Gindi Vincent

The Dish on Career, Fashion, Faith, and Family

Family

Christmas 2021

by 2 Comments

What. A. Year!

Seriously. I don’t even know where to start.

I started by reading last year’s letter. You know, I’ve been writing Christmas letters since my senior year of college. There are still some of you who get our Christmas cards that remember those old letters that would come on Christmas-y paper tucked into an old fashioned card (before photo cards).

That first letter went out in 1990. So here we are, a full three decades into this tradition. I’ve missed a couple because of kid chaos, but overall I’ve been pretty good.

I’m sure I have them all somewhere. I’d love to see if ever there has been a year as wild as this one.

You all know well this year started off with two big Cs. I had just received the cancer diagnosis when a week into the New Year every single member of our family was diagnosed with COVID. Except me. Which was an absolute miracle because it meant my lumpectomy did not have to be delayed! Bray got really sick, and still doesn’t have his sense of smell back. The kids were fine but it meant homeschooling for several weeks right before surgery.

The surgery and month’s long radiation were successful and I rang the bell right before Easter weekend! Thank you all for your prayers and support during this time.

All the while the kids played spring sports (the boys playing on a wonderfully fun team, the Astros, for spring baseball and little bit playing Grace softball) and Bray and I juggled really busy jobs.

No sooner did sports end than we had a fifth grade GRADUATION on our hands and I could hardly believe we were going to have middle schoolers this year! I basically stopped writing for months after cancer so I don’t really have a record of all these precious moments at the end of elementary school. I think I’d burned up all my words.

A gorgeous family vacation to Bar Harbor, and a little reminiscing of where we spent our honeymoon, brought me back to life and gave me words again. We had an amazing trip, full of lobster, boating, Acadia National Park, and downtime together.

Beyond that, I don’t remember much over the summer. We did get to celebrate Bray turning the big 5-0 with at a party at our house. And we finally got to see my dad and stepmom, twice!, after two years apart because of the pandemic. The kids were obsessed with the farm and the horses and the baby may become an outdoor survivalist.

The summer flew. So fast that suddenly we had 6th graders. Middle school. Sheesh. The boys played on the school football team and little bit ran cross country. Just over a month later, we were celebrating the trio’s 12th birthday. I also got a clean bill of health from MD Anderson (no check ups for a year!).

Now we’re nearing the end of the first semester and two of the three are playing basketball, while the baby decided to sit this sport out. The eldest is playing the trumpet in band and little bit is also training for cheer team tryouts.

And since it wouldn’t be a Vincent Christmas letter without a bombshell at the end, there is more big news this year. After a wonderful nine years at ExxonMobil, I’ve accepted a position as Assistant General Counsel for a business division of Honeywell. I learned so much and grew as a lawyer tremendously while at EM, and now I’m excited about this new opportunity in my career. As the icing on top, I will go from a 33 mile one way to commute to work to a ONE mile commute. God is good.

While this year held much good for us, we know so many are still suffering because of the pandemic and other losses. I pray we can encourage one another and hold each other up during these really challenging times. I don’t know what we would do without the support and encouragement of our community.

From the Vincents to you, we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a 2022 filled with great joy.

Four Weekends: No. 4

by Leave a Comment

You made it! I feel like Grover in the Monster at the End of the Book! You made it all the way to the last of the four weekends away!

Weekend one – celebrating the kids.

Weekend two – family time.

Weekend three – girls trip.

Weekend four – family friends.

That’s right, today we’re talking about the gift of family friends.

You may have gathered if you’ve read me over the years that Bray and I are VERY different. Country/city. Politics. Free time. Hobbies.

All different.

What weaves us together other than love and attraction which we still thankfully have 16 years in is common values. Faith. Family. Morals.

But because we are so different and because we have kids of both genders, it was really hard to find family friends. People where Bray connected with the husband, I connected with the wife, and the kids connected with each other.

When we came to our current school, the kids were in first grade, and we found family friends for the first time. Really dear and meaningful friendships which continue to this day. Some families have left and some have joined but I feel tremendously grateful for some core families with whom we adore spending time.

One of those precious families invited us out to their lake house on Canyon Lake. It’s a gorgeous lake in the Hill Country we hadn’t ever visited before. With all the activity of October, we weren’t sure we were going to make it, but luckily we did.

All we had to do was pack a bag and drive up. We threw some wine and appetizers in the car but the wife had meals all planned out. Casual and easy but delicious. The husband drove a super fun boat and the kids swam and tubed and surfed off the boat waves.

While the kids explored the area, the grown ups sat on the wrap around porch and drank coffee and visited in that decadent unhurried way. We laughed and unwound. We watched sports and played pickleball (I love it and am supremely awful) and had loud competitions on the vintage foosball table.

Even my husband, who would almost always prefer to be at the ranch or the farm, remarked on our way home what a fabulous time it was.

Adults don’t get to have long swaths of time to laugh and goof off and hear each other’s stories. We squeeze it in here or there over a drink or in between cheering for our kids team.

You know me. I don’t want to mess around with the small talk. I want to get into your STORY. Deep. All the gory details. This weekend was a gift of stories and history and joy.

We all felt lighter afterwards. And more connected. And most of all, grateful. Grateful for the families God has placed into our lives to enrich it and make it more colorful.

Each of these four weekends gave us something back. I’m so thankful we had each of them.

Four Weekends: No. 2

by Leave a Comment

Yesterday, I debuted my four weekend series of posts. I’m highlighting the four straight weekends I was out of town in October. How each of them play a part in our greater growth and community if we’ll make room for these times and relationships.

Weekend One – celebrating the kids!

Weekend Two – family time.

Bray loves the ranch. I much prefer the farm in Louisiana where his parents live, but he loves the more rustic ranch in south Texas.

I used to go more but I’ll admit that I don’t go often now. Life’s commitments and lack of ‘comforts of home’ mean that I don’t head down to Seadrift more than once a year, usually.

After Bray and I got engaged (Halloween 2005), we spent New Year’s Eve down at the ranch with his family. While there, we took our engagement pictures. Tractors and barns and fields with trees made for a picture perfect background. This year, I’d settled that I wanted to retake those photos with the kids. Bray turning 50 and the kids turning 12 and going to middle school made it a must do. I didn’t even know when I picked this year that we’d also be celebrating me beating cancer.

So we all packed up and headed down. There are fences to mend and cows to work and I’m not particularly good at any of that ranch work. I was able to catch up on some reading and make meals which was restorative on it’s own.

More importantly, there are no interruptions. There’s no cable tv. No internet. No close neighbors. No activities. No to do list. The kids are outside until dark and then we’re building a fire and chatting around the table in the one room ranch house.

As the kids get older, we often separate. Bray takes one or two or none and same for me. We are together weekday evenings for dinner but it’s often rushed and hectic with sports and homework and Bray and my jobs.

At the ranch though, it’s just us. The five of us. One little unit with no competing activities to divide us. As the kids get older, I’m more and more grateful for the moments we find together. And the kids even humored me with matching outfits and smiles under the tree and in the barn. (More to come on that in our Christmas card/letter this week!)

It’s busy. This life. But weekend two gave us a time out we all needed.

Four Weekends: No. 1

by 1 Comment

This October, I was out of town every single weekend. Four weekends in a row.

I’ve wanted to write about each of them. As I began to map out my posts, I realized they were a tapestry of what we need.

Ideally, they don’t all come right in a row because, you know, meal prep, house cleaning, catch up, etc.

But with great fortune, they each come.

Weekend One – celebrating kids. Intentional focused time on them. Weekend Two – family time. Time uninterrupted by life’s chaos. Weekend Three – girls weekend. Away time with friends to laugh and have good wine and talk about the big issues of life. Weekend Four – family friends. Time to spend with husbands and wives and kids that everyone in your family connects with and enjoys.

So I’ll cover each of them over the next few days. And I realize a romantic getaway with your person isn’t on there. That’s needed too. The reality is that it doesn’t come every year. Maybe it’s just a date night every quarter that tides you over.

The first weekend of October we celebrated the triplets turning 12! TWELVE! It’s almost impossible to imagine. I started blogging the month the trio turned one. I read over that first birthday blog post love letter when they were 2 and can’t even process how fast it’s all gone.

Instead of having a crazy big birthday party like we did ten years ago, or two years ago, all the kids wanted was to each bring a friend to the farm to fish and camp and visit the horses. I’d told them the next big birthday would be their sweet 16, so until then we do something fun with a six kids (when each kid gets to pick one friend, you land at 6!).

Bray was totally the man of the hour.

He was ON the whole weekend. It was a ton of work because he was the boat captain. We have this tiny aluminum boat at the farm, it’s been Bray’s family fishing boat since he was a kid, and Bray captains it through the gorgeous overgrown bayous and into the larger Gulf-fed waters until they find fish. This time, the kids jug-lined instead of traditional fishing and it was a HUGE hit. The kids said it was the best fishing they’d ever had and boy did they find some fish.

The four boys and Bray camped out down at the camp house which was in between tenants and the girls and I stayed up with Bray’s parents at the main house.

There were presents and desserts (pie and maccrons, per request) and gumbo and donuts, but most of all there was fishing. Fishing on Saturday and fishing on Sunday. The videos from the trip are some of the funniest I’ve ever watched. And while I stayed back at the house managing meals, Bray did the heavy lifting entertaining the kids on the boat.

There were some hiccups.

Stanley (our DOG who you know my feelings on) disappeared. He does this. He usually picks major events like birthdays to try and ruin (he ran away the night of Bray’s 50th birthday party this summer). When the kids got back from the fishing trip late Saturday afternoon, Stanley was nowhere to be found. He loves the farm and really doesn’t leave the main grounds when we’re there. The kids were beside themselves, esp the eldest. So, after an exhaustive search on the four wheeler, Bray agreed to take the boys out to search the bayou. Lo and behold, Stanley had followed them in the marsh, jumped across the bayou and was stuck on the other side in high water reeds. That dog has nine lives. He was safely returned no worse for wear.

Then, when we headed home, we hit a major detour. Bray had to come home Monday morning so it was me and six sixth graders. The trip from the farm to Houston is about two and a half hours. I left extra early, noon on Sunday, so I could be back in time to speak at church worship that night at 5 pm. After we got through Beaumont, traffic STOPPED. Not slowed. Stopped.

Turns out, the great state of Texas had decided to CLOSE Interstate 10 on Sunday afternoon. What could go wrong? After a noon departure, I dropped the kids back at their homes at 6:30 PM! That’s right, nearly seven hours in the car.

And yet. I have to say this was one of my favorite parts of the birthday weekend. All of these kids are massively awesome. The baby’s best friend crawled up in the front seat, swapping with the eldest’s best friend, and decided we’d have a sing along. Since we were parked on I-10, we rolled down the windows, waved at the cars around us, tried to get truckers to honk, and gave a Gatorade to a stranded motorcyclist.

And we SANG. At the top of our lungs. I have video proof. The song selection was HYSTERICAL! Y’all, these twelve year olds gave me hope for humanity. We had 12 year old boys singing Let it Go and Avocado. When we arrived at one of the houses (they all live in the neighborhood so I had an easy drop off), little bit’s best pal hoped out of the car and said I would totally do that drive again!

I can’t even with their awesomeness.

The thing I loved about this trip was really spending uninterrupted time with the kids and their friends. Their closest pals. Who are so cool. And interesting. And funny. At parties, I’m catching up with their parents. At sporting events, we’re all cheering. But on this farm weekend, we were having meals and conversations (extra long ones on the ride home) about a wide array of topics.

So weekend one was a huge success. Thanks largely to Bray and a passel of amazing kiddos. A twelfth birthday for the record books!

The Terrific Twelves – A Different Birthday Letter

by Leave a Comment

Sunday, we drove home from the farm in Louisiana.  Saturday was your TWELFTH birthday and you each brought a friend for the weekend to celebrate.

Typically, I pen a birthday letter to you all. 

I revisited my original blog birthday letter. 

It’s fascinating what’s changed and what’s stayed the same. 

I wrote about the eldest’s persistence even then and it’s still one of my favorite qualities about him.

While little bit is still fiercely independent and can tell (or reenact) a story with delightful dramatics.

And the baby? Well, he still has a sensitive soul and a love for learning.

Other things have changed.

So many.

But what I was struck by, on the drive home, was how amazing you and your friends are. 

I thought, instead of a letter this year, I’d share that story. 

You see, instead of the typical 2 ½ hour drive we were all expecting, you six sixth graders got a 5+ hour drive. Some highway construction genius decided to SHUT DOWN I-10 on a Sunday. 

The freeway was shut down. And we didn’t know until it was too late and it took us two hours just to pass one exit. 

That drive could have been a total disaster. I was certainly in frustrated spirits.

But you all made it fabulous. 

You laugh and told jokes and best of all put on music, rolled down the windows, waved at the cars full of stranded drivers around us, and SANG. At the top of your lungs.  Baby Shark. Avocado.  Let It Go.  You even had me singing. And cracking up. 

What struck me is how cool you have all become.

How much I love spending time with you all.

Even in confined spaces J 

This weekend you struck out on your own and fished and explored and fed horses. 

You advocated for your lost dog and waded through murky marsh to rescue him.

Then you went and made a five hour car trip completely fun.  A feat I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish. 

As one of your friends said after FINALLY exiting the car back at the neighborhood, “I’d do that car trip again!” 

So would I. 

It defined for me what is happening. What you are becoming. 

These grown (growing) people. 

Of course there is still so much maturing and learning. But I’m starting to see glimpses of the older you.  Who you will become.  How you will make this world bigger and better and brighter. 

Wow. Lucky me. 

So all those words of the letters are still, mostly true, but for this birthday I thought I’d say thanks.  Thanks for being an original. For learning and laughing and managing to figure all this stuff out.  In the face of a world gone mad and hurricanes and cancer and pandemics, you just kept growing up. 

I can’t wait to see what unfolds this year. 

Love you more.