Happy Mother's Day!!

This is the first time Rachel has officially written her name - the letters aren't all t o get her but I love it! Sweet!

God has blessed me with my precious daughters!

They sure love each other!

The infamous sand pit

Vimal loves digging sand pits at the beach for Rachel (or are they really for him?) to play in. So, every time we are at the beach he digs a big hole so that she can play in there and then so as the tide comes in he wants her to get in and get caught. She loves it!

Discovering Sand

Anna's first experience with sand was so much fun. She kept picking it up and letting it fall through her fingers - she was so mesmerized.

Pre-school friends

Here is a sweet picture of Rachel's pre-school buddies - Bethany, Sophia and Eliza. It was Sophia's last day of school before she moved to California. We miss Schultz family already!!

Our family

NC State Farm Days

Sisters

Marbles Museum

Pretending to be a Doctor in the ambulance

John Brian and Rachel playing in the water center

Playing "cashier" in the pretend grocery store

In a predicament

A few days before Anna was actually crawling she got stuck under her crib. Crawling backwards seems to come first with most babies and Anna followed suite.

Big Month

This past month has been quite eventful in our house. And I often remind myself that I need to take a few minutes to sit down and blog about what is going on. And to share all of the new things that Anna is doing but the most I seem to manage is to jot it down in her first year calendar. Even getting it on the calendar is an accomplishment some days.

I am finally coming to grips with the fact that I am not a very organized person. It is hard to admit, but it is true. I fail to prioritize and follow through. I am often just lazy and do whatever is the easiest thing to do at the moment and whatever I want to do rather than what is the most important. I am only telling you this because my blog is often a reflection of this. I am not a very good writer so I usually just post pictures and don't often write about how things are going and what is new around here because it takes energy that I don't want to expend. Just getting my pictures uploaded and onto the computer and finding the time sit down and post some of them seems to be about as far as I get. I am going to try to do better about occasional written updates and not just pictures - although I know you all love the pictures of our precious s (that is what you really come here to see, right??). And by the way, if you are visiting...please leave a note - I would love to hear from you that you've been to check up on us. You must click on the comments section under that specific post and then if you don't have a google account you have to reply under annoymous.

I don't have Anna's calendar in front of me now, but I'm going to do my best to remember the dates. Okay, here are some of the events since my last post:

April 8th - Anna started crawling
April 9th- Anna started speed crawling :)
April 10th - I got to volunteer in Rachel's class - so fun!
April 14th - Anna's first tooth broke through
April 23rd - Anna started pulling up on some things
April 24th - 28th - my roomate and great friend from college, Tracy visited from Minnesota for a few days. Thanks for coming, Trac!
April 27th - Anna said the "B" sound for the first time (she is not nearly as talkative as Rachel and hasn't babbled yet so she is making progress )
April 29th - Anna started clapping (and boy is she pround of herself!)
May 1st - Vimal and I celebrated our 9 year Anniversary!! I love you, Sweetheart!! Thank you, Kristin for watching the s so we could enjoy dinner out!
May 2nd - Anna's first trip to the beach and Rachel had a blast...she absolutely loves the beach - we went to NMB on a retreat with our Sunday school class at church and had a great time.
May 7th - Anna will be 9 months old!

A few other random things - we visited Marbles Museum in downtown Raleigh with Elizabeth Ratledge, her little boy, John Brian and her mom - we definately want to go back! We also went to Farm animal days that NC State has with our friends the Albaughs and the Noethers - that was a lot of fun, too!

I'll post a few pictures soon to catch you up to speed. Thanks for stopping by.

First Bath together!

Rachel and Anna had thier first bath together a few days ago...it worked really well with Anna in the baby bathtub inside of the big bathtub! They had a lot of fun playing together!

Foreshadowing things to come!

Daddy is the best!

Thanks, Grandma

Shovel some food into Anna's mouth and you will be her new best friend. This loves to eat and can put away some food. So far she likes just about everything...the plain yogurt is a little sour for her but just add some mashed banana and voila...a yummy lunch! Her little smile says is all...thanks for feeding me, Grandma!

Jumping Bean

Sweet Faces

Easter Birthday Party

Rachel had a very small party the day before Easter with just a few of her friends. It was such a fun time and because her birthday (the 20th) fell so close to Easter this year I decided to do an Easter Egg party. So, we colored Easter eggs and had a Easter Egg hunt afterwards. It went so well. This is the first time we have colored eggs with Rachel and we'll definately do it again next year...it was a lot of fun!

Easter Egg Hunt

The Friday before Easter I decided to take Rachel to her first Easter egg hunt. It was the Town of Cary Easter egg hunt and although my neighbor had warned me it was crazy...I had no idea! What should have taken me 5 mintues to get there took 20 minutes to just get to the park and and park my car. Then we had to walk 1/2 a mile to get to the correct field for her age group -and by the time I got there, the egg hunt for her age group had ended so I let her go to the field close by (didn't want to miss out after the ordeal to actually get there!). Well, it was more of a run and grab as many eggs as you can type of thing rather than a hunt. They just scatter eggs all over a baseball field! Rachel seems a bit disappointed in this picture. Not sure we'll be doing this "hunt" again next year!

Cupcakes this way!

On Rachel's birthday we had our neighborhood friends over for cupcakes! Many of our afternoons are spent playing outside with our neighbors in the cul-de-sac.

Happy 3rd Birthday, Rachel!

Our sweet Rachel turned three on March 20th! This year she understood a little more about her birthday so that made it fun. I'll post more pictures later, but I wanted to at least get one up!

ABCs

Rachel loves to write and is practicing her ABCs. My letters are on the left and hers on everything on the right...I'm not sure how well you can see in the picture but I was pretty impressed that she could write them this well.