Gotcha Day 2022

Has it been fourteen years?   Yes, the date says as much.  Today is the anniversary of the day we first met Maddie, fourteen years ago and halfway around the world.  We thought about celebrating tonight with some Chinese food, but we get home pretty late from taekwondo, and after taekwondo there's small groups for Maddie and tonight's small group went on for an hour and a half, so it was good we didn't get the Chinese food, as there wasn't time to actually eat it.  No, we decided to push that off until later, probably this weekend, as tomorrow night we have taekwondo again. 

It was a somewhat full evening, as you would guess.  Yes, Maddie had her teakwoodo practice tonight.  We were there with her, watching her with the first class, helping younger students and watching out for flying kicks from some of those larger younger students.  She's glad to help though, attentive and quick to help out and observe where necessary.  Afterwards, she has leadership, and lately we haven't been able to see that as much, because the students in leadership are in a different room with not much of an observation area.  That's okay though.  

As I said, afterwards, it was time for small group.  We get home just at 8:00 pretty much, and that's pretty much when small group starts, so as soon as we get in the door, she's heading upstairs to hop online with her computer and get with Camille and her friends.  Today's small group went on for quite some time, and that's never a bad thing, as the girls are really open with each other, sharing and praying with one another under Camille's and Lauren's guidance.  We're so grateful she has this opportunity, and Maddie is pretty happy to go to small group each Thursday night too.

It's National Bomb Pop Day, and to celebrate... we had a bomb pop.  Going grocery shopping recently, I picked these up because I knew the "holiday" was coming up.  Of course, there's another slightly larger holiday coming up soon where we all eat red, white and blue bomb pops.  So having a box in the freezer is good.  We like these though, and I'm not sure if they'll make it past the weekend!

We got around to watching the next episode of Ms. Marvel, which has been one of our favorite Marvel shows of late.  It's been done well, and so far we've been hooked on the story and the characters.  But afterwards, we went to an online channel where I keep a lot of old videos of Maddie when she was much, much younger, and together all of us cycled through them.  There's one video that is essentially a slide show of our trip to China and our first meeting with Maddie on June 15, 2008.  I put it on this blog so long ago, right here, and tonight we watched this video again.  The music from "Kung Fu Panda," at least the song "Panda Po," will always be associated with this season in our lives, a perfect soundtrack.  And after that, we watched another one of Maddie before we met, which can be found here, also posted on this blog quite some time ago.  But there were many other videos we just sat and watched of a young Maddie, jousting, firefighting, chasing around our pastor, fishing, assaulting someone with a war hammer, and so much more.  It was just a nice, sentimental evening looking back.  We'll celebrate with a nice Chinese dinner in a few days, but given our limited time this evening, this was a nice way to celebrate.

So today we were doing a lot of prep for the weekend - I'm speaking at KidPak again.  Maddie was moving along with the LEGO Star Wars story, Mom was fixing some meals for the Fourth of July and doing some gardening earlier, while Nana was doing what she does every single day.  It was just another day, but it was nice.

We closed things out by reading from our book, and then saying our prayers.  For fourteen years we've had a lot to be grateful for.