Looking Back and Catching Up

I don’t really have anything exciting to talk about that is current today.  I will say, I thought about blogging last night and decided I’d rather read instead and so I did.  And that felt SO good.  I think I had sucked all the enjoyment out of blogging by making it something I felt like I had to do every day!  Now that I haven’t put that pressure on myself, I feel like I enjoy it more because I blog when I want to, not when I feel like I have to.
I think I left off about mid-June…right around Jenna’s birthday.  June is always the month our church does VBS.  For a small-ish size regional campus, our VBS is a HOPPING place that week and the days immediately prior to.  Since we are in a small community, the community really comes out for VBS. 
This year, the theme was Colossal Coaster World.  I’m sure many of you right now are humming that catchy tune….yeah, well, that tune was co-written by a fabulous musician in our church named Jeremy Johnson.  He and his wife (who also has a recently released album) have a tremendous testimony that I was honored to watch unfold.  Anyway, because Steve and I both volunteered, Kylie got to attend and of course, this was Jenna’s last year (next time, she’ll have to volunteer!)

Yep, she had a t-shirt too and that’s a chocolate pop-tart in her hand!  I had to be there early since I worked registration and so Steve dressed her.  You can’t see it very well, but she had a super-matchy bow.

This is the future of the church right there.  Train them up…

Because it was her last year, Jenna was able to lead on stage with some fellow 5th graders.  She loved it.  And I loved watching her.  I loved the music and everything about VBS this year.

Both of the girls really enjoyed it.  I hope Jenna will be able to enjoy it again next year as a youth volunteer.  I think she will.  She definitely knows how to handle those kiddos! 
But she was plum tuckered out after the week was over.  We had a friend of hers spend the week with us so she could attend VBS with her. 

One afternoon (evening?), we went out to celebrate Jenna’s birthday at a local Mexican restaurant.  YUM!

June is always a great month. 

My Happy Place

This is my happy place…

My lifegroup from church.  I love these people.  They, collectively, make up my happy place.

One Year Home!

One year ago today, at 12:07pm, the wheels of a large aircraft touched down on a Chicago runway after a long journey from Hong Kong.

The minute that happened, our Kylie automatically because a US Citizen. 

I have made several international trips and every time, landing in the US has brought me to tears, but there is nothing…hear me…NOTHING like arriving on US soil after 2 weeks in China WITHOUT your husband and with your newly adopted child.

I knew that just steps outside of customs Steve awaited and I got choked up just thinking about it.  I knew once I latched on to him, I might never let go.  And I really didn’t want to.

But then, we touched down in Nashville and I really did think I would cry from joy.  PURE.  JOY. to see these faces all waiting to see this child they had prayed for.  My photo calendar has a few of these photos for the month of March because they are so dear to me.  So, in celebration of Kylie’s citizenship and surviving a whole year at home, here they are again.  (click here to see the blog post about our arrival).

Note:  I still cry when I look at these pictures…the smiles…the joy.  I love these people.

Christmas!

OK, so hopefully this post will wrap up the Christmas posts and get me back on track. 

Christmas Eve, Rachel M. and I hosted, what has morphed from our families’ Christmas Eve celebration into a Christmas Eve open house of sorts.  I love love love to bake between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so I bake up a storm and Rachel typically contributes the savory finger foods (and some sweets too).  We invite anyone who doesn’t have anything to do on Christmas Eve.  We always think not many people will come, but it ends up being 6 or 7 families and just the right number.

Of course, we work around the awesome Christmas Eve service at the church. 

I’ll tell ya, the service is one I look forward to every year.  It’s not long and it’s all family, so I wasn’t sure how Kylie would do.  But as expected (since we went to the 2:00 service), she fell asleep and slept right through the best part…

It’s an awesome quiet time right before the mass chaos of Christmas.

Christmas Eve, we let Jenna open up one gift and traditionally, it’s always pajamas…usually Christmas themed.  This year, there was a little twist and it was a big hit!

Footies!  And to top off the excitement of the day, right before we left for service, Jenna comes in with this…

Good thing the tooth fairy and Santa know each other! 

Christmas morning, Jenna managed to sleep until about 7:30 or 7:45.  I woke up before her, of course, and got presentable.  When everyone was up, we traipsed downstairs.

This little scooter thing was Jenna’s gift to Kylie.  She saw it somewhere (on tv, online?) and paid for it herself.  It is like a 360 ride on toy and so it’s very easy to maneuver and Kylie LOVES it.

I love this but still haven’t found time to put photos in it.  In time though…in time.

Jenna took money and bought both of us stuff and she is getting really good at picking out thoughtful gifts.  For instance, because Steve volunteers at the gun range, she picked him out a Wii paintball game.  But the biggest “Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle” gift this year was for Jenna.

So Jenna reads the riddle (there were numbers underneath but for privacy, I cropped them out) and she’s trying to figure out what it means when the box starts vibrating.

Now before I catch heck about giving my 11 1/2 year old a cell phone, an iPhone no less, let me explain…this is my old iPhone 4 (part of our early Christmas to each other was that Steve and I upgraded to 5s) and because of our shared minutes plan, it only cost me $10 more to put Jenna on the plan AND I am under no contract and dropped our $30/month mifi, so still saved $20.  Anyway, we wanted to see how responsible she would be while we have little to lose and lots of control.  In this day of instant contact, I like being able to reach Jenna when she’s at a friend’s house or across the street/outside playing.  Anyway, it has been a good thing for us (the best way to get her to listen is threaten to take away the phone!) and the phone did come with a list of rules that she had to agree to before accepting the phone.

Anddddd…that’s her reading them.    But all in all, she’s been good with it and I loved her excitement.

Later in the afternoon, we went for the Taylor family Christmas and how wonderful it was!

My niece Alex and her family weren’t able to make it in town but this is the rest of the crew.  I love these folks.

After that, we went home and exchanged with the big kids which I always enjoyable.

This is Steve with his gift from Chase.  I can assure you, he didn’t smile like this for ANY gift I got him  Humph.

We bought Gage a Wii which was his big surprise.  He didn’t really get too excited over it here, but Micah says they play it all the time so I know he is glad to have it.

It was a good Christmas.  Not too chaotic…I wished the weather had been colder.  I’m a fan of white Christmases, but that definitely wasn’t in the cards this year.  Maybe next…

And that concludes the Taylor Family Christmas of 2012.  Thanks for hanging in there with me!

Catching up...

Y'all bear with me.  I slacked up on my blogging during the holidays so I'm playing catch up. 

We had a lot of little fun activities coming into the Christmas holiday....at church, we have a Living Nativity.  This year, it was different...Kylie was too young to go out and see it, but I took her over there anyway before class started.  But I started teaching a 3 year old class (which I L.O.V.E. BTW) and I had the great pleasure of walking them over.

They all watched and listened so intently.  I was SO proud of them!  And some of the were even brave enough to pet the animals...

 

 

 

And lucky for us, no one melted down, which with 3 year olds, you just never know.  A few weekends before this, we decided to attend our little city's annual Christmas parade.  This year though, our church decided to be part.  Steve and several folks from the church put many hours into our float and then many members walked and handed out our church Christmas CDs.  I hi-jacked this photo from a friend (thanks L!)

 

 



 

I planned to watch the parade from the sidelines. However, there was so confusion with Jenna about that because she thought she was walking in it so by the time I got her dropped off the road was closed and I had no choice but to go.  And I had Kylie.  And no stroller.  So here's what we did...

 



 

 

OK, seriously, she only rode like this for a few minutes...but boy oh boy did she love it!  She kept waving and saying "hi!" "hi!" to everyone.  It was a great time and I kept hearing the folks watching saying "Wow" and "Whoa" when we passed by.  Just one of 1,593,293 reasons I love my church.

 

We also attended the big Christmas concert at what we affectionately refer to as the "Mother Ship" which is our home base church.  It's a rather large church and I love it, but I would not trade my regional campus for all the money in the world. 

 

Having said that, the concert was a wee bit crowded.  But wowzers...you haven't been to a Christmas concert until you've been to one at the Big House.

 



 

 

Steve played percussion, so the girls and I managed to find a whole row in the balcony.  With us, sat my friend Jill's husband with their two children and our friends the Yanceys with their 3 kids.  At the end with their newborn son were the Coates.  What that meant was our row had 8 children.  It was like a mini-daycare!  I couldn't get a ton of good pics, but check this sweet one out of Moses...

 



 

Our smaller choir had a special part too and let me tell you...they are small, but they are MIGHTY.  I would venture a guess that we took a grand majority of the best singers from the main campus.  They ROCKED. IT.  I mean...there just aren't words.  And then our awesome pastor, Jay, got up and said a few words.  It was a great night.  Kylie did so well...she loved the lights and the music.  She must have an ear for music because she's always loved it...



 

All in all, we had a great holiday season.  And bear with me as there is still more to come...

30 Days of Thanks - Day 26

Today I'm thankful for pastors.  There are several in my life that have led me through some of the best and worst times I've ever experienced.

My home church pastor, who has now gone on to heaven, was there when I was born, there when my mom died (literally), there when I got married, there when I had Jenna and I was actually at my home church the weekend before he had a stroke in the pulpit (he passed a week later).  This man was literally like a second father to me and I have missed him many, many days since his passing.

Then there is my current church pastor who rocks my socks off every Sunday, is an adoptive parent and was integral to our own adoption process.  He was there when we arrived with Kylie and has been our biggest supporter and cheerleader throughout the whole process.  We just finished up a sermon series on the book of Revelation and OH. MY. WORD.  I'm telling you what, I could do an entire blog SERIES on what I've learned.  If you are interested, you can go here and listen to the podcasts.  They are just SO good.

I'm just so thankful there are other pastors and ministers that God has made instrumental in my life.

Today, I am thankful.

30 Days of Thanks - Day 10

Today I am thankful for my Lifegroup.

At our church, we don't have traditional Sunday School.  When we launched our regional campus, we called it serve one, worship one.  Launch members would serve one hour (teach a children's class, greet, usher, help park etc) and then the next hour we'd worship one.

In place of the standard Sunday School class, Lifegroups were created.  Most of them, including the one we are in, meet Sunday nights.  And that buzz phrase that has become so popular is oh-so-true with these folks...we really do "DO LIFE TOGETHER".

Now this is only the ladies in our Lifegroup and there are some honorary members missing too, but lemme tell you....THIS is my family (well, a small portion of them).  I left for China on Wednesday and made Steve Skype me into Lifegroup meeting both Sundays I was in China.  OH YES I DID.  And I'll tell you what, seeing these faces from thousands of miles away was like a fresh drink of water.  I literally teared up seeing them.

I have every one of their cell numbers and know I could text, call or email any of them at any time for any need and they'd come running.  You just don't find that everywhere.  It seems like there's just not enough words to say how thankful I am for this group of Believers.

I am thankful.

Happy Halloween Part II

Somehow we managed to stretch our Halloween celebrations for several days.  And this is a good thing because Halloween is one of Steve's favorite holidays.

Last Sunday night, our church Life group had our annual Halloween party.  I didn't have time to put an outfit together.  Well, I had the TIME, I just didn't have the creative thought to figure out what to do, so I donned my authentic Chinese dress and went as a China girl/Geisha/whatever.  Steve literally threw his outfit together a few hours before the party and got tons of compliments.  He was a zombie (shout out to TWD fans!) and apparently does a pretty good job on makeup. 

The girls got to wear their costumes and I almost died over the extreme cuteness.

I'm not sure Kylie knew what to make of Jenna at first...but she got used to her pretty quickly.  We also had her watch Steve putting his makeup on in the bathroom so she would know it was him.



 

And then this is our Life group.  We are a huge bunch of goofballs...kids at heart.  And yes, that's our Children's minister and his family dressed up as the good folk from Duck Dynasty. 

We roasted hot dogs and made s'mores.  Yum yum.  It was a great way to start our fall!!!