New Year's Resolutions - Part 1

     In celebration of the upcoming year of 2009, we have decided to see what each family member's New Year's Resolutions are. The first two you are about to see come from Elisabeth and Josiah, who talk about the things they want to strive to do better in during the upcoming year. The next 4 members of our family will have their New Year's Resolutions posted later in the day. Enjoy!

Josiah's New Years Resolution

Elisabeth's New Year's Resolution

Closing Ceremonies

Hi there everybody, this is Jonathan writing an update from a balmy (71°F!) Cedar Park, Texas. One thing you can always count on here is to not count on the weather - it can be 30 degrees one day and 80 the next, as we found out last week! We have been very busy lately, which explains the long hiatus between posts. Sorry about that!

Our Christmas Day yesterday was relaxing. We started the day off by making coffee and hot chocolate with cookies for breakfast, and then opened presents with just our family for the latter part of the morning. We had a great time, our dog Teddy even got a present - his own frisbee! Later in the day we went to Salado to visit some good friends of Taj's whose mother, Beverly Mitchell, was an absolute angel to Taj during all her visits to M.D. Anderson in Houston over the years. We had a nice time talking with them and eating chocolate fondue (but mostly just talking)!

As you can see on our Dopplr widget on the sidebar of this site, we will be at Bev and Dave Olivers' (Taj's parents) in San Antonio tomorrow through Monday morning. We will also be joined by John, Kim, and Hannah, who had already visited us earlier in the year when we went camping over Thanksgiving break. There we will have our traditional Christmas dinner, followed by games and movies. Should be a relaxing weekend as lately everybody has been rather spread out on weekends between work, swimming, schoolwork, and what-not. We're looking forward to it! Hope you all have had an outstanding Christmas full of fun and fellowship, and we hope you have kept your focus on Jesus - the reason for the season. With all the religious "neutralization" of the Christmas holiday there has been lately, sometimes it can be easy to take our eyes off the originator of this whole universe. Just a reminder. God Bless and we hope you all have a blessed 2009 as well!

One quick announcement I wanted to make - I have made it a lot easier for anybody to comment on our website and my website. Now, anybody that has a Facebook account can use that account to post comments on any post. Just click on the post title to get to the comments, scroll down, and click the button that says, "Connect With Facebook". Once you do that, your comments will show up on your Facebook newsfeed (and we will be able to see your comments on this site), but you can of course change the privacy settings within Facebook if you desire. As always, we LOVE LOVE LOVE when people post comments, so go right ahead! We're thinking of this as our new "CaringBridge Guestbook", so don't be bashful! ;) Again, hope you and your family is doing well this holiday season. Thank you for all your prayers and support. Until next time...

Camping and Turkey Day

     I hope this finds everyone in good spirits after a peaceful Thanksgiving Day and weekend. We had a very nice Thanksgiving Day with my mother and father in law, Bev and Dave Oliver, my brother in law, John Oliver and his wife, Kim and daughter, Hannah. We shared a delicious Thanksgiving meal with our dear friends the Anchors and the McGorty’s. Holly and Shawn were great hosts and prepared a yummy 25 lb Turkey and everyone provided different side dishes. We watched some football, visited, played some cards and games. I also celebrated my birthday on Thanksgiving Day and was treated like royalty. I received so many birthday cards and nice gifts. I truly am blessed to have so many wonderful family and friends in my life.

     Now let’s back up a few days from Thanksgiving. The kids and I left on Sunday afternoon for camping and spent 3 great days at Inks Lake State Park with the Anchors, McGorty’s, Tanners and Olivers. We enjoyed Gods creation in the full color of fall, it was so beautiful. There were plenty of campfires on chilly nights, cups of hot coffee in the morning, fishing, canoeing, kayaking, hiking, intense touch football games, cards, dominos, good talks and laughter. We also had moments of missing our #1 camper, Taj. One of Taj’s greatest loves was camping with family and friends. We honored Taj by going forward with this family camping outing and enjoying it to our fullest. Taj never gave up on anything and we will not either ! Here's some of our pictures from the camping trip:

     Also, a quick reminder - we do have email notification support for the site now so you can do that, just type in your email address on the right side!

     We now move into the special Christmas Season. I hope that in the days and weeks to come that we would all embrace the greatest gift ever given, Jesus Christ.

Fall is in the Air...

Hello on a beautiful and chilly fall day in Cedar Park. This morning started early here as Uncle John (Taj’s brother), Jonathan, Josiah, Shawn Anchors and his boys, Joshua and Caleb ran in the Wing Ding 5K. The McGorty family joined the rest of the Browns and Anchors to cheer on all the runners. As part of the race they handed out large pumpkin pies to some of the race participants as they finished, our runners brought home 4 pumpkins in total ! They also handed out all kinds of free goodies after the race - smoothies, Chickfila food, coupons, popcorn, Gatorade drinks, bottles of Sweet Leaf Tea and other food. Daniel and Hannah even got to enjoy the climbing wall. Here's some pictures from the race and their visit:

The last few weeks have gone quite well considering all of the adjustments since Taj was taken home to be with Jesus. The kids and I miss her so much, as we know you all miss her also. Taj left a legacy of loving God, Family and Friends, faithfulness, giving and giving some more. She was my “ Sweetpea “ and she always will be.

We are really enjoying Uncle John, Aunt Kim and Hannah’s visit with us. They will be leaving tomorrow to spend some time in San Antonio with John and Taj’s parents. Next Sunday they will meet up with us at Ink’s Lake State Park for a few days of camping. Thanksgiving Day will be spent in Cedar Park with family and friends. We've also been playing a lot of ping-pong lately, resulting in epic battles between all members of the family. Here is a short video of one point played between John and myself:

John and David Play Ping-Pong from Jonathan Brown on Vimeo.

Also, if you look on the sidebar there is now a field in which you can type your email address in and click "subscribe" to get notifications of new posts. Of course, you will need to click the link in the email to see the full post - so be sure to do that! Also, make sure your spam filter doesn't filter out the updates...don't think there'll be a problem with that though. Let Jonathan know if you have any problems.

We love when you post comments on our site. Please know how much we love and appreciate each one of you. Life is precious and it is more meaningful to share it with faithful friends like YOU !! God Bless and have a great weekend! - David

A New Beginning

Hey there, thanks for stopping by! Today we are happy to announce that as of today, this new website you’re now on is live and open for business. We decided to make this site after seeing the way Taj’s site drew visitors and acted as an effective portal for communication with others. We tried to make this website easier to use and comment on, so leave us some feedback! We're going to try to post on a regular basis, probably 2-3 times a week (much like the CaringBridge website). This is about the extent of the core functionality of the site (the posts), but there’s a few more really critical features that we're excited to tell you about, so read on!

As we began the transition from the CaringBridge site to our new family site, we began to think of ways we could improve the user experience over the CaringBridge site. The two drawbacks that really stood out to us were lack of customization and interactivity. As you will soon see, the customization part has already been taken care of. We are now able to embed videos, photos, and a multitude of other content - which means more fun things for you all to look at! The interactivity features are what I’m really excited about, so I’ll tell you about that now.

In the past, we used the guestbook on CaringBridge. It was great, but other than the journal posts to you the audience, there wasn’t really any other way we could reply to the kind notes of encouragement you left - and that kind of bothered us. At the same time, we knew that a true “guestbook” could not be replicated on any other site. So, we no longer have a “guestbook” per se, but we have a solution that works equally well. That solution is a comment system that is based on the Disqus platform. From now on, “guestbook” posting will be replaced by leaving comments on the blog post of your choice (usually the most recent one). It’s a little complicated to explain, but bear with me. Here’s how it works: if you see a post that you want to leave a comment on (and we hope that you do), first click the link to go to the individual post. On our site, there are two ways to do this:

1st Way - Click the post title.

2nd Way - Scroll to the bottom of the post and click the link that says “x number of comments”

Now that you’re onto the individual post’s page, it’s time to comment! Scroll down a bit and you’ll see the box where you write a comment, and a couple of other things. You can post anonymously, but we are going to ask that every commenter be registered with Disqus in order to comment. Go to this link: Signup For Disqus to sign up for a Disqus account - and please upload some sort of picture of yourself so that you are easily identifiable (your profile picture will show up next to your comment when you post it). The beauty of this system is that you only have to make one account on Disqus, and you can post comments on both this site and Jonathan's site. That way, Jonathan as the administrator can see who’s posting what on both sites, and we all can interact alot better with each other. The other cool thing is that instead of replying to the post itself, you can also reply to an individual comment. Just click the “reply” button on that individual comment. This will be really cool because the replies will show up as threaded conversations under the post - you’ll see what we mean when you do it. Jonathan also added another neat feature: if you have a webcam, just click the “Record Video Comment” button and the site will automatically recognize your webcam and you can record a message that will then show up under all the other comments on that post. Cool, huh? And when you mouse over the persons profile picture, you can see how many posts they made and some other neat stats.

Well, that about wraps it up. There’s some other goodies - like Twitter integration and updates of our latest photos - but I’ll let you discover those on your own. In the coming weeks, we’ll try to get onto a more regular posting schedule. We’ll also be adding some features such as getting email notifications (like CaringBridge) and a browsable archive of posts, so stay tuned! There’s some other features I’ll talk about in a later post, but for now we’ll let you explore and maybe discover them. We really hope that you’ll sign up for an account and begin posting comments or even notes of encouragement, just try to make sure you have that profile picture, ok? There will be a similar update like this posted over at Jonathan's site that is tailored for that page, so be sure to go check that out too. Our family would love, love, LOVE to hear your feedback on the site because it helps us improve it - so leave us a comment or send Jonathan an email letting him know what you think. That way he can make the site easier and more fun to use, and then we all win! Be sure to ask us if you have any questions about signing up for commenting or anything like that as well. So, thanks for reading this and check back regularly for more posts, musings on life, and other fun stuff. See you out there in cyberspace!

- David, Jonathan, Emily, Elisabeth, Josiah, Daniel, and Teddy