Progress Report

As July and summer are racing by, I thought I would take a minute to see how it’s all going!

To start, the kids and I are on our own, as Jeff is in Japan for a week-long business trip.  This is the first time I’ve been by myself with three kids, and it’s been a bit daunting.  So far, it’s not been bad, although church was a squeaker this morning. 

The paging system at Richwoods is such that your children (as a group) are assigned a number, and, if your child needs you, that number is flashed up in the bottom corner of the screen during the worship service. 

Our kids are number 186, and I was paged for the first time EVER this morning, much to my shock.  I’ll admit, it shouldn’t have been a shock with a baby, as I’ve been paged at every church in which I’ve had a baby in the nursery, but this is the first time I’ve ever been paged at Richwoods.  I rushed back to the children’s area, and a very young nursery worker was holding my pitiful, red-faced son.  He was no longer screaming, but the hapless worker told me that they had tried his pacifier, his bottle, everything, and nothing had worked.  Jeremy sort of snuffled and snuggled into my shoulder as I went back to retrieve his bag.  (Church was about 20 minutes from being over.)

To my surprise, I saw at least eight babies crawling or lying around the teeny-tiny “Snails” room, where the immobile babies are supposed to be.  Three workers were desperately trying to keep up with them all.  (Our pastor told me a few minutes later that they had something like 18 children in the one-and-under rooms this morning.  Holy smokes!  No wonder they paged me!)  I took Jeremy to the lobby and fed him, grateful that I wasn’t up to do prayer team at the end of the service, as there was just I, and my other kids had to be picked up too!

Our kids truly outnumber us now, and, when one of us is absent, it isn't easy!

In other news, our summer checklist is going nicely.  We’ve visited the zoo, gone to a pool or water park every week, and have faithfully done the multiplication tables twice a week.  The older kids are also playing their daily, 30-minute allowance of video games and spending lots of time playing outside with the neighbors.  This is truly how summer should be.

Yesterday afternoon, the kids and I attended a kick-off picnic for a new Richwoods church campus that will start meeting on our side of the Illinois River in January.  Richwoods has close to a thousand people that attend among three services on Saturday night and Sunday morning, and about a quarter of them drive from east of the river.  The new campus pastor, Ken Stewart, is currently putting together a launch team, the group of people who are committed to attending the new site.  As this new site will be much closer to our community than the current Peoria campus, our family is all in.  (The uber-correct terminology for this is that Richwoods is becoming a “multi-site” church, if you’re interested.)

It was neat to look around last night and see the people with whom we will be worshiping before too much longer.  I recognized very few faces (the downside of a large church), but that will change.  Believe it or not, I met a woman who attended my alma mater, Lipscomb University, and found out that there were several people there who have a history with the Churches of Christ.  As a matter of fact, the campus pastor comes from a Church of Christ background, which we discovered several years back, before we moved to France.  But the new people were fun to get to know.  It really is a small world.

And I’m excited about having the opportunity to be part of both a large and a small church at the same time.  It’s a unique situation that doesn’t come along very often.

I took Jeremy to get his three-month pictures taken on Wednesday.  He was photographed after the tiny six-month-old son of a teen mom.  Jeremy looked like a giant next to him.  The photographer looked at Jeremy and asked, “So, is he sitting up pretty good now?”

I stared at her a second, realized she was serious, and answered, “No. He’s only three months old.  I’m hoping to get some pictures today of him pushing up on his arms!”  The photographer laughed and apologized, and she took some great pictures of him.

Well, that’s how we’re rolling.  Sometimes, I wish it could all slow down, but that’s not the nature of things, is it?

Have a good one!