggest changes is how much her hair lightened from the dark brown to blonde!

I said to Steve today, "Can you believe we've taken 48 month photos?" It hasn't been easy (getting babies to pose!) - but I will definitely treasure them!

xo

Rachel

May days

Here I am playing catch up again! I keep saying that once Junia sleeps through the night, I will get a better schedule going - but she still isn't there yet! :) This morning, she woke up at 6:30a (which is unusual for her), and she didn't fall back asleep because the room was so bright. Now in the late morning, she's taking an extra long nap, giving me a chance to finish this post that I started (probably a month ago).

Junia walks easily with a push-walker, but she doesn't show a ton of interest in walking by herself. She's been crawling for 7 months, so I think she just feels like that's good enough :)

Reading to his sister - I'm thankful that it seems to have clicked with him recently!!

Me, "Who do you want to color from Frozen?"

August, "Anna's dad."

Not the answer I would have thought, but we can make that happen! Haha.

All the flowering trees were so gorgeous this spring!

Wearing NPU colors for Blue and Gold Day! 

They set up three shops - ice cream shop, coffee shop, and pancake shop! I love when they play with the toy food!

Never enough sleeping baby photos.

She's always pulling everything out in the kitchen while I cook!

Checking out the details of the redbud tree.

We're missing spring sports - soccer and baseball - but they can still dress the part!

The girl cousins found a baby turtle near a pond, and they brought it to show us! It was so cute!

I tried Joanna Gaines' recipe for chocolate chip cookies (from her first cookbook), and the cookies are amazingly chewy and sweet!

For Earth Day, my mom dropped off an activity for the boys with recycled magazine pages. We put these cutout flowers on our front window! She also gave me a reusable Swedish dishcloth and some magazine clips she thought I would like. :)

He calls himself, "Indiana August" in this hat. 

I loved these Mother's Day cards and gifts! Both Nolan and Ephraim colored cardinals and flowers for me :)

Reading outside on a warm afternoon!

There are so many maple "helicopters" in our neighborhood right now, and the boys really like them. Our gutter was growing many maple trees before Steve tore them out!

Sweet girl.

"How completely satisfying

to turn from 

our limitations

to a God

who has none."

A.W. Tozer

XO

Rachel