It's Sew Awesome!

I have undertaken a new adventure: the art of sewing! My mom was gracious enough to let me borrow her sewing machine while I learn as many intricacies as I can about this noble craft until I decide to invest in my own. I wanted to make sure that this is something I will enjoy enough to keep doing the rest of my life before I buy a machine.
Now, I knew absolutely NOTHING about sewing or even sewing machines, since I never took any sort of Home Economics class in high school and never really was interested in learning before. However, now that I have more time to devote to learning things, I decided that learning to sew was important for having a family. This way I can mend clothes, or even MAKE clothes for my kids and for Garry. I'd say that's a pretty wise, economical decision.
My wonderful pastor's wife, Elaine, is my guide on my sewing journey, and she is awesome. I had my first lesson last Thursday, where I was taught how to thread the machine and get the bobbin set up. She then helped me with the settings of my stitch and then it was up to me to practice!
I tried to practice earlier today, but the baby was getting into everything, so I had to get up every few seconds. After she went down for her afternoon nap, I was able to focus and practice these basics.
I am super proud of myself because I sewed myself a little pouch. I think I will give it to Anika. It is a mini pouch for a mini girl.
This makes me really excited to start getting patterns and attempting to sew larger items, like cute sundresses for my girl or maybe even dresses for me!

New Joys, New Worries

Two days before her eight month "birthday", Anika has astounded us with her agility and can now climb up the three little stairs that go up to our second level of the house. We are so proud that she has been developing physically and has the mental determination to scale these stairs! However. However. Now that she can pull herself up onto things (she also loves scaling boxes and suitcases that are left on the floor) my mommy brain jumps to all the things that are dangerous that she can access, the toilets being one of them. I have been trying to get in the routine of closing the seat everytime, but now I think I am just going to keep the doors to our bathrooms closed. I also now have to be cautious when I am baking or have the oven open to make sure she is not around to reach up and grab the inside of the door. With every stage of life that Anika passes through come a new set of worries and terrible things on which my overactive imagination can spend too much time. When expressing these things to my mother, she said something that summarized this new chapter of our adventures perfectly. "Welcome to parenthood." And we are only EIGHT MONTHS in to what will hopefully be the next sixty years of our time together on this earth. The importance of the vows on Anika's baptism take on a whole new meaning when physical dangers start popping up all over the place. Anika is ultimately God's, not mine. I need to trust and pray that I can watch over her and keep her safe as far as it depends on my responsibility; but earthly dangers aside, I trust that Anika is in the arms of Jesus and her Heavenly Father, which is the safest place for anyone to be.

Wonderful Days of May

We had some fun times the beginning of this month. I managed to capture most of it in pictures for once too! Hooray for using the camera!

Tante Melissa graduated from Dordt! hooray!
The Riezebos siblings

After watching Melissa complete her four years of hard work, we headed to Pella for Tulip Time with Garry's parents so that they could experience the wonderful world of Dutch traditions here in little ol' Iowa.
Watching the night parade at Tulip Time!

Posing by the Tulips!

Family Picture!

More pretty tulips and a pretty girl!

Visiting Uncle Jordan and Aunt Andrea in Brookings, South Dakota!

Parental Musings of the Easter Season

Having a child is amazing; amazing simply because as a parent, that child is yours. As a parent, I get to love, cherish, guide, and discipline my beautiful daughter that I carried for nine months and then went through labor in order to bring into the world. Absolutely amazing.
Since this is my first year as a parent through the week of Christ's death and resurrection, I seem to be feeling things differently. The idea of God the Father watching his son endure pain and torment on the cross takes on a whole new meaning. As a parent, I hate it, absolutely despise it, when Anika is in pain. The pain can be as little as a slight bump of her head or more extreme like getting her finger pinched by her carset buckle. To see her face look up at me, tears forming in her eyes, beginning to cry as if to beg me, "Make the pain stop, Mommy. I am hurt and I need you to help me," makes me ache for her. Of course I wish that at my touch, the pain would be instantly gone and she would immediately smile and be ready to play again, the feeling of pain a forgotten experience. All I can do is hold her, rub her back, murmur sweet expressions of my love for her and how everything will be okay in a moment, that the pain will not last.
How tragic a day was the cross for our Father God to watch his son, his only son, go through the physical agony of crucifixion and the spiritual agony of hell. For God to choose to do nothing to help his son, to decide not to send any sort of comforting words, to remain silent when Jesus looked up into heaven, searching for his Father's face and cry, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" Jesus knew that at any moment the Father could have ended his son's pain, make it instantly vanish.
How could God have done it? How could he forsake his own son and put him through that pain?
God turned his face away from his son and looked upon his daughter: Joelle Dawn Riezebos. He looked away from one child in order to save millions of his children, including me, from crying out from eternal pain and suffering apart from Him.
God must have focused on me, and the glory that awaited Jesus after enduring all this pain, or how else could a Father watch his child suffer? I am forever grateful that God is my father, for the sake of the son, and that he did allow his son to die for me so that I might be with Him.
Hallelujah!

No, We Haven't Fallen Off the Face of the Earth...

I am a terrible blogger. LAZY is my only word to describe why I have not updated pictures or news of our little family lately. Not that I have been lazy in life, just lazy when it comes to opening up blogger, starting to type, finding some pictures...
So here are the highlights of the Riezebos household over the past couple months:

March 19th Garry, Anika and I drove down to Lincoln, NE to visit Anika's newest friend in the world, second cousin Evelyn Joanna. Anika was very interested in the baby. We were very excited to celebrate God's gracious gift to Amy and Marcus with a safe, fairly smooth delivery and a beautiful, healthy baby girl.


March 21st marked Anika's turning SIX MONTHS OLD! She is a mover and loves to explore by scooching and army crawling all over the house. I cannot leave anything on the ground that she should not have because she will be by the forbidden item in two seconds. Here's some pretty six month pictures!





Anika loves Jake



March 25th, I woke up in the morning, looked out the window, and saw...



April came with my baby growing more and more adorable every day. Here are some pictures from early in the month.







Anika is now capable of sitting up all by herself, but she rarely sits still as she would prefer to move around and grab toys and explore.
And here she is, in all her SEVEN MONTH majesty! I cannot believe how fast this is going. Everyone says time flies, but I never imagined it would go by this quickly. And I hear it gets worse...



In other news, I am painting our house (finally) and getting rid of the colors I didn't like. So here are all the before pictures. I'll hopefully post the afters SOON! Although painting a house with a baby is quite a challenge. I have to wait until this weather gets warmer so that I can open the windows to vent the paint smell without it getting 55 degrees in the house...

Springing into Spring

Changes are happening everywhere: outside the snow is melted away, inside my daughter is growing at an alarming rate, and inside my creative bug took over and I followed some urge to decorate for spring.
We had a difficult first that we just got through: a sick baby with a massive headcold. No fun at all. But Anika is a little trooper and even managed a few smiles in between her bouts of coughing and struggling to breathe. Poor little girl. And poor mommy who had to sleep on the couch and get up every couple hours to battle that mucous build-up. That's the job of a mom though. We are pretty amazing creatures when it comes to caring for our babies. I didn't know I could handle that little of sleep and still function. Although my eye started to twitch a bit after a few days of not a lot of sleep at night...she is doing much better now though, and is back to sleeping about 7-8 hours at a time. Praise God!
On a happier note, Anika has started eating solid food! We have started her on green beans, which I believe taste MUCH different than what she's used to eating, so she doesn't really EAT them as much as swishes them around in her mouth and makes faces. She eats them better in the morning and for lunchtime. At night she is not as willing to try.
Anika is also growing like the cutest little weed you've ever seen. She is now starting to babble as well, which is super fun to hear all those different consonants after just giggles and shrieks. I'm hoping that she can get the "m" consonant down to start saying "mommy", but so far the "d" is more prominent in her vocabulary, so we might have a daddy's girl on our hands!
Here are some catch-up pictures in no particular order...

Precious Lord, Take My Hand

The last few weeks have been a hectic time for our family. On January 29, Garry's Grandma Strikwerda was admitted to the hospital. On February 5th, Garry's mom called us as told us that Grandma was not doing well, and that she might possibly be near the end of her time here on earth with us. On February 6th, Garry's sister Melissa, Garry, Anika and I all flew to California. We were able to spend the next few days visitng Grandma in the hospital, first in ICU, and then in another room. Garry was only able to stay through February 9 because of the stresses of the busy accounting season, but he was able to see Grandma when she was still able to respond to us. On Friday evening, February 11, Grandma Jane was called home to be with Jesus. I decided to stay in California for another week to be available to help with anything, and for Anika to be a happy distraction in a sad time.
Grandma was blessed with 82 years, although they were not easy years to live through. However, she is a wonderful example to our family of how to remain firmly rooted in God and his promises to us, no matter what struggles this sinful world has for us. She lived through World War II in The Netherlands, lost a spouse at a young age, and dealt with numerous health problems throughout her life. Whenever I would visit and ask how she was doing she would say, "Oh, pretty good." Even after losing her independence and living in a nursing home, she would still find reasons to smile. We are so thankful that God allowed Grandma to meet Anika before she passed away, and we remain confident that she is with her Savior and will get to see us all whenever we join her in heaven.