A Weekend of Celebration

The Norvell family has had much to celebrate over the past few weekends. Not only did God bless us with a grandchild ( and nephew) on Thanksgiving day, but this past weekend we were able to be together again to celebrate a truly momentous occasion. Jon Norvell, the proud new father, graduated from Southwestern Baptist Seminary on Friday, Jan 12. It was a special day for the whole family, as this was the same seminary that my father-in-law graduated from several years earlier. Here is proud mom and dad with the recent graduate.

And here are the siblings. There were many people there from both families. Jon was blessed to have a whole row of supporters. Let me tell you something interesting about Jon. I feel like in society we toss around the word "smart" too loosely. Jon is one of those people who truly deserves to be called smart. In the few years that I have known him, I don't think there has been an occasion where he didn't know the answer to a question. His family tells a story about him in high school....Jon loves history and is very good at it. In high school, his history teacher gave a wrong fact, and Jon corrected him. His teacher was so surprised (I don't know if they were surprised in a good or bad way!) that he told Jon "if you are so smart, why don't you teach class tomorrow." So...he did! He taught his high school history class for a day, and I am sure was way more interesting than his teacher ever was. So, all that to say and illustrate the knowledge that Jon has been blessed with, and now that he has finished his degree, I am sure he will use it to bless others.
So after the big graduation celebration, Dave and I got to celebrate and early Christmas with Mom and Dad Norvell. Because we won't be traveling for Christmas this year, this will be the last time for us to see Dave's parents for a while. On Saturday I cooked Belgian waffles and we opened our gifts.
Dad loved his gift...we got him an ice cream maker to go with all the dutch oven cobbler he makes!Mom got some help from Dexter opening her gift....a new crock pot!!!

and like a true dog...Dexter loved being with his people while we opened gifts. He also got a kick out of the whole gift opening process, playing with the gift wrap like it was a toy. I took a little video, but it was so dark that I decided to leave it off the blog. Just imagine a little dog shaking wrapping paper like it was a dead animal or something.....quite funny.

I hope whatever you did this past weekend you were as blessed by family as we were.