2009 in pictures (lots of pictures actually!)

This has been a really big year for our family with lots of change and lots of exciting things happening. We started the year by flying to Tasmania on New Years day. The purpose of the trip was to attend the wedding of my old Bible college room mate who I've been friends with since I was 16, but we figured if we were going all that way we'd do a good job of it and organised a 10 day trip around the state, with mum and dad coming along for the ride as well. This is us at Cradle Mountain on a surprisingly warm, sunny day (we had many rainy and freezing days down there even in Jan and even had the fireplace on a couple of times).

This is at Port Arthur, in the penitentiary.

This is Jaden locked up at Richmond gaol.

The beautiful Russell Falls.

Bushwalking (the tree behind us is actually quite small, you should've seen some of the absolutely HUGE old trees!!)

At Tasmazia which was Jaden's favourite part of the trip.

Once we got home from holidays it was into full swing baby prep as I was due with our little bubba at the end of Feb. After 2 years of trying and a lot of heart wrenching times of thinking it would never happen we were so excited!! This was my baby shower which turned out to be on the hottest day of last summer with about 30 ladies all crammed into my sister's place. It was lots of fun though and we were soooo blessed with all the generous gifts!

On 1st March 2009 our little Bethany Joy was born. Brand new here with a very emotional mummy and daddy.

We all fell in love with our little princess straight away, inlcuding her big brother as you can see by his face in this photo.

She was so tiny to start with, just 6 pounds, 5 ounces.

Such a little cutie pie :-)

When Bethany was only 9 weeks old we moved house, which turned out to be a rather stressful event for a new mum, but we're very settled and happy here. We had tried to buy a house at the end of last year but our loan ended up being rejected. We had to move because our landlord was selling and we were not looking forward to heading out into the fierce rental market again, but God had an amazing plan in store. Some friends of ours from church bought a bigger house after taking on board 2 extra family memebers as foster children and they called and asked us to rent their house. We are here long term with eventual plans to buy it off them and they let us treat it like our own with murals, picture hooks, gardens etc, yet they sort out repairs, upgrades etc. They have been amazing to us and it's so nice to be able to feel at home here and not deal with real estates, inspections etc. The pic above is Bethany's bedroom with her beautiful mural and below is Jaden's. They were done by a fabulously talented friend of mine from church.

Not long after we moved into our new house my baby boy turned 10, can't believe I've been a mum for a whole decade!! Jaden is a big fan of all things science so he had a science party which was a big hit with both him and his friends.

I made a beaker for the cake.

The next big event for me was organising a girls camp for 15-25 year old young women. It was soemthing God placed on my heart and I thought it was a tad nuts to try my hand at something like that, having never done it before and having a baby who would be 4 months old on the camp, but again God came through amazingly!! I had a fabulous team to work with and things just all fell togther. I am normally quite a stresshead but was so amazed at how I was able to just lean on God for it all and remain really calm and peaceful. The camp was fantastic and it has since led to us having a fortnightly home group at my house now for young women up to 30ish. It has also led to another camp as the older ladies from church saw all the pics and heard reports and wanted one too, so we're doing a similar camp in March for the ladies but a very chilled out version as we sense it's a refreshing time so I'm looking forward to that!

We had a feast on the Sat night, which was a wedding banquet as we are the bride of Christ and it all turned out so lovely :-)

Not long after that I got a lot busier when I decided to home school Jaden after 2 terms of struggling at school. Here he is at our first visit to the Penrith home schooling group for ice skating.

We had a really enjoyable 6 months together, these pics are just a few little highlights of our home schooling adventure! Cooking....

gardening.....

and making an ant mine.

Then came the big surpirse for 2009. I am pregnant again!! After it took so long to get pregnant with Bethany we decided to not use contraception and just leave it up to God whether we had more kids or not and much to our shock and excitement when Bethany was only 5 months old the hubby knocked me up again!!! Our little peanut is due on the 23rd May next year and I get to have a sneak peek next week at my ultrasound. I am currently 18 1/2 weeks :-)

The year has flown by and little Bethany has grown up so fast and changed so much. She is walking around the furniture and crawling so fast. She is such a curious and cheeky little bub and lives up to her middle name by bringing us so much joy!!!

Our recent family holiday to Umina has been another highlight of the year and we are going to book a trip for Dec again next year.

So that's been our year, change, surprise, excitment and we are looking forward to finishing the year off with a lovely christmas with our families :-). I just have to give God so much praise for the ways He has guided us, provided for us and just been there with us always through every up and down!! 2010 will bring change for us too. Jaden is heading back to school and will be going to the public school up the road and our new little bub will come to meet us.

May you all have a lovely christmas and may 2010 be full of many blessings for you!!!

Carolyn :-)