jude is going to have a......

 little brother!!!

 we found out 2 weeks ago that we are having a boy!  we are so excited to add another little boy to our family!  i always thought i wanted to have a girl (and i'm sure girls are great!), but after having a little boy, i have fallen in love with mothering a little man and i think i would love to have a family full of boys!  so i was super excited to know that we are getting another one - and jude will have a good buddy to play with since they will only be 22 months apart.  it is our prayer that the Lord will use them in each others' lives to help each other walk with God.

we would love your prayers right now.  we found out at the beginning of june that there are some complications with this pregnancy.  it's a very long and confusing explanation, but the short of it is that i had some bloodwork come back with a rare antibody that could be life-threatening to the baby.  they are monitoring me closely throughout the rest of this pregnancy - we have an excellent OB, are now also meeting with a high-risk OB, are at a great hospital in boston and just feel like we have the best care possible.  we would love for you to join us in praying that my antibody level remains low throughout this pregnancy and that the baby will remain unaffected.  this also provides complications for future pregnancies, so pray that the Lord would give us wisdom as well as comfort in knowing that He has ordained this for us and has great purpose in it.  

thanks for celebrating with us!  can't wait to meet this little guy around Dec. 5th!

Family Reunion in Charleston, SC - June 18-25

my entire family (aunts, uncles, cousins, etc) gets together every 2 years for a reunion/vacation.  this might have been the craziest year yet since we keeping adding little ones to the mix.  there were 26 of us there... in one big house on the beach.  it was an awesome trip.  i love being with my family and it's such a gift to get together every 2 years since we are spread out everywhere - new hampshire, boston, chicago, st. louis, alabama, and florida.  we had a great time seeing charleston, playing on the beach, riding bikes on the beach, lots of walks, games and eating together.  i'm still waiting to process my film from the trip, but here are some digital shots:

Father's Day

He really wanted to ride in the cooler while grammy pulled him around outside :)

special friends

while we were in austin, my close friend, caroline, drove 4 hours from tyler, tx to come see us.  nick had to work so caroline and ellie made the trip on their own and spent the night with us.  i can't tell you what a refreshment it was for me - the smiths (along with all of our other gordon conwell friends) moved back to texas last summer.  we have missed them terribly over the past year.  jude and ellie were born 3 weeks apart and it was so fun to be able to experience the new realms of parenthood together.  caroline is an incredibly gifted singer/songwriter and she is working on a great project called the "scripture to music collective," where she is writing a song for every book of the Bible to tell the story of scripture in song form.  (you should check it out - her songs are so rich and you can download them free) :)

just a little progression of jude and ellie's friendship:

Ellie just home from hospital; jude 3 weeks old

ellie and jude at 2 months old

ellie and jude at 16 months

my favorite shots from our time with caroline and ellie:

bonding at Hula Hut over tortilla chips

pajama time!

time for milk and then bed

right before the ball hit jude in the head :)

they didn't think bath time was near as fun as we thought it would be!

other close friends of ours from gordon-conwell, daniel and heejei, actually moved to austin while we where there. we spent an afternoon with them - it was so great to see them!  their little boy, nathaniel, was born 13 hours before jude and they lived in the apartment right below us!  daniel was a groomsmen in our wedding and met heejei when we got to gordon-conwell and they got married the following summer.  greg and daniel have been friends since they first lived in china in 2004.  it was really wonderful to be with them and to see the boys together again!  heej cooked an amazing lunch for us - i have missed her cooking!

nathaniel and jude playing the drum together - each with a drumstick :)

Family Vacation in Texas - June 4-11

Our summer has been a blur so far.  We moved out of our place in Rockport at the end of May and flew to Austin, TX where we spent almost 3 weeks with family, on vacation, and raising support.  It has been one stop after the next as we are experiencing the nomadic life right now.  So far, we have been in 6 different houses since we left our own on May 29.  Jude has been quite the trooper, although the disruption to his sleep has been the most difficult (considering he's also teething and trying to figure out what's going on, where all his toys are, what happened to our house, and why he's been sleeping in a pack-n-play for the past 7 weeks.  I have a lot to blog about, so I thought I'd try to play a quick catch up game. 

Jude loved the ocean water, the sand, the pool and playing with his cousins!

 

Mother's Day

My little helper

So we like to start 'em early around here doing chores. :)  Greg always said he couldn't wait until Jude was older so when I said, "Greg, can you take out the trash?", he could turn to Jude and say, "Son, can you take out the trash?"  :)  Funny thing is, Jude has had a fascination with the swiffer broom for as long as he has been mobile.  He would follow me as I swept, holding on to the bottom of the broom.  Now that he's walking, he loves any chance he can find the swiffer out and available.  Maybe I should make this a video to sell called, "You, too, can teach your 14-month old to sweep your house."


He also loves to pull clothes out of the laundry basket, piece by piece, hurling them over his shoulder without even looking.  Unfortunately, he also likes to do this with the clean clothes that I take out of the dryer and put on the couch to fold.  I've given up fighting that battle.  So now, he throws each piece off the couch as I fold, and once he's done, he picks each piece back up, putting it on the couch, so that he can again hurl each piece over his shoulder across the room.  Here is Jude "re-sorting" my laundry piles for me.

Greg's Ordination Service

Jude is so proud of his daddy.

This past Sunday was a really special day for us.  After almost 5 years of seminary training and all that happened in-between (marriage, a baby, and 3 degrees later), Greg's call was affirmed by the Southern New England Presbytery and this past Sunday, he was ordained as a minister of the Presbyterian Church of America.  It was an exciting day - to see God's call on Greg's life affirmed by so many, but also a weighty day as Greg understands that this is not a title or an achievement, but an immense amount of responsibility given to him by the Lord.  He has definitely felt the weightiness of this over the past week.  But we are also celebrating this mile-marker: marking the end of seminary and training and affirmation of our call, and also marking the beginning of the path for which we have been preparing so long.  We are so thankful for all those who have supported and encouraged us through the past 5 years of seminary.  God used so many of you in such significant ways in our lives - you will always be part of the story we tell of how God provided for us while both of us were in seminary.  Thank you.

Unfortunately, the service was on Mother's Day, so many of our friends were not able to make it.  And family, of course, lives very far away.  So I wanted to video the ordination part of the service so that many of you could feel a part of it and see what it is about.  Dr. Lints, our dear friend and professor from Gordon-Conwell who is also one of our pastors at CityLife, led the ordination time. 
Here is the video of the ordination (about 18 minutes) and the second video is Greg giving his first benediction at the end of the service (about 30 seconds).