Home for the Holidays

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we have had lots of lovely time with Ella.  Having my house full of all its members definitely brought joy to my heart...and dishes to my sink!  ;)  Kinda crazy how just one person makes such a big difference in the daily chores!  We were ready to serve Ella in whatever way she needed over the holidays, but her to-do list was simple.  She most wanted to do little things we take for granted like drive the car, look at the stars she's been missing in LA, read a book for fun, take a bath, and connect with friends.  Having Ella home was enough of a holiday break highlight for me, I didn't feel the need to over plan, especially since Ella just wanted to recharge in regular-life ways.  So, here are few of those Simple Things that filled our Thanksgiving and Christmas.

  

Tea dates

An early visit from Sinterklaas over Thanksgiving weekend

LOTS of Ivy snuggles!

Swing dance lessons from Ella

Staff lunch for the preschool teachers

Christmas dress up days for our last week of school

Present opening fun!!

A drive and walk around the Christmas light neighborhood

A 1000 piece puzzle completed in 1 day

An at home Escape Room

A Christmas Zoom call with Anna, Derek, Andrew, Heather and Annabelle (and various dogs)!

A New Years Eve at home, where we hosted high school friends, fried up ollie bollen, played Jackbox games, and made them all sleep over.

 A New Year's goal to memorize more Bible verses, helped by Dave's gift of a monthly temporary tattoo subscription!  Cool, huh?

More friends sleeping over and showing off their Stanley Sisterhood

Learning lines for the next big play in February, Father of the Bride.  Delia learned right before break that she was cast as Kay, the bride!! Her biggest part to date!

AND the biggest event: Delia easily passing her driver's test this Break to earn her driver's license!  She was a little more timid and slow to learn, taking a full year to get to this point, but we're super proud and super excited that we never have to teach a teenager to drive again!! ;)

Not pictured: a half dozen dates with friends, 8 books read, a whole season of Survivor binged, lots of great movies shared (including our favorite, Oppenheimer), regular restaurant meals (thanks to generous gifts from family and friends), late nights and lazy mornings, countless trips to the Coffee Shop, several pajama days, big house projects taken off the to-do list (like shampooed carpets, a legit Christmas Break high point for me!), all of Ella's favorite home-cooked meals on the menu, and Formal dress shopping.  

The end of our Break was supposed to have a grand event in it, but a last minute cancellation had us spontaneously whip up a Plan B.  I'll write about that next; stay tuned!

From Spoon to Broom

Delia's curtain on Mary Poppins closed on a weekend in late October, and just a few days later she was back in our Performing Arts Center for the start of the next performance-- Elf!  This was a Middle School musical, but her role was by special invitation of our director: Choreographer, Mentor and Stage Manager!  She shared the jobs with her drama buddy Lexi, who played Mary Poppins.  These upperclassmen girls had the best time befriending the enthusiastic, younger performers, teaching them the joy of kick-ball-changes and jazz hands, and keeping them from breaking and misplacing things backstage!  This was a whole new behind the scenes part for Delia and she really enjoyed it.  There is one scene where Buddy the Elf dances around the stage tossing shredded paper to make it snow, and Delia appears briefly on stage, in her all black outfit and with her giant broom, to sweep up all the snow.  That was the extent of her stage time for this one and it cracked us up.  From Spoon to Broom!

Early stages of choreographing.

Sweet shout out from the director.  

The whole cast-- a super fun and talented bunch!  Many of them are 8th graders who Delia can't wait to act with next year in High School!

After Opening Night, Delia came home and hilariously said, "Mom, Lexi and I just stood off to the side after the show and no one noticed us!  No one wanted pictures or hugs.  One person beckoned us over and we thought, 'This is it!' but then she just said, 'Can you go find Christian for me?'  Lexi was the star and had kids lining up to take pictures with her one month ago and now we're nothing."  HAHA!  So we had to bring them flowers and treats and race the stage afterwards for hugs and pictures and huge praise the night we went.

The show was super cute and extremely well done.  Even though Buddy the Elf and Santa and Jovie were all amazing and performed way beyond their middle school years, we're partial, of course, and thought the choreographer turned snow-sweeper stole the show! ;) 

Fall is for Friends

Through a season of transition and changes, we thank God for the good friends He's surrounded us with!  Both Ella and Delia listed the friends in their lives as what they're most thankful for this year.

Delia's favorite thing is shopping with her friends.  They don't buy much, but they love trying stuff on!

She's no fan of football, but she'll occasionally tolerate the sport for the hang time with friends.

Ericka, a dear friend from both preschool (pictured above) and Book Club (pictured below), turned 40 this season and we loved celebrating her with a big surprise party!

An old friend from college, and a groomsman in our wedding, was in the Bay Area for a Pastor's Conference, so Dave went for a little drive to eat lunch and catch up with Aaron for a few hours.  He left feeling recharged and joyful.  Aaron and his family were so dear to us through the seminary years, it's been a blessing to stay connected and a gift for Dave to get this special face-to-face time.

A huge highlight this fall was hearing Delia stand in front of her church family to profess her faith in Jesus, her Lord and Savior.  It was so special for Dave to officially welcome Delia into the life of the church. He loved walking with her through the class and hearing her testimony before Council too.  The people pictured above have had an immense impact on Delia's faith over the past year, so it was important to her that they come to her Profession of Faith.  They are the dearest bunch, who all love Jesus and boldly encourage each other in their walks with Him.  I hate how shadowy the picture is, but I love the memory of our pew full of Delia's people (and their sweet families who came too!).  

These are the types of pictures Ella shares with me!  Her biology buds each holding a part of the cow eyeball they dissected.  As her science classes intensify, she's been blessed to find a core group who share a major and a schedule (and thus similar projects and stresses) and who live in her dorm!  They study together in the dorm study lounge every night.  We're glad she's found a way to make her work fun.

Thanksgiving was so lovely, and will get its own post soon, but this was a favorite time for me to observe-- Ella's best friends reuniting and coming over for a day.  How I loved hearing these mature young ladies share their hearts, how the Lord has been working, and what they hope and dream for their futures.  They caught up on every detail and spoke truth and encouragement to each other.   It's been a time to find all new people and figure out who you are and what you want and, while that has mostly been a joy and a thrill, there is nothing that feeds your soul like spending quality time with the old friends who know you best.

Full Hearts at Family Weekend

When we hugged Ella goodbye in August and said, "See you at the end of October", that felt sooo far away!  I'm thankful the months flew by with everyone thriving and loving life.  There was no part of our Family Weekend with Ella at college that wasn't awesome.  Seeing our girl, meeting her people, and being immersed in her world for a few days filled our hearts with overflowing happiness.  Her college mixed in some special Family Weekend activities and we were intentional about getting Ella off-campus for some fun meals and outings.  And the whole weekend was even perfectly timed with our own Friday off school!

  

We timed our travels perfectly to meet Ella right as she emerged from a class at noon.  We were excited to take her out for lunch.  I loved watching these sisters run into each others' arms at first sight of each other.  Ella does not hate the Caf food, but didn't complain about a break from it for the weekend.  First non-Caf meal was at a fun little Pho restaurant.  

Ella's Friday schedule includes a 3 hour afternoon chemistry lab, so after lunch we dropped her back off and headed out to tour a nearby college in SoCal.  This is the same school Ella looked at last year and probably would have also done very well at.  We wanted Delia to see it also.  Though, she was impressed with its aesthetic and fun features, Delia did not get that gut feeling that this is where she's being called.  Getting a front row seat to see Ella thrive at her school has made a big impact on Delia and it's likely both girls will end up at the same place.

Back to Ella's college, where we met her for a delicious picnic dinner on the lawn, followed by the annual fall talent show which was tons of goofy fun!  We enjoyed spreading our blanket by Ella's good friend, and twin!, Ava, and her family and getting to know them a bit.  After the talent show, Ella invited us to her Friday night Swing Dance Club, where she was recently elected a leader of!  So fun to catch some of the dancing under the patio lights and meet some of the friends Ella has met in this club.  Delia learned some new moves.

Saturday morning we 3 girls got into the awesome mother/daughter self defense class taught by the charismatic chief of police at the school.  It's a strange thing to have fun with, but it was an experience I'm glad to have shared with the girls!  When asked who wanted to actually try their punches and kicks on a real dude (wearing a super padded outfit), Ella volunteered and suited up for battle!  She did great!

We got free shirts and pepper spray for attending the class!  But, the coolest thing was after learning the facts and moves and practicing, the class ended with the chief of police praying protection over each of us women and asking the Lord to ensure we'd never have to use what we learned.

The afternoon was ours and Ella said what she'd most like would be an off-campus outing.  She and all her friends are car-less and mostly bound to campus, so she was anxious to explore.  I found the perfect museum for us-- the California Science Center!  Free to the pubic and located on the USC campus right in the middle of all the 1984 LA Olympics structures, it was a neat part of the city that was new to us.  This museum is famous for housing the Endeavor Space Shuttle.  It has a giant NASA exhibit that we all found interesting.

It wasn't all space, though.  This museum covered just about every aspect of science in a cool hands-on way.  Between Delia's AP Environmental Science class and Ella's Bio and Chem classes this semester, we frequently heard, "I'm learning about this right now!"  We walked through a small aquarium, saw each stage of baby development in the womb, visited the desert, arctic, and deep sea, and learned about different animal mating rituals to name just a few of the random sciences we explored.

The girls tried using a giant lever to lift a pickup truck.

We wandered through beautiful gardens.

And we cracked ourselves up in the "Casa de Fuego" where we were supposed to learn about fire safety, but decided to recreate memes instead. 

We swung back by school to pick up a few of Ella's friends for dinner at a cozy local Italian restaurant.  What's better than a big plate of homecooked pasta when you've been eating in the school cafeteria for months?  These are 2 of Ella's closest friends who did not have their own families in town for this night of Family Weekend, Tori and Ava.  Bethany and Jasmine are her other 2 besties, but they weren't able to join us.  We loved getting to know these sweet funny girls.  Both are psychology majors, something Delia is considering, so it was encouraging for her to hear their passion and plans for the future too.

After dinner we asked if we could take the girls anywhere special, any shopping or outings they were needing or craving.  Tori sweetly asked if we could just get desert together, so our easy conversation and laughter continued over froyo.  The girls then invited us back to the dorm to join them in Jackbox games!  We felt so cool and included! ;)

While Dave and I stayed in a nearby hotel, Delia stayed in the dorm with Ella and her friends.  She didn't sleep great, but loved the taste of college life and is all revved up about how she's gonna decorate her own dorm in a few years!  Ella's been bouncing between 3 churches.  One has amazing warm fellowship; one has amazing worship and does communion every Sunday, which she loves; and one has amazing preaching.  We went to the amazing preaching church and then out for after-church pancakes and omelets at a nearby diner where we talked about how hard it is to find the 3 things you're looking for in 3 different churches. ;)

Hugging Ella goodbye at the end of this weekend was so much easier!  There were no tears.  We will see her again in a few weeks for Thanksgiving, but the ease for me was in seeing how well she's fitting into her new life.