Updating for the sake of updating.

Hello world,

Boy have I been doing a horrible job at updating! My last post was in March. Yikes! Since then there have been so many changes! Ryan has finished his first year of seminary at SBTS and did quite well! I'm so proud of him for working so hard and still making time for me. He's such a wonderful husband! My brother, Julius, and my SIL, Wella, had their baby girl, Genevieve, on April 25! She is just precious and already growing like a weed.

Here's my mom holding her right after she was born:

Here is a current pic of her:

MOHAWK BABY! And look at those chubs! So cute. I still haven't gotten to meet her in person. We did skype with them after she was born and I just wanted to snuggle her up! Thankfully, our fellow community groupers, Bruce and Chinh, had their twins, River and Rayne (a boy and girl) on March 17 and Kara and Crockett had their baby girl, Tessa, on May 16 so we've had a lot of snuggle time with babies to ease my baby fever. Ryan even babysat Tessa BY HIMSELF one evening while Kara and I went shopping! Can you believe it? He is so great with babies. :)

On April 17 we celebrated our first anniversary! I can't believe it's been more than a year since we got married. Since Ryan was in the midst of school, we decided to celebrate our anniversary at the end of May and take a trip to Chicago. Ryan had never been and I hadn't been since 9th grade. It was a fantastic trip even with the sore feet. Here we are at the famous Cloud Gate scuplture in Millennium Park:

On July 4, we had a community group cookout/block party in the neighborhood where we meet. We had a great turnout and got to meet a lot of neighbors. We're praying for God to do great things there! Here's a few of us from the party:

I love our community group! This was also the first week that Ryan and I officially became the community group leaders! Our former leaders, Matt and Lauren, have become coaches and we have been apprenticing under them. We were so thankful for this opportunity to be able to minister to the body and continue building strong relationships with other believers. Soon our group is going to multiply, meaning we are going to basically split in half and form another group because ours has grown so much. It is a bittersweet time, but we are excited about making room for new people to join!

We just moved (and by "just" I mean 3 days ago) and we're loving our new place. I'm so thankful for Village Manor and it was a great first home in Louisville. We just needed a little more space and I really wanted a dishwasher. I will never take that machine for granted again. We moved out to the east end of Louisville and our new community group will meet out there. We're excited to be able to meet new people in the community and hope to further the gospel there as well.

I'm sorry this is such a long post! I really need to get better about updating. I'm planning on doing a lot of new craft/home improvement projects over the next few months and will try to blog them in hopes of inspiring others to try them as well! Thank you so much for reading and hope you have a fantastic weekend!

Peace,
Amy