Happy 2nd Birthday Matthew!

Today is Matthew's 2nd birthday. Two years ago I was seeing this cute face for the first time.

Two years feels like an eternity. Memories are fading, emotions are quieting, and life goes on... but I miss him so! What a sweet little boy he was. 

I hugged Clay and Claire extra close tonight, not taking for granted the fact that I still have my two other little ones here with me. They will never make up for missing him, but they give me such joy in the meantime. 

Clay's Baptism

Mr. Clay-man was finally baptized this past Sunday! We had my parents and Cole's parents in town and my uncle from Atlanta came over with his kids. We're so glad to dedicate our little guy to the Lord and have the promise of the community around us to help raise him in the faith. We love our new church and felt so loved on Sunday :)

Obligatory family pics, of course!

House Pics!

Come on in and check out our home! We're not finished with everything we want to do, but we've run out of money :) so we'll just have to have patience. Everything is a work in progress!

Front of the house. I made the wreath for $30 - pretty proud of myself. We live in a starter neighborhood that's super cute, but the houses are pretty close together (as you can see). What sold us on this place was the pool/ tennis courts/ playground/ club house that come with living in this neighborhood. Claire is SO excited about the pool opening! 

Our "backyard" - it's about 4 square feet, but hey, we'll take it! The neighbors to the right of this pic haven't put up a fence either, so we kinda share each other's backyards :) 

Cole's office/library/sitting room. He doesn't have his own office at The Vine, so we had to buy 5 bookshelves to house all of his books. This room should be the dining room, but we really have no use for one. 

Another view of the office with the stairs in the background. We had to buy a baby gate immediately... Clay LOVES climbing the stairs! 

The living room. We bought that ginormous TV last week :) The only thing that separates the living room and office is the couch & short bookshelf that are back to back and a column. We like the openness of it all! 

The kitchen (and the door to the garage in the background). We're eventually going to buy barstools for the high counter there. 

 The rest of the kitchen and the door to the backyard. I love how many windows this house has! 

The guest room. I haven't done much with it and those curtains are cheapo, but that's a project for another day...

 Clay's room/ extra guest room. We wanted to have a place for both sets of parents when they're in town at the same time (like this weekend for Clay's baptism). I love his room. It's so bright! 

Claire's room is a funky shape, but it's perfect for her. She likes to sit on the toy box and watch people and cars go by. 

 I had fun putting her room together! I don't want to go too girly, since Clay with probably share it with her someday, but I still wanted to have lots of fun accents. I still need some more wall art and maybe stenciling, but it can wait. Also, she loves the closet... she calls it her "house". 

The master! It's enormous and we're still figuring out what we want to do with it, but we love it. It has a huge bathroom and walk-in closet too. 

Well, there ya go! Come visit us! We love having people in our home and we got a bigger house specifically for hospitality! Any time you're traveling thru the ATL, let us know and we'll put you up in Hotel Nickell :)

Happy Easter!

Easter was great this year! Besides the amazingness of realizing once again that Christ died for us, we also had a house full of people to celebrate with! Cole's sister Julia dropped by for a quick overnight on Friday with three friends from college and Chris & Jordan Stern came for a long weekend. This was Chris' 6th Easter break with us... keeping the tradition alive! It was a great weekend, full of good talks, fun games, lots of food and drink, and just a little sleep to keep us going :)

Happy Easter Y'all!

10 months!

Our Clay-man is 10 months old! 

- He isn't walking like we thought he would, but every day we think he's almost there!

- His new thing is yelling: yelling when he's happy, yelling when he's hungry, yelling at his sister when she makes him smile, and yelling when he wants me to pick him up. 

- He's also gained a lot of weight in the last few weeks. At his 9-month appointment, he was a little small, so my pediatrician recommended giving him more food and more formula. He gained 3 pounds in about 3 weeks (!) so he's an even 20 lbs now. 

- He cut his top four teeth this week so he's been a drool-machine, but hasn't complained much. Those new teeth sure are sharp though!

- He's still our smiley, happy, goofy baby and we sure do love our little guy! Come visit him (and us) in our new house soon! 

Diving in

We've only been here at the Vine Community Church a few weeks, but today we had our first crisis. One of the students from a much loved family in our church died last night in a car accident. Cole woke up this morning to the phone call and has been gone all day meeting with students, grieving with the family, and preparing for an impromptu memorial service for the youth that happened tonight. It has been an emotional day. I just got back from the service and am heavy with the grief that I witnessed there. I didn't really know the boy, Peter, but had gotten to know his sisters and parents just a little bit in the last few weeks. Last week I actually sat with his mom and sisters in church and took communion with them (Cole is usually running around the whole service so I'm on my own) and felt so loved by them "adopting" me for that Sunday. And here we are, a week later, and their whole world has crashed down on them. 

I keeping thinking about the day Matthew died and my heart just aches for his mom especially. The disbelief, the numbness, the anger, the crushing grief, and the aching emptiness is so overwhelming. Just making through the day is painful. I remember this wild and crazy sorrow that would come over me where I would think that I might not being able to keep living with my son gone. It's horrible. It gets better, of course, but the first days are horrible. I wish so badly that I could do or say something to make it better for this family. I wish Cole could give a magical sermon that would ease all the pain and calm all their hearts. But we can't do that. So instead, we pray that God would give them glimpses of heaven; glimpses that will bring peace, and eventually joy, to their hurting hearts. 

So I ask that y'all would pray for this family and for our youth group; that God would use this tragedy to bring glory to His name and that the hearts of all these hurting kids would be drawn to Him. 

New House!

Here's a pic of our new house! I'm not ready to show pics of inside yet :) Give me a few more days (or weeks) and then I'll share!

9 months old!

We've been in the process of moving for the past week, so Clay-man's 9 month mark came and went in all the hustle and bustle. Now that we're finally settled (kind of), I thought I'd update you on our little guy.

Height: 28 inches, I think

Weight: 17.4 lbs, which is on the small side

Eats: since he's a little small, I've started feeding him more real food. He LOVES it and yells at me for more :)

Sleeps: he's an awesome sleeper. He naps twice and sleeps at least 12 hours at night. He and Claire have definitely spoiled me by being such good sleepers!

Personality: very much a little man! He is constantly on the move and likes to yell at us. He is also super-smiley and good natured. The only time he gets grumpy is when I'm not giving him much attention. Last week was hard because I was in full-time packing mode and couldn't play with him much. He wasn't a fan of that and was pretty upset at me most of the week. Now that we're settling into our new house and there's lots of stuff to explore (i.e.: lots of boxes to chew on), he's much happier.

Oh, and the beer was not my idea. Poor confused baby! 

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I'll update y'all on our new place once we're a bit more settled! So far, we are loving Cumming and are very happy here. Our house is awesome, the people are church are very welcoming, plus there's a Starbucks on every corner. I mean, what's not to love?!!

Oh my goodness!!!

Where has the time gone!!! In one week we're moving to Atlanta! Wow. I've been packing like crazy and realizing that even though I think we don't own much, it's still A LOT of STUFF! Box after box after box and I still have lots left to do.

I haven't blogged because Cole has the computer with him. He had to start work on January 28th, so he's already there with all his stuff and I'm here packing everything else and hoping that all goes well on our house closing so that we can be reunited! I am not a fan of this single-parent thing that I've had to do for the last three weeks. I will be very glad to be with my man again! He did come back and visit for my birthday (Feb 4th - 27 years young!) but I think Claire was a little confused when he left again. I think she's missing her daddy and not totally understanding why we have to wait to move with him.

Melt my heart!

Anyway, we filled our time by taking a nice, long trip to Asheville to see my parents. Mom went all over town with me to shop for little pieces of furniture that I'll need to fill all the rooms in our new place :) We found a headboard for Claire's bed and a little coffee table/cabinet to keep media stuff in (at Goodwill of all places!). 

On the way back home, we stopped in Columbia to visit Matthew's grave. I realized that this may be that last time for awhile that I'm able to visit my little man's resting place, so I wanted to stop and take a minute to miss him and to grieve over the fact that he wasn't there to meet his little brother (it was Clay's first time to come to the graveyard).  

My three kiddos - two here and one waiting for us in heaven. 

For Valentine's Day, Claire and I made heart-shaped cinnamon rolls for breakfast and then we all went on a dinner date with my friend from college, Becky, and her two kids. Her husband was out of town too, so we decided it was a good night for Chicfila! 

My little Valentine! 

Claire and Ryan were great playmates!

Now I'm just going to be packing and cleaning until next Saturday. Hopefully Cole will be home on Thursday and he can help me organize everything for loading it on the van. I am not looking forward to that chaos! 

In the meantime, I'll leave you with a picture of my kiddos. Claire wanted me to take a picture of "me and Clay with our cheeks together!" so here it is :)

Claire is 3!

Today Claire turned 3! For her special day Cole took her out to breakfast, then we had photo shoot, then we had a birthday lunch, then we said "bye-bye" to her pacifiers! She has loved them since she was a little baby and I've only been letting her have them to sleep, but we figured the time had come for her to give them up completely :). It was a sad day for Claire-bear. But she was cheerful about it. We tied them to balloons and released them into the sky... only to have them fly straight into the trees. Oops. (They blew out later, so who knows where they are now.) She also had a princess party on Sunday, but I'll share pics of that later. It was a lot of chaotic fun! 

We love our little Claire. She is sweet and sunny and such a joy to be around in this stage of life. She is soaking everything up like a sponge and is so very eager to please us. In fact, when she saw her birthday decorations on Sunday, she said "Oh mommy! Thank you, thank you! I'm so proud of you for putting up my decorations!" What a girl! We love you, Claire Ann Nickell :)