Two More Birthdays!

We are officially in birthday overload. Caleb and Rahel celebrate their birthdays last week 3 days apart--that doesn't even give us enough time to finish one cake before I have to make another :-)

Our big 8 year old requested a Lego cake.

(he build the center piece)

We spent the day at Lego Land. My parents gave us all tickets for Christmas, so we decided to go on Caleb's actual birthday. We decided last year to start a new tradition of doing something special with the birthday child rather than throwing big birthday parties. You spend about the same (or less) and the one on one time is priceless. This year, the whole family got to join in on Caleb's outing since we had these tickets.

Lego Land was super fun!

If you're counting, yes we do have a seventh child with us (just practicing :-). We had an extra child's ticket, so Caleb got to bring a friend.

As we were riding the carousel, I asked Rahel if she'd ever been on one. That sounds like a silly question, but Hermela and Meron had gone to a little carnival type place in Addis when they were in the care center, so I thought that maybe she had also. But, she had not. I realized that this was the very first ride that she had ever been on. So fun. She loved everything there and rode all the roller coasters.

This was in the Kingdom Land. Caroline is jousting on a Lego horse.

Colton braved the roller coasters like a pro as well. The cool thing here is that everyone in our family could ride almost all the rides as they're designed for kids 2-12 years old. This was his first one. After this, he held his hands up on all the other ones.

Here's Lego Mini City-an area full of various landmarks around the world made of legos-unbelievable that amount of work that had to go into this.

This is the Daytona 500 Track

(all the fans in the stadium are Legos too)

These are life sized Lego creations.

Kicking back on a Lego safari.

And then just 3 days later, the big 1-0. Rahel has reached double digits and is now 10. We decided to get 10 balloons and do it up big as it was her very first birthday celebration ever.

She loved that. She also asked for a strawberry princess cake. She had never seen one of these dress cakes, so she was pretty surprised. She said, "Who made this one?" I told her I did and she said, "mommy makes the best cakes." (It's super easy-just takes time, but I'll let her think that if she wants).

Ariel is her favorite princess.

No place to put the candles except for blazing straight out from the front of her dress.

Then it was present time. Rahel's side kick was close by sporting her "little sister shirt."

A new watch from Nick's parents. Now she's telling time all day long-great teaching tool!

And one of my favorite moments of the night is when she opened this. It's called a Wildlife Storyteller

The company that makes these has various animals with solar rechargeable recorded gospel messages in them. They come in over 5000 different languages and either tell the gospel story or a collection of different bible stories. Rahel's is in Tigriniya (her native language) and has 192 bible stories on it and we just sent a couple with our friends from our small group who are currently in Haiti meeting a group of orphans that we plan to help support through Children's HopeChest. I'll definitely be bringing the Amharic version when I go back to Ethiopia as well. Such a great idea!

When she turned it on, she listened for a few seconds and then a beaming smile came across her face. She said, "It's about God!" She listens to it at night in her bed before she goes to sleep.

Now I want to get a few English versions for our other kids.

Happy birthday to my two big kids!