Fourth Festivities!

We had a great weekend filled with many activities to celebrate Independence Day! It all started last Friday night when our church hosted a fun evening with games, food, live music and fireworks! It was great fun and I didn't take any pictures! I spent the majority of the evening standing in line with Helen and two of her friends waiting to get their faces painted! Oh well! The fireworks and fellowship were great!

On Saturday evening we went to Nana and Papa's house and enjoyed a cook-out with all of the cousins present! That doesn't happen very often, so it was great fun! Here is a picture of all seven cousins! It sure is hard to get all of them to look in the same direction and smile...but a cute bunch of kiddos none-the-less! Yes, Helen is wearing a night-gown and Ty is wearing Superman pajamas in the middle of the afternoon!
After dinner, we headed out back by Papa's garden for some baseball practice. Beckett and Connor practiced pitching and Ty practiced throwing. It was fun watching the "boys of summer" play ball!

Another pic of Beckett, Connor and Ty taking turns pitching!

Then it was time for a ride on the "gator"!

Papa took us to the back of his property to pick and eat some blackberries! Yum!

Will didn't pick them.....but he sure liked eating them!

Then we rode over to the "creepy tree". That is what the kids call this particular tree that is dead and stands out in the middle of a field.

Then they hammed it up a bit to show how the creepy tree really creeps them out!

Back at the barn, Will had to sit in the seat of the tractor for a little photo session!

Then on Sunday after church, we headed downtown for the LC parade. This year, to kick off the parade, they held a "firecracker run" down Broadway for the kids. Beckett and Helen both participated and we were so proud of them. I posted two quick video clips at the bottom of this post of each of them running!

This was Will's first experience at a LC parade and it did not disappoint! Let me just say that this expression on his face just sums up a small town parade perfectly! He seems to be thinking, "Did I just see what I think I saw?

For example, men with funny looking hats on their heads racing little go-carts around and doing routines where they about crash into each other. How is that for entertainment?

And I kid you not, this guy was in the parade, riding in the back of a truck that had signs for one of the local candidates who is running for Judge. Yes, that is a monkey sitting on his shoulder and yes, it was wearing a diaper and drinking a water bottle. No wonder Will had that confused look on his face in the earlier picture. I'm not sure that I even understand this!

Now THIS is a float that I think makes sense at a Fourth of July parade! This is what it is all about!

Did I mention that at a small town parade, every person who is riding on some type of float, car, truck, ATV or go-cart, throws candy to the on-lookers? We came home with a Halloween-type stash of candy! (Except none of it is chocolate because it would melt immediately in this 95 degree heat~so that is kind-of a bummer!) Helen would grab the candy and stash it in the basket of Will's stroller. Well, somehow a dum-dum sucker made it into Will's seat! He managed to get the wrapper off and stick it in his mouth before I saw him, so he had his first ever sucker at the parade! He thoroughly enjoyed it and now he wants every sucker that he sees! Smart boy!

This is Helen running down Broadway in the Firecracker Run! Her video turned out blurry, but you can still see her hot, red face and sweet smile as she ran by me!

And here is Beckett as he ran by me toward the end of the race!

So proud of both of them!

It's July Already??

I can't believe how quickly the summer is going by! Here is a quick update from our family for the last couple of weeks! I'll begin with a picture of Helen with a rainbow painted on her face. She went with me to our local homeschool curriculum resource fair last week to pick up some items for next year. She was excited to get her new math books that she will use when we begin Kindergarten in a couple of months. I can't believe my little girl is beginning Kindergarten! Anyway, there were a couple of young girls at the fair who were doing face painting and Helen picked this FULL face rainbow with glitter and everything!
We've done a bit of swimming this summer. We've gone to the lake a couple of times with friends and also to a pool or two. So thankful for friends who share their pools with us on hot summer days!

Beckett got to go to Atlanta with Nana, Papa and Connor for a couple of days to see some Braves baseball games, so Sean and I took Helen and Will to Chuck E. Cheese's. Helen thinks this place is "the bomb"! She was SO excited when we told her we were going! Here she is with the big mouse himself!

This picture makes me laugh! These two were both cheesin' hard for the camera! Will was genuinely having a blast, and Sean.....well, not so much. Chuck E. Cheese's is not his favorite place to spend an evening....but he always has fun hanging with the kids!

We don't go to Chuck E. Cheese's very often, but Helen always likes to have her picture made by this sign when we are there.

Beckett and Helen both went to VBS a couple of weeks ago and then last week, Beckett attended Worship Camp all week. We got to enjoy their program last Sunday night where they sang, danced, participated in a "black light" song and did sign language as they worshiped. Beckett had a great week and he learned so much all week long! Here is a picture of him singing along with several other kids in the choir!

Here is a picture of Beckett (was he scared?) with some of his buddies after the program was over. They wore black clothes through the program because of the black light songs, but for the last song, they all wore their camp t-shirts. It was a great week! We LOVE First Baptist LC and their children's program! So thankful for this opportunity for kids to gather together, have fun and learn the many ways to worship and praise our Heavenly Father!

This was Beckett's third year to attend worship camp and the first year he came home one day and wanted to know what a "solo" was. I explained it to him and that was the end of that. The next day when I picked him up, the camp director told me that he had tried out for, and gotten a solo! This year, Beckett tried out and got a solo part again. We are so proud of him for using his talent to praise God and thankful for all of these kiddos who led us in a sweet night of worship! There were four solos in this song and Beckett sang the second solo.

Check out "The Slam"!

I've got some catching up to do and some fun pictures of the last week, but tonight we updated Beckett's blog instead of this one. So, if you are interested in a quick re-cap of all of Beckett's major league baseball game experiences, hop on over to "The Slam" to check out his latest blog entry!

June 19, 2009~Home!

June 19th 2009 was the day we arrived at home with Will and we were re-united as a family! This is a fun picture of many of the people who were at the airport waiting for us that afternoon! There were signs, balloons and many family and friends there to support and welcome us home!
My sister worked it out with security to get Beckett and Helen to the gate, so they were the first ones we saw when we came off the plane with Will. We were able to have a few minutes with them so they could meet their baby brother before we headed out to see family and friends!

Here we were one year ago on June 19th.....(and if you know Sean very well at all, you know he did not want to wear matching shirts when we came home.....but he took one for the team and put it on at the last minute for pictures!)

And here we are today, June 19, 2010. (Notice no matching shirts!) :)

I thought it might be fun to take a family picture every year on June 19th. Just a good way to see how much the kids have grown! They really have all three changed so much this past year! I'm amazed at how quickly this year has gone! Looking forward to another year of fun and memories at the Harper Hullabaloo!

One Year!

One year ago on June 15th, 2009, we woke up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, walked down a little dirt road, through a certain red gate and held our precious baby boy for the first time! Here is a picture of that first moment that I held Will Tekalgn Harper!
Here is the picture of Sean as he held Will for the first time. I think he was about to kiss Will's cheek in this picture! So sweet! I loved that the special mothers had dressed Will in a red shirt and Sean had worn a red shirt as well!

June 15th will always be quite special for our family as we remember the gift that we were given just one year ago when we met Will for the first time! How will we celebrate? Well, I think that in the years to come, we will certainly talk about this day with Will. We will look at pictures. We will talk about and remember his birth family. We will talk about and remember the special people at Hannah's Hope. And we will continually praise God for His plan to knit our lives and our families together in such an amazing way! This year, we had the wonderful blessing of celebrating this one year home milestone with some very special people! When we traveled to Ethiopia last June, we met many amazing families and two of them were from Tennessee! Yes, Will was coming back to Tennessee with two other babies that he had been spending time with at Hannah's Hope! This past Saturday night, we attended a cook-out at the Johnson's home to celebrate our one year home with Lucy Lane and her family and Silas Lucht and his family! It was so great to be with these two families that we had been with just one year ago and had shared such a special week with! It was great to see Will, Lucy Lane and Silas together again! So here go the pictures of the evening.......

When you are one and a half years old, you don't really play with other kiddos....you just sort of play around them! So here are Silas and Will playing beside each other! That water table was a huge hit with our boys and they were soaked by the time the evening was over! They did do a great job taking turns on that yellow roller coaster car!

Here is a picture of Will and Lucy Lane playing beside each other at the water table! Their little buddy to the left is about their same age, and his family is traveling in about a week to bring home his baby brother from Ethiopia! It was so great to be with so many families who were at different places in their adoption journeys!

Lucy Lane and her brothers and sisters have some super fun toys! Will was all about this lawn mower!

He was also very much into this car! And he wasn't too interested in sharing, or being taken away from these wonderful toys to take pictures!

So when the mommas decided that we needed to get some pictures of these three buddies together, it just wasn't happening. Maybe we will learn that in the future, we should take the pictures at the beginning of our time together when everyone is fresh and happy! This picture just makes me laugh! Will was not getting out of the car, so Amber and Kristi set Silas and Lucy Lane in front of the car. LL either fell over, or just decided to lay down and Silas and Will were not interested in smiling, so pictures were pretty much a bust!

Kristi had this adorable cake made to celebrate one year home with our children. So cute and so thoughtful to include all three Ethiopian Tennessee friends! Loved it!

Now the real trick was to try to get a picture of them all with the cake. Again, I had taken Will away from the coolest toys ever and he was just not feeling the cake! He was momentarily captivated by the flame as Kristi tried to light the candle, but he really wanted to get back to the play lawn mower! I still love this picture! It just overwhelms me to think about the fact that these three children came from different parts of Ethiopia with very different life circumstances, that they were all born within about four weeks of each other, that they were all three brought to Hannah's Hope and that God placed these precious children with families who all live in the same state!

And here they are one more time with their mommas! Silas with Amber, Lucy Lane with Kristi and Will and me. They really are very happy, laid back kiddos.....it was just a very warm night with lots more fun stuff to be doing rather than taking pictures! And by the way, these sweeties do have wonderful daddies! Don't know why we didn't take a picture of them with their dads. Wait, maybe it was because they were over pictures!?!?

And did I mention all of the fun toys at the Johnson's home? Will wasn't the only one enjoying them! There are absolutely no pictures of Beckett and Helen from the cook-out because they were so busy having fun in the best backyard ever. That is Beckett on the far right on the trampoline. He had so much fun that he didn't even eat supper. Helen was probably on the zip line, or the swing set, or the see saw, or in the play house or.......so many fun things to do!

Thanks again to the Johnsons for hosting such a fun, memorable evening for our families to celebrate one year home with our children! It was a great night!

My heart is full. Full of love for all three of my precious children. Full of memories from that special day one year ago today.

Thanks be to God!

Fun In The Sun!

Just a quick update. Beckett and Helen have been attending VBS at a local church each morning this week and they are enjoying their time at "Saddle Ridge Ranch!" So much so, that Helen picked out a special cowgirl outfit to wear one day! She is really loving the music time and the dance motions that go with the songs! Will and I have had fun together during the mornings while they are at VBS and today I took Will to the University to take part in a hearing study done by their audiology department! He did so well!
On Tuesday afternoon, I took the kids to the splash pad to cool off! Will wasn't so sure about it. It took him a while to warm up to being sprayed with all of that water, but once he did, he really loved it! Love that belly!

Just a cute picture at the splash pad of Will and Beckett playing together!

We came home and got out our five dollar slip and slide. Carson, Noah and Turner joined our three for some backyard fun! Sunday night we had about 15 big kids on the slip and slide. We have certainly gotten our money's worth out of that piece of plastic!

Just trying to get a picture of all the Guldan/Harper kiddos! Love having these friends just next door! So fun to meet Carson at the fence and plan whose yard they want to play in!

What does Sean do on his day off?

Check out the volunteer in the red hat and the waders who is carrying a bucket! He thinks he is quite the celebrity now! (Nevermind that you would have never known it was him if I didn't tell you he was wearing a red hat!)If you have a couple of minutes, watch the video and find out about the work they are doing in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park to re-introduce brook trout into some of the streams. My fly-fishing husband spent last Friday volunteering his time to help in this effort. Don't think he didn't leave the park without moving on to another stream to try to catch some trout as well! :)