Hello friends and family!
Another month is over and we finally seem to be settling
into routines here in our new life in Washington. Of course, I am currently
writing this post from South Carolina, where we have spent the weekend for my
sister Karina’s wedding! It has been a wonderful weekend getting to spend some
amazing time with family, all together for the first time since our wedding two
years ago. We’ve enjoyed making new friends and making sure that Karina and
Hunter had an amazing and happy wedding! We sent the newlyweds off last night
and now we are relaxing with the rest of my family until our flight back to St.
Louis this evening. We love seeing how our niece Teagann is growing and we are
having so much fun with her! It’s been a busy weekend, constantly on the move
between bachelor and bachelorette parties, rehearsal, and the wedding, all in
various locations in South Carolina. We were fortunate that the hurricane
didn’t cause any damage here aside from a few delayed flights, and that the
rain was all on Friday and we had a beautiful wedding day yesterday! We are
tired but so, so happy.
August has been a pretty intense month for the both of us.
The start of school and start of vicarage, along with moving and wedding
preparations, have kept us both busy.
August 1st brought the start of faculty meetings
and home visits for me. I spent mornings in meetings, afternoons working in my
classroom, and evenings driving around to the homes of my 14 students to visit
them. It made for some very long days, but we were able to get some packing
done in the midst of all that.
The next weekend was a frenzy of packing and moving
preparations in our apartment. We carefully planned meals (as we were still on
our Whole 30 diet) for moving days and worked to cook our food ahead so we
could finish packing up the kitchen and everything else. Sunday and Monday, we
packed and cleaned and prepped from morning til night. On Monday afternoon, we
picked up the truck and began loading up our things with some help from some
wonderful friends. Our biggest stress was the lack of space in the truck – we
should have gotten a bigger truck – but knowing we would have to come back
anyway to pick up the second car, we knew we could leave some things in the
apartment. As a sort of Type A person, it was frustrating to me to not have
everything done and neatly wrapped up when we left on Tuesday morning, but it
all worked out just fine.
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| Moving day - in front of our new house! |
Tuesday morning, I was up at about 4:00 (there may have been some paranoia about our moving truck being stolen tied into that). Thankfully our moving truck was still there and so we hurried to eat, pack up my car, and clean, and then we were off to Washington! Some wonderful members of the church showed up to help us unload when we arrived in Washington, and with the help of 5 or 6 men, our moving truck was unloaded in a matter of 30 minutes. They even stayed around to help us get furniture assembled and placed correctly in the house, which was an enormous blessing. They also brought an entire pick up truck full of food for our pantry! So we spent a lot of time that day getting our basics unpacked – sheets on the bed, some dishes in the kitchen, and the tv hooked up, as well as unloading bags and bags of food into our pantry.
It was back to work for me the next day, and Nick began to
go into the office as well to get acquainted with the space, unpack some books,
and start some basic work. We slowly unpacked throughout the next few weeks,
making our home more and more functional each day – getting the kitchen fully
unpacked, getting clothes hung in the closet, and thanks to Nick, getting
decorations on the walls. We are finally feeling mostly settled into our new
house and we are loving it! Pictures will come soon. We are thoroughly enjoying
the amount of space we have – there is so much space to spread out and it is so
much less cramped than our apartment. (It also means that even if we make a
mess, it’s not as big of a deal as it was in our apartment!) We are loving
having the dishwasher to help with the work of washing dishes rather than doing
them all by hand, and washing clothes in our washer and dryer without having to
put quarters in (and we can also just put a load in in the morning and take it
out in the afternoon when we come back from work which is a huge blessing!). We
are absolutely enjoying the fact that we have a back patio to set up our grill
and sit out and enjoy the occasional cool evening (we are hoping that we get
more of those soon!). We also love the fact that everything is just 5 minutes
away in Washington. There are some fantastic restaurants we are excited to try
and we have been enjoying running around the city in the mornings.
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| We're enjoying using our grill on our back patio! |
I have been adjusting to the long commute to and from Fenton
each day, which has been just about a 40 minute drive each way. I found some podcasts
to listen to in order to help pass the time. The long commutes make for some
late evenings for me, especially with the extra work that the beginning of the
school year brings. Nick has been an amazing life saver because once he gets
home from work, he gets dinner started, so that it’s ready when I get home.
That saves me a lot of time in the evenings when I get home. My school year has
started out like most school years start – with a lot of work and a lot of
exhaustion. I am finally adjusting to my class and I feel like my class is
beginning to settle in and learn routines, which really makes the days easier.
This year I have 14 students, which is over double my class size of 6 last
year. It has been quite the adjustment to remember how long it takes to get
things done with a large class, and I’ve been slowly remembering to pare down
the amount of things I have planned and increase the amount of time to
transition between activities throughout the day. That, along with the
students’ increased abilities to listen and learn, has made things start to
slowly get better and a bit less exhausting. I’m excited to get even more
settled into routines so I can be a little less overwhelmed and get home a bit
earlier.
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| Vicar Nick on his installation day |
Nick has been thoroughly enjoying and thriving as Vicar
Nick. He started out slowly, getting settled into his office and writing a
sermon that he preached on August 20-21. Once school started, he began working
with the 7th grade religion class, getting to know them, because he
is teaching them confirmation each week. He began teaching confirmation – to
the 7th graders during the day and to a group of public school
church members during the evening. He has begun his nursing home calls and home
visits to shut in members of the congregation, visiting with them. He assists
with church services when he is not preaching, and he will be beginning to lead
a weekly Sunday Bible study as well. He is gearing up for a busy month, with 2
preaching weekends in a row, the 7th grade confirmation retreat this
week, and the beginning of the Sunday morning Bible studies. He is enjoying the
supervision of the pastor and the company of the other staff there at the
church. He is so good at developing relationships with the church members and
has already learned more names than I could even hope to do. We have made some
friends in the church through staff socials and Sunday lunches and we are
excited to spend more time getting to know the wonderful people at this church.
We are looking forward to this year because we see so many
opportunities for growth and relationships. We are excited for what vicarage
year will bring, but we also know that it may be difficult to find a good
balance of work time and resting time with each other as we work with commitments
at two churches, new schedules (Nick has a lot of evening commitments now), and
my long commute. We ask that you pray that we can find joy in our work so we
don’t feel overwhelmed by the commitments, and also can be intentional in
preserving time we need to rest and be together to grow our relationship. We
ask that you pray for safety for Mikaela as she makes a long drive each day,
especially in storms and into the winter. We ask that you pray for health so
that we can continue to serve as needed. We also ask that you pray for strong
bodies as we begin training for another half marathon coming up in October, and
that we can avoid injury.
Thank you again for all your love, support, and prayers. We
appreciate knowing that we have so many wonderful people walking alongside us
in this journey.
In the name of Christ our Savior,
