Precious Memories

So this will be the first in a series of blogs about my visit home to TX.  There was just way too much material for one blog, haha.  I'll try not to make you wait too long for all the juicy details.

I think I told you a little bit about my family a few blogs back.  Basically, my mom and her siblings (minus my uncle Brad, who lives in California) and all of their kids/spouses/their kids get together for basically every holiday. But Christmas is probably our favorite, because even the wayward prodigals like myself make an appearance.

We always do breakfast at my grandparents' house on Christmas morning.  This year, since Christmas was on a Sunday, our family (my mom, dad, and I) ate breakfast with everyone, then left and went to church and came back.  When we got back to the house, everyone was cracking up and passing around pictures, newspapers, etc.  Turns out while we were gone, my grandma had pulled out these boxes that she had saved full of memories from each of her kids' lives.  They were full of things from newspaper articles about them, to their report cards, wedding announcements, class pictures, and all kind of things they had made as kids.  It continued into things that my siblings and cousins had done - our preschool and high school graduation programs, thank you cards we had written them, and so much more.

Some of my favorite things I found in my mom's box:

My grandparents lived on the main street of my hometown and used to put big announcements (like this one of course!) on this sign out front.

Just in case everyone didn't see the sign, here's the official birth announcement in the paper,. Does anyone else think it's weird that they put their address in there? I can't believe no one tried to kidnap me after this.

I'm pretty sure my folks are roller-skating in this picture.  And maybe going to bale some hay?

My parents' wedding announcement.
Some things to note:
My mom was 17 when they got married and my dad was 24. I used to joke with them that I was planning to do the same when I was 17.  They didn't really find it amusing. I guess times were different then.
Apparently people were very interested in all the details, down to the plaid pantsuit (haha) she wore as they traveled to their honeymoon.

Really, mom and dad??  That is a serious bowl cut.

Rockin the frilly collar

Me and my sisters.  I really hope this is from Halloween, but I am pretty sure it isn't...

My and Christopher (my cousin and his fiancee), Clay and April (my cousin and her husband), and my Uncle Mike

My Aunt Michelle, my cousin Julie, my dad, and my cousin Erica

My grandpa and my parents

Feeling very blessed to have come from such a legacy of love and faith, and I hope I get to sit down one day with my kids and grandkids and have as much fun as we did this Christmas.

The Best Gift

So yes, Christmas is just around the corner, so I'm sure a lot of you have gifts on the mind, whether it's the tons you still have left to buy (like me!) or the ones you're hoping to get under the tree.  I hope in the spirit of the season, you'll indulge me getting a little serious and sharing with you about one of the best gifts I've ever received.

Most of you know that I spent about 6 1/2 years working with a ministry called Children At Heart, more specifically the Texas Baptist Children's Home in Round Rock, TX.  And I know I talk about it a lot, but I really can't help myself.  It's still so much of who I am, and the people there are so precious to me.  It's hard not to talk about what you love. :-)  Anyhow, for those I haven't talked to death about it, when I left in March 2011, I was the case manager for all the girls living on campus, but in my earlier years working there, I had the privilege of getting to work with a special group of boys that lived in Cottage 7.  This cottage was the "little boys" cottage on campus. In fact, a lot of the boys I placed were as young as 5 or 6 when they came to us.  Cottage 7, while they could be very physically exhausting, were basically my emotional escape during my years at TBCH.  If I was having a rough day, if my teenage girls' cottage had pushed me to the brink of insanity (don't get me wrong, I loved those girls to death too, but come on, teenage girls are who they are), or if I just needed to "get away,"  I would go to Cottage 7.  An hour of playing with those little guys was the best medicine for a bad day. :-)  It would be hard to express how truly special these guys are to me.  When it was determined that we were going to make the shift for me to take over the girls and I realized that meant I was going to have to give up the case management for the boys, it was actually quite heartbreaking for me.

But we made the shift, and even though I moved into a less direct role with them, I still got to be a big part of their lives through the choirs and other things on campus.  When I knew I was going to make the move to NYC, I think they were the hardest kids to tell.  One in particular, Heath (obviously not his real name), took it pretty hard.  I had placed Heath about 3 years earlier, when he was 9, after his father's death (his mother had left when he was just a toddler).  I had spent a lot of time working with different specialists to get him diagnosed and treated for multiple social and learning disabilities, and though he still had his struggles, he was (and still is) doing great.  My last week on campus, I went around saying my goodbyes, and spent an afternoon over at cottage 7.  Heath said, "Miss Janell, I have a present for you." and he went back to his room.  He comes back with a pretty large red plastic dragon figurine, which he presents to me proudly.  This might not seem like much to any of you, but I knew that that dragon had been given to him by his host family, whom he adored, and was one of his most prized possessions.  

This, funnily enough, set off a hilarious chain of events where all of the boys went to their rooms to get me a comparable "gift." Some of the things I received that day...two stuffed dolphins, like 5 Zhu Zhu pets (and even a Zhu Zhu pets "house"), some interesting lego creations, a porcelain cat, and probably some other things I can't remember.  I could barely carry it all back to my office.

But anyhow, all this to say that that bizarre red dragon is now one of my most prized possessions.  In fact, much to the chagrin of my roommate, it sits right on my dresser all the time.  And every day when I see it, it is a reminder of how, even though I am selfish and awful and was totally not equipped to do that job, God was somehow able to use me to help these amazing children.  It's also a good reminder that even though it sounds cliche', the best gifts are really those that come from the heart.  That's a good thing to keep in mind in these coming days.

So, I know you're dying for the visual, and I don't think it will disappoint...

Beautiful, isn't it? :-)

And in the interest of not being too serious here, another quick Heath story...

When I came back to TX in July for my cousin's wedding, I drove up to Round Rock for the day to see everyone.  Heath was in trouble, so he was stuck in his room for a little bit, but his house parents were kind enough to let me pop in and say hi.  It was pretty great to see him, and he told me he had a gift for me. Of course, he had no idea I was coming, so I don't think he put quite as much thought into this one.  Haha.  THIS is what he came up with:

Yes, that is a cat feeding bowl he made in ceramics.  Do I own a cat?  Nope. Do I even like cats? Nope. So I guess Heath is 1-for-2 with the giving, but the red dragon makes up for the cat bowl, I guess.  :-)

Hope you all have a truly blessed holiday season, my friends.  By the way, I think it goes without saying that the gift of Jesus trumps red dragon and cat bowl.  Don't forget it.

Thanksgiving, Fakesgiving...As Long As There's Turkey, Who Cares??

Well, my friends, I hope you all had a delightful Thanksgiving.  I, personally had a very different day than I'm used to, but I am learning that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

I'll start by describing a typical Thanksgiving for me...
<Many of you know my family, so sorry for the quick history lesson for my other blog readers>
I was extremely blessed to have grown up with essentially my ENTIRE extended family (well, on my mom's side, my dad is an only child) within minutes of me.  My grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were all within about 20 minutes of where I lived with my parents. Even now, as adults, everyone but me lives within about an hour of each other.  There are 9 grandkids in all, so that's already a pretty big crowd, and now we've started adding in spouses/significant others and even kids of our own (well only my sister Alecia has those for now), so we have anywhere from 15-25 people on a given holiday.

We usually do Thanksgiving at my parents' house (Christmas is at my grandparents').  I always wake up early in the morning, turn on the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and pretend to help my mom in the kitchen while sneaking away every chance I get to watch the TV (don't worry, I record it and watch the parts I miss later). The family starts coming around 2:00, and it gets real loud real quick.  We are just a loud family, there's no getting around it.  We love to talk to each other and play games and yell at the football game on TV, it's just what we do. Thanksgiving is a wonderful, LOUD, delicious day in my family.

This year, I knew it wasn't really going to be feasible for me, financially or otherwise, to come home for both Thanksgiving and Christmas.  So I opted to take some time off at Christmas and spend Thanksgiving here in New York.

Back in October, when Sara and I knew we were both going to be here for Thanksgiving, we thought it wise to do a dry run, a test drive if you will, basically to make sure we didn't suck at making all the Turkey Day delicacies we had "helped" make all these years.  Sara had done this last year and dubbed it "Fakesgiving," so we decided to officially make it a yearly event and set about planning it.  We bought all of the essentials and invited our closest friends over to partake in this unofficial holiday.  I think 2010's Fakesgiving consisted of 4 people at our old apartment in Glendale...this year, we had SEVENTEEN people in our tiny little apartment.  We didn't even have enough seats so we had to get creative.  Check it out:

Good Food & Good Friends

Friends from my Apostles community group

Nothing wrong with eating picnic-style on the floor :-)

Amazing friends that I get to work with every day

Despite the "coziness" of having all those people in our apartment, it was one of my favorite New York moments to date.  Having friends from all of the areas of our lives...co-workers, high school friends, college friends, Apostles friends...it was amazing and we felt so thankful (forgive the pun) to have everyone together for a delicious pre-Thanksgiving get-together.

Our real Thanksgiving was a little more low-key. I didn't get up and turn on the parade, I got up and actually went to the parade!!  Although the real thing requires getting up a LOT earlier and being a LOT colder than watching it from my parents couch, it was still pretty cool to see it in person.  I try not to double up too much between my blog and Facebook, so check out my Facebook if you want to see the whole parade album, but here are a few of my favorites:

To Infinity...And Beyond!

Kung Fu Panda

Snoopy

Straight No Chaser...you should all know them if you took my advice a few blog posts ago and bought their Christmas albums.  One of my all-time favorite groups!!

The star of the show, Santa himself

After we thawed out from the parade and took a quick nap, we prepared all the food and our friends started arriving.  This time there were only 7 of us - Sara and I plus our friends Andrew, Audrey, Allison, Angie (What's with all the A names??), and Whitney.  We ate and hung out and ate and ate some more....

Andrew, Allison, Sara, Whitney, Me

Yum!

Sooo many desserts!

It was a truly enjoyable and relaxing Thanksgiving, and though I obviously missed my family, it was fun to start some new traditions up here.  Plus, I got to Skype in with the whole family while they were all together, so it was almost like being there myself. :-)

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Alex (and any of my other Scrooge-like friends), you can stop reading here...


So, it's really starting to look and feel like Christmas here.  The weather has been absolutely beautiful, but it's definitely starting to get chilly.  All the stores are decorated and there are about 2-3 times the normal amount of tourists (the only downside to this wonderful time of year, haha).

My friend Skip and I actually went ice-skating in Bryant Park on our lunch break the other day.  I haven't been ice skating in years, so that was interesting.  And Skip is from Maine, that's all I'm gonna say about that.  He actually got in trouble (several times) for skating too fast.  Haha.  I did NOT get in trouble for skating too fast, that's for sure.  But I also didn't fall on my butt, so that's something.

Another very touristy thing I did this week was checking out the store windows.  For those of you who don't know, a big tradition here is that the major department stores in Manhattan (i.e. Macy's, Lord & Taylor, Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale's, Saks, Barney's...) go all out and decorate their windows for the holidays.  It's a pretty big deal - they have to rope off the sidewalk in front of the windows so the gawkers don't get in the way of the rest of the sidewalk traffic.

Anyway, I got off work early on Monday, so I walked like 40 something blocks up 5th Avenue and checked them all out.  Pretty amazing stuff.

Macy's

Lord & Taylor

I don't even know what store this is

Trump Tower

Bloomingdale's

And best of all, today after work I ventured over to Rockefeller to see this bad boy...

And take a real good look, because I will not be going anywhere near Rockefeller/Times Square/etc until after New Year's. No, seriously.  Tonight I made the mistake of walking down 50th as one of the Rockettes' shows was letting out and literally was stuck for 25 minutes on ONE BLOCK.  I couldn't move because there were people shoved in all around me.  If I was more claustrophobic, I probably would have had a panic attack, but I survived.

Alright, well that's all I got for now, but I'm sure there will be more Christmas in New York goodness to come. Sorry, Scrooges.

Happy Friday!