27 posts tagged “stephen”

After 3 years of his first instrument, Stephen is retiring his flute.  He is loving his new instrument, the guitar and is happy to move on!   Taryn continues to enjoy playing violin with a group.  It gives her the incentive to keep practicing even though she has not taken any private lessons since this new year began.  She hopes to take part of Tehillah Chamber Players again next Spring, when, Lord willing, she will be able to drive herself to practice!

Here are two clips of their concert.  The first one is shorter with a recognizable melody from Fiddler on the Roof with a brief violin solo by Taryn.  The second one is a piece entitled New World Symphony which they both think is the best one out of the half dozen that they played and a little longer for fans of orchestra type music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGXOwxxziFs&feature=channel_page

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCA3g1RQGr4

 

For three weeks, starting today, Kid Venture at church is preparing the children for the death and resurrection of Christ!   The children's director at church approached Stephen some months ago and asked if he would be willing to draw some scenes that would be a visual for the children during this preparation time.  Since it couldn't be sketched with pencil and didn't incorporate Steve's strength of pencil sketching and shadows,  we thought his drawings created with Sharpie pens, turned out superbly!  What a joy it is to see the gifts of your children being used in the body of Christ as they grow up in Him. 

 

Yesterday had three pretty significant events occur!

Take One...

We had our Christmas party with a group of families from church who have become very dear to ours over this past year as we met monthly just to fellowship and mutually encourage one another not as couples or just kids but as families. This has especially been important as our church family continues to expand and you can sometimes feel disconnected from the mass of people.  Meeting with a few families regularly has kept us feeling a bit more plugged into Church of the Redeemer.   Here's a photo from toddler to teen playing the draydle (sp?) game together after which we sang Christmas carols and of course ate lots of yummy treats.

Take Two....

Stephen had his first meet with his Grace Swim team and for their first year together, they did a fantastic job competing.  He beat his personal time in his specialty stroke, the 100 breaststroke.  His relay team of 4 guys came in 3rd in the 200 IM medley where Steve swam the breaststroke and 2nd in the 400 free relay!  The other videos we taped were too large to upload so we'll try to get one next time of him breaststroking but for now, here is Steve in the 50m free.  He's the guy towards the top of the screen with the blue cap.

 

The team has bonded pretty well over the

past month of daily practices.  This is a great bunch of students who are very encouraging towards each other.  After the meet they celebrated by having the buffet at 9 at night.  Steve ate and ate and ate.  All that hard swimming sure works up an appetite.

 

Take Three....

While I was at the swim meet with Stephen, the younger three kiddos had their Christmas piano recital.  Since it was Sam's first one, we wanted to highlight him tonight!  We are proud of the progress he has made in just 3 months of lessons.  The other two did super as well.   

 

The much anticipated race that H and S have been training for is finally over!  The best news about it was all the proceeds when to support research on Batten's disease to an organization called Garrett's Wings.   We have friends actively doing that in California so it made the race even more meaningful for us all.  (Hey Allios, you are always part of our prayers here on the Eastcoast). 

On the left are videos of Steve lapping Howard during the swim(H did well but reiterated it was his toughest part of the course), then coming in from the semi-hilly bike portion (Steve's hardest section) and finally at the finish!

Oh, by the way, Steve got a medal for coming in 3rd in his age division of 13-15 year olds!  That's a great way to remember his first ever competition and he is so thankful to have had this memory with his dad.

 

Steve made his first ever soccer goal today and had the pleasure of doing it TWICE!  He also played GOALIE (not his fave position) and had 2 saves!  What a game!

Ordinary days usually include:  errands, physical activity and studying - summer or not!  We find great joy in the extraordinary (like our East Coast Trip) but are very thankful too for the "ordinary" as well.

We're going to be routine-LESS the next 3 weeks as we are getting ready for our California TRIP!  We're on a countdown here.  Only 5 days before we leave.  We'll be doing lots of visiting with family and friends & staying with different people at different places and each day will definitely not be ordinary.  We look forward to it a lot.  But, in the meantime, we are enjoying the regular and normal rythym of life in NC.

Snapshots of our ORDINARY day!

 

The boys hanging out at the pool with friend, Kiko.  But, the thunder started rumbling so they were booted out after only thirty minutes of play!  Now, I think this is a typical NC happening..... unpredictable thunder and lightning in the middle of the summer.  With the drought, we didn't get much of that last year.  And, in Cali, no drop of rain EVER in the middle of July.     

• Taryn survived DRIVER'S ED!!!  Her and Kat are very happy to be done with that.  Now, they just need to wait patiently till they can team drive together for the behind-the-wheel part; 6 hours of observing each other and 6 hours actually driving.  They say they may be called the end of September or early October.  Of course, they wished it would be sooner. 
• Stephen's been working hard.  We got an update from his missions team group.  Here's a quote and the gist of what's been happening out in West Virginia.

We are having a wonderful week!  Our group fellowship, our team's work ethic, and our ability to have meaningful conversations with the homeowners of the house we are working on has all been very encouraging. 

• Paige was supposed to do a gymnastics camp all week but when she got there, no one was even close to her age. So, we pulled her out. Thankfully, we were able to get them to agree to gymnastics lessons in the Fall instead.  She is really looking forward to that!  The last time she took gymnastics was about 3 years ago with her cousin Olivia. It's been a long time coming to finally get to do something she loves so much again!
• Chris and Sam are sad to see their week of basketball frenzy come to an end tomorrow.  They said they would love to do it for another week if they could.  I'm glad they are not because I really miss having them around although I don't miss the mess they make when they are around :o)  
• Howard did 500 yards non-stop today as Paige prodded him on to keep swimming more!  That's double what he needs to do.  It's been a quite a journey getting to this point. He never imagined he could really swim as well as he is now.  His thought on this was "someday when we're older and don't think we can do anything new anymore, we're going to make a list of our "can't dos" and try them anyway!"  

 

Thank you for those of you committed to praying for Stephen this week (and his group) and next as he ventures to West Virginia with our church youth this coming Sunday for the whole week!  He has been away from us before; in fact for 9 days once camping with another family and then with his grandparents exploring the wild of Wyoming and South Dakota.   We trust the character of our assistant pastor and have no qualms about him leaving for the trip but it is supposed to get easier to let them go away as they get older, right?  I think it gets harder because the more you are in relationship with your children, the more you miss them.  But, we are excited for him to get this chance to experience serving others in an area (one of the most depressed rural counties in the U.S.) where he has never been before.  Also, for him to learn to depend on the Lord in a different setting and see the Lord work from another angle to increase his faith.  That is our prayer for him as we begin to ask God to show Himself to Steve through this time in new and different ways.  Please pray with us for him.  We do covet the prayers of the community of believers!

We are excited over here for another reason!  Howard successfully swam 250 yards without stopping (the length he needs to swim in this mini-triatholon) and doing his rotary breathing correctly.  He said it was HARD and is still pretty much torture but everytime, it gets just a bit easier.  He said too that it was hearing his son, Stephen, encouraging him as he was ready to give up halfway through as the driving force to keep enduring. 

This is our encouragement to you folks with young children.  Someday, your children will be rooting you on and encouraging you when you want to give up.  Doesn't ever seem that way when it feels like all you do is give, give, give when they are little but it does happen! 

 

 

 

Lots of tidbits of this and that happening.  First, some great shots of Backyard Explorer's Camp that Paige, Chris and Sam went to.  They are hopeful that something of this sort will happen again next summer! 

Today, I learned that Stephen and I have something in common.  A love for techy digital cameras.  He has been having fun making movies with Taryn.  More of his creative, artistic side coming out in a different form.  Unfortunately, I am pretty protective with my somewhat costly camera so he decided he should probably bite the bullet and get his own.  He did some researching the past couple of days figuring out how much he wanted to spend (thanks family who gave some graduation money!), looked up some reviews and found exactly what he wanted.  My camera is about 3 years old so of course, he bought one with pretty much the same capability that my camera has for half the price (yeah, I despise that about technology that it changes so quickly and gets cheaper - not that you can get more for less necessarily but that if you bought something for what you thought was a good deal years back, it just isn't as great as you can get now).  The best part about this process is playing the Best Buy - Circuit City price match.  He found what he wanted at Best Buy online on sale (but this wouldn't guarantee it would arrive before our East Coast trip) but at the Best Buy store they wouldn't budge price-wise so we called up Circuit City who had the same camera in the right color in stock and they gave us the BB online sale price! A huge savings.  We've done this several times over techy gadgets in the past and Circuit City always seems to come through with a better bargain so I guess Circuit City is really the Best Buy!

Before hanging out with some friends for dinner and home-made Ben and Jerry's vanilla

peanut butter cup ice cream (YUM!),  Taryn did a workshop performance at Matthews Playhouse. She spent 3 whole days learning and rehearsing 5 songs and parts to Highschool Musical.  We like the movie some. Not necessarily for its quality but because we like "musicals" in general.  Not one of our faves but it does have some catchy songs and it is definitely a step-up from Grease(which they haven't seen) back in the late 70's...just as cheesy but a little cleaner.   Here are small snippets of two of the songs she did this afternoon. She's learning that she loves the combination of singing, dancing and acting all in one venue.  She is hoping to audition for the theater's spring production with an older group of kids (14 and up) as you can tell this group she is with was ages 9-14 with her being the oldest at as she likes to say "almost 15."  But, regardless of age, she was challenged and liked it a lot!