Well, to start off with, we went down to California for Dirk's brother's (Peter) wedding. That was in May and Arie had his first airplane ride. Peter and his beautiful bride Miriam now live close to the DeWinkle farm in southern Idaho.
Arie and his Beppe in San Francisco
Peter and Miriam
Soon afterwards, starting in June, we spent FIVE weeks visiting our families. What fun! We spent the first few weeks with Molly's family. We hadn't all been back to visit family for almost a year, and we ejoyed it. Molly's sister's family was visiting also from the east coast, and we had a blast aquainting ourselves with John, their one year old. Arie had a lot of fun with his aunt, uncles, cousin, and his Nana and Papa. He also went to the zoo and met his great grandma and his great-great grandma!
Butterflies at the Zoo
Arie and His Great Grandma
Arie, John, Nana and Dog Eppie
The next few weeks we spent with Dirk's family at the farm and stayed at Rudi and Anne's house.
Arie and His Pake
At the beginning of last summer Dirk and I were the only married kids in the DeWinkle family and now five of them are moved out and married! Lots of changes, to say the least. When we got there, Siska was planning her wedding for 7-7-07 in the Bahamas. Farm work went on as usual right up until the wedding and Dirk enjoyed getting to work for a few days on the dairy.
The Picture Says It All
The Mr. Dirk DeWinkles
The Wedding Site
Needless to say, we crammed as much fun into a few days as we possibly could and were of course very tired by the end of it.
The Reverend Taking a Siesta at the Airport
This get us almost caught up to the present. Right around May Dirk got a job working for a local farmer here in the Palouse area. There is a beautiful house on the farm that we've been remodeling and got to move into when we got back in July. God's hand in providing such a good job and a home has been very apparent to us. All the timing and details seemed to be worked out for us before we even knew they needed to be worked out! We are very blessed and so thankful.
And that's it for all the new news. Arie is doing great and is now a whopping 16 pounds and 27 inches long. He's a happy, easy-going little guy and was so layed back during our whole vacation. On our trip to the Bahamas (which included a ten hour drive to California, 7 hours of flying and one lay-over each way, and a three hour time change!) he only lost his composure once, and that was at 11 PM. He made it all that way without crying, almost! With such an easy kid, I joke that our next baby will be a handful. :)
Our Happy Little Man
