Last year I wrote a whopping THREE blog posts. I have big aspirations this year to write at minimum one blog a month. Think I can do it? Me neither—but here’s to trying new things.

As I type this out, the three little kids are sleeping and Hezzy and Nathan are out in the shop watching Nathan’s favorite Spiderman movie to celebrate Hezzy’s seventh birthday. SEVEN. Somehow that little squishy babe we toted across the world and back is seven. The kids have deemed this his 6-7 birthday (cue that hand motions).

With Hezzy turning seven, that means this blog is about seven years old. And while I used to be a lot more diligent about updating, it is still so fun to look back through the years. What can I say, living overseas had a lot more bloggable moments than living in rural Missouri.

So with all that said, this year I am aiming to write more. I can’t wait to look back on these days and read about what life looked like with a seven, five, three and one year old. I can’t guarantee it will be entertaining, but hopefully it will be a good representation of what our life.

Last year, we decided to forgo the Christmas cards and I wrote a blog instead. This year, we already missed the Christmas card time, but I also already printed the photos we were going to use in each card. Nathan may decapitate me if we don’t send them out because clearly we don’t need 50 5×7 photo prints of our family. We’ll see what happens.

In case they don’t make it to your mailboxes, here’s what our year has looked like:

The winter was full of RSV and a whopping case of the flu and a whole lot of newborn Gabey snuggles. I returned to work from maternity leave in February and we had a pretty uneventful spring. During the summer, we found this house that we loved on Zillow. We weren’t necessarily looking to move, but knew that our current home wasn’t our forever home. We went out look at it with our realtor, and we decided to put an offer in. After some finagling, we got to buy the house. We made the move about thirty minutes north of town, and love it. God so graciously has provided for us this sweet home that we consider our forever house. Our closest neighbors are the cows across the street and it truly is such a blessing.

In moving, our kids entered a new school district and again, we love it. This fall Hezzy started first grade and Naomi started kindergarten. BIG KIDS. Reya also started preschool and loves telling me about all the fun things she gets to do at school.

In November we got to celebrate Gabriel’s first birthday and Reya’s third. We had a farm themed birthday in our little shop and it was so fun. We also got to take sweet family pictures on our land, and it was a fun way to commemorate our big move.

All in all, it was a wonderful year.

Here’s to a new year with some big goals.

Stay tuned to see what our family is up to this year.

Here’s some of the amazing pictures our friend Hannah took for us—I can’t put the full family one on here because it may or may not be coming to your mailbox if I ever get my Christmas cards out. So these will have to suffice until then.