Sunday School Shower!

This weekend, baby boy Brogli and I were showered in style!

First off, I just have to tell you how amazing our Sunday school class is- Matt and I prayed for a long time for godly friends and a real sense of community. God definitely provided it in our class! When I think about all the years that we weren't committed to getting up early enough on a Sunday to go to Sunday school and truly get involved in knowing our classmates, I can only think of all the time we wasted not having these great people as friends (and our teachers!). These are the kinds of people who you can call on- ask them to pray about anything from a parent with cancer to a lost pet and they will. They will call to check on you, email encouragement, and share a laugh when you take things too seriously. I know I'm starting to sound like a Hallmark card, but we have made some true friendships and have loved sharing life with all the members!

Every baby born into this class gets completely showered in gifts and more importantly prayers, and everybody signs up to bring the family like a week of meals. It's amazing, and I am so thankful and blessed to be the recipient while having this second baby of ours!
I think this is the first SS event Shannon hosted in her home, and it couldn't have been more lovely! I'm so excited to get used to this all boy stuff- look at what cute decor it made! Loved the little blue booties on the cake:
The only food I requested when asked was "any kind of dip" and I think that meant that every body made their favorite... oh man, I could just live on this table for awhile:
Everyone was so generous with gifts, Matt and I felt so blessed unpacking them all from the car later that afternoon- I can't even tell you! We never expected to have a 'second child' shower, and every one was so thoughtful! There were even some handmade gifts! Jen made the most amazingly detailed hand-painted Noah's Ark onesie, and Jillian made me mommy jewelry- a pair of beautiful earrings with both kids' birthstones on them!
The girls were also sweet enough to include my two sisters-in-law and my mother-in-law in the party. I was terrible about taking many photos, my friend Sarah took most of these! Here is most of the crowd, I was so happy to get to see so many SS friends at once!
I had such a good time that I sat & wrote my thank-you notes that night before I forgot any of the funny jokes and things from the party, planning to take them with me to church the next morning. I even put them in a bag and hung it on the doorknob to not forget them... well, I walked right out the door without them! I just had to laugh because that's how my brain has been this whole pregnancy. I forgot Kenna's diaper bag too!

Thank you again Faith 1 ladies! You are the best!

Sunday School Valentine's

This week I got the opportunity to host one of our Sunday School classes ladies lunches. We do this every month, and it's a great time for us ladies to get together, and for those of us that have kids to let them play together. We've gone to the park and people's homes, and it is always such a fun time! Since it's February, the theme was of course Valentine's day, and one of our fabulous moms made cupcakes for the kids to decorate with sprinkles and candies. We had something like 8 ladies and 8 kids under the age of 4... well, 9 if you count Angela's pregnant belly which we definitely do! We haven't had that many little ones all in the house since Kenna's birthday!.

It was loud, fun, and a little wild, and we had seriously some of the most delicious chocolate cupcakes I've ever had in my life, and some really cute pictures of all the kiddos at the end of the day. It's always so nice to swap stories with these girls, and to see our kids have such a great time too. Thank you all so much, I can't wait for next month!

Ladies in the living room

These were seriously the cupcakes from heaven!

Peyton and Maddie making friends.Carson goes for the icing firstSorry Jennifer, I did not mean to take a picture of you spilling the sprinkles!Little boys like three little birds on a wireKenna digging inPeyton and Haley (our newest littles) barely made a peep the whole time!Seriously, does that get any cuter?Sweet little girly girl!Carson, Georgia, and Jackson playing ball

(PS- Katherine, I stole some of your pictures from facebook- if any of you would like these, please feel free to "steal" them!)

Very Fall-ish Things

In addition to going to the pumpkin patch a week or two ago, we've been able to do some other fall-ish things recently too... like going to the NC State Fair and a corn maze!

NC State Fair:
Going to the fair is a special tradition if you live in Raleigh... lots of people even take a day off work to be able to go spend a whole day there with their families! This year, Matt and I planned our afternoon at the fair around two Christian bands that came that night, Tenth Avenue North and Jeremy Camp. Grandaddy and Nana B. agreed to keep Kenna while we went so that our afternoon was relaxed with no time pressures! It sounds silly, but just having no diapers to stop and change all day was such a treat!

One of my favorite things is collecting all the stickers and wear them with pride... we brought extras of all of them home for Kenna this year too.
Every year we ride the Ferris Wheel together and take a picture at the top. Our picture this year was a little awkward since we weren't actually sitting next to each other. The little door to get in and out of the ride was right between us! Luckily we didn't fall out. It's beautiful to see the entire fair from the top of the ride.
Mercilessly, we didn't take photos of all the ridiculous amounts of fair junk food we ate... which honestly is why everybody goes to the fair. My favorites this year were the NCSU ice cream (which somehow I had never had before! Delicious!) and the awesome apple cider slushies (I had three and literally could have eaten dozens more. They were incredible!). Matt's favorite was the ice cream too, McBride's polish sausages, and the elephant ears (he loves the elephant ears, and I love the funnel cakes!)

For a fun comparison, here is the one we took on top of the ferris wheel in 2006, right after our second anniversary! I remember being bitter that my sunglasses had just broken and it was so sunshiney that day! Isn't Matt's smile is adorable? We look so much younger!


The Corn Maze:

We went to a corn maze in Morrisville with our Sunday School class, and we had a great time even though it was a little chilly and tried to rain on us a few times! There were a couple of fun things besides the corn maze (which was extremely detailed and partially shaped like a picture of Kay Yow from above) such as a corn kernel sandbox, a "cow truck" (a tractor pulling sideways barrels on wheels that were decorated to look like cows... they looked like an awesome, bumpy ride!), a hayride, and my favorite... a corn husk chucker gun. I'm sure that's not the official name, but imagine those "guns" they use to shoot out tshirts at football games, then imagine shoving a corn husk into it and shooting it out into a field, trying to hit a round hay bale with a target painted on it. Awesome! We all shot it a couple of times.

They also had duck races (our class is competitive!):
We were laughing that Kenna has already been on two hayrides in her short life! She was turned around looking at another little girl who was screaming bloody murder... apparently not so much a fan of the hayride. Kenna loved it! They started playing music over a speaker right after this, and she started clapping along and laughing.
We tried to get Kenna to crawl through the hay tunnel, but she wasn't so sure about it, and I started wondering how we would get her out if she crawled into the middle and then stopped! But it made for a cool picture:
We ate a great lunch at Smithfield's barbeque before calling it a day, and all the kids left with balloons with a bag of cookies tied to the string. We love our Sunday school class and have had such a great time getting to know these incredible families! Hayride, corn chucker, barbeque, and balloons... if that's not a successful day, I don't know what is!