our family hobbies
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camping trip.
By David I took our two oldest to Dreher Island State Park campground. Campground is a wistful word. I’d consider it more of an RV parking lot with trees. We parked on concrete pad #38 in the shadows of massive, bedazzled travel trailers. The scope of some of the setups was staggering. Do people live here? Lawn chairs, loveseats, lampposts, mini fridges, televisions, full sized gas grills jostled for flat space between pines. Folding tables groaned under the bounty of red and yellow Sizemart condiment jugs. A din of barking dogs, country music, and laboring AC units served as the soundtrack to the island. If you consider tailgating roughing it,…
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six on friday.
Judah. The pool is his happy place. Amelie. Exuberant lover of animals. Gabriel. This boy is officially potty-trained and we’re so proud! Noah. Mr. Expressive. Daddy. The pool is so much more fun with him. Mommy. It’s the happiest summer.
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rainy day fire pit.
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hospitality: a few practical thoughts.
Thanks for sticking around for this little series. Like I mentioned earlier, the two main ways David and I have learned a life of hospitality is through: 1. Doing it, and 2. Learning from others. So to wrap things up, here are some tips we ourselves have picked up along the way: 1. There isn’t one model of an ideal host. There just isn’t. God enjoys diversity way too much for that. We’ve watched and learned from folks young and old, married and divorced and single, rich and poor, outgoing and shy, stylish and nerdy. We’ve been inside gorgeous homes and in hipster homes and corrugated-tin huts and dorm-style apartments.…
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a story about hospitality.
If you know David well at all, you know about his love for people lingering in the margins of society. When I met him in college he was sharing his story of freedom from a life of drugs and violence and his hope in Christ with prison inmates. When we did youth ministry, he reached out to all the students, but always moved first to the outsider, that kid on the fringe dressed in all black with chains or the one who was too shy to navigate the complexities of high school social dynamics or the one who routinely got wasted on the weekends. He spent his first year of…
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new back yard.
We laugh at how much worse our yard looks right now. So we’re focusing on little corners of beauty – like the two Peppermint Crape Myrtles David brought home on Friday. Judah and Amie love the new expanse of space for playing soccer.
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a series about hospitality.
I thought I’d write a series of posts on hospitality, because it’s something that gets me really excited these days. Hospitality is not a gift I was born with. I’m an introvert. [I joke with my friends that I have a two-hour social limit. I love, love being with people for two hours, and then about one minute afterward it becomes a chore. The bigger the group of people, the more mountainous the chore]. I can be a perfectionist and also insecure. I like to protect my space and my alone time. I like quiet evenings buried in a book. I hate playing games. None of these are characteristics that…
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family yearbooks.
For Christmas, 2012, my gift to David and the kids was a photo book of our year-and-a-half in South Asia. It took me many hours, and the book turned out to be 90 pages long (!!??), but it was well worth it. I tried to document as much as possible of our life there, in lots and lots of photos, and in written descriptions of everything from Judah’s preschool to family vacations to our two homes to having to say good-bye. The book has proved priceless already. We took it along when we went to visit churches and supporters, to give them a glimpse into our South Asia life. And…
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daily photo project.
So I totally flaked out there at the end of my January photo project. But I made through almost the whole month, so I’m pleased. I did actually learn some things, namely that lots of practice really is the key to getting better (at just about anything, right?). I still can’t shoot in full manual mode but I can tweak my exposure a little better at this point. Also, I learned that one of my big weaknesses is that I just don’t take my camera out and about with me. So in the end you can only take so many interesting shots of your own house/yard/kids. Thanks for bearing with…
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friday evening.