Christmas Eve 2017

If you have been a long time reader, these pictures will look familiar.  They are just the 2017 version. :)  We started our family Christmas celebration at the Christmas Eve service at church.  I always love the Christmas Eve service!  We end it every time just with candlelight, while singing Silent Night.  So special.

At home we ate our traditional Chinese food for dinner, and then had our own worship service, with sons G, A, and C helping to read the Christmas story this year from my grandfather's Bible.
     

After prayer, we began opening our gifts to one another.  Daughter H was able to join us for the evening, and we had fun being all together!  She gave my husband this Keurig for Christmas!

Little Man is obsessed with this show.  We watch it with him....it's a little edgy (scary)....but we are all enjoying the very good acting by child actors, and can talk about each episode after we watch.

So happy that two of my boys still want legos!

Son L received these cool water speakers (behind him on the bookcase).  They light up and water spouts up with the beat.  We had fun trying out different songs to see how they would affect the water.

These are daughter G's feet.  She has long wanted Chaco sandals, and this was her year to get them!

We faked son G out with this gift....it was so fun!  He had wanted the battlefront 2 game (Star Wars, for those of you who may not know), but we packed it with a heavy book in a bigger box so that he wouldn't guess what it was by the weight and shape.  He opened it from the bottom and saw the book first, and was kindof confused....it was a book on eschatology!  Haha!  The rest of the evening, while all the gifts continued being opened, he loaded it on the xbox so he could play some before bed.  He LOVES this game.

Daughter G gave hubby and I light sabers, so we could have a light saber battle for date night!

Kyle Ren's tie fighter.

Daughter H got to open her stocking that night as well, since she wouldn't be with us the next morning.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Transition

I have been putting off writing this post because it is not an easy thing for me to talk about, but our daughter H turned 18 and chose to move back in with her biological family.  In the end, the life she had created with us, parts of which she truly loved, was not enough to keep her anchored here.  The life she has returned to is vastly different than the one she had with us.  It is chaotic and operates on a kind of predictable yet continually traumatic dysfunction.  Knowing that that is the life she has chosen for herself makes me feel a host of jumbled emotions, none of them good.

Daughter H has been a big part of our lives for six years, and living in our home as our daughter for five, so it feels strange not to have to factor her into our daily plans, not take care of her mental health needs, not know her schedule or give her rides to and from work.  In some ways it has created a void of time and mental/emotional space for me that I am having to mourn and then choose carefully what to fill in its place.

Our relationship is not non-existent, but it is broken.  It is not what I had thought it would be.  I am not altogether sad that she is no longer living here, as our relationship had been deteriorating for a long time and daughter H was often angry and angsty.  But if she was not going to live with us, we had hoped she would make a lateral move to another place that would be a healthy environment for her.

Are you familiar with the five stages of grief or loss?  They are:

denial
bargaining
anger
depression
acceptance

These stages are not meant to be linear or even sequential, but can be cycled through in any order any number of times.  I am finding myself feeling all of them at various times.  I wonder if she is, too?  I don't know.

If the Lord brings us or daughter H to mind, please pray for each of us as we work through this transition, and especially pray for daughter H to stay close to Jesus and to know His great love for her.

Grad Party times Two!!

How do you have a grad party for two people with very different tastes?

You let them each decorate their own "all about me" table....

and pick their favorite dessert to have alongside their cake....

and the rest is happy, generic party!

We had a bit of a food emergency when the power strip got overwhelmed and stopped working, so everyone chipped in to heat food on our stovetop and carry it outside to the food line.

Many people were none the wiser!

It was fun to see so many people we love from various chapters of our lives all in one place!  We have the BEST relatives and friends.  They were so kind and generous to both son G and daughter H, and we are very, very grateful for their celebrating with us!