Happy Valentine's Day - He First Loved Us

I received a Valentine email from Lifeline (our adoption agency) today and wanted to share it with you.  It is a great reminder of the perfect love we receive from God...better than any earthly Valentine we could ever receive or even imagine.

Happy Valentine's Day!

As followers of Christ, we love with a love that is not of this world. It goes beyond emotion, outward beauty, and "success." This love comes from God, so we are free to give it without hesitation or fear of not having enough or giving too much. We enjoy a love that is everlasting - always enough. One song exclaims:

"Oh, I'm running to Your arms

I'm running to Your arms

The riches of Your love

Will always be enough

Nothing compares to Your embrace

Light of the world forever reign."

"Forever Reign" - Hillsong

1 John 4:7-12

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

Nate's Valentine Party

Class Valentines

I apologize for disappointing you if you were hoping to see a super cute crafty Valentine from Pinterest.  I actually looked at some several weeks ago and planned to do something crafty, but by the time Valentine's rolled around I wasn't in the mood to be crafty any more.  I guess that's normal...it's my normal anyway. 

So, Nate and I headed to Wal-Mart to pick out some not so crafty Valentines, which I am 100% positive he likes better than anything crafty I would have made.  Of course, he chose Cars valentines.  That was great with me and they came with pencils instead of candy. :)

Practicing writing, which is not one of Nate's favorite things. 

This one is my favorite.  It's to my dad.  We thought he would like to have a pencil also.  Nate sure does love his Pops.  We met my parents for lunch the other day and Nate totally bypassed my mom to see Pops first.  For the record, we will be giving Nan (my mom) a little something also.

The other day Nate was watching Cars 2 and I walked in the living room and found this.  He told me all of his cars were on "boats" (one actual boat, three sofa pillows and one dog toy) like the first part of the movie.     

I love this little boy and his imagination so very much.  

Gadgets Disappeared

Last night I was trying to add a button for The Cupcake Kids and my gadgets (blogroll, archive, other buttons) disappeared.  I've been to the blogger help forum, but there isn't a lot of info there.  If you have any suggestions, please let me know!

Christmas Day

Nate woke us up about 7:30 this morning.  He was surprisingly calm and said he was hungry.  He usually doesn't eat a lot of breakfast so I was surprised food was on his mind on Christmas morning.  We are doing things a little different this Christmas and we prepared Nate the night before that we would not be opening presents first.  First, we would do our last Jesse Tree devotional and give gifts to Jesus.  It is his birthday after all. 



How do you give gifts to Jesus?  The other day I was reading a blog post by Ann Voskamp called 10 Ways to Celebrate Christmas Morning. Number three on the list is "Gifts for the Birthday Child."  They choose things from the Compassion International Catalog (Samaratin's Purse has one also).  Why do they do this on Christmas morning?  Because in Matthew chapter 25, Jesus says when you give gifts to the least of these, you give gifts to me (Jesus).  That resonated so much with me!  Doing things for the "least of these" is something Christians should be doing on a regular basis, not just at Christmas, but it was really exciting to know that we can give gifts to Jesus on the day we celebrate His birth.  By giving gifts to those in need, we are not only blessing them but we are giving gifts to Jesus!  I have heard this verse many times, but this was the first time I had heard it associated with Christmas.  So, after our Jesse tree devotional, the three of us gathered around the computer and picked out gifts for Jesus.  We actually let Nate choose three gifts and he chose, chickens, a soccer ball and garden seeds.  We also prayed for the children/families that would receive these gifts and prayed that they would have the best gift of all - a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Now it was time for gifts.  We decided ahead of time (and prepared Nate) that he would just be getting gifts out of his stocking and opening one gift before church. I will admit I was a little nervous that he would do a lot of whining and complaining about waiting - waiting to open gifts and waiting to open the rest of his gifts after church.  Surprisingly, he didn't mind at all and had a great attitude.

Carefully using the scissors on his Swiss Army knife.

The quit taking my picture smile.



After a wonderful time of family worship, we finished our gift giving.  I will admit that a few days ago I wasn't excited about going to church on Christmas day. I wanted us to be lazy and stay in our PJs all day.  I thought why can't we just have family worship at home?  Well,  about Thursday I began to get so excited about celebrating the birth of our Saviour with our church family.  I could not wait to sing and worship God for His greatest gift to us.  Thank you, God, for changing my selfish and lazy heart!

This was Nate's favorite gift.

We had a restful and leisure afternoon.  Later that evening we celebrated Christmas with Darren's family.  We had a wonderful meal together and exchanged gifts.  It didn't take Nate long to crash after this long and eventful day.  He's not asleep in this picture, but very tired. 

Darren, Nate and I received many great gifts today.  But, none of them even come close to comparing to the gift God gave us when he gave us Jesus.  I hope you know Him and experience the peace and hope that only He can give!  Merry Christmas!

Christmas Eve

We always spend Christmas Eve with my family.  We celebrate Christmas and my sister's birthday (her birthday is Dec. 23).  Many, many years ago my grandmother started having steak and shrimp for Jill's birthday.  My mother has continued that tradition and that's what we have for dinner every Christmas Eve.
I like to get a family picture at Thanksgiving or Christmas. The weather didn't cooperate at Thanksgiving, so before dinner we had to have our annual family photo shoot. It was a great afternoon for pictures and everyone cooperated pretty well.

After dinner, Ashlyn always reads the story of Christ's birth from Luke 2.  This year my mom had a different plan.  Before the Christmas story, we had to sing The Twelve Days of Christmas.  Each person had one or two days they had to sing when the time came.  It was a lot of fun and very comical.  Nate's part was the first day - partridge in a pear tree.  He did a great job but his partridge was in a "bear" tree. 

After the Christmas story we had a great time opening gifts. 

Nate loves my dad, Pops.  They are best buddies.  Nate loves to sit in his boat and play in his tackle box.  My dad always sends him home with fishing worms.  Nate has quite a collection now so my dad thought he needed a tackle box for Christmas.  If you look closely, you'll see a little red box.  Pops also gave him his very first knife.  It's a Swiss Army and Darren and I will, of course, only allow him to use it with supervision.  Darren's dad gave him a BB gun last year, so I guess it was time for him to have a knife.

More worms for his collection.  Looks like he and Darren and Pops will be doing lots of fishing this spring.

Finally, we ended the night with Happy Birthday to Jill.  Ashlyn likes to make Jill's birthday cake from scratch.  She also wanted to try using fondant icing for the first time.  I volunteered to help her with the cake.  I have never worked with fondant and thought it would be fun.  She got here around noon on Friday and didn't leave until around 4:30.  Almost that entire time we were working on the cake - either baking it, making icing, frosting, working with the fondant, decorating, etc.  It was a comedy of errors.  Almost everything that could go wrong went wrong, but we laughed our way through it and ended up with a pretty cute cake.  For the record, it wasn't supposed to be orange.  That was just one of the many bumps in our cake making road. :)