Our Felicity: 8 Years Old

It's hard to believe that our first baby is eight years old! Felicity Renee lives up to her name and brings us more happiness than words can say. She is many things but confident, smart, motivated, hard working, persistent, creative and very social are some that stand out the most.

Felicity loves school and all of the learning and socializing that happens there. She's convinced her second grade teacher is a genius and always has a new story from the second grade lunch, classroom, or playground scene. Her teacher tells us that Felicity's classmates come to her for help and that she's eager to give it.
Music and Art continue to be a joy for Felicity. She loved playing Velveeta in her first grade musical "The Cheese Stands Alone", and she's always singing songs she's learning in class. She's hoping to play the violin, and she somehow manages to know every word to all of the songs on the radio. Felicity enjoys learning new art techniques and spends a good amount of her free time drawing, painting and coloring.

This summer, reading became a real love for our girl...or maybe Harry Potter became the real love. She read the whole series between the last two weeks of school and summer's end! I love that she shares the love of reading and will read to her brother and sister as they are going to bed at night. 

We are so incredibly proud of how brave Felicity was this spring as she took on swim lessons for the first time. It was challenging. We prayed a lot. She persevered and was able to meet her goal by September. It's such a joy to see her enjoy the water and bob her heart out!

Felicity is so grown up in many ways, but she still loves to play. Legos are one of her favorites. Her big present this year was the Harry Potter Great Hall Lego set, and she begged and begged to work with Daddy on it every day until it was done. She's also really good at using all of the jumbled up pieces from various sets to create a whole new world. I love her creativity and patience in the process. She also enjoys playing LOLs, Baby Merlissa and Husband (and Taunaties), and Barbies with Moriah, and she can't go to sleep without Teddy and Moosie (one under each arm).
This spring when Mommy was huge and uncomfortable (waiting for Zina) we started watching Just Add Magic as a family. The show really inspired Felicity in the kitchen. She created her own cookbook of magic recipes and asked us almost every day to let her and Moriah try their hand at cooking them!

Something we can't leave out is Felicity's continuing obsession with the KC Chiefs. If there was a queen of Chiefs Kingdom I think she would be in the running. She not only loves Chiefs games but now keeps up with other teams' records to see how we match up. One of my favorite quotes from our girl was "yeah, I think we're gonna win on Sunday. Trubisky and his crew aren't as hot this year." (insert smiley cry face and sorry to all our Bears fan friends!). We took her to her first game in December and a preseason game in August. Sadly, they lost the game in December at the very end because of a two point conversion by the Chargers. I'll never forget seeing her sweet little face melt into tears. Thankfully we won the preseason game so she no longer thinks she might have been bad luck ;).
The biggest blessing in our sweet girl's life is watching the love she has for Jesus continue to grow. She is so faithful to hide His word in her heart and flies through the AWANA verses with great joy. It's a gift to watch her apply the truths she's learning at Sunday school as she works through God time cards in between Sundays. At the end of first grade her teacher wrote us a note that said Felicity shined God's light so bright. We were amazed because that was our prayer for the school year, that God would shine His light upon her. Before second grade started, she wrote out a beautiful prayer for the year. We're not even half way through, and God has already answered so many things: she has a new friend, jogging laps in P.E. are getting better, and she couldn't be happier with her teacher.
Felicity enjoys her church family so much that she doesn't want to sit with her own family at Wednesday night dinners! She's eager to be baptized, and we are eager to see the good work God has ready for her in days to come.

When she grows up she wants to live in Paris or next door to us (we have to paint it something other than yellow first). I asked Felicity some things she'd like to accomplish in her next year. She said she'd like to learn to do a cartwheel and something that "probably isn't possible but..." she'd really love to learn to throw a football as far as Patrick Mahomes. When she grows up she wants to be a scientist, artist, ballerina or an Aldi worker. I just love all of these responses because they're so our girl...Eight years old, dreaming big with a good head on her shoulders.

Z-Cakes: 3 Months

Zina is 3 months old, and as her Daddy tells her every day she's "the cutest one I saw"....

At this point it seems that Zina's baby blues are here to stay, and we're pretty excited to have another blue eyed girl in our lot. That makes our family tied with three browns and three blues. 

Zina is obsessed with her hands. Many cross-eyed stares this month as she takes them in with wonder. She also likes to have them in her mouth. A fair amount of drool makes us think she might be teething too. We love the way God made this girl: chubby legs, double chin, cheeeks, stork bites, a bit of brown, and in some lights, auburn hair coming in...

Zee-Zee absolutely despises tummy time but has great head support when being held. She's not a snuggler and always wants to be facing out, looking around at the big wide world. For the most part she's only happy during the day when she's being held or fed, but the play gym has given us a little independent time too. She even grabbed the plastic ring on it and gets mad when her hand gets stuck or she lets go and can't get it back. 

Until the last week of the month Zina was still sleeping through the night which made up for the grumpy, little sleep during the day. Recently she has decided that 3 a.m. is a good time for a meal though! 

Finally, I can't end this post without mentioning her sweet voice. She has discovered it, and it's so fun watching her listen to herself! Her big blue eyes look around like "who dat?" while she does her little croaky coos. It's the best.

Our Felicity: 7.25

I can't believe it has already been three months since Felicity turned SEVEN! I was out of commission in the early days of carrying baby number four so we didn't get around to her pictures until recently. What a great excuse to get outside in Felicity's first for real, fluffy, you can really build a snow man snow since she was one and a half! I love it too because she has recently started reading Narnia on her own, and it feels like we got to enter into it for a bit...

For her seventh birthday party she wanted a Greatest Showman theme. She has fallen in love with the music and loves to crank it up and sing and dance her heart out. Our circus decorations were up, but she just couldn't resist dressing up as Belle, village Belle to be precise. I love that Beauty and the Beast still holds a special place in Felicity's heart four years later.

Our girl continues to love school and goes bounding out of the car full speed ahead each day. Her teacher says she's much more talkative this year and is a wonderful helper. Felicity has great enthusiasm for math and a mind made for it. She's always asking for math problems even during bed time snuggles. She likes to solve them on her sequins flip pillow. I'm amazed at how quickly she can do mental math with large numbers and how many math facts she already knows by heart. We're excited to have this new gifting in our house and not so sure we'll be able to keep up for too long!

The biggest surprise of the year has been Felicity's obsession with the Chiefs. We started casually turning the games on, and she was captivated. Week after week she learned the game and players by watching the entire game. She was so focused. We were amazed! Her enthusiasm caused us to become super fans as well so when things were looking good for an amazing season, Dan got tickets for all three of us to go to a Thursday night game. We bundled up in at least four layers, and Felicity cheered her guts out. She loved watching all of her favorites: Mahomes, Kelce, Hill. We played the Chargers in a close game that ended with a devastating loss in the last seconds due to a two point conversion. Her heart was broken, and her face showed it. Immediate tears flowed and an expression appeared that I haven't seen since we put stuffed Santa away after Christmas when she was three years old! Thankfully we recovered from the trauma and continued to enjoy watching our team through the playoffs. She took the AFC championship loss a bit better saying she was happy because we still had a good season, BUT she is still saying she will NOT be watching the Super Bowl!

A few other things that can't go without mentioning are her mad skills in Monopoly and Clue, her forever first loose tooth that finally came out just before her birthday (while Mommy and Daddy were both gone for the first time in her little life), learning magic tricks from Daddy, still downing cheeseburgers with the best of them, reading her first book of the Bible (Mark) on her own, and setting high goals: In response to the table talk question "What do you hope to accomplish in your life?"...

"I want to get a 100 on all of the rest of my spelling tests and get back my Arabic." 

                                                                                          - Felicity Renee

The Little Prince: TWO

Our little Prince is TWO, and we couldn't love him more! It has been so much fun to see his personality come out in the past few months...

...and that's all I wrote when he actually turned two. The joys of being three of four kids! As I write, Ephraim is closer to 2.5, and it's hard to remember what he was like at two because he has really become something else in just a few months.

I do remember being completely smitten with him and amazed at how sweet and polite our Ephraim was at two. Even when he woke us up in the middle of the night for more water, he would always say "Water please" and "Thank you, Mommy" in his gravely, half asleep voice. 

He also thoroughly enjoyed driving around to see Christmas lights. We loved his little "oooh, that's pretty" from the back seat. Opening presents was also a new experience this year. What was inside was no matter. All the fun was in the opening.

As I type I'm reminded of a few other things because the c, m and command keys are missing from our keyboard thanks to this little guy. If light toggles or the wooden pole that keeps our sliding door locked were missing, we always knew Ephraim had made his daily rounds. Dan joked that he had to get through the same destructive routine to make every day complete. Elevating and messing were his favorite past time for sure but always with a gentle, sweet spirit...

The way God has filled our hearts and home with this little Honey Cake are too many to count. There's just no way to remember them all, but that's ok. We treasure them up along the way by giving thanks to the Giver of these gifts, and that's more than enough...

Our Little Wonder: Three Years

It's hard to know where to begin when a little life is lived so big that it's just bursting at the seams... 

Moriah is our middle girl, but she loves to live on the edge of extremes. She loves to play at full sound, running, jumping, dancing, giggling, chased and chasing...at the same time she can sit forever playing alone in her room talking softly to Peppa, princesses, baby dolls, or stuffed animals. Her temper can flare with screaming, vein popping, and exasperated sighs, but she's also the most empathetic member of our family. Countless times I've seen her carry the hurts of Felicity and Ephraim as if they were her own. I continue to marvel at where it all comes from and be thankful for the special work God did in creating Moriah Ann...

Moriah makes us a bit crazy at times. When things transition from loud to quiet too fast, you can almost guarantee she's upstairs changing her wardrobe AGAIN. Her favorites are swimsuits, tights, tutu skirts, and princess dresses. She's very independent and does a great job of dressing herself but gets extremely frustrated if things aren't working out and generally leaves a trail of wardrobe changes behind her. She also started waking up in the night again, and I'm not kidding she always wakes up sounding like a horror film. We're working on that. Age three goals. 

On the other hand, MoMo definitely keeps us all laughing. Her crazy, frozen, serious/somewhat disturbed with a bit of silly faces when she hears her favorite songs in the car have us rolling, and she has taken to dancing in a swimsuit on our ottoman every morning. "Mommy, can I have "Lights Shine Bright?" Her moves are a unique slow-Mo arm sequence with intense faces followed by supper fast punching arms. Gets me every time. 

No one will ever forget her grand entrance to the living room at Christmas proudly carrying the removable section of her potty chair and announcing her great accomplishment. She says the funniest things like "Look Mommy, I got screw drivas under my pillow. Wanna see 'em?!" and things we're still trying to undersand like "tamation is yuck. we have to clean it" and "let's go to the chocari baseball game" What is tamation and chocari? No idea, but she sure knows. 

A few other things can't be left out like Moriah's obsession with sweets and impersonations of Elmo and Cookie Monster. Her favorite foods are "Thai" which is anything with rice, chicken and red sauce and Tunisian cous cous. Every once in a while she surprises us with a Tunisian word and still wants a Tunisian story. She's a charmer for sure and seems to have a thing with older men. We are terrified! She adores her classes at church and all of the teachers and little friends that come with them. Chocolate eggs at Easter (almost a year ago), the crazy fireworks we saw on the 4th of July, open gym and Day Camp at Bloomingdale Church all made a lasting impression on her and come up pretty regularly in conversation. All things physical like summersaults and climbing seem to come naturally and without a hint of fear. And we've all fallen in love with the things she says:

tank tang/ chicken
tanakits/gymnastics swimmin' suit
green beams
swimmin' cool
You got armpips?
What you got?
What you say?
mash-a-tabowls/ mashed potatoes
I love you, sweetie.
Oh you so cute!
Oh my crash!
nuggle/granola bar

When I first coined her our Little Wonder, I had no idea how true to her it would be. As we leave year 3, I find myself on the edge of my seat excited and just a little terrified for what's in store for year four. No doubt some crazy, fun, hilarious, times ahead with just the right splash of sweet to keep us all under the spell that is Moriah.

The Little Prince: One Year

Ephraim Daniel you have been such a sweet presence in our family during this first year of your little life. There is a calmness that comes with that oh so serious piece of your personality. It has been such a gift and pure grace in a year of so many changes. In twelve months you've lived in four homes and traveled more miles than many go in a lifetime. You have been easy going and steady through it all. 

I am amazed by your persistence and determination and wonder how what is now a full focus army crawl toward a gadget, wire, cabinet, vent, bowl of water, etc. will look as God grows you in days to come. You haven't quite caught on to the word "no" and have to be removed physically over and over from the places you go that are off limits. This same spirit allows for some intense ring stacking and block building. Once you put your mind to something, you are a force to be reckoned with...

So many gifts to hold on to from this year...swimming on your tummy in the tub, your little newborn cry that sounded more like a goose than a man cub, your Dracula phase when all you had were the top two vampire teeth, how you relish the sister and daddy chorus of "nigh-night HONEY" each night before bed, your first word was Ma-Ma and block (blah) was a close second, your awkward bald ring around the back of your head stage, pulling up all of the vents over and over, your raspy early voice that eventually led to a big Bubba Roar!, army crawling like a boss and learning to crawl super fast on knees and hands at 11 months, rocking to music and standing at the piano whenever daddy plays, that sniffing crinkly nose smile that actually shows your top teeth, standing at the window to see the wide world outside or play peek-a-boo with the curtains, eating so much all day everyday, imitating my humming sound affects at one year old, making your sisters crack up laughing on a road trip at 8 months old, your giggle when I realize it's a fake cry and do my best imitation of you, and that stank face when you are upset...so many other things I wish I would have written down, but I'm grateful to have treasured them up in my heart. God has filled it so full with serious love for you our serious boy.

Once Upon a Time...

January 4, 2017

2 weeks old

1 month and still a bit shell shocked...

2 months

3 months and SO serious...

4 months

5 months and it's hard to keep a straight face with dino toes...

6 months strong...

7 months with so much to ponder...

8 months...finally caught a smile!

9 months

10 months

11 months

12 months

A whole lot of love...

...ONE handsome, sweet Little Prince...