Family & Home

Area our family lives in: We love the area we live in! Our home is close to many local, metro, and state parks. which we get passes to every year. Parks are one of our family's favorite places to visit! At these parks we enjoy hiking, exploring, and seeing the wildlife. Bike riding, swimming at the beach, canoeing, sledding, going to nature centers, visiting farm animals (especially the spring baby animals), splash pads & playgrounds, to name a few! 

In addition to visiting parks, some of our other local favorite family hobbies are: reading books together, an annual summer camping trip, playing card & board games and various sports. And we really like getting outdoors! Some other local places we like to visit as a family are zoos, children's museums, orchards, and local fairs & festivals. Sometimes we have a family movie night which the kids look forward to, with popcorn and other treats! 

We want to cherish the precious time we have with our children during their childhood; so we choose not to pursue time-consuming activities or hobbies that would take us away from our children & family. Instead, we like to include our whole family in the activities we like to do. 

Life at our home: We enjoy eating dinner together as a family, and other meals when we are home together too. We enjoy these times of talking and sharing round the kitchen table. We also enjoy having friends and kids over for meals, games, and fun times. Our family likes to spend time together before bedtime, and do Bible study and pray together, and sometimes sing together with our kids playing piano. 

Work & family life: Nick has a successful career in business as an accountant and enjoys what he does for a living. He is able to provide well for our family. Nick also has a good amount of time off of work for family time and vacations. He is also able to work from home a lot, and having him home with us is fantastic! Christina resigned from her professional corporate job to stay home with our first child, and has been blessed to be a full-time mom to all our children ever since then, something she had always dreamed of! She enjoys being home with them, and she pours her life into caring for them. 

Encouraging each of our kids: God gave each of our children different and unique gifts and talents, and as we see those special gifts in each of them, we desire to guide and encourage them to pursue what they enjoy and were created to do. We provide our children with many opportunities to expand their abilities and talents. The older boys have enjoyed playing on soccer teams and a basketball team. Our daughter has enjoyed taking ballet & dance classes with friends and also choir and private voice lessons. All of our children have taken private lessons with a plano teacher & fill our home with beautiful music, and some have tried other instruments like guitar & violin too. We love hearing beautiful music played in our home by our kids! 

In addition to spending time together as a whole family, we like to take just one or two of our children out to special adventures, a bit to eat, or other fun time to really connect with their hearts. These have been some precious daddy-son, daddy-daughter, mother-son & mother-daughter times and we really appreciate growing our relationships with our kids this way.

We also love serving as a family together and some ways we have done that are by helping out at church summer camps for kids, babysitting for friends in need, serving a meal at Thanksgiving, our kids playing piano for our elderly uncles when we visit at their nursing home, as well as our whole family working together to do a summer Bible study for kids.

Family trips: We all enjoy traveling, from road trips, to flying, even cruising the ocean blue! We have taken our children to many places in our state & across the country, and even other places in the world, making wonderful family memories & often meeting new friends along the way. Over the years we've taken family trips to Boston, Chicago, Nashville, Ohio, Kentucky, Iowa, North Carolina, and up north in Michigan, including Mackinac Island; as well as several fantastic trips to Florida including Cocoa Beach, Fort Lauderdale, St. Petersburg, and Cape Coral. We've also taken the family to Orlando, Florida a couple of times (Our family enjoyed a special trip to Disney with Nicholas's parents, our children's grandparents). One year we took a special cruise departing from Miami, Florida and explored Puerto Rico, Grand Turk Island, and the Bahamas (Christina's mom, our kids' Nana, - came with us too, so that made the trip extra special!) Just being together and watching the joy our kids have with us and each other is so wonderful! 

Extended family: We are close with the children’s grandparents and enjoy spending special meals, holidays, and family trips with them. The kids have little cousins and their aunt (Christina’s sister) is expecting another baby this summer, so a little baby cousin is coming soon! (Everyone around here loves babies!) Our children adore their little cousins and we just love spending time with them.