It's the first day of what?!?!

It's August 11th.  How on earth did that happen?  Where has the time gone?  Granted with all of the families moving in here in the apartment complex, we've been trying to help in small ways.  Since we were able to move in early, everyone else is just now starting to get here or get settled.  It has been such a blessing to be able to have been her for the extra month to get settled and adjusted.  Absolute blessing.

But today we took a big step.  We started school.  A week earlier than planned.  We had really debated and after seeing how hard the transition has been on our kiddos, we felt like giving them another transition for school (especially for Noah) would've just been so hard.  So homeschool it is.  It will for sure take some creativity with the schedule this year with stuff in the mornings on Mondays and Wednesdays, but we'll make it work.

Plus the extra motivation is that we can do something fun like swimming once we're all done.  The beauty of living in Florida.  I do, however, feel pretty unprepared for school to start.  So I found myself at 6:30 this morning trying to get everything together.  We've realized that if we start first thing in the morning before he gets into any sort of habit for the day, that it actually helps him focus and then he's excited to have more free time.

And the dude has been begging for us to start it the past week or 2.  We're not sure where that came from or why, but we're just going to go with it.  Time will tell how this will work for all of us.  He may have some needs that I can't really take care of, so we might have to get creative or find other outlets for him.  We'll see.  And Leah will be doing more this year and starting to do workbooks, so it will be like wrangling a couple of cats.  Good luck to us!

Other than that, it's really hard to know what's been going on.  We're hitting ministry partner development as hard as possible right now and we're enjoying having a church to consistently go to.  Disney is sporadic but often enough to be fun.  The kids have grown leaps and bounds in their swimming, which is really fun for us to get to see.  We're getting into the swing of things, getting more of a schedule with cooking and cleaning and just being all around organized.  It feels good.  It feels like steps in the right direction.

There is still stress.  It seems to take a lot of form in our marriage or in our bodies.  We're trying to figure out how much to get tested for or if we are just responding to all of the slow release of stress that seemed to have built itself up in us over the past 2 years.  We know it's taking it's toll on our marriage, which is so challenging.  We wish we had a buffer to help the other one, but that's just not our reality right now.

We are super grateful for results from Leah's ultrasounds that everything in her little body looks good.  After nearly a month and a half of UTIs and 4 different antibiotics, the Urologist wants to just keep her on a mild one for the next few months to prevent any more right now.  They were very excited to see that her tests all came back positive today, so we're happy and hopeful that she can stay healthy now.  One less thing to worry about.

For now, we continue to heal.  We continue to try to move toward one another.  Our hearts long for friends and family close to have more of a buffer, but we're also excited for the opportunity to come alongside others in their journey.  And to have them come alongside us.  This year we will have lots of chances to love others well in the midst of transition and hard times and we're hopeful that this can be a year of rejuvenation.

Confession

We have a confession.  We got our Disney passes.  And we've gone a little crazy.  Blisters.  Sore legs.  Sunburn.  Exhaustion.  We've been to Disney.  See, one of the best things about the program we're doing this year at headquarters is that we get free Disney passes (well, free except that we get taxed on them).  And well, we figure we're here for a year and then we'll probably never go to Disney again, so we probably should take advantage.  Our kids are also at a great age for Disney, minus some of the more intense rides.

This is how we feel about arriving at Disney

I should be clear, this isn't the reason for the lack of posting.  It's more of trying to figure out how to entertain two kids who used to be able to entertain themselves.  Don't get me wrong.  We still try to make them do things without our interaction, but the "what can we do now?" phase is totally upon us.  And they haven't exactly handled the transition well, so that's been interesting to navigate.

But we've made a rule for Disney.  You have to try it at least once.  So there has been some screaming and defiance about some rides.  And we'll never ride them again.  But we tried them once.  We can at least say that.  So far the kids are really enjoying it.  It's pretty tiring for them though since we no longer have a stroller to give them a break.  Now they have to work for it.

We're feeling relatively settled.  We had been waiting for a while to get some things we had bought from people last year who lived in the apartments (the items were misplaced for a while).  Now that we have everything, we're getting a lot more organized.  Of course, our place always looks lived in.  We're just not one of those tidy families.  Chaos is how we roll.

It's also been great to be able to navigate the area a fair amount.  Between church, doctor appointments and Disney, we've ventured out of our area quite a bit.  Traffic is pretty much always horrendous which we're not a fan of, but we're figuring it out.  The toll roads are actually our friends, way less traffic.

We're reading.  We're swimming.  We're talking.  We haven't found a healthy outlet for date night, outside of going somewhere like Chick-fil-a.  But we're hoping to find something like Awana for the kids to do on Wednesday nights so we can have a built in date night.  We've found a church that both us and the kids love.  It's old school with hymns and an organ and much more formal than we're used to, but we're really enjoying it.