Easter Weekend

After a crazy week, Team Smoker settled in for a fun Easter weekend. Ella got sick, but it didn't rain on her parade! Daddy surprised Mommy, Ella & Henry by coming home early on Friday. We had a great evening together. We colored Easter eggs on Saturday (Ella was really into solid colors.) Notice the way she put the crayons in the missing egg area of the carton... pretty funny. I had a hard time keeping her fingers out of the 'dye' (check out her orange fingers!)

Henry was completely un-interested...as was Phil with the Purdue game on at the same time.


Easter morning was really fun with a terrific church service ( click here for a demonstration of how we can spread the good news of Christ) and then Easter baskets, and egg-hunt and then the day with family. We had a great time.








Hope you had a wonderful day as well!

Easter's around the corner

While Phil was in Canada this weekend, I took Ella & Henry (along with Phil's parents and Grandma Donnabell) to a special Easter breakfast. There was a build-your-own-pancake/sundae bar (Ella put sprinkles, marshmallows, jelly beans and syrup on her pancakes!),

an appearance by an Easter bunny (OK - rather a well endowed gray bunny... not quite what I pictured when I signed up)

and then an easter egg hunt. Ella's friends, Patrick and Brianna along with their Mom, Bridget, also came to the breakfast. There was quite the sugar high going on but the kids really had a great time. Thanks so much family for all of your help! Ella will remember this for a long, long time!

Play Date

The Crew: Sarah Noto, Olivia Salerno, Sean Kinnucan, Ella & Henry Smoker

The kids and I got together with some good friends on Friday, 3/14 for some good ole fashioned playing! The kids still do a lot of 'parallel play' but they are learning to share and take turns and are having a good time just hanging out, making noise and eating goldfish crackers! Here are a few pics!

A little bit of Spring...

Ahh... we're so ready for spring. It was about 60 degrees today so we decided to take a stroll around the block with Penny in our new 'duel-ly' (the two-seater stroller.) We had to turn around when Ella was running down the sidewalk and face-planted on the ground. Oops. 3 band-aids and the help of our 'Boo-Boo Buddy' (an ice pack) and she's fine! Anyway, we enjoyed the weather and can't wait for it to be here for the summer!

A Day for Ella

It had been quite a while since we did something just for Ella so we decided to get a babysitter for Henry (thanks Nick & Anna) and we took Ella ice-skating and tubing/sledding. She had a blast!







Ice skating wasn't her favorite... as we heard "Carry ME!" halfway around the rink the first time.







But tubing - was really fun. She giggled and laughed and kept shouting 'Again, Again!' It was a lot of fun!

I guess it's time...

for us to finally have a website. We have another URL already (www.smokerfamily.com) but it's been almost two years since we've updated it. Now we've got another child and the first one isn't nearly as calm as the picture on that website suggests! We've got good friends with a family blog so I guess we'll just follow the pack on this one. :) We'll keep it short and sweet... just a family picture to get it started.