Photographic Reflections
January 4th, 2007 by natalie
The month of December proved to be festive and full for our family. Below are some highlights from the month:
This was actually from November, but our whole family enjoyed traveling to Topeka and attending a rally with President Bush to support Jim Ryun.
Another November one that I just couldn’t forego: One of my students won this Clavinova at the Clavinova Festival and surprised me the following week by giving it to me as a birthday present (he and I share the same birthday!). I was ecstatic! I’ve been praying for a Clavinova for quite some time, but who would have thought the Lord would use one of my students to answer my prayer?!
Mom and I hosted our annual Neighborhood Ladies Tea at our home again this year. This is the invitation we delivered to the ladies throughout the neighborhood.
Mom made most of the food and took care of arranging the table. I took care of the invitations, recruiting a speaker and putting together gifts for the ladies who attended. We have had such a wonderful time getting to know our neighbors better through this event!
My annual Christmas recital was held December 21. This group of six students talked me into writing an arrangement for them and they did a fabulous job not only learning it, but also memorizing it for the performance!
Duane joined Joel as guest musicians for the occasion and kept the audience spell-bound as they played and/or sang “In Christ Alone,” “For Unto Us a Child Is Born” and “Silent Night.”
A group shot of all the students who participated in the recital. What an amazing bunch!
Our Christmas Eve Candlelight and Communion Service at church is a special time of remembering the birth of Christ and rejoicing in the salvation He came and died to secure for us.
Once home from the service, Nadine prepares to dig in to the smorgasbord of favorite hors d’ orderves prepared by our talented mother.
The search begins! On Christmas Eve, traditionally, Dad writes clues for each of us and we take turns searching for our first gift. Nicole and Andy work together to decipher the first of their clues.
Just so he doesn’t feel left out, I usually write clues for Dad. Ironically, this year Dad and I used almost the same format for the clues we wrote, even though we had no idea what the other was doing. I’m not sure what to think of that…
Naomi shared a special reflection that she wrote on the subject of Christmas. She has begun a tradition of doing this each year and always blesses us with her insightful thoughts.
Christmas Day was a refreshing, low-key day spent opening several gifts, reading, playing games and just enjoying being together.
Several days after Christmas, as a special treat, Nicole and Andy organized a group of us to go out for dinner in style! Andy drove the limo and we had a blast sitting behind the tinted windows, drinking pop and water from the bar and watching the interior lights morph into multiple colors.
We had a delicious dinner at P.F. Chang’s, followed by a wonderful time of talking, reminiscing and drinking coffee at Starbucks.
Mom wanted to use up a lot of our leftover food and a ham we were given as a gift, so we invited several families over one evening for food, fellowship and games. (Those guys definitely helped put a dent in the food! ;-))
The girls certainly did their fair share of depleting the food supply too!
The rest of the crew quickly packed their food away and started into the games.
On New Year’s Eve, we hosted a party at our home. Following last year’s Masquerade, we were ready for a less extravagant event and organized a night consisting of a variety of games.
Speed Scrabble was one of 6 game stations where members of each team had to compete against the other teams. Team members accumulated points at each game station toward their overall team total.
We took a break at midnight to welcome the New Year with silly string and sparklers. (I brilliantly took all of my pictures with the lens cap still in place, so thanks to Jynae for snapping this shot!)
Our team came in first in the mind games (A set of twenty puzzles put together by my Dad. In between the game sessions, each team was given 10 minutes to work together to solve as many of the puzzles as they could - ranging from math to logic to spatial to word problems, etc.) and second overall (once our game score total was added to the mind game total). We were pretty excited!
And that was the end of 2006.
[...] As I mentioned briefly at the end of this post, Dad put together a collection of mind puzzles that we worked in groups to solve at our New Year’s Eve party. We had to work in ten-minute chunks of time between each game session, so there was quite a bit of pressure to think quickly to solve them - a little nerve wracking! I thought I would post several of them here and see if anyone wants to take a stab at them. I’ll post each of them in a separate post so that you can leave your answer in the comments area. You can also e-mail your answers to me if you prefer. Oh, and if you were here and already know the answer, you’re not allowed to participate! [...]