Garrison's dedication

On August 29th we invited all our family to come and join us for a weekend of celebration, as we were celebrating Garrison being dedicated at our church on Sunday. Thomas and I reserved a couple of rooms at The Edge water park in Duluth for our families to come, hang out and have some fun. It ended up being a great weekend!

The kids (Iva, Reed, Brody and Andrew) loved the water park. Garrison, however, did not. Thomas tried to take him to the kiddo part, but Garrison didn't like it one bit. Oh well, everyone else had fun. We found the arcade area and that's where Garrison wanted to hang out. So I spent lots of time watching Garrison "drive" the car arcade game.

Saturday night we ordered Little Caesar's pizza and hung out in the hotel rooms for awhile. The rooms were a nice set up. On one side they had a bed, flat screen tv and bathroom. Then on the other side they had a bunk bed, bathroom, couch and table. While the adults finished eating and chatting the kids went to the side with the tv and watched Sponge Bob Square Pants. Here is a picture of them watching the tv. Can you tell they're related? They were all hooked.


Here is everyone else hanging out on the other side of the hotel room...



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Garrison's dedication

We taped the dedication with our video camera and not with our digital camera (which we normally do because it's much easier to download onto our computer.) I'm not sure if we'll ever be able to find the time to get the video on our computer so I thought that I would type out what Pastor Mark said at Garrison's dedication.

What is dedication?

We get dedications from the bible. Jesus' parents took him to the temple to be dedicated.

In the bible it says "Train up a child in the way he should go..." (Proverbs 22:6) The word "train up" literally means "to dedicate". The picture is we've been given children as gifts. Every child is a gift. An incredible and amazing gift from God. The act of dedicating is really us (parents) saying, "God you've given us this gift and now symbolically we give this gift back to you. We wouldn't have all the activity if God didn't give us this gift.

Not only is it a dedication of the child, but it's a dedication of the parents too. It shows that us, as parents, will raise our child with biblical principals and according to what God instituted.

It's a dedication of the child, the parents and the church family to say that we're (the church family) going to help. In dedicating, the parents, are asking the church family to stand and say in ways of teaching Sunday school, being involved with kids programming and just encouraging the child when they need encouraging and rebuking when they need rebuking.

After saying this Pastor Mark took Garrison and prayed for him.

In this middle picture Garrison saw all our family sitting in the front couple of rows and started pointing at them. He was getting super excited that he could see them. It was really cute!