I seem to do all of my best thinking when I am supposed to be sleeping so tonight I figured I would let some of the thoughts out of the cage of my mind
and maybe that will reduce the rattling enough for me to sleep.
We shall see.
This new year has me, like most of you, considering a lot of things:
all of the events of the previous year, how life has changed,
how life may change in the coming year,
and how long I can feign control over those changes this year.
As for what this new year will bring and how much of it I get to control, I have no idea
but I can say without a doubt that this past year has brought the highest highs and lowest lows of our married life (and that is saying something-we have been through some MAJOR stuff in the almost 3 years we have been married).
I won't bore you with the lows, if you don't already know, you don't need to.
But I do want to share at least the 3 HUGE things that came into our lives this year and have changed them forever.
The first to happen was the biggest and most influential.
We bought our first home!
We had been looking for a house since January and found this one the end of February. Getting into it was the biggest pain and biggest miracle of my entire life. We finally closed the very end of April. The first full day that we spent in it was our second anniversary. What a gift huh!
We love so much having our own home. It helps me to feel so much more grounded and stable and gives Josh a source of never ending projects. We have done so much work on it
(it needed a LOT)
and it is really coming along. I think it is one of the most beautiful, comfortable homes I have ever been in.
The second life changing thing to come to our lives, kind of came as a result of the house:
We got a kid!
My 17 year old brother to be exact.
Little Brother came to stay with us for the summer to help Josh work on the house. All summer long they worked outside, tearing off the old siding and putting up my pretty new siding, and inside, ripping up flooring and putting in beautiful tile and knocking out walls to give me another closet. We were very grateful for the extra hands even if getting work out of them took a little more prodding than anticipated.
We did decide however, that once the summer was over we were going to let Little Brother stay with us and go to school here. It is his senior year and he desperately wanted the opportunity to participate in extracurricular activities that his high school in Tiny Town just couldn't provide.
So we have a kid, a teenger, and everything that goes with it, dances, driving lessons, girlfriends, band and choir concerts, ACTs, college applications, job applications, cooking lessons.
It is quite the adventure.
It has really helped us appreciate our time alone more and for that I am grateful, but I am also very grateful that we have the means and opportunity to help Little Brother get off to a more successful start in adulthood.
The last big change that came to our little family was Roman.
We love this little pup with all our hearts! He is so very different from his daddy, which can be so very frustrating at times, but we try to remind ourselves that Pike was not normal and this is what we should have expected from a boxer pup.
Pike and Roman are the very best of friends.
They are constantly together and cry if they are ever separated
(heaven forbid we should try to bathe them one at a time!)
It is so fun to watch them both especially now that Roman is big enough that Pike can play with him without worrying about hurting him.
He adds such a different dynamic to our family, it is so wonderful. I really can't imagine not having him now that we do-even if he does still chew very important things....
What a blessed year we have had!
There were a lot of struggles, tons of tears
and infinite desperate pleas to a wonderfully benovelent
Father in Heaven
(even if his timline and mine we really need to get in sync)
And if we came out of 2010 a little beaten, a little bruised, and a lot more humble,
I think we came out on top in the end.
Here is to the hope that we can retain the humility, peace, and gratitude well into
the new year.
