Elijah's first birthday was last Saturday. Today is Hannah's birthday and maybe I'll manage to get all the pictures from her birthday posted by next weekend. Last week Scott took the older kids on a hiking trip with my father. It was Hannah's first real hike. They had a wonderful time and from what I understand their favorite part was getting to eat their snacks along the trail.
While they were hiking, I took Jonathan and Elijah to the park I used to play at when I was a child. It's nice to still see some of the old toys that I remember still there.
It was great getting to spend time with our younger two children by themselves. They grow up so fast these days. I wanted to just enjoy the day and let them have fun at their own pace. Normally they spend their park time keeping up with their older siblings. This time I just slowed down and let them lead the way for the most part.
After the park we enjoyed a good visit with my paternal grandmother. We got to see her flowers and had a nice long visit.
Then we returned to my maternal grandmother, Memaw's house. My sister and her husband came and my parents were there. Since we wouldn't be able to come back for Hannah's birthday, we went ahead and had a joint birthday party for both Hannah and Elijah. Elijah got to eat his first chocolate cake. We have a tradition of not letting any of our babies have chocolate cake until their first birthday. 
Hannah got a bicycle from Papa and Nana and Elijah got a walk behind/ ride-on toy. They both got birthday money from Mema as well. The exciting part of the night was when Elijah took two steps all by himself. He figured out he could walk while walking behind the toy that my parents gave him and then he stood by himself and clapped his hands wanting all of us to clap with him. Then he took two steps to Ruth who was sitting near him. We were all so excited and he thought it was a wonderful game that made us all cheer for him. Then we had a cook out at our house last Sunday afternoon and invited some friends over for that. Over all it was a really good weekend last weekend. We had a good busy week this week too. After having a week off for Spring Break, I put the kids back to work this week. We added gardening to our homeschool activities. It's been really great! We have a bigger garden this year than we've ever had before. I've started the kids writing Gardening Journals where they can draw pictures and take notes about the garden and some of the things they notice as they go out to water and weed the plants.
It's been such a busy week and we had a really great day today for Hannah's birthday. I'll try to post more pictures and tell about what we did today before the week is over. :)
