January and a Smidge of December

Donovan was dedicated at church yesterday. Our fourth one, our last one. Alex and I both really enjoyed standing before the church professing our committment as parents to raise Donovan to be a Godly man someday. Pastor Jim gave us a verse for him. And oddly enough, the verse that he chose has a phrase from a song that I have been singing to Donovan in the kitchen for about 6 months whenever he's snacking in his high chair and I am cleaning. Anyway, he chose it because Donovan means "delightful one, or one who delights."

Zephaniah 3:17
"The Lord your God is with you, he is mightsy to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing."


Isabella turned 7! I cannot believe I have a seven year old child! She loves school. Goes to school, comes home, immediately does her homework and then tries to get her sisters to play pretend school with her. Loves horses and got to ride one for her birthday at a local stable. She really enjoys ballet, reading, and if she finds out she is going to learn something new at school she wants me to teach it to her the night before so she is prepared and won't have a chance of getting an answer wrong. She is still best friends with Layla and hopefully that will last until eternity. She currently has two top missing teeth and one on the bottom.



Addison turned 3!
Addison is so fun. She has a sweet little voice, still has really bad grammar and pronounces things funny, but we are working on it because we realize it won't always be cute. She recently started ballet lessons and oh my... she is the cutest ballerina in the world. She follows her teacher around like a little puppy. As soon as we take the big girls to school at 9, she asks for lunch as soon as we pull in the driveway at 9:03. Asks for a snack about 500 times a day, is the tiniest, skinniest girl, hair is finally starting to thicken up and grow, she has what I call cartoon eyes because number one they are huge with big thick eyelashes but mainly because when she gets upset about something they literally fill halfway up with tears while other tears stream down her face. She is very cuddly, very sweet, stubborn, and if Mickey Mouse were real they would be best friends because she adores him and always wants to watch Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.





Donovan had his first birthday!!! My little baby....sigh. He is now a full fledged walker. Loves his independence, already is eating me out of house, has the most hilarious laugh and if something strikes him as funny you can usually get him to do if for at least 10 minutes straight. When he wakes up he immediately throws everything out of his bed. Just started calling me "mama" with his lips all tucked in and it is SO cute! He is such a boy, he loves to crack his head on, well, anything, but thinks it is particularly funny to do it other people's heads. I swear he walks around everyday with a concussion. He did find out that it isn't so funny to do it on the kitchen floor though. He won't eat anything in the morning until he has had a bottle of milk. His big sisters have never had a cross moment with him, even when he pulls their hair or headbuts them. He can do no wrong and they adore him.







In other news we took the kids sledding for the first time. You may be thinking, "Mari, how is that possible? Izzy is 7 and you haven't been sledding before now? Well, no. I'm always pregnant in the Winter and Alex just never took the bigger kids by himself. They LOVED it! Except Donovan. Every time Addison would go down she would just remain on the inner tube and someone would pull her back up the hill. Halfway up she would say, "lets go again!" Of course she loved it, she never once got off her little snow pillow.



I hope you enjoy this post because I was just going over my homework for the week and I have about 150 pages to read for two different classes this week and it is just going to get worse as the semester goes on. So I may not be back on for a while.