Catching Up

Let’s see… what have we been up to lately...

 

We spent a weekend in Wimberley with Kolby’s parents in early January and we had a blast. Somehow the weather was beautiful and warm, so we took advantage of it and spent a lot of time outdoors. We visited Pedernales Falls State Park, which was beautiful (picture below). The dogs got to come with us and we all had a great time hiking around. Then we went to a local vineyard for a wine tasting and to watch the hill country sunset from the winery’s patio area.

 Near the end of January I helped throw a wedding shower for our friends from church, Mike & Amy. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before on the blog but making cakes is my new hobby. I throw a shower every couple of months and it was getting too expensive to order cakes so I decided to just learn how to do it myself. My SIL, Remy, helped me get started, and then a coworker’s wife showed me some good tricks for making the icing smoother. Here is the cake I made for Amy’s shower:

While the girls were busy with shower stuff, the boys spent the weekend at the ranch shooting who knows what.

 

The other day while Kolby was searching for project ideas for school, he stumbled on a job opening with a study guide and curriculum website.  They were looking for writers to help launch a section on the Bible as literature.  Because of how bizarrely coincidental it seemed, he went ahead and sent in an application. Things came together fast from there.  He will get to write modules for their poetry section and the new Bible section.  It's a cool part-time thing that will allow him to do something that really caters to his knowledge and interests.  Plus, it'll be nice to have something extra to do over the summer!

 

Oh, I have more exciting news! We booked a Spring Break trip to Phoenix. We are going to the Texas Rangers’ spring training. Add that to the list of things I never thought I’d say :). Kolby has wanted to go to forever and we just decided why not. Lucky for me, the trip won’t all be about baseball. We’ll probably only go to two games and then spend extra time at the ballpark one of those days to watch practice (and other things you do at spring training, I guess?!? this is all new to me). We’ve never been to Arizona so we’ll spend the rest of the trip sightseeing and relaxing. We’re going to take a quick side trip to Sedona for the last two days. I’m really excited about the vacation because it should be pretty warm and there is a lot of neat stuff to do and beautiful things to see. Plus it’ll be just us so that’s always fun.

 

Speaking of things I never thought I’d say, I registered for a 5K yesterday. [Insert sound of hell freezing over.] Last week we were over having dinner at Brad & Remy’s and we decided to video conference my parents to say hi. Remy mentioned she was training for a 10K and my dad said he was going to do the 5K part of Baylor’s annual race (the Bearathon, obviously). One thing led to another and we decided to make the Bearathon a family affair. I’m not sure how things escalated to that point… I was holding Tucker and must have not had my wits about me. I don’t run. Ever. I don’t even work out. Unless staring at Jillian Michael’s 30 Day Shred DVD box while eating a late night bowl of cereal counts as working out. But I’ve wanted to be better about exercising this year so I think the 5K will help get that off the ground. That said, it’s been a week since we decided to do it and I’m still in the visualizing part of the training process :). It’s in just over five weeks, so I better get to work. I know most of you could run a measly 3.1 miles cold turkey, but I haven’t run a single step since being forced to do track in middle school (as part of the requirement for being on the basketball team). I am just plain out of shape. This should be interesting!

 

Switching gears, our church does Life Groups in “seasons” so that there are natural opportunities for people to join and change groups, and we kicked off the winter season a few weeks ago. The group we host/lead is studying the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15), using Tim Keller’s book, The Prodigal God. I am already hooked, and I think it’ll be a great study. One of the first pages of the book defines prodigal as “recklessly extravagant; having spent everything.” It was not just the wayward son who was prodigal, but the father as well—his welcoming his repentant son “was literally reckless, because he refused to “reckon” or count his sin against him or demand payment.” The father in the story obviously represents God, “the God of Great Expenditure, who is nothing if not prodigal toward us, his children. God’s reckless grace is our greatest hope.” How true is that? We’ve really enjoyed this season of Life Group thus far.

 

That’s about all that is going on around here. Kolby got glasses. He looks handsome. I got my hair chopped off. Picture to come soon. Until then, I’ll leave you with this picture of my favorite nephew (wearing the outfit we got him for Christmas!):