April, Easter and Our Flood

This post has lots of pictures so beware!

She looked so cute just sitting there! I had to take a picture!

Daddy taking a little nap with Emily

It looks like Daddy is the only one sleeping!

Rockin' out at the piano!

Emily loves to play the piano, it's so cute to watch her. She usually sings as she plays.

J.R. and I planted some really pretty flowers in our front yard.

This is a Chattahoochee Phlox

A close up of the Chattahoochee Phlox

This is Raspberry Surprise Dianthus

Gerber Daisy's

Really pretty African Daisy's

My flower garden from the side

Flower garden from the front.
The 2nd flower from the left is a Blue Star Lithodora. I forgot to get a close up of it.

Emily loves to ride her tricycle in the driveway!

Emily got on the trampoline all by herself this month!

We brought Pebbles up so we could plant grass in the yard and Emily is loving it!
I had to take this picture through the door because I knew if I opened the door they would both move. This is adorable! They are sitting on Emily's blanket.

Soakin' up the sun

Playing with some floaties

She was trying to blow up a little beach ball

We had an 83 degree day here a couple weeks ago and Emily had lots of fun jumping on the trampoline with a sprinkler under it.

Running through the sprinkler for the first time in her life!
She hates getting water in her face so we have never had success getting her to run through a sprinkler but this year she doesn't seem to mind.

We dyed Easter eggs for the first time since we got married!
Emily was very excited about it!

Dying eggs with Daddy!

Emily wanted to make all the eggs pink!
No surprise there

Dying more eggs pink with Mommy!

Putting stickers on the eggs

The finished product!
Half of the eggs were dyed by Emily and half were dyed by Laura

A close up of the finished product
Look at all those princess stickers!

The Easter Bunny came!

Emily looking in her Easter basket on Easter morning

Daddy and Emily on Easter morning

Emily got some cool sunglasses!

J.R. got a chocolate bunny!

Before we let Emily come out on Easter morning we asked her to tell us the real reason we celebrate Easter and she said "So we can get candy." We told her that wasn't really why we celebrate Easter and then we told her the story of Christ resurrection and we asked her again why we celebrate Easter and she said "so Jesus can bring us candy!" Maybe next year we will have better luck.

On Monday April 25th we got a lot of rain and this is what happened to our backyard.

I had to take the pictures from our bedroom window because it was raining to hard to go outside. There is a ton of water down there!

It's breaking our fence!

It's starting to break the fence on this side too!

There goes our sand turtle!

Look at how deep the water is, it's in the seat of the baby swing and our fence is gone!

There goes that side of the fence!

Look at all that water!

Now the water is even deeper. It's almost touching the yellow swing and it's part way up the slide!

The street in front of our house flooded too. That recycle bin belongs to someone else, who knows where it came from.

This doesn't show the flooding in the street very well but it is worse than it looks.
Right after I took this picture I noticed a bunch of water pooled in front of our garage so we went down to the basement and found 2 inches of water through out the garage and basement. It took up 2 1/2 hours to get it all out and thankfully nothing was ruined.

Here's what the damage looks like now that the water is mostly gone.
See that fence panel, it got ripped out of the ground with the concrete still attached!
We collected all our fence panels and posts and some of them were washed 1/4 mile downstream. I'm sure they would have gone farther but there was something in the way that stopped them from going any farther. What a mess!

A view of the whole backyard with part of the fence missing.
Even though we lost part of our fence we are just grateful that we were not hit by any of the tornado's that ripped through our area over the last few days. Our damage is fixed a lot easier than those who were hit by the tornado's.

March

I know it's been a while since I updated my blog but I didn't take very many pictures until the end of March.

We have an octagon shaped window above our front door and in the afternoon the sun shines through it and blinds us. It is especially bad if we are sitting on the couch. We tossed around a bunch of ideas for solutions to our problem and finally decided on a wreath. We went to Micheal's and got two wreaths, one round and one heart shaped one. I wrapped stands of flowers around both wreaths and J.R. tied them together for me. I think it turned out really pretty and it does a great job keeping the sun out of our eyes.

On February 28th we got a ton of rain. As you can see the ditch in our backyard overflowed a lot. It really wouldn't be bad if our neighbors had a ditch too but for some reason whoever was in charge of digging the ditches stopped at our house. J.R. has offered to dig a ditch for the neighbors because we get a ton of very noisy frogs down in that area and the mosquitoes are really bad down there but they have not given him permission to dig in their yard yet.

At the beginning of March I babysat a little boy named Steven. He and Emily got along great!

Steven and Emily

On March 23rd J.R. worked until 1am so Emily and I had a Mommy-Daughter Date! We went dress shopping! Emily had a blast! She was running around the dress section asking to try on all the pink dresses they had. Here are all the ones she tried on.
This one was a lot cuter in person. I didn't like how it looked in the picture.

She liked the butterflies and flowers on this one

Admiring herself in the mirror!

She called this one the Cinderella dress

This was the only dress she tried on that was not pink.
She didn't like it once I got it on her.

She absolutely loved this dress!
She kept asking me if we could buy it.

She was so excited about this dress it was hard to get her to hold still long enough for a picture

When she saw this dress she said "Wow Mom, I can get married in this dress!"
The only size they had was a size 6 so it was a little big.

This one was very bright pink!

We ended up buying this dress.
I found a shirt to go under it and I think it made the dress even cuter than before.

This beautiful girl is Brittany
My brother Kris proposed to her on March 10th and they are getting married on August 6th!
I can hardly wait to meet her!

Emily loves her Daddy!

My pretty Princess!

She loves playing Princess dress up!

Emily put all the accessories on me! I think it's funny that she put the crown on upside down!

Now Mommy is a pretty princess too!

We cleaned out our garage and Emily had lots of fun playing in this little basket while J.R. and I worked.

Trying to fill Daddy's shoes is a big job

Emily has been wanting to wear shorts "just like Daddy" for a while now but it was still a little bit cold outside and she didn't have any, so she took matters into her own hands and made her pants into shorts!