Kaleb wants real food. Today he managed to grab a piece of lettuce off of my plate and put it in his mouth. He'll be six months old in a few weeks, so we are going to start solids this week. The kid is clearly ready. :)

Dear sister, You should really go to cosmetology school, because that shampoo you just gave me was awesome. You only smeared the bubbles in my eyes 3 times. Love, Kaleb
Kaleb's one hair. We got him out of the bath and he had one little hair sticking up straight. Click on the picture to get it bigger. It looked so funny we had to try and get a picture of it.
Kaiya's LONG hair. This girl has plenty of hair. It is down to the middle of her back when its wet and combed out. Cute, but the struggle to "do" her hair is getting more challenging.

Rally the troops....

Hey guys, tony here, we are in the middle of packing but I saw a newsbreaker that frankly broke my heart. Most of you may know by now, but please pray for Steven Curtis Chapman's family. His 5 yr old daughter was killed today when his teenage son accidently ran over her. His new cinderella song takes on a new meaning after this. Pray for healing, pray for support, but mostly pray for this event to glorify God. I will share a quote by one of my favorite authors that has impacted me through tragedy.

"{Lewis grieving the death of his wife}Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game “or else people won’t take it seriously.” Apparently it’s like that. Your bid—for God or not God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity--- will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high; until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world."—C.S. Lewis (A grief observed)

It's been a busy week around here. Here's the recap of the week in pictures:

So long, farewall, you've been a good little car...

The little armadillo friend I was talking about. A week ago I noticed that something had dug a hole next to the trash cans. Whenever I took something to the trash I would try to kind of peer in. I wanted to know what it was... and I didn't want to know -- if you know what I mean. One night I mentioned the hole to Tony and we were wondering if there are groundhogs in Florida. Later that night we were getting ready to leave the house and I carried a bag of trash on my way out. I got on the side of the garage, looked down and found this little guy and screamed like a little girl. Then grabbed the camera, of course. :) He didn't seem to mind us much. And Kaiya is convinced he is a rabbit.

This is the position that we find sweet Kaleb in most often. :) He has found his toes and has been having a love affair with them ever since.

This is his second love affair -- Daddy's apple core. Kaiya got within a foot of him and while sucking on the core he reached over to try and grab her apple too.

And our last trip to the beach before the move...

Kaleb's face right after he got wet.

Kaiya & Kaleb's footprints

Who's coming with us???

Tony here... I have been busy finishing up here in florida while trying to open an office several states away so needless to say the newsletter has been a little slow. I am hoping to work on it this weekend. Thought I would post this link in the mean time to tempt all our friends to move by us. Blessings!

http://finance.yahoo.com/real-estate/article/105075/Charlotte-Named-Best-Place-to-Live

Free Money!

I've had a couple people ask me about how legit this offer really is. Since they do ask for SSN and birthdate when signing up. So I did some digging to confirm they are for real. Company has ties to AOL founder, Steve Case. Here are a couple links w/ articles about them.

Article #1 -- Good info about company

Article #2

Article #3

Anyway... there's the scoop folks! And just to leave you hanging... coming soon... armadillo pictures. I told you we are being invaded by Florida creatures. This little guy is creating a nest next to the trash cans. Stay tuned... I'm about to change the name of our blog to Animal Planet.

Revolution Money Exchange

This is big news for anyone who loves FREE money! :) This is a new company who is a competitor of Paypal. I wondered when that would happen... cause Paypal has had the market for online money exchange for quite awhile! But anyway... they are using the Internet and word of mouth as one of their biggest marketing tools right now. If you sign up for an account with them, they will give you $25! Nice, right? But the offer is only good until Thursday, May 15th. And they are giving $10 for every person referred, so if you are interested, make sure to go through this little button here so I can get credit for it. :)

Cute video of the kids interacting with each other. I shot this last week and I'm finally able to post it. Towards the end of the video you will notice Kaiya's sideways eye glance. She does this all the time now when we ask her a question. Usually she will say, "Ummm..." while she is glancing to the side. It's cute -- not sure where she picked that up, but it makes me smile almost every time. We are busy busy busy packing up the house, getting ready for a yard sale, putting stuff on craigslist and eBay. It's exciting!

Ants

Okay... for those of you who have been reading our blog for awhile, you know that we were going crazy w/ bugs (i.e. scorpions, ants) when we first moved down here. I think this house was seriously built on like 999 ant hills. And they know we are moving soon and are determined to make us miserable until we go. Ruthie has been having dreams (nightmares) about these things. Here's where I discovered them most recently while doing some packing...

Giggles

Looked out the front window and saw the neighbors busy at work in the yard. Doesn't this picture just make you giggle? :) Tony and I thought so. They are really cranking neighbors so I think it made it just a bit funnier. P.S. -- It wasn't raining!

Sweet Boy

Rice Cereal and other tales...

It's Kaleb's turn for a post! He has reached several milestones this 4th month of life. The most exciting one for mama is that he is sleeping through the night. This milestone was reached through rice cereal. :) Here are a few pictures with Kaleb's first experience with cereal.

Umm... this is weird... Okay... gimme the spoon!
We had a great family night last night. I was on a quest for new shoes. My excuse: I'll be working in Tony's office for awhile and need something more updated. Mind you the last time I bought new shoes was while pregnant with Kaiya. So... 3 years and no new shoes is frugal enough, I think. So we headed to the Outlet malls and made a stop at Nine West. They had the BOGO 50% off deal going on so I got one black pair and one brown pair. Cute, huh?

After dinner we decided to call Ruthie. Thursday nights she goes downtown to feed the homeless. We've been hearing about this ministry for awhile and wanted to see it first hand. And... truth be told, we also wanted to see the guy in the middle first hand:

I won't elaborate as to why we would want to see Chris Allen firsthand. Only we heard from someone who lives with us that he was a pretty cool guy. You can draw your own conclusions.

And after meeting him -- we agree. He sings pretty good too -- check him out: www.myspace.com/chrisallenbandworship

Anyway... back to our family night. We had about 45 minutes to kill before going downtown and because it was unplanned we had no food for Kaiya. So we stopped at IHOP to grab dinner. And the coolest thing happened. The restaurant was really dead except for an old guy by himself and this lady with her three children. Just before our food arrived the lady w/ the kids googoo-ed at Kaleb and then left. As our waitress was serving us our food she told us that our bill had been taken care of by the lady. And that she said God Bless You. WOW! So cool. Jehovah Jirah=God is our Provider -- it is so true. We've been getting little blessings like this lately. (L.C. - got your package -- it was a hug in the mail, came on the perfect day - a response will come soon!) God is just so good to love on us through other people. And it was a great reminder that we need to allow ourselves to be used and be looking for opportunities to serve others as we go about our day.

In all the craziness of being blessed by a free meal I suddenly feel something warm hit my leg. I know what some of you are thinking. No... while childbearing has altered my bladder control, I wasn't that worked up about the free meal. :) I look down and see hashbrowns on my legs. I didn't remember spilling anything from my plate -- in fact, I hadn't even started eating yet. So I look down at Kaleb who I am holding and he has shoved an entire fistful of greasy hashbrowns in his mouth. Apparently he thinks that now he has eaten cereal he should be eating EVERYTHING! :) Give an inch... he takes a mile. He is more like Kaiya than we realized! :) Hilarious. Tony scoops the remaining hashbrowns out of his mouth and we are cracking up. Kaleb sees us laughing and starts giggling too, which really made the whole thing more funny. The kid sucked on his greasy hand the rest of the meal. We were afraid that he was going to lose a finger or thumb he was sucking so hard. :) It was awesome.

After dinner we headed downtown to the park where we watched the ministry that Ruthie does with the homeless. All these 20 somethings provide a meal for approx 30-50 homeless people and then Chris Allen leads in worship and they have a guest speaker who does a Bible Study. It's a neat thing - and we're proud of Ruthie - she has a compassionate heart. Plus... she is permanently responsible for providing dessert for the group so we are guaranteed something extremely yummy in our house on Thursdays.

Our kids were zonked as we headed home around 10 p.m. Kaiya slept through an entire sponge bath while on the changing table. I washed her hands & feet when we got home and although she asked me for a sticker (which is a diaper changing ritual) she forgot she had asked me about 3 seconds later and into bed she went. Tony and I watched Survivor and called it a night.