Chloe is "Free!"

Happy Birthday to our sweet and funny light of our lives. Three years ago she made me a Mommy. My life has never been the same and I couldn't be happier about that! When we started talking about her birthday I asked her how old she was going to be. She told me "Free (Three), but can I just stay two?" I don't want her to get any older so I told her that she could stay two for as long as she wanted!

Happy Birthday Chloe Boe!

Happy Birthday...

Meghan!!! We hope that you have a fun day!!!

Silver Linings: My Pollyanna Post

Life has been crazy lately. Stressful even. I have really tried to look at the positive in situations and thought I would share a few:

Situation: Beckham, my sweet-sweet little boy, decided to use a pen and draw on my favorite couch...that just so happens to be white.

Silver lining: Beckham is one of the loves of my life. He brings so much excitement and laughter to my life. He is sweet and healthy. And, quite frankly, he could have used a Sharpie marker, right???
(By the way...The picture above is after I had cleaned off 1/2 of the mess. Did you know that hand sanitizer takes pen marks off of microfiber???)

Situation: I was in a car accident last week. It was my fault. I thought it was a 4-way stop. Ouch.

Silver Lining: My kids weren't with me. The person I hit was seriously a saint and I only hit her tire (she was driving an F-350...for those of you like me: that is a REALLY BIG truck). If I would have hit her a second before or a second after I did, there would have been major damage to her truck. There were no injuries.

Situation: Chloe's birthday party. I ordered all of the Fancy Nancy party stuff (i.e. plates, napkins, cups, pinata, goodie bags, decorations, etc.) from an online store. The store guaranteed that the stuff would be here in plenty of time for the party. The night before the party, I received an email from the company telling me that they had just mailed it out that evening. The store is in North Carolina. No chance of the items arriving in time for the party. My sweet husband went with me to 4 stores the night before the party in attempts to create a Fancy Nancy party with no Nancy.

Silver Lining: Come to find out, Chloe didn't seem to mind that Nancy didn't make an appearance. She and her friends didn't miss the Fancy Nancy plates, napkins and cups. And as I am typing this, I realize I didn't miss them either.

Situation: Losing to Chloe 14 times today.

Silver Lining: I got to play the Disney Princess Memory game with my sweet Chloe Boe 14 times.

I know that everything has a positive, it's just that sometimes I get so distracted that I don't even bother to see the good.

So here's to seeing the good in everything. Have a nice day!

7 Years...

...and not one itch! 

Happy anniversary to us!

(This post is a week late. That is how we do things around here...)

Sweet Advice

This made my day. I hope it makes yours...
(turn up the volume on your computer)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snAjZ8mfoYw

December Recap...

For those of you who don't know, Jon was born and raised in Holland. Amongst many fun and interesting traditions and holidays the Dutch celebrate is the holiday of Sinterklaas. Each year around the end of November, Sinterklaas (kind of like Santa) and his elves travel on a steamboat from Spain to Holland. Sinterklaas observes the children for a week and then determines if they deserve gifts. Every year on December 5 (the actual day of Sinterklaas' visit) we get together with Jon's side of the family to celebrate. This year we also celebrated Bobby's return home from serving a 2-year mission for our church earlier this year. It was the perfect time to update the family pictures!

At the end of November, we picked eachother's names for a gift exchange. As part of the exchange, we get to wrap the gift to represent the person in whom we are buying for. We also write a poem about the person and sign the letter from Sinterklaas. It is such a fun tradition (and if I wasn't out of town right now I would post some pictures of some of the fun wrap jobs this year. Maybe when I get home!). Another fun tradition is that the kids all put their shoes on the front porch. During the festivities, Sinterklaas comes and fills the kid's shoes with candy and knocks on the door. The kids run to the door to see what he left them. The kids LOVED it! I am excited that we have some of these fun traditions to carry on in our family to represent Jon's rich heritage.

See...I Told Ya!

On an earlier post in November, I mentioned that my sister-in-law, Meghan, was going to be taking Santa pictures. Look at how awesome these turned out!!! I am SO HAPPY that we have a happy picture of Chloe with Santa. She not only isn't crying, she actually looks like she is friends with the guy! It was fun because we are friends with "Santa" and so he really knew my kids and called them by their names.

Since everyone was in town for Sinterklaas, it was a perfect time to get a group shot of all of the cousins with Santa. 7 kids and Santa??? That takes talent! I hope she does it next year because it was totally worth it. Thanks, Meghan!