Irony

The weekend before Thanksgiving,  John and I sat on the balcony of a pool in Goldsboro.

That in itself is no big deal, we've sat in dozens of pools through our two boys' swimming careers. But the cool thing about this pool is the memory attached to it. It was here, as we watched Daniel swim, we researched adoption agencies to help us begin our journey to our daughter in China.  So, here we sat around 12 years later,  getting ready to watch that dreamed about girl swim in her first year round meet as a full time year round swimmer!

Life (God) often has taken us places we never could have dreamed!

Halloween 2016

This year for Halloween, we had visits from Rae and Kylo Ren from the new Star Wars movie.

Evie Claire's 3rd birthday

On October 28th, Evie Claire turned 3! We all gathered to celebrate at a park close to her house. The most famous guest at the party, Elsa, painted the little ones faces.

I made the cake.

Backtracking---family bowling 2016

In real time, it is actually February 2017. I want to publish 2016's blogs, so I'm pushing to finish documenting 2016. For the next few posts, there will be little to no description. My main goal is to get the pictures on the blog.

Final score-Dad 1st, Abbey 2nd, me-3rd and Elijah 4th

Elijah sweet spot was in the game room.

Art with the grandkids

Hurricane Matthew

On September 28, 2016, Hurricane Matthew came to our state. In fact, at one point it was forecasted to come ashore right at our beach. We went a few days ahead and put all of the outdoor possible projectiles into the garages, and then went home to wait and pray.

It ended up that the beach house was relatively unscathed. We had more damage and loss of power in our home town than at the beach.

Our neighbor Bruce gave us play by plays. He told us that the waterway came up to the yard of the houses across the street.

We feel very thankful that we had such little damage.

Our front porch ceiling fan bit the dust

The beautiful pear tree next door didn't survive the winds.

The beach looked like a war zone. All of the dunes' fencing was gone with a lot of debris washed ashore. The beach was much thinner than before.

Abbey and I enjoyed the beautiful, after- the -storm- sunshine!