10 years of wedded bliss

Last August Kevin and I celebrated 10 years of marriage. 10 years, how can that be? We told ourselves early on in our marriage that we would do a tropical all inclusive for our 10 year anniversary because we didn't for our honeymoon. Last year we were a little busy with 2 new little munchkins so we didn't make it on our trip, but we thought we could pull it off over spring break this year and if we didn't do it now we didn't know when we would do it. So in January we decided to go for it and we booked 4 nights at the Barcelo Maya resort in the Riviera Maya. It was heavenly! Our parents were gracious enough to take on the tribe, splitting the time between both of them. My parents had them the first couple nights and then Kevin's parents flew in and stayed with them the last couple nights. THANK YOU moms and dads. We could not have done it without you. We knew our kids were in great hands.

The ocean view from our beach.

Our travel agent told the resort that we were an anniversary couple so we had this sweet treat waiting for us when we arrived.

Dinner out one night.

Before dinner the last night. We enjoyed gorgeous weather the whole time (while it those at home enjoyed thunder, lightning and hail).

One of the pools and swim up bar.

My view for the first day. It was so great to sit and read and sleep. I read two books and averaged 2 naps a day. By the last day I was unable to take a nap. I think I finally caught up on sleep after 6 years:) We didn't do much, which was perfect, just what we wanted! 

We did do a little bit of snorkeling. Right off the pier by our resort there were a lot of fish. Mostly because people would feed them there. This picture was taking shortly before Kevin got hit on the head by fish food that some ladies were throwing in. They found it quite hilarious and Kevin was wondering why there were so many fish around him.

The section of the beach where our half of the resort was. This is taken from the pier. The resort was huge and very nice, we did a lot of walking.

Another before dinner picture. We felt so blessed to be able to take the time to relax and connect without our kiddos around. We did think of them often though and decided that we'll have to go back in another 10 years and take them with us. We are so blessed to have each other and it was great to be reminded of what it was like when it was just us.

Happy Easter

Happy Easter! Praise the Lord for his amazing gift of salvation through his son. Here are some Easter pics before church, as well as some from our Easter egg hunt with friends a couple weeks ago. The order got messed up somehow, but I don't feel like fixing it:)

All the kiddos present for the hunt. You can see how happy my little girl is. All these kids 5 and under! It was a little crazy, but super cute and fun.

Once Brooklyn learned what to do she was all about holding her basket and filling it up.

I think Hudson only put two eggs in his basket before he realized there was candy in the eggs, then all he wanted to do was eat it.

Happy girl Mo.

Ethan and his buddy Trey.

Morgan and her buddy Emmry.

All four kids, as good as it's gonna get.

Back to Easter morning. Matching outfits from Oma. I need to get them dressed again and take a picture standing up so you can see how cute the girls' dresses are. Thanks Oma!

My pretty Easter tulips.

Ethan and Morgan

Lest we forget the "older two", I thought I'd let you know what Ethan and Morgan have been up to this past week. Ethan had his first ever Open House and Music Program at school this past Tuesday night. It was fun for me to be on the mommy end of an Open House at school. Paying attention to only my child and not schmoozing with all the parents:) I was a lot more relaxed and a lot more proud.

Ethan was beaming like this all night. His teacher is also the music teacher. She does amazing work. It is incredible how she gets all those kids to sing and do super adorable motions. I have never seen Ethan sing like he did that night.

"Allelu, Allelu, Allelu, Alleluiah....Praise ye the Lord....."

All three Kindergarten classes totally into their song.

Morgan was beyond excited for her first haircut. My friend has been coming to our house to cut my hair and Hudson's hair for the last several months. It is so nice to not have to load everyone up and head out to a salon. This time I had her trim some of Morgan's dead ends off, with hopes of having Rapunzel hair soon:)

Ethan also had his first ever Grandparent's Day at school on Thursday. He was excited to have Nana and Papa come to see his room and watch him perform in a program.

We've also been to a few Easter egg hunts over the last couple weeks. Pictures to come soon of those and hopefully a nice Easter picture of the monkeys.

Do-it-yourself photo shoot

Since my favorite photographer up and moved to Dubai this past winter and the thought of getting these two monkeys to sit on a red dot at JCPenny's is enough to make me sweat,  I decided to take Hudson and Brooklyn's 18 month (ok 19 1/2 month) pictures myself. Instead of setting myself up for a failure of a perfect photo shoot, I decided to just snap some pics of them playing before church last week. Not the most beautiful background, but they'll have to work. My angels....

Yesterday I decided to brave Savemart by myself with the 3 younger ones to do our weekly shopping. It actually went well. H and B are still shell shocked when they go to stores because they never get to go to stores, so they are usually very well behaved. As we were walking through the store Hudson started hugging Brooklyn saying, "uv oo" "uv oo". So sweet!

Another Hudson story: Yesterday afternoon he hurt himself when the kids were out playing in the garage, I took him in the house in hysterics and gave him Brooklyn's binki that happened to be sitting on the counter. Mid tears he takes it out of his mouth and says "Brooky, Brooky" He wouldn't suck on it because he knew it wasn't his. Smarty pants.