May: Arwen's 4th Birthday and Mothers Day

Our sweet niece Arwen Gayle turned 4 years old on May 13.  She was kind enough to celebrate her birthday early on May 7 so we could be there for her party.  Owen and Arwen are the best of friends and Shelley (my sis in heart) said that the best gift for Arwen would be to have Owen at her party!  So we shared in her 4th birthday party at a local deli/frozen yogurt place in Shreveport followed by a trip to a playground.  It was so fun to watch her excitement for her friends, family, cake and presents.  She is a beautiful little girl with a huge heart and spunky spirit.  We adore her and were so happy to get to spend the weekend celebrating her.
Knowing that Owen loves CARS, my brother wanted to show Owen a life-sized replica of Lightning McQueen.  A local towing service has a car on it's property that is painted to look like Lightning.  Other than the fact that it's not the same car as Lightning it does look a lot like him.  And to a 4 year old boy who's obsessed with CARS characters, it was almost as good as the real thing!  He doesn't look super excited in the pic because it was about 90 degrees and very sunny that day.  But he talked about it for days afterward.

It happened to be Mothers Day weekend while we were together. My mom was so happy to get to spend the day with her entire family. The Eck family has grown to 13 people and the youngest two are almost a year old. It doesn't even seem possible that we'll be celebrating our nephew Jackson's first birthday on July 21 and our nephew Jonas' first birthday on September 24. They were both crawling or near crawling and they didn't want to be cuddled quite as much as the last time we were together. Kate has grown to where she can keep up with Arwen and Owen now. She had such fun being one of the "big kids" that weekend. God has truly blessed our family.