holidays
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april.
April was full of pollen, warm temperatures followed by 45-degree days, pushing through school work amidst spring fever, and Easter festivities. Two of our friends that Amie babysits for gave her a gift card for a manicure, so I took her and Caroline the week before Easter. It was Amie’s first manicure! That same evening, we hosted some of the girls from church to help fill eggs and gift bags for our church Easter egg hunt. This is becoming a very fun annual tradition. We had a Good Friday church service, then the picnic and cookout Saturday afternoon. The weather was perfect; it was my favorite of…
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december.
Our family tradition is to buy and decorate our tree on Thanksgiving weekend, but we did it early this year for two reasons: one, Joe and Lindsay were coming and I thought it would be festive to have the house decorated for Christmas before they arrived, and two, we heard a rumor that there was a “Christmas tree shortage” this year. I was never able to confirm that rumor, but I wanted to make sure to grab ours early (does that make me one of the people that creates a panic which leads to a shortage?). As fun as it was, I will not do this again, because by…
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thanksgiving 2021.
This post is obviously long overdue. I’ve been wanting to share pics from Thanksgiving this year because David’s brother, Joe, and his family were able to come from Pittsburgh. We loved having them here and it was so fun seeing the cousins reconnect. Joe, Lindsay, and the kids stayed over at Steve and Linda’s, and even with the cold weather (for SC at least), we did lots of hanging out between the two yards and at the river. With that many boys it’s vital to be outside as much as possible! Sadly Noah went down hard with a virus out of the blue on Thanksgiving afternoon and missed every part…
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thanksgiving gratitude.
There are limitless gifts I could thank God for on this rainy, cozy Thanksgiving morning at the end of 2020. Here are five of them. He is purifying and refining His Church. Suffering always exposes what’s really in our hearts, what we really live for. Always. And for most of us, 2020 has been a year of suffering, in big and small ways. Trials have a way of bringing out our true nature — the entitlement, pride, control, distrust, anxiety, and fear. This is just as true for Christians as it is for non-Christians. And the question we are faced with, as believers, is, “What will we do with our…
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easter weekend 2020.
During this spring of the coronavirus, we take our joy where we can find it. And it turns out, there’s much joy to be had, if we’ve got eyes to see. We couldn’t spend Easter weekend celebrating Jesus’ resurrection with our church family in the usual way, but we did celebrate. One way we looked for joy was by making a Thankful Wall. Thankfulness is contagious, just like complaining is. When we started noticing all God’s gifts to us it was hard to stop. David had the chance to perform two wedding ceremonies for couples whose wedding plans were put on hold due to the quarantine, one Saturday…
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thanksgiving weekend 2019.
Thanksgiving weekend is one of my favorite parts of the year, and we’ve created some really fun family traditions of late. I’ll share them with you! The preparations Thanksgiving Day is deliciously slow, with morning hours cuddled up in pj’s. This year the cuddling included Milo. He is really just the cutest thing. David joked with me, “I don’t know who loves Milo more – you or Amie.” If you’re wondering, I think guinea pigs make the perfect pet. Well, I really think cats are the perfect pet . . . but sadly we can’t have them because several of us are very allergic. So we settle for a…
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halloween 2019.
Gabe has struggled with allergies for years, so we took him to an ENT this fall, and they recommended that he get tested. On Halloween morning, of all mornings, we went for his skin test. Not a fun start to one of his favorite holidays. It was a little traumatic, and he had a couple pretty intense reactions, so they stopped the testing, gave him Benadryl, and told me that they’d have to do the rest through bloodwork. The huge bump on his back is from Bermuda grass. Go figure. He felt pretty miserable — his eyes even got all red and puffy. We went yesterday for his…
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gabe’s birthday weekend.
Gabe turns 8 years old tomorrow, on Memorial Day, so we started the celebration Saturday with a visit from the boys’ birth family. Christi, her boyfriend, Jon, and her mom, Kim, drove to Columbia to spend time with us. They came bearing gifts and we had a great day, despite the fact that it was 99 degrees here. It was very nice to end the day with a trip to Gabe’s favorite place, Pelican Snoballs.
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easter weekend 2019.
Easter weekend is my favorite weekend of the year with our church. We had such a great time that it took me a whole week to recover and share about it here on the blog. We like to make the weekend feel sort of like an at-home retreat by having the Good Friday evening service, a Saturday egg hunt and cook-out, and then services Easter morning with brunch served in between. This year we added in serving lunch for one of the ministries our church partners with, Providence Home, Friday, so we got the fun of hanging out together there too. The cook-out on Saturday afternoon was one of those…
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giving thanks on january 1.
Happy New Year, dear readers! On Sunday afternoon I pulled dusty storage boxes down from the attic, and turned on our Spotify Christmas music playlist one last time while the kids and I took ornaments off the tree and unwound strings of white lights and rolled up the stockings. I’m usually more than ready to take down decorations and reclaim our living room, but this year I found myself a bit melancholy, not quite ready to say good-bye to the Christmas season. We made beautiful memories this year, like always, and I can’t quite put my finger on why it was so special, except maybe a new feeling of togetherness.…
