November flew by for us and now we’re only weeks away from welcoming our next baby girl into our home. We enjoyed some birthday celebrations, Thanksgiving, putting up the Christmas tree with the children this year, and are ramping up for the big change in our growing family. It was really fun to see Timothy so excited and involved with picking out items and writing notes for the Operation Christmas Child boxes this year. Hopefully we’ll do this together in future years and he’ll get to be even more hands-on.
We’re getting our home and hearts ready to receive the gift of another daughter and the good news of Jesus’ incarnation Christmas. Timothy’s been excited about our Advent readings and recalling the memory verses that point to Jesus’ coming at Christmas. His daily expressions of gratefulness for his new baby sister are so sweet to us and it’s been precious to see his excitement catch on with Grace, too. They both seem eager to take on their older sibling roles to their little sister so it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out when she arrives and rocks our family’s world.
This last month of 2015 was a flurry of activity with some final outings before meeting Baby Mary and continuing to prepare our hearts to celebrate Jesus’ birth. I finally finished packing our hospital bag on Sunday before Christmas and went into labor that evening. It was unexpected, but after hours of laboring at home, we went to the hospital in the middle of the night and met sweet little Baby Mary Anne Ma at 3:16AM in the morning on the 21st. Twelve days early was a new record for us, but we were so grateful to get to meet Mary before Christmas and celebrate this additional blessing in our family as we adjusted to being a full-fledged family of five.
December