Small Group Weekend

Wow I am getting behind on blog posts. So many fun things have been happening these past few weeks! We had back to back weekends of showers and party time. Our first baby shower was with our small group from church. These people are almost a second family to us. We started meeting together years ago before any of us were married and now we all are except for Ingrid and Brian, who are getting married this July! Two of the families already have kids and we will make three. It has been so special to see how connected our lives have become over these past years and to know God was paving the way for these friendships long before we could foresee it.

It was great having Brian and Ingrid in town the whole weekend (they are living in Ohio while Ingrid is finishing up her residency and then they are moving back to KC this summer!) so we all took advantage of our time together. Sat night we celebrated the Clarke wedding by showering the bride-to-be with "unmentionables," as the invite put it. It was a true girls night filled with lots of food, wine and girl talk late into the morning. We gave her some of our martial advice, talked through problems we had all come up against in our marriages and prayed for the couple as the months wind down before the big day. Here are my sweet friends

Then on Sunday, we all met at the Black's house for a Baby Clark shower. We decided to make it a couple's shower so everyone could visit and enjoy time together. The girls made sure to add a little flair to the party with some cute decorations and most of the boys helped grill out. We played a game where Whitney had cut up features of Matt and I (and a few celebs) and each couple had to put together pictures of what our baby may look like. We had some very practical ones and some totally bizarre ones. We were cracking up by the end of it all. Here are their creative efforts.

Lets hope our kid does not have Angelina Jolie lips...sheesh



The one on the left totally looks like a puffer fish, ha!

And the awkward winner we picked....

Their names were not on there at first but we made them sign them all after the guessing was over. The most funny part of it all to me was the "Rachael mouth" that was used totally had a little basil piece in her tooth. I am notorious for getting food stuck in my teeth and Matt is always pointing it out. You couldn't see the little guy in the normal sized picture but when you blew it up, there he was in all his glory. Whitney didn't notice when she was cutting all the features out but it didn't escape Matt's eyes when he first looked at it. Ha! How fitting.

These were the awesome gifts we got. They pooled all their money together and bought us all these cloth diapers. We were blown away by how generous this was and super excited. We even got the perfect container to hold them all in her room. We spent the next 10 min guessing all the colors names and making up our own that were more "baby appropriate," like colostrum yellow. Nice, I know.  They also got us the book shown above. Everyone came up with advice and a prayer for our daughter and sent it to Courtney. She then scrapbooked everyone's thoughts inside the book and gave it to us. Everyone's thoughts and prayers were so honest and appreciated, each one reflecting the writer's situation or point of view. We loved this. Here we all are posing together, girls and boys...

The three small group kids first picture together. Daisy was caught off guard and Noah was ready to eat. So goes it photographing kids.

Overall it was such a good weekend spending time with everyone and pre-celebrating these big events in our lives together. Thanks to all the girls who planned both parties so well, you did a great job and we felt very loved!