Bye Bye 2011, Hello 2012!

So, it's 10:53pm. Nathan is in bed. We need to get to bed because Matt has to work tomorrow morning. But right now my awesome husband is out at Wal-mart trying to scour for boxes for our move (they said to come around 10:30). This is what New Years Eve looks like for us this year! I don't know if we are getting old, or it's just the fact that Matt works over the holiday weekend AND we are moving right around the holidays...but I'm okay with it. I have a fire going in the fireplace at least! And we ordered curbside to go from Applebees earlier tonight. Way to ring in the New Year!

It actually turned into a trying day this afternoon. It started out great. Nathan slept until after 9...hooray! So Matt and I slept in before Matt had to go see his first patient and then Nathan and I went to the gym. I had a great long talk with a dear friend of mine from Indiana and Matt made it home early enough to meet the guys at the house to do a "walk-through" of the house. They've been scraping the vaulted popcorn ceiling this week. Well, due to circumstances that we believe were IN their control, they are not done and have to come back Monday, ruining our plans of getting the house ready this weekend for our move in next weekend. Matt has off Monday, so we were hoping to have that day as well, but most likely will not. We felt very frustrated and disappointed this afternoon especially when everything we went to do became more trying because Nathan just wasn't being very umm, "adaptable"! Oh great, where did he learn that from? ha!

Anyway, the good news is, it gave us time together as a family at home...not running around trying to get ready for the move. Matt and I were able to give Nathan our full attention and laugh and lay around on the floor while he chased stuff we threw, rode on our backs and "honked" our noses (We've been teaching him to show us where his and our noses are...this is how we do it!)

We have been struggling to balance everything. Everyone says how easy it is to move from an apartment and I agree that it has to be much harder to move out of a house, but it is HARD with a 16 month old. Everything takes so much longer to do. Every load that Matt (or I) takes to the car Nathan cries because he wants to go out with us. Doing work at the house is difficult as well and almost every other day we say, "If only I could drop him off with mom so we could do some of this stuff faster!"

But I think God has something to teach us through this. I did notice how much better Nathan was with our undivided attention tonight. He needs us, he needs our love and attention. And we are going to look back some day and wish we had more time with him at this stage of life. Matt and I talked about this tonight. From here on out there is probably always something that we are going to need to be doing (part of why we loved apartment living for so long!) But we don't want to sacrifice our time with our child(ren) to get our "to-do" list done. Obviously, there are times when we don't have a choice but want to be smart with the time we have to be productive (ie. when he is sleeping) so that we can love on him and enjoy him when he is with us. We don't want this rich time in our lives to slip by. It doesn't mean it will be easy. We knew there would be challenges to raising a family this far away from our own. And that is the hardest part sometimes. It is the decision we made, but it is still a challenge that we will continually work through.

But we are blessed beyond measure. To be the owners of a home right now is a rich blessing. To have a healthy son is as well. We have SO many things to be grateful for and Matt and I spent some time tonight making a list. We wanted to focus on these things as opposed to being so frustrated over the here and now and what is going on with the work we are having done with the house. According to a study we did in small group, that is a "rich people's problem." The fact that we HAVE a home and our PAYING someone to do work means we are rich...as opposed to about 90% of the rest of the world. And this is where our focus should lie, on gratitude and contentment.

So I guess there is a prayer request for us in all of that writing! I don't blame you if you didn't even get to this part, I wouldn't have. Thank you for listening and Happy New Year to all of our dear family and friends! Here's to another year of the Lord's refinement in our lives. Love you all!

Oh, and a picture to make it worth your effort it you got this far. Nathan loves bananas. It's his new obsession:

Also, you might notice he likes to have his drink options of water and milk on hand.

P.S. Yes, I have some catching up to do of our Christmas! No promises as to when that will be :)