It's Okay To Be Ordinary: December 2014

Friday, December 26, 2014

Merry Christmas!

We started our Christmas festivities on the 23rd with our Walker side get-together. It was great that my dad was feeling good enough to come over this year and he did great throughout the evening. It's always fun to get together with these guys as there is always a lot of laughter. :)

Next up was Christmas Eve at the Morrow's. My mother-in-law cooks the entire meal herself and it is always delicious! It's fun to get caught up on everyone's busy lives!!

These guys decided they wanted to sleep in on Christmas this year (fine with me!) so we started opening presents around 9:00. Nick would've slept in much longer but Hailey was up and ready to go. This is the first year that I have actually been up waiting around for someone to come open presents. :)

The BEST part of Christmas Day is the FaceTime call with Elder Morrow. It is so awesome to be able to hear his voice, see his mannerisms again and see his whole personality that you can't always see in pictures.

The most amazing part of the call with him came at the end when we knelt together in family prayer...he was actually kneeling in the bathroom at the members house for privacy. :) He began offering the prayer and the spirit enveloped us in a manner we have rarely felt. We were all, including him, overcome with emotions and as he continued on, I realized the feelings I had were the feelings of pure joy. It is not a feeling that you can buy with money or that you can get from opening a gift, it is worth much more and felt much deeper than anything obtained here on earth. That was truly a moment of pure joy for me and I believe for each one of us...joy for the opportunity Bryson has had to serve a mission, joy for the gospel in our lives and joy for eternal families.

Saturday, December 20, 2014

Happenings...

Each year I get together with my friends Chris and Cara to make caramel apples and pretzels. This year we were crunched for time so we only made the apples and they ended up not turning out very well because we didn't get them cold enough after dipping them in caramel. We were in too big of a rush. :(

So I made the pretzels a few days later and Hailey wanted a picture with them so she could take credit for making them...haha.

Lynnie Lou is a little snuggle bug if you tickle her little face and arms when she's sitting on your lap at church. This week was Brian's turn. :)

A sweet lady who was shopping at the Outlets in North Carolina posted this picture on Facebook for all these boys families to see...I LOVE when nice people do that. :)

Sophomore Basketball

After 5 months of required conditioning, camps, tournaments & open gyms, tryouts for the high school basketball team finally came. Tryouts were held over two days and Hailey cried on the way home from day 1 thinking she did not do well enough to make it. They posted first cuts that night at 7:00 (they were actually 3 or 4 minutes late posting it and that was a LONG 3-4 minutes) and she DID make it through to the 2nd round. Woot Woot!

She felt pretty good after day 2 of tryouts but there were still some anxious nerves as we had to wait till 7:00 again. She had a dinner to go to for young women's so she and I were going to be logging on separately to see if she made it...her from the church and me at home. At 7:00 we were both on and they still had not posted it. TWENTY agonizing minutes later they posted it and SHE MADE THE TEAM!

WAAAAA-HOOOOOOO

They played 8 pre-season games and her sophomore team did really well...I think they won at least 5 of those. She has also been playing on the JV team and they won about half their games.