Gotcha Day - Five Years Later

Five years ago, our lives were changed forever - in one of the best ways possible - when we met Madison for the first time. Happy Gotcha Day!  

A lot has happened in the last five years, four of those years chronicled here on this site.  In fact, July 16th is the four-year anniversary of this blog itself.  It's been fantastic, hasn't it?  She's grown so much, so smart and beautiful now.  This morning, we went to church together, and everyone was quick to compliment her - and us - on such a special occasion.

It was a great service today, one dedicated to the story of the Prophetess Anna.  We continued with the Tribes series, with a closer look at the Tribe of Asher.

After church, we headed home and did a bit of gardening outside for a bit, adding the last of our mulch to certain areas.  We have a bit more mulching to do, but Madison was quite helpful with the remaining bags of the stuff - we called her "Mrs. Mulch."

In between, we went back to the Pixar Park, this time using the Kinect to go on an adventure with "The Incredibles."  With the Kinect and Madison, there's an occasional frustrating moment or two, but overall, the experience is awesome.  It's also pretty active.  We got the Kinect thinking it would be great for Madison to be up and active while playing video games.  But she wants Daddy playing with her all the time too!  It's fun, but this game system can wear you out!

We cleaned up inside a bit too, because guess who was coming today?  Ba-Ba and Nana arrived fairly late, having spent quite a bit of time on the road today.  It was a long drive for them, as they had to go through quite a bit of rain, and a lot of traffic too.  But they arrived safely, and we were quite glad to see them.  We sat and talked for a bit, and as it grew dark, we noticed an unusually large amount of something outside:

Lightning bugs!  This one in this picture is remarkable - we had the tripod set up, and this lightning bug stayed still for the camera for the prolonged exposure.  Pretty nifty!

Madison and Daddy spent a lot of time running around catching lightning bugs.  Mommy gave us a jar, and the two of us jumped and ran all over the front yard, trying to catch these guys.  Of course, we released them unharmed.  There were so many lightning bugs all over the yard - it was pretty awesome.

And since we were out at night time, we thought we'd do the sparkler thing too.  The Fourth of July is coming up soon, and we've had these sparklers waiting for a nice occasion - why not tonight?  Madison and Daddy once again ran around the front yard, this time with sparklers.  We took a few long exposure shots of ourselves, but didn't spend too long with the sparklers tonight - we'll do that again next time.  Still, here's an interesting shot of Madison - you can see her to the right.

It was late, and everyone was tired from a full day.  It was a great one!