We stopped at the park on the way home since it was such a beautiful evening. The kids kicked off their shoes to run and roll around in the grass. It is so fun to watch them have fun! 
Emily Joy, we love you and look forward to celebrating many more birthdays with you!
We added a new member to our family yesterday. We've been looking for a puppy for the past several months and we finally took the big step and brought one home yesterday. Lucy is half St. Bernard and half Mastiff and she is 8 weeks old. 
She will be a big girl one day so we are going to do our best to train her well now when she is small. The kids are besides themselves with excitement. They have a puppy they can call their own! 
After church a week before last Sunday we went to our friend's Darrell and Karon's for lunch. The kids love going there because they have lots of animals - most importantly HORSES! Karon and Darrell have 2 horses and a pony. Karon saddled up Sylvia and both Emily and Alaina got to ride a little. 
They received a lesson in bathing and grooming the horses too. Karon gave the kids several huge carrots to feed Sylvia, Bucky, and Sissy. We hope to gain lots more horse sense from Karon in the future. Emily didn't want to come home - she was in horse heaven.
We had a wonderful Easter Sunday celebrating Jesus' resurrection. What peace to know that God loves us, wants to have a relationship with us and had a plan to make that all work. What an honor it is for us to share that with others. We are praying that those who hear it will embrace it! 
I forgot to report on another exciting thing that happened during our Spring Break adventure. Alaina lost her first tooth! She'd been wiggling it around for several days and it eventually came out as she was eating popcorn one night. She loves showing off her missing-tooth-smile!
This is the last post of our spring break adventures. On Wednesday we took the kids to the aquarium in Newport. Emily had to have a picture of this crab because it was HUGE. It is called a Japanese spider crab. 
Wouldn't want to run into one of those guys in the water! 
There were also several touch pools that the kids checked out. In the picture below they are touching a small ray.
Tuesday afternoon we made our way down the coast to Newport and checked into our hotel. After some swimming in the hotel pool we drove out to the Yaquina Head Lighthouse. 
It was a beautiful place. We didn't get there early enough to go through the interpretive center and lighthouse so we visited again on Wednesday. Lila and Rylan were too short to be allowed to climb the stairs all the way to the top so Ryan sat with them while Emily, Alaina, and I went to the top. We were out of breath by the time we got there, but received a good history lesson from the volunteer dressed in an old lighthouse keepers uniform as we rested. 
