It has been a whole year

I have no idea how to sum up a whole year.
Maybe I'll make month by month updates and post them all at the same time.
It was fun for me to look back at a year ago and see how much has changed and how much is still the same.
One project I have been working on for the whole year is organizing pictures. I can happily say I am completely caught up. All the pictures are divided into folders, uploaded to Google photos, backed up to flash drives and an external hard drive. This was no small task as I hadn't kept up with that since we moved - which by the way will be 8 years in a few months, which is crazy to us in so many ways.

I guess I will start with fall of 2018.
I have a senior in high school..... we took senior pictures with family pictures, and we had a separate shoot out at the track. She loves hurdles and is always ready for track season.

I'm not a huge fan of social media, so I rarely post, but here are the first day of school pics.

Anika 12th

Brandon 10th

Jessica 8th

all attending Western Michigan Christian

Maria 6th at Muskegon Christian School

Matt's niece, Emily, was married to Case DeJong in October. Matt performed the ceremony and we were all able to make it.

The Eenigenburg family minus Ben (Jen's husband) and Tammy (Mark's wife)

Matt also performed a wedding for a former student of mine in Minneapolis in October. It was a quick weekend trip back and Jessica and Maria came along to hang out with friends.

Fall sports brought a new adventure for Anika. She has talked about joining the swim team for years, but decided her senior year was the one to make it happen. A few weeks into the season, the team was losing points because they didn't have a diver, so she volunteered for that, too. She learned 14 different dives in 7 weeks and made huge improvements from the first week to the final week. She learned enough dives to make it to regionals. She had a great year, and made some wonderful friends. She even had a college recruiting her to come and dive for them!

Brandon spent the season on the JV soccer team and was the center back for defense. He was moved up to varsity for the last few games and got to play for them a few minutes as well.

Jessica played 8th grade volleyball and ran middle school cross country. She really enjoyed both, primarily due to friends and great coaches. She never quite completely mastered the over hand serve but did a great job at the positions she was asked to play.

Maria continued to play Storm soccer but once again for another new team, with different players and a new coach. She fully enjoyed the coaches and enjoyed soccer again - after last year, she wasn't sure she wanted to continue to play.

 

We spent most of August and September telling Brandon he needed to share Blueberry (Anika's loving term for the CRV she drives) and would not be getting his own car. Within a few weeks, my boss's mom asked that her sons take her keys away before she got too dangerous on the road. She owned a black CRV and within a few short days, Matt was the proud driver of a much newer vehicle, and Brandon was the driver (but not really so proud) of the little green civic, lovingly named Avacado.