April!

An exciting event of April was Zach's 35th birthday! 

Celebrating Zach's birthday dinner!

The girls painted him a picture for their gift. 

We also celebrated Easter this month! We invited some neighborhood friends over to enjoy some fun festivities with us. Here we are decorating eggs.

Here we are making edible empty tombs.

Carrie had her own artistic interpretation of the tomb.

Then we went inside, read the Easter story, and made resurrection rolls. 

Here we are Easter morning. 

After a lovely church service in which the childrens' choir sang praises with the adult choir, we headed to my folks for a cousin egg hunt!

The crew ready to hunt. 

Joy missed the hunt, but woke up to enjoy some play time. 

What a gift to celebrate freely the joy of knowing our Savior rose from the dead, conquering our enemies, sin and death! What a triumphant Savior we serve!! 

We decided to take a Spring vacation this year. The cottage was open and Zach had a Sunday off preaching so we went for it! We packed up for a week at my folk's cottage to enjoy some quality time together by the lake. Here are some shots from the first day...

We had a wonderful first day, but things quickly turned South as two of the kids got croup the first night (probably due to playing in the cold water) and another kid threw up a couple times. And that continued the second night. So after two nights of no sleep we had 4 cranky, tired kids and 2 cranky, tired parents...we decided to call it, pack up and head home where we could at least hope to get some sleep. 

It was a big bummer to have to leave after all the work of packing/preparing. On the drive home we asked that God would redeem this vacation. And He did! Once we got home we unpacked and had three great days going to fun places in GR as a family. We went to the park one day, the public museum the next and the Children's Museum the third. And we all caught up on our sleep and had a great Staycation. 

 Daddy and Lydia digging out dinosaur bones together- a cool souvenir from the museum.

 This month I got to take Carrie out for a Mamma/daughter date. She chose Russ'. (Is this my kid, or what?) It was awesome.

 Joy enjoyed her first outdoor walk in the stroller this month.... although she missed seeing most of it.

 That's better.

 Yeah for bike rides!

 All ready for church!

 Si, our little photo bomber.

 Here we are in the van. Just want to remember what traveling with 4 kids in 4 years is like.

 Mama and Carrie having a snuggle after some cloud gazing.

 We went to a fun gymnastics class this month. Silas loved the pit. He just jumped in, climbed out, jumped in, climbed out the entire time. Actually, I pulled him out every time. But he loved it.

Joy slept most of the time, which made it much easier for me. 

 Four kids in a trunk. It sounds like the title of a childrens' book. :-)

 Jump time!

 A group shot at the zoo!

 Silas seeing the tiger.

 A whole family shot- I'm trying to get more of these.

 Just enjoying some of the warmer weather.

 Enjoying some Mc Donalds at the park.

 Beautiful girls.

 Our washer broke so Zach took some time to fix it. Silas had to help.

 Enjoying some Joy Joy snuggles to end the month.