Daddy and Bianca's Birthday

~Posted by Roma

(Before I start this post, some good news for our readers: our family has finally moved from Texas to Oklahoma, and are reunited with my Dad after 9 long months! J Things are going very well, and we are getting settled in to yet another new home and new adventure. We will do a post about that move soon!)

The last two birthdays of the year are my Dad’s and Bianca’s! Their birthdays are only a little over a week apart! So, back in July, we celebrated Dad and Bianca. We decided to combine Dad’s birthday and the 4^th of July together. So, we not only had traditional birthday cake and gifts, but we also set off fireworks and had friends from church over. (This was all while we still lived in TX) One very special thing we did for Dad this year, was creating a binder full of letters from us, family, distant relatives, friends, co-workers, pastors, and mentors. There were quite a few letters! Then I decorated the binder and Mom put it all together and we presented it to my Dad on his special day! He appreciated it so much since we had done the same thing for Mom a few years ago. The Reverend that married my parents even wrote a letter! J

In addition to the binder, we made a “Blessings of Mark” framed picture.

 We had a fun time with family and friends and Mom’s famous double chocolate ring cake and really enjoyed the day. (And now that we live in OK it has been so nice seeing Dad every night!!)

Then came Bianca’s birthday. We celebrated that everywhere! We celebrated it in Ohio, in our home in northern Texas, in Dallas Texas…so we celebrated around 3 times. J First, Mom had decided we needed to take a spontaneous trip to Ohio to surprise the family, since we hadn’t seen them in so long. Of course we were thrilled to do this and it was so hard to keep it a secret! (My Mom’s parents knew we were coming but her younger brother and his wife and two boys did not know at all.) I recorded a video of us walking into the kitchen where our Uncle J, Aunt C, and cousins E and J were sitting, and it was epic! J We had a wonderful visit! Besides doing a lot of catching up, visiting other distant relatives, going to the movies, swimming, etc., Bianca enjoyed birthday peach cobbler and ice cream, and presents.

Bianca with Uncle J and Aunt C in front of Cracker Barrel on a Sunday afternoon.

Our Mom just loved getting to see her brother again—and he loved seeing her! Here are the two of them at our cousin E’s baseball game one day.

When we returned safely from Ohio, our home-away-from home brothers K and O came over one day so we could celebrate Bianca’s birthday…again! We had a yummy dinner and ended it all with Carrot cake, German chocolate cake, ice cream, and more gifts. (We can’t celebrate enough. J)

Bianca with her favorite OLDER brothers. J

But the celebrating wasn’t over yet. We had to take Bianca on a surprise birthday trip, of course! So we piled in the minivan one day and found ourselves at…the Cowgirl Museum in the Dallas/Fort Worth area! It was the coolest museum! They showed a lot of short videos, displayed cowgirl clothes, guns, had a station where you could sit on a fake horse and watch yourself ride a “bucking horse” on the screen in front of you, and of course, there were plenty of exhibits on the history of cowgirls. We enjoyed going to a pretty unique museum for a change. Pictures were not allowed, so we got pictures of the outside. J

Then after eating a snack at Taco Cabana, we drove over to our next surprise. And boy, were we surprised! We pulled into the driveway of the H family’s house!!! We haven’t known the H family for very long, but Bianca and Ben had met their oldest son through a college gathering and they are just the sweetest, Christian homeschooled family with five kids just like us! (More like teen/young adult kids.) We spent the evening with them. They made us the most delicious meal; the fellowship was wonderful; the cake, the 10 different flavors of ice cream (YES!!); the gift basket they lovingly put together for Bianca; the rose bush they gave us to take to OK—it was such an awesome evening! We 10 kids probably enjoyed the game of Capture the Flag outside the most. Girls against boys. And the girls WON!

All of us kids posing with the H kids before we all got sweaty playing.

We ended Bianca’s sweet birthday celebration by going on a photo shoot with this guy right here being one of the photographers.

This is Jessie. Bianca recently announced on her blog that she is being courted by this godly young man. Go to her blog here for the details. I snuck this picture of them and really like it. I’ve been a pretty sneaky chaperone for the last few months haha!

Bianca

So, there you have it. No more birthdays until 2016! J There were so many great pictures of Bianca, and Jessie did a great job, but I’m going to run out of room here. Now, for a blog post about MOVING from TX to OKIE……

Have a blessed day!