Playground

After spending some time at one of Fayetteville's main parks on Monday, we decided to go to our "park" at the end of our street yesterday afternoon.

As you can see, they're still building a pond (right) and planting grass

But the playground equipment was installed and Emelyn loved being the only kid there!
We found these pictures with braille letters...
A counting chart...

and a pretend car to drive.

Then we went home to make supper...

And after supper, Emelyn helped Jake get the bikes ready for a ride.We went on a fun bike ride...

...and ended at the park (again!)

Here's Emelyn's favorite part of the park:

I'm guessing we'll spend a lot of time here in the coming months!

Park

Yesterday Emelyn and I went to the park... it was in the upper 60's, very little breeze, and it was so exciting to feel the warmth of the sun (not to mention seeing some green grass!)

As we were walking on the trail, we passed by a pasture that had a pony grazing next to the fence. This and the numerous puppies were the highlight of Emelyn's walk...
...that is until we stopped to play!
Engineering the train..

Sitting in the train - can you tell how sunny it was? I'm sure I can adjust the brightness of the picture, but it was so nice to see sun that I kept it as it was.

Then we found the slipperslide (Emelyn's favorite part about the park on our street)

Our of over 30 pictures, none showed the HUGE smile on her face nor captured the "whee!!!" each time we went down the slide

Our little dare-devil then decided it was more fun to try to go up the slide than down it.

I guess we'll need to work on this... :)

Midweek Pictures

In an effort to not let another week go by without pictures, here's some from the last two days.

Emelyn's breakfast request as of lately: a big bowl of raisin bran. I don't ask nor complain :) Last week it was shredded wheat. sigh.

Watching the birds in our yard after breakfast and begging to be outside too

We made it outside today, and she loved it! Notice the orange stains on her clean white shirt? We bought a bag of oranges and Emelyn ate an ENTIRE orange!

She thought she saw daddy's truck coming down the street only it was our neighbor two houses down. :(

Laughing with daddy

And a blurry but funny picture... Emelyn has been really snugly lately... and we love it! We asked her where puppy was and she ran over to him and immediately bent over to give him a hug. She has such a ferocious love for her animals.

Not much else is going on here... we've had a laid back week and we're hoping this week at home will give Ems some R&R to beat the cough/runny nose/raspy breathing. We finally broke down and used her inhaler today to see if that provides any help.

Jake is having a bone density test done tomorrow so we're hoping to find something out with that. He's been more tired than usual and we'll be glad when all of these tests are over so that he can get another blood transfusion. We also formed a team to walk in CCFA's "Take Steps Be Heard" walk in June which has been fun to set up. We had to choose a team name. Some of the others: Swollen Colons, Colons and Semi-Colons, The Royal Flushers, Super Poopers... lol... I refused to have a name revolving around bowel movements.. like "Cer" Fartsalot (get it?) so we settled for "Curing Jake's Aches." Cute?

And not much new with me either... I just finished a study on Esther, and have also really enjoyed listening to the "Radical" series - I'm on sermon 5 of 8 and can't wait to finish the remaining 3. I've also been playing with the idea of freezer cooking - I've been doubling/tripling our favorite recipes to freeze and so far all are just as good (and sometimes better!) when heated for later meals... not to mention that it makes the day so much easier when I don't have to think about or do anything for supper. :)

I've also been paired with a girl at Compassion House (a house for pregnant 12-28 year old girls) and I took her to her first prenatal appt last week. She's simply precious. I'm looking forward to spending the next 18 weeks with her as we walk through this pregnancy together. We'll soon know if it's a girl or boy which will be exciting!

I'm sorry, there's not much else to share... we don't live terribly exciting lives... very full and wonderful... just not always exciting for others to read about. :)

Routines

Last Thursday and Friday were beautiful Spring-like days - upper 60's and 70 degrees- so we spent most of the days outside. In fact one time we were in the garage to get in the car and head to the park but Emelyn climbed into the stroller before I could pack it to go! So we stayed home and walked 30-40 minutes in the stroller, then another 10-15 in the wagon, followed by a lot of running around.

We also sat on dad's toolbox for a while just watching the birds fly around and listening to dogs bark... it's amazing how observant kids are... or maybe just how un-observant we grow-ups are.

Saturday Emelyn was stuffed up again which seems to always follow days outside. :( Since bad weather was coming in, we decided to stay home and not go to OKC to watch KSU in the NCAA tournament. Again, :(

Saturday and into Sunday a storm did come and we ended up with 7-8 inches of snow. After church and naps, daddy and Emelyn spent most of the rest of the day doing this:

On to some funny things about Emelyn. She's quickly reaching that stage where she's learning new things all the time, has an imagination, and also really prefers things to be consistent. I guess with her world changing so fast she needs to know some things don't change... like the fact that every person AND animal needs to eat at meals... (feeding Molly her breakfast)

...and every day when she wakes up (morning or nap) after shutting off the vaporizer, she is then ready to get out of her crib, and then we have to sit in her rocking chair where we rock for a little bit. Then she turns around asks for "book" and wants the "light on." So we turn on the lamp and read/sing from her baby bible book. After looking at every page, she's then ready to get down and play.

Oh yeah - did I mention Molly (or monkey or puppy or Minnie) is her constant companion? She talks to her animals, feeds them, points at their eyes, ears, nose and mouths, carries them in her purse and takes them for rides in her "car."

There are so many funny little "routines" that we have to do each day to make the day complete -dancing while getting dressed, singing the toothbrush song while brushing teeth, praying before eating (really just saying "amen!" - sometimes she'll say "amen!" as soon as she sits down so that she can eat right away), having a cup of milk at each meal (can't eat if the milk cup isn't present!), and one of my favorites still is daddy having to take his coat off as soon as he gets home - that or the fact that she needs a book to read with clothes off in order to go potty - even her socks have to be off!

Visitors and Gifts from Kansas

Lately Emelyn will recognize people in pictures and say their name so Jake got out a wedding album... Emelyn recognized a lot of "mommy!" and "daddy!"

... as well as both sets of grandparents - calling them "bampa" and "bamaw" - we were quite impressed that she remembers them since we don't see them as often as we'd like!
Friday night, my Uncle Kevin, Aunt Donna and Cousins Anna, Laura and Alex came to visit on their way to Cozumel for spring break... it was so nice to see them and to catch up over dinner

Stacking things with Aunt Donna

...playing with Laura

Emelyn received a St. Patrick's Day gift in the mail from Grandpa and Grandma C and she had a lot of fun opening it :) Such a ham!

And when I asked her (in her new green John Deere hat!) to smile for the camera, this is what I got:

Then my brother Andrew came to visit during some of his spring break which was a lot of fun! He left this morning to venture back to Kansas. It took Emelyn a while to warm up to him, but she eventually realized how much fun Uncles can be!

Cooking

This is a very random picture - and only you Broeckelman's will know and appreciate it. Do you remember this cookie jar from Grandpa and Grandma's house? It use to be full of peanut brittle every time we went there. Well, after Grandpa and Grandma moved to town, this is one thing I mentioned to my parents that I'd like if no one else had wanted it when they did the estate sale. I've had it tucked away, not sure what to use it for until this past week.... it's perfect to hold granola bars and little cracker bags for Emelyn!

I took Emelyn to some friend's house while I went to the dentist this past week, and when I came back to get her, her hair was in super adorable pig tails! Here I am trying to recreate it for Jake with very little success (mainly b/c someone pulled out one side as soon as it was in!)
Looking all grown up

Super smiley when she's had a good night's rest and has food in front of her!

Outside one day this week... so much to see and do!

Running up and down the sidewalk over and over and over

My little helper - if I have oven mitts out, she wants hers too. Such a big girl!

Look at how excited she is to be "helping!"

A little blurry but still cute in my opinion. :)

We have a busy weekend and week ahead full of Dr. appointments (and likely another blood transfusion for Jake :( His hemoglobin has dropped to 8.1 we found out last night) , dinners with friends and family visits. Jake got up bright and early to go on a fishing/floating adventure with the guys in his office to kick off the weekend and spring weather.

Emelyn is 17 months old today - we can hardly believe it. It seems each day she asks "what's this?" and we'll tell her, and she then remembers that word, and it's yet one more word in her quickly expanding vocabulary. One quick "funny" - one phrase that she uses a lot is "Shuts Off!" Meaning, shut it off! Literally, each morning when we go into her room, we don't get a smile, or a hug or a hello - instead she points at her vaporizer and says "Shuts off!"

Smiling Girl..

Now that Emelyn is feeling a little better, we're seeing more of this:

And this...
Especially when we went outside and saw this being built at the end of our street ... a new city park!

Emelyn was ready to go bye bye...

With the spring weather - almost 70 yesterday! - we bought this backpack for future hiking... Emelyn has been having fun with it already!

About the time we think Emelyn is feeling better, she seems to have a bad day, so we finally took her back to the Dr yesterday. If we stay inside and read books and snuggle, she's fine and doesn't cough, but the minute we go outside or let her run around, she starts having coughing fits and raspy-sounding breathing. Despite this, she still sleeps, eats and plays great. The Dr is pretty sure it's asthma and not a cold and gave us an inhaler to try out. He recommended we give her a treatment, then take her to the park and see how she does - if she's fine, he said it'll confirm that it's asthma - the funny thing, is that she has the same inhaler/medicine as her mom at that age... some things don't change over time after all! We haven't tried it yet, but with the 60+ weather predicted today, we may end up at the park. :) Have a good weekend, everyone!