Our good and perfect gift

She's finally here!

Her name is Ivy Lora Pennington and she arrived at 11:33 am on Tuesday, November 30th, 2010
She weighed 8lbs. 1oz. and was 21 inches long. She is BEAUTIFUL!





Sunday evening I started having 'real' contractions, half an hour apart. Monday morning I already had an appointment with the midwife and a non-stress test scheduled since I was technically past my due date(Nov. 21st). Baby looked great and I told the nurses that we would probably be back that night or the next day. We decided to do some walking that evening and have a fun family date night so we took the kids out to eat, shopped at Bass Pro Shop, and walked around the mall. The walking worked...by the time we got home the contractions were 15 minutes apart. Right after we got the kids in bed I decided that they should probably go to Grandma and Grandpa's house, so we woke them all up, bundled them back up, put them in the car and Aaron dropped them off at Mom and Dad's. The contractions continued all night, but never got any closer together than 8-12 minutes. This was not unusual for me and I figured we might be getting close, so around 8:30am we ended up at the Bellevue Medical Center. Sure enough, I was definitely in labor :) Baby arrived 3 hours later!
We named her Ivy Lora. Her middle name is in honor of Aaron's Grandma Lora Pennington.

We are so abundantly blessed beyond any reason. The Lord has been so amazingly gracious to us and we give Him all the glory. Every good and perfect gift comes from above, from the Father of Light, in Whom there is no shadow.

Ivy is our good and perfect gift this year.

The Recent Adventures of Rylan

Rylan with Daddy at AWANA.
Aaron went in uniform to speak for council time at Sparks last week. He did a great job. The kids loved him, and Rylan was pretty proud!


How cute is this?!?! Rylan's first drawing of Batman. I think it's a keeper!

Harvest Costumes!

The kids dressed up for our church's annual Harvest Party out at Jordan's Place. It was a big event this year with a lot of games and fun stuff set up for the kids.

Unfortunately, our smaller princess got sick about 30 minutes after we arrived so we had to leave, which was a bummer. Mike and Leia, Cole, and Cammi were kind enough to keep track of Rylan and Bree though, so they were able to stay and enjoy the party!

The kids really wanted to choose their own costumes this year and here's what Rylan and Bree agreed upon:

A Knight in Shining Armor, 2 Medieval Princesses, and a Dragon!

If you can't tell by now, Bree is in the cheesy smile stage of childhood. :)

A pretty vicious dragon!

Pumpkin Carving

Tonight was pumpkin carving night!

Rylan wanted an "angry face."


Directing Daddy on the detailing, apparently :)


Bree actually thought it was pretty fun scooping out her pumpkin.


What a chilly October night! Rylan commented that it looked like his pumpkin stole something from Bree's pumpkin. Bree's pumpkin looks shocked and Rylan's has a pretty naughty smirk.

Applesauce!

One of my favorite things about Fall....

Making applesauce! This year our family graduated from pints to quarts :)

We made 16 quarts this weekend!

Fall pics

We took a quick trip to Nebraska City this afternoon to snap some Fall pics of the kids. Everyone was 'mostly' cooperative. I wish we would have had a little more time to do single shots of the kids, but it got a little hectic after about 45 minutes, which is really not very much time to get a lot of individual pictures of each kid. Everyone kept getting bored. :) I think we might try and take Elle to the park tomorrow to get some more good shots of her by herself.

I was so excited to get a Christmas card photo of the kids, until I got home and remembered that in a little over a month it will be obsolete and we'll have to take a new one anyway!

Oh well.

Rylan -5

Bree -3 1/2

Elle -2

Grant -1

Big day for Rylan

Look who learned how to ride his bike without training wheels this week!

Perfect Park Day

Rylan learned how to ride his bike without training wheels, and that warranted a trip to the park this evening! It couldn't have been a more beautiful evening.

Rylan only flew off the spinning thing a couple of times….seriously.

Nothing cooler than finding a stick!


Apparently the sun was blinding.

We love our beautiful Glenwood Lake Park!

Rode around the lake a couple of times.

There was some pretty serious competition between Rylan and Bree to try and pass each other on their bikes.

You can totally make that!

This week's project has been Rylan and Grant's room. We've made some steady progress and I've had a fun week of creating(actually just stealing other people's ideas).

I made a banner to match their quilts and got some great decorations at Hobby Lobby for 50% off. An old green dresser we got off of craigslist years ago got a new coat of paint and new knobs(also 50% off). I found the old ladder in the barn. My favorite find though, is the cute antique fan. Got it at Joe's in the Old Market for $5.00.

I found an adorable paper airplane mobile on Etsy.com It was made from scrapbook paper. Could I make that? Heck yeah! Maybe not quite identical to the one online, but considering I used scraps of paper I already had in my scrap paper box, I think mine will do just fine.

Etsy: $36.00 for 5 planes

Mine: $0.00 Remember I used scraps I already had? Score!

Rylan has been begging for one of these little "Ugly Dolls" from Land of Nod.

They carry them at a store in the Old Market and he's a little obsessed.

Land of Nod: $19.95

Mine: $0.75

Two squares of felt at 4/$1.00, plus some stuffing.

Also, mine actually matches their room.

A 'crispy' sort of day

A cool and crisp Fall day! Aaron's working so the kids and I made mini apple crisps. We used tasty new crop Jonathan apples. So yummy and tart!

Getting ready to bake them!

...and after much anticipation(seriously, there were tears during the LENGTHY 20 minute baking time)....Ta Da!

Projects

The Fall season has begun and that means it's time to start up house projects again! I haven't really done any projects or decorating since Spring. It was nice to take several months off and just enjoy family time in the Summer, but I'm happy to get going on the house again. Since we found out that we're having another girl we decided to move everyone in to different rooms. That means months of decorating for me....YAY!

Here are a couple of things we've been working on these last two weeks.

I'll start with the worst. This is the girls' room. It's going to be blue/grey and white with some touches of green. I want it to have a very french influence with lots of cute little birds. We started last night by taking down 2 layers of ugly border. By we, I mean my mom. Thanks Mom! The color is not quite correct in the picture but the original wall color is a brown squashy color. We're painting all the trim white because it's so mismatched and pieced together.

The new wall color is a really really light blue. Almost white, actually. I just painted the one wall so far. I want some light brown and white tree silhouettes painted on the biggest wall and it dawned on me last night that I should take advantage of Loyal being here, so I hurriedly put two coats on so he could paint the trees before he leaves. He is a professional artist and travels all over the country with an art company that does insanely huge murals and sculptures for mega churches. Pretty neat stuff. I'm really excited that he can paint the trees for me because I cannot draw a tree to save my life! I'll post pics of the trees tomorrow.

Here's the inspiration for the trees

The steps. Still very much a work in progress. I stripped the tops of the steps of two layers of paint and we've stained a couple. The wall obviously still needs to be sanded and painted and it's a big project but it's coming along. I just sanded the fronts of the steps last week, painted them white and added the numbers.

Our bedroom: Almost done! Repainted everything including the floor. My good friend Leia is coming sometime soon to help me paint the floor with a diamond pattern. It will be greyish blue and white. I cannot wait to see how it turns out!!! As you can see, I also still need to get knobs for a couple of the dresser drawers.

It's been a busy couple of weekends for weddings.

This first bouquet was for Jacob and Becca's wedding, a couple from our church.

And this one was for Andy and Sarah Kate, some friends from "way back when." How lucky for me that I got to do TWO hydrangea weddings in a row! I just love hydrangeas!

First day of Fall at the zoo

What do you do on a beautiful Fall day? Go to the zoo! We try not to go too often during the Summer because it's just too hot and crowded. Seems like as soon as September hits the crowds leave and the weather is just perfect. As an added bonus, Loyal is visiting us this week and he hadn't been to the zoo in like 5 years, so it was a great time to go!

Can you believe they are ALL looking at the camera!?!

Trying to reach pennies, I think. :)

Lemurs at the Madagascar Exhibit. Grant was pretty fascinated.

Elle admiring a tortoise after she got over her initial fear of such a scary creature.