Annual Family Portraits Part Two

I hope you can guess the theme for this year -- the "CHARGERS". The kids bought these shirts in Shanghai at the "Fake Market". We also thought it would be fun to let others know our yearly Bible verse, which for this year is Zech. 4:6 -- "not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit says the LORD of host." As a family, we want to live, trusting more in Jesus than in our own strength and ability and power and wisdom. Alan and I will be celebrating our 25th Wedding Anniversary on April 11th. God's Spirit has indeed knitted our hearts closer together as one in Christ. We have been invited to lead a one-day workshop conference on April 21st. The theme for the conference is -- EMBRACING OUR DIFFERENCES! How appropriate for Alan and I to speak on this topic! Please pray for us. We want to encourage all Christian marriages to glorify God. We have also turned in the homeschooling applications for both Isaiah and Abigail. Everything should be approved before we take off for the States on July 5th. I have also started on my retirement process. Yes, I will be retiring from Ming Chuan University by July 31st of this year. So, this year's portrait theme seems to be quite appropriate -- we are indeed charging forward with interesting changes ahead of us this year!

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Annual Family Portraits

Here are three of our annual family portraits. Our kids are growing up so fast!

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Finally, the Back Balcony

Even my back balcony was "redone". We took every container out and looked through and threw out and ... you get the idea. Yes, apartments in Taipei are very small. So, my oven is in the back balcony along with my washer and dryer and where I hang my clothes to dry so that I can save elctricity. Without a garage or a pantry or a walk in closet, our back balcony is our only "storage" place. I had to find ways to put our fans back there in the winter time and our radiator heaters out there in the summer time. And whenever I come back from the States, I had to find ways to store 50 boxes of cereal! We also have four folding chairs, our swimming gears, tools, mop, brooms... and the list goes on!!! Needless to say, I love how our back balcony looks now. I can actually walk back there! All the hard work and the chaos have really paid off. We all love the final result. We have taken our annual family portrait and will wait until that comes out before we hang all the "family pictures" back up on the walls. As for our mini-Louvre Museum, we might be changing that a bit, too!

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The Before and After -- Our Dining Room and Isaiah's Room

We still have the same huge dining room table, which we love. And we have not put up all of our wonderful pictures. But I think you can see that we kept some of the same furniture, but we have eliminated many other "items". If you look behind Abby, you will see Isaiah's room before the remodeling job. It was -- okay, CLUTTERED. We have three different styles of bookcases and every one of the bookcases was packed, crammed, with books. We again got built in shelves and things look so great and so much more organized. Isaiah thinks he feels better with a lot less sneezing now that his room is finished. And he loves his room as it is so spacious now. We cannot post pictures of Abby's room YET, as we are still waiting on her furniture. That will not be until April.

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The Before and After -- Our Master Bedroom

Our master bedroom used to be crammed with things and furniture. We moved the chest of drawers into Isaiah's room and moved my "home office" into the bedroom with the desk that can be closed up at night. It's a great feeling not having to look at the clutter and the room feels so much bigger, too.

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The Before and After -- Living Room

The bottom two pictures are the before and the in-progress pictures. As you can tell, I had a lot of flea market/cast-off pieces of furniture all grouped together against that wall. My living room looked cluttered and very much like a yard sale. I had wanted to do something, but I am rarely "home" during any of our vacations. So, this year, after our return from Shanghai, we decided to get the remodeling done since we have lived here going on nine years! After almost a month of living in "chaos", we love the final result. That wall of "clutter" now has built in cabinets. Our whole house has been repainted, too.

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