Thanksgiving Week

I left off Tuesday with David's birthday. We went to dinner that night at Tokyo Steakhouse. We had a good time together.

Fire is part of the fun...
Here's David and Grandpa (who's 91 years old and drove from Colorado to join us):
The ladies at the restaurant sang Happy Birthday while banging a gong 31 times. (David tried to pretend he was 21 but we ratted him out!)

On Wednesday, the guys spent the day in the kitchen as preparations were made for Thursday. Daisy hung out with Aunt Katie.
Isn't her ladybug outfit cute?!?!?!

Some of us went out for lunch at an English pub.

In the evening, David and I snuck away for a dinner date while his mom and sis babysat Daisy.


Late Wednesday, Uncle Scott, Aunt Amy and cousin Brennan arrived. (They live in Chicago.) Daisy met them Thanksgiving morning. Pictured is Scott and Brennan at the table ready for the Thanksgiving meal.
Here's a bunch of the family seated ready to eat the feast.


In addition to the big meal, we also did an early b-day celebration for B-man on Thursday.
Here are the Chinn siblings with nephew Brennan.

Daisy also got to hang out with Gramma a lot.

A few of us decided to brave the crowds and go shopping at the outlets at midnight with hundreds, I mean thousands, of our closest friends. We had to wait in a lot of long lines...

It hailed on us several times... (not joking)

It was also very cold waiting for Target to open up. I loaned Katie my stocking hat because I had a sweatshirt hood. I also put on the Under Armour shirt I had just bought at the outlet. That really warmed me up. :)

We returned at 8:30, just in time for Katie to say bye and head with Chris to the airport. I promptly fed Daisy, who wasn't happy with the bottle daddy was trying to feed her with.

Then I took several naps before joining a group for lunch.


We spent the rest of the day relaxing some more. Daisy and cousin Brennan got to hang out together, so naturally we took some pictures.

Finally, we began to pack our stuff up before calling it a night. Daisy was super cute at bedtime.

The Massive Update (with photos*)

It’s been a while since our last post. A week to be exact. I started a post this morning at 4:45 am, since I was up feeding Daisy. I was almost finished with it at 5:25 am when the program on my phone locked up and shut down. Of course I had forgotten to hit save. Ugh. I lost everything I had typed with my right thumb…

Here goes again. This time I am typing from a laptop. This should go much faster.

Daisy has gotten her first cold, and she has successfully passed it along to me. Unfortunately I think David is next. He is starting to sniffle. Before I write anything else, I want to mention:

HAPPY 31st BIRTHDAY DAVID!!!! That’s right. Today is Daddy David’s birthday. YAY!

On to the massive update…

Last Wednesday, the Swanns invited us to join their Homegroup for a Thanksgiving dinner. We decided to go, and we arrived just after getting home from work. Daisy was tired and proceeded to fall asleep on David’s lap…



For three solid hours… isn’t she precious?!?!?!



Thursday, we walked downtown to meet our friends Glynis and Nick for dinner at the Cellar. Daisy was strapped into a carrier, and she fell asleep on the way.



She slept the whole dinner…



Friday, our staff team held a going away party for Zach’s Place. (For non-NLCF folks, Zach’s Place is a room our church has rented downtown and used for meeting space the past decade. The landlord finally revoked our lease in order to bring the space up to fire code, then it’s becoming a laundromat.) Here is Daisy’s first and last time in Zach’s Place. Interestingly, this is the first place where Daddy ever saw Mommy, back in spring 1998…



On Saturday, we packed our car to travel for the week. On the way out of town, we stopped to see Jeanette’s house that she just bought. The painting is coming along – she’ll move in after Thanksgiving. Can’t wait to post more pics of it next week!



We drove down I-81 to Roanoke to pick up Mom Chinn at the airport. I gave Daisy a bottle in the car from the back seat.



At the airport, Gramma Chinn got to hold Daisy again.



We then went to Charlottesville to see Aunt Lisa. We had dinner together, and our friend Anna joined us (she’s holding Daisy).



When we finally got to Mechanicsville, Daisy’s cousins were waiting up to see her.



Sunday morning, we attended Walnut Grove Baptist Church, where Daisy met a ton of family friends. She even got to meet some ladies who held her mommy when she was Daisy’s age.


After church, we grabbed lunch and took it to our friends Brandon and Jane’s house. They just had a little boy, Alex, and he and Daisy met each other. The dad’s also had a baby burping contest. (There wasn’t really a winner.)



We then went to a gathering of childhood friends of mine at Joy’s house. She, Elisa, and Christina all have little ones. We took plenty of pics together, including one of all the dads. Those poor guys had no idea what they were marrying into!








Our last stop out was to visit Mason and Marcie’s new house. The have done an awesome job with some home improvements. They enjoyed meeting Daisy, and being both redheads, they were partial to Daisy’s hair color.


When we returned to Grammy and Grandpa’s house, we celebrated David’s birthday by eating Pizzeria Uno’s deep dish. We gave David his birthday gift – a new food processor. Since he loves to cook, we thought it would be a nice new toy to play with.



We also gave Asher an early b-day gift (he turns 3 on Saturday) and Jonas a late b-day gift (he turned 5 in September).



Monday morning, we took some Christmas card pictures – here’s Uncle Davey, Asher, and Daisy.






We drove to Virginia Beach during the middle of the day and introduced Daisy to our dear friends Chris and Shawnea.


Chris is a nurse and helped us administer Daisy’s thrush medication since he’s an expert. :)


Their daughter, Hannah, also met Daisy.


Finally, drove back up to Newport News and arrived at Mike and Bertie’s house. This is where we’ll be all week for the Chinn family reunion and Thanksgiving. Daisy met Aunt Katie and Uncle Chris.

Today, we woke up and gave Daisy a bath. Then our friend Brent came to meet Daisy on his lunch break from work. He also brought us lunch from Jason’s Deli. Yum.


Now we’re just napping and relaxing on daddy’s birthday… And that sums up the massive update!

2 hour delays and other things...

Today I am having a 2-hr. delay for the second day in a row. Its not really too snowy in Blacksburg, but it is cold, and it was probably snowing/icy in Giles when they made the call several hours ago!

I'm using the extra time to post a few things up here. I know its been a while since I've posted... during that time we did our annual NFL game weekend (this year was Baltimore) as well as Thanksgiving and the last Hokie home football game of the season against arch rival UVA. I have pictures to share of these events, and will try to get them up soon.

In the meantime, I wanted to post a website that you all need to check out if you haven't already: http://www.adventconspiracy.org/

The whole point of this is to refocus our minds as followers of Jesus back on what matters -- and that's Christ and sharing Christ's love to all. What better way to share the love of Jesus, who made the ultimate sacrifice, than for us to "sacrifice" our normal ways of celebrating in this capitalistic consumer culture and to instead give our time, money, and resources to help those in need?

Something to chew on during the holiday season...