This Saturday a couple of young ladies from church hosted a bridal shower for our friend, Rachel. Rachel and Peter are a sweet couple from our church who have known each other for years and will be getting married this August. It has been such a joy and a privilege to watch them grow from friends, begin a courtship, become engaged, and now anticipate their wedding. We are so excited for them!

Dan totally saw it coming all along.

After some snacks, a group of girls from church sang, “May the Mind of Christ My Savior.” They did a great job singing a beautiful hymn.

Our Pastor’s wife, Rachel’s future mother-in-law, gave a little talk. A big part of the talk was expressing our church’s excitement for the couple and telling Rachel how much we love her.

Then it was time for presents!

There were lots of kitchen items. Here, Rachel was telling everyone that she had just opened some measuring spoons.

Rachel is very sweet and thanked everyone for their gifts. This is her “thank you face”.

Her grandma framed a picture of a mountain in Alaska. Peter and Rachel plan on traveling through Alaska for their honey moon, and may even go hiking on the mountain pictured.

One of the last gifts Rachel opened was a very special quilt made by a family friend.

And, believe it or not, the next gift was another quilt made by another one of Rachel’s good friends.

Congratulations Rachel! We are looking forward to your wedding in less than two months!

As I mentioned in my previous post, I had the privilege of co-hosting a bridal shower for my soon-to-be sister-in-law, Leslie, this Saturday. For being my first shower, I’d say the planning went very well. Even more than that, though, I would say the shower was a great success and fun time for Leslie to meet some of her soon-to-be family.

The other Planners and I wanted to incorporate some sort of theme that would be unique to Leslie. Well, Lelie loves orange. And she had the creative idea for an engagement picture that included some scrabble pieces. We put the two together and made it an orange and white, scrabble themed shower.

Altogether there were about four ladies who ended up bringing different parts of the lunch. Once everything was compiled and spread on the table, we had more than enough and it was all delicious.

Our friend, Tariho runs a soap making business and offered to make our favors for the shower. She created an elegant soap cake and sliced it up for everyone to take a bar home.

And you just can’t have a soap cake without a real cake, now can you?

I was excited to try a little Pinterest project myself and put together a vase decorated with oranges. It wasn’t as difficult as I expected and I think it turned out alright. I also wanted to make sure our game prizes weren’t anything lame. So we bought truffles. How can you go wrong with truffles?

I put together a little talk to share with Leslie on “The Calling of a Christian Wife”. It was based on a couple of verses in Titus 2. For each characteristic of a wife, Leslie got to open a token gift that somehow represented that characteristic. That helped to make me less nervous, kept the onlookers from getting too bored, and was just fun.

Things got pretty serious when we pulled out the “Bridal Bingo” sheets. Lets just say there are some competitive ladies in this family!

But, more important than all of that, we had a lovely time to get to know Leslie, and let her get to know us. It was great to have some family together just to be excited about the upcoming events in the Taylor family. Less than six weeks until Bob and Leslie’s wedding and we are eagerly looking forward to the celebration!