The Verhaarens

 There has been much to celebrate this past week. On the 20^th was Jack’s first birthday. Of course we were excited to celebrate Jack being in our lives for a year and are so grateful to have him as our son and look forward to many more years of joy to come. Thank you to everyone for your gifts, cards, calls, and texts. He (and we) are loving the new toys and books to play with.

What I was looking forward to the most was the cake; it is my first on in Maryland and was so much fun. I was having such a hard time figuring out what to do and had so many different plans, but ended up just using color. The colors red, yellow, blue, and green are used to decorate his room and so I thought it would be appropriate for his cake. So many artificial colors can’t be too good for you, but all things in moderation. Jack ate it, but didn’t go crazy about it. So now we have a one-year old, and by all accounts he is officially a toddler. (The celebration was spread over a few days so he is wearing different clothes in all the pictures in case you were wondering.)

Like most everyone else, we celebrated Easter weekend. It was actually quite spiritual for me as well; I was surprised at how affected I was despite the weekend being so busy. We had stake conference and our relief society was put in charge of preparing a meal for the visiting authority and other priesthood leaders so I was busy with that, and Chris was in charge of a baptism that was a big deal for our ward, and Jack had to tag along with everything so he had no semblance of a normal schedule. But the evening session, the baptism, and the sacrament meeting from the previous week were all so good. It all reaffirmed what we believe and know to be true so it was great. Then to really celebrate we were so fortunate to have an awesome dinner with some friends out here. So much good food (ham!) and great company. Although it was a busy, crazy weekend, it was a perfect Easter.

 

Chris and I also had the opportunity to celebrate our anniversary for the first time. We have now been married three years. For our first anniversary Chris’s parents were in town for his graduation, and for our second, my parents we in town because it was five days after Jack was born. We were able to go out to eat (thanks to our Christmas present-thanks Tom and Marel!) and I was able to fulfill a life long dream of eating filet minon. And it was great. Chris got a steak and liked it as well. Apparently the 3^rd anniversary gift is supposed to be leather, so we ate beef.

Earth day was also in there somewhere, we try to do our part everyday so nothing special here.

Happy everything!