A few years ago, some website started the “top 9” trend of taking your Instagram feed and making a collage of the top 9 most liked images from your account for the past year. My assumption is this was a clever way to gain access to millions of accounts to further develop the algorithm that seems to know more and more about us each day. But I, like many others, delighted in seeing all my best photos together in one image. Last year the website started requiring subscriptions and money to create the collage, so I opted to make my own “best of” post. If you’re interested in a huge dose of “boy did he not know what he was in for in 2020,” check out the next to last sentence in the opening paragraph of that post. In the spirit of doing something annually simply because you did it the year prior, in order to reflect on the past 366 days, I have curated a collection of some of the best images from 2020 for the Kellough family.
The first milestone of our year is usually Maggie’s birthday. This year she had her first actual birthday party with friends at The Little Gym. We paid extra for the workers to dress like Anna and Elsa, and they looked INCREDIBLE. But Maggie sobbed in the corner for 20 minutes because she was scared, so we had to politely ask them to turn back into normal women (albeit with more elaborate makeup than one might usually see on a Little Gym worker). Maggie overcame her big feelings, and she had a blast. Bear had his own fun as well, but avoided the girls when possible. A few days later, at her 4-year check up, we learned that Maggie had a weak eye. Her birthday pictures would be the last images of her without glasses on for quite some time. She now wears a patch for three hours a day, and the doctors are hopeful that her weak eye will grow strong enough to ditch the glasses with time.
We did not know it, but the second week in March we would host our last house guests for a VERY long time. My mother and step-father came for the weekend as the COVID reports were just heating up in the United States. We spent the morning at the Children’s Museum in Houston (with hundreds of other people), and then Kristen and I considered going on a date to see the new Pixar movie “Onward.” Fortunately, we didn’t waste our money, because Disney released this movie a few weeks later on Disney+ as movie theaters (and everything else) shut down nationwide. The kids got in some sweet time with my mom, which was good considering they would not see her again for many months.
One family tradition that I have mandated every year since returning from our time living near DC is our trip to find bluebonnets for the quintessential Texas photograph. What you can’t see in the picture is that Maggie was COVERED in red splotchy hives from some sort of reaction to a fever. That early in the pandemic, we assumed every sniffle and cough was COVID, but the nurse we spoke with over the phone assured us that there was no reason to believe such a reaction would be caused by the coronavirus. Fortunately for me, my years of editing out pimples and blemishes on family photos prepared me to even out Maggie’s alarming red discoloration. The polar opposite expressions in this photo make it a memory we will enjoy for many years.
That same weekend that we took the bluebonnet pictures, my church cancelled services. Many on staff had high hopes about the time frame of when in person gatherings would resume, but no one knew what to expect. My job as Media Arts Pastor meant that a portion of the work creating our online worship experience fell to me. In just a few short weeks, our church YouTube page grew from 75 subscribers to over 1000 as online church became the only way for our church family to gather. With preschool and work closed indefinitely, suddenly we were home all day, every day, together as a family. God blessed us with incredible weather in Houston for the first couple of months of the pandemic, and we took advantage of our huge backyard. Playing in the pool, drawing on fences with chalk, swinging on the swing set, and eating lunch every day on a picnic blanket under the sun became the new routine. Also, Bear discovered his new favorite pastime was throwing anything and everything whenever he fancied.
One of the most jarring experiences this year was Easter weekend. A time that is normally filled with gatherings, huge community egg hunts, and church sanctuaries filled to the brim with people ended up being a weekend at home, watching church online. Our backyard egg hunt was plenty entertaining for the kids (so much so that we did it twice), and we made sure to dress up on Easter Sunday for some pictures. Letting the celebration of the resurrection of our Savior go by without a somewhat formal family photo was not a tradition we were willing to forego due to the pandemic.
Shortly after Easter, our next milestone was Bear’s 2nd birthday. Compared to Maggie's big 4-year old birthday, the little celebration at home didn’t seem to be enough, but he was plenty happy with his cake and presents, and we made sure to grab some family photos to commemorate the occasion.
I HATE the beach. Truly. There is no shade, I hate the grainy feel of sand anywhere on my body, and smearing sunscreen on my pale flesh to avoid a sunburn is a terrible ordeal for me. But my wife loves it. She loves all of those things that I hate- the abundant sun, the feel of sand under her feet, and the smell of sunscreen. We even have a sunscreen scented candle in our home. As it turns out, my children also love the beach. Kristen put together a quick trip to Galveston at a beach house at the end of May, and the kids truly had the time of their lives. Our AirBnB was on the quiet west end of the island, and combining that with the fact that our kids function best before lunch meant that we had a whole football field length of the beach to ourselves for two mornings. Bear would reach out and say “I wanna hold your hand.” Once I had his hand firmly grasped, he would pull me to the waves, only to run back as soon as they started to swell, yelling “Run daddy! Da ocean is coming!”
After our trip to the beach, and successfully avoiding crowds and COVID, we started to feel a little more confident in traveling. We had not seen Kristen’s parents since the holidays in 2019, so we made a trip to Round Rock to visit with them at the beginning of June. Being close to family was the primary reason we left DC a few years ago, and going so long without seeing them was difficult to stomach since they were just over 2 hours away. We washed our hands extra well for a week, avoided people even more than we had been, and loaded up the car. The beauty of the pandemic was that I could work from anywhere, so I didn't skip a beat at work, though the slow internet speed in the Kennedy home was truly a cross to bear. And while we were there, we got together with the Hansens who have two girls that are each a year behind our two. It was a shame it took so long to get all of us together, but the kids had a lot of fun playing in their big backyard and eating hotdogs together.
For the next few weeks, we resumed a quiet life at home. Church services had returned in a restricted format on Sundays, but without childcare offered, I was the only one that went in each weekend. Our offices opened up a little bit, but the bulk of our work continued to be at home, with a lot of zoom meetings. I bought an extra robe so I had something to wear while working at home when my other robe was in the wash. For months I only bothered to put on real pants when going in to church on Sundays, and there came a point during our time at home when Maggie stopped wearing clothes almost entirely. One day we were arguing with her to put on some clothes, and she simply asked, “why?” Neither Kristen or I could reason out a valid explanation for her to wear clothes if we weren’t leaving the house. We have a private backyard, and no two story neighbors, so Maggie basically abandoned clothes at a certain point in the warm months of the pandemic. Bear tried his hand at it some, but one poop incident in the backyard communicated loud and clear to us that he was not ready for such freedom.
For the past couple of years, we have somehow ended up hosting our friends, the Kridlers, on July 4th. Anything done twice in our book is a tradition, so we were eager to continue the annual visit, especially considering they had just welcomed their baby girl earlier in the year. After some back and forth about the safety of bringing an infant around others during COVID times, they decided to join us, and Maggie was elated. Her greatest desire was to hold this baby, and after donning her mask, she was living her best life that weekend.
By the middle of July, we faced our biggest decision yet about risking COVID exposure for the sake of a taste of normalcy. Kristen’s family gathers each year at a little resort on the river near Kerrville. This year, her parents were using this gathering as a celebration of 50 years of marriage. After working through a lot of doubts, we decided that if Kristen’s parents were willing to risk it, then we would follow them to this family gathering. Spending time outdoors made it a little less scary, but we all held our breath a bit for a couple of weeks after returning home. You can read here a little about how we made such a risky decision, and the time we ended up enjoying together. We even got to grab lunch with the Litzlers as we passed through San Antonio, which was icing on the cake.
Watching a slide show of their 50 years together.
On August 11, we ditched the kids for one night with Kristen’s parents and celebrated 8 years of marriage. We got a cabin in Dripping Springs, ate BBQ, and ignored our phones for 24 hours just to talk and be together- simple, but absolutely essential. After months of children crawling on us literally all day, every day, this was needed. We are dreaming of an extended trip in 2021.
PRE-SCHOOL RETURNED IN SEPTEMBER. Dear God, what a treat. Yes, we cherished our time together, but living the same day over and over had worn us thin. The return of school was life changing.
One day in October, after we had made a routine of riding bikes around the cul-de-sac in front of our house, Kristen decided to pull the training wheels off of Maggie’s bike. As I was mowing the lawn, I noticed this choice, and thought to myself that it would end in tears and blood. To my surprise, Maggie almost immediately obtained the balance needed to stay upright. In no time, she was riding loops in front of our house. And Bear continued to astound us with his balance on his bike with no pedals, which will hopefully make his transition to a pedal bike one day an easy task.
As Halloween approached, we weren’t sure how we were going to celebrate the holiday. Our usual plan is to hit any and every church carnival and trunk or treat within a 10 mile radius of our home. With those all cancelled, our only option was a classic door to door endeavor. We had some concerns, but we discovered that most homes either engineered creative devices to deliver candy without coming close to us, or they just left a bowl of candy on the porch. After an hour of helping ourselves to treats, we ended up with two large mixing bowls full of candy for the kids (and parents) to enjoy.
November brought us a quick getaway to Waco to do everything that Magnolia had to offer, with a special thanks to Kristen’s sister Tracy for coming to stay with the kids. The Gaines have seriously made that town a new world, and the cupcakes tasted better than they should be allowed to taste. We had 6 all to ourselves and felt no obligation to bring any home for the kids.
With the return of school came the return of absurdly priced photo packages that we just could not pass up. We’re suckers for these classic photo heirlooms though, and shell out the money to hang them on our walls.
Our annual family portrait session happened a bit later in the year than usual, but we made sure to make time for this tradition. You can see a few of our favorite images here, but my absolute favorite picture was of the two of my sweet babies together.
And with that, we hit the holidays! A non-traditional group photo at Thanksgiving with my family, fun with Kristen’s parents and sister at Christmas, and a gathering at our home with some of Kristen’s extended family. Our big family gathering with Kristen’s side got cancelled, but with the change in plans, we were able to spend every holiday in Houston, sleeping in our own beds. What. A. Dream.
If you made it this far, then you’re a true friend of the Kelloughs. We’re dreaming of the return of normalcy in 2021, but having faced 2020, we now know we can handle more than we ever thought we could.