Weekend in Virginia

We spent last weekend in Virginia with Gretchen's family. What a welcome refresher and wonderful time with family! Clean, fresh air and warm sunshine every day was good for us and for Samuel. It had been too chilly in the Chicago area for him to be outdoors much, especially lightly dressed. He is almost 7 weeks old now - can you believe it? Time is flying by and he is growing fast. Almost every day his personality emerges more and he gets chubbier. I'm sure he weighs over 10 pounds now. When he hit the 6-week-old mark, he started smiling so much! Now he smiles a lot every day, especially when he hears our voices and we talk to him.

It was very hard to say good-bye to Gretchen's parents and sisters, as we don't know when we'll next see them. Our time with them was precious. There are a few pictures below. For tons more pictures head on over to our baby blog site - "First Samuel". Click on the link to the right where is says "Samuel Scott Hall".

We leave for Albania on May 14. Thankfully we have our tickets already, and Samuel's passport came in less than two weeks after we applied for it! We are very excited to return to Tirana and resume ministry. The summer will be crazy busy, and we are looking forward to it! Gretchen's sister, Addie, will be staying with us for almost 2 months to help out with Samuel and get involved in various ministries there. Also, we have two interns, John and Jennie, that will spend the summer with us and doing youth ministry. There is a team of four coming from our home church, Grace Church of DuPage, to run the evangelistic camp this summer. We're going camping in southern Albania, near the Greek border! We've never done this sort of camp, but we're super excited for it.

Justin took this picture when he was carrying Samuel in the Baby Bjorn. So cute:

Here's the whole family:

Samuel visiting my dad's chickens. He doesn't seem too interested.

Samuel and me wearing green stripes together :)

The sistas with Sam: