February News...A Month Late

Hello friends and family!

These two California natives are excited for the beginning of March, signaling the coming of spring! The weather has steadily warmed up, and even though we were blessed with a mild winter, we appreciate the changing of the seasons even more now that we live through snow and below-freezing temperatures. There are some small blessings to living outside of California after all!

February…such a unique month. Not only does it have fewer days than any other month, but once every four years, we add a day to this weird month. Thankfully for us, February wasn’t too weird. Instead, it brought some fun and relaxation back into our lives!

Nick worked through the last few difficult weeks of his winter quarter, completing papers and exams with only a few late nights staying up doing homework. In addition to school responsibilities, he has been helping out in church services on a regular basis and attending pre-vicarage workshops in preparation for his duties next year. However, his hard work paid off and he was rewarded with a two-week long break, which will finish up this weekend. On Monday, it’s back to school will another full load of classes, including Pastor as Educator, which includes a practicum in an area school, Systematics III, and some fun history classes.

February brought a fantastic lightening of my workload as well, as I turned in my completed accreditation document the last week of January. Not having this huge project on my plate anymore allowed me to go back to focusing on new lessons and games for my kids, as well as getting our students ready for our school musical coming up in April. Although teaching is still never easy, and this month wasn’t perfect, it is wonderful to be able to go back to what I really love to do, rather than spending all my time on accreditation work. February in Kindergarten is a very loaded month, including the 100^th Day of School (an all day party!), Groundhog Day, Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, and this year, Leap Day and a field trip to the symphony. It’s a lot of work but so much fun!

February also marked the return of our social lives after a very, very busy and stressful January. Nick took me on a fun date to an arcade where we played glow in the dark mini golf and arcade games. We got to spend some fun times with friends for the Superbowl and another weekend going out to a fancy dinner to celebrate the end of the quarter. We went to a Valentine’s Dinner Dance at our church with some friends, which not only gave us some quality time with wonderful friends, but also a fun night of dancing which is always a lot of fun! We got to enjoy a second snow day of the school year, although the snow did melt away by the end of the day. We took the free day to watch the full Lord of the Rings Trilogy (extended edition). This totals over 12 hours of movie time, but it is totally worth it! Nick had been itching to do that all winter, so it was fun to take advantage of our unexpected free day. We also were blessed with a visit from Angela, Nick’s sister, on her spring break. We had a lot of fun taking her around St. Louis, playing board games with her (well, Nick played board games), and eating some delicious food at local restaurants together. February was a full and fun month, much-needed for us! We are feeling blessed and loved after all the fun we got to have and the people we got to spend time with this month.

Enjoying fondue at The Melting Pot with Angela

Valentine's Dinner Dance at our church

Having fun mini golfing!

Our half-marathon training is progressing well, I am happy to say! We had a small hiccup in our training this month. Early in the month, I tripped and fell while on a morning run. The next week, my knee was still bothering me and causing a lot of pain, so I went to the urgent care, where they x-rayed it and diagnosed me with a suspected fracture in my kneecap. I spent a long five days in a full-length leg brace, hobbling around and having to be creative in my teaching methods. However, praise God, I went to an orthopedist and he told me that there was no break at all, and the pain in my knee was likely just normal running pain. So after about a week and a half off running, we were back at it, just with more ice and Advil. We’re now up to 9 miles in our training runs and we’re still enjoying it! We spend many evenings passing the ice pack back and forth for our aches and pains, but we are excited to be moving on and we are excited for our race coming up April 10^th!

Our first run back after my leg injury kept us out of the game for a few weeks.

God’s blessings on you and your loved ones! We thank you so much for all the support, prayers, and love you send us.

In the name of Christ our Savior,

Nick and Mikaela Duerr

Work, Work, Work

A few days ago, I was browsing through my Timehop (the app that shows things that you posted on social media in past years) and I saw our blog post from January last year. The title? “Month of Mayhem.” That has seemed to sum up this year’s January for us as well. I don’t know if it’s because everything starts to run in full gear again after taking breaks for the holiday season, or just because of the particular schedule at my school, but whatever the reason, the result is insanity.

After having two weeks off and visiting Mark in Michigan, we started back at school. Nick was stepping back into a quarter that started just after Thanksgiving, which means the quarter was already at full speed. On top of that, he is taking a very full load of classes this quarter, with five regular classes and a once-a-week lectionary class. This means he is spending a lot of time on readings and papers, and a lot of time in classes. The upside, however, is that he is absolutely loving his classes this quarter, because he is learning practical and applicable information. He is also now registered for his final quarter of seminary before our ever-approaching vicarage year!

For myself, jumping into January means trying to corral and retrain my students after two weeks off as well as working on extra projects. January is packed full of events – an open house, a basketball tournament, the Spaghetti Dinner (one of our school’s biggest fundraisers), Lutheran Schools Week, and of course the faculty meetings and PTL meetings that were cancelled in December because of the holidays. The biggest project I have been working on is accreditation for the school. This is a huge process for our whole staff and I have been having to hold committee meetings and do a lot of research, typing, collecting evidences, and editing. It’s a project that puts a lot of extra work on top of the normal work required of a teacher. On top of that, we had a snow day thrown into the mix – my first snow day as a teacher! It was nice to enjoy a bit of time to relax at home, but it actually is deceptively more difficult for a teacher to have a snow day, because it totally threw off all my lesson plans. However, it was really nice to actually have snow to work with this year during our snow science unit, as opposed to last year when it was sunny and 55 degrees that week!

On top of all the homework, we have had meetings weekly, sometimes feeling like it was nightly whether they were meetings for accreditation, meetings with the Parent-Teacher League, or meetings about vicarage. In resuming our running as we train for the half marathon in April, we have to be consistent about our workouts, and of course all these meetings have been problematic, since evenings are our training time. So instead of trying to work around our evening schedules, we have made our early mornings even earlier, with a 4:45 wake up time in order to get up and get in a workout before school. While this is a challenge (and let’s be honest, we don’t always wake up in time), we find that we are more productive on our free evenings because we aren’t having to work around our training schedule after school. Our half marathon training is well underway now, with our long runs increasing a mile each week, but we are having a lot of fun and we’re getting really excited as we train and learn more about running. We had a lot of fun taking our Christmas money shopping for much needed winter running gear as well – some new gloves, more pairs of long running pants (because on the really cold mornings we have to wear more than one pair!), and jackets.  

Since this post has so far been a lot of groaning and complaining, we have some exciting news to share! We are ecstatic because, due to extremely amazingly generous support, we were able pay off two more of Mikaela's loans (the ones with the highest interest) last week! This brings us to a total of six loans paid off, five of Mikaela's and one of Nick's (he had one loan that was accruing interest, so we paid it off, so now Nick's loans are not accruing any interest). Our hope is that, so long as Mikaela has a job over vicarage, we will be able to completely pay off all of her student loans and begin to pay off Nick's – a huge success considering we are given 10 years to pay off these loans! We have been amazingly blessed in our time here, and because of the generous support we have received, both financial and in prayer, we have one less thing to worry about. Thank you so much!

On another positive note, we are looking forward to some very fun events coming up this month as the work obligations lighten (a bit) and the weather warms up (hopefully). We are excited to spend time with our friends for the Superbowl today, go to a dinner dance at our church next week, and have some family time as Nick’s sister comes to visit us and then I head out to South Carolina to see my sister! The anticipation of Call Day also continues to grow as we wait to find out where we will be on vicarage next year!  We look forward to the adventures God brings and the blessings He provides.

In the name of Christ our Savior,

Nicholas and Mikaela Duerr

New Year: Bring it On

Happy New Year everyone! In my usual procrastination, what was supposed to be the last blog post of 2015 has turned into our first blog post of 2016. The new year dawned bright and sunny yesterday morning after many overcast days, and it was a beautiful sight to see. (It’s also really cold outside, but that doesn’t bother me because I get to spend the day on the couch under a pile of blankets!) If you have heard about the record flooding here in Missouri, not to worry, we are safe and unaffected. The area in which I work and we attend church has been affected severely with flooding, and some freeways have been closed for several days. However, the New Year’s Eve church service was cancelled, and everything should be cleared up in time for the start of school on Monday, so we are thankful that this flooding has not been a problem for us, but we keep those affected in our prayers.

December was a dichotomy of extreme relaxation and extreme busyness with little in between. We spent the first week of December in California, mostly spent at my parents’ house: babysitting my niece, watching tv, doing some Christmas shopping, taking extra naps, catching up on work. We enjoyed an extremely fun weekend celebrating the wedding of our college friend Whitney, and then got up bright and early to fly home to St. Louis. The next two weeks passed in a flurry of work, school, church services (Nick was helping out with mid-week Advent services), work brought home, homework, chores…all that fun stuff. It was a rough couple of weeks as we were both playing catch up from the week we missed while also battling the usual stress and difficulty that December brings. Once we were on break, however, we both crashed quickly. We spent a week in Michigan with Mark (Nick’s brother, who is on vicarage) so we could be together for Christmas. Most of that time was spent playing board games, reading, playing video games, and watching movies. It was a wonderful time away from our normal routines to rest and relax. I wish that I could say that in the last few days being back in St. Louis, we’ve been super productive and active…but, well, it’s mostly been more of the same – sleeping in, reading, watching tv. But hey, self-care, right?

Hanging out with Teagann when we went home

Our friend Whitney's wedding!

Christmas in Michigan with Mark

The New Year brings a desire to reflect – to reflect on the year behind and to dream and plan for the year ahead. A few days ago, I looked back on my first post of 2015 – a picture with all the crazy events and accomplishments of the previous year. Let’s be honest, 2014 was the biggest year of our lives. Graduation, marriage, new car, new city, new jobs, new school…pretty much everything was a new experience, a new adventure. My wish at the end of 2014 was for an “uneventful 2015.” Maybe that sounds really lame, but after a year of new experiences, I was ready for some time to learn, grow, and settle in a bit. This past year lived up to that expectation for us. Again, does that sound lame? Maybe. But in reality, I look back to a year ago and I see how much we have grown up and the goals we have accomplished...

Academically, Nick has learned so much. He is now in his fifth quarter of seminary. He learned how to write and preach sermons, and he’s done so in the church setting several times. He is learning about theology and doctrine, counseling, and worship. He has gained experience working in a retirement home, attending Jewish ministry events, and spending many weekends helping to lead worship services at our church.

Professionally, I have learned more and more about teaching. I loved having the opportunity this summer to work ahead on classroom projects, rather than coming in unprepared like the year before. I have been able to take on more responsibilities at school, and I have gained experience in working with new students that bring new blessings and challenges to my classroom.

Financially, we have accomplished a lot. One of our main goals and passions since taking Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University is to eradicate our debt. This year alone, we were able to pay off 25% of my student loan total, in addition to a small chunk of Nick’s student loans, which is a wonderful accomplishment for us! (Especially considering they give us 10 years to pay off these loans). We were also excited to recover from the hit of wedding, honeymoon, and moving enough that we have money saved up so that…well, we can actually spend money on things when we need to…or want to.

Personally, we were able to settle into routines enough, and start thinking about our future, that we could start setting personal goals, not just short-term goals, but goals for the long run. This past year, as you know, we got into running. Running a 10K race was a major accomplishment for the both of us, and it was a lot of fun. We have learned so much about ourselves, about each other, and about our marriage.

Stealing from a former post written by a friend, 2015 was a wonderful year, because I love more people now than I did at the beginning of it. We have been able to develop our friendships with the wonderful friends we met upon moving to St. Louis as we grow and continue to love those we left behind in California. We are so in love with our beautiful niece, born in 2015. We got the opportunity to spend more time with some friends in our last trip to California than in the past year and a half, developing those friendships and making new friends there along the way as well.

We’ve enjoyed this past year because the stability and routine allowed us to grow in so many ways. It’s even more valuable when you think about the years we have coming up in our lives – moving for vicarage this year, moving back to St. Louis next year, and moving to our first call the following year. The next few years will be continued new adventures, new places, new jobs, new people to love. We look forward to them so much and we are so excited to see where God takes us!

Thank you for all the support, prayers, and love this past year. We look forward to what 2016 will bring!

In the name of Christ our Savior,

Nick and Mikaela Duerr

The Calm after the Storm...and the Storm

Christmas greetings everyone!                                                                                                                  

It’s hard to believe that we are already into the Christmas season, but it is such an exciting time of year! We are thankful to be currently in California, enjoying this time with our families, and relaxing a bit before we return to our normal lives in St. Louis. We needed this break after the month we’ve had!

November in our household was packed full of events and very long to do lists. We spent the month in anticipation of and preparing for our trip out to California for Thanksgiving vacation. I am a bridesmaid in the upcoming wedding of my friend Whitney this Saturday, and when Nick and I realized that we would have to take several days off work and school to be at this wedding anyway, we asked (begged and pleaded) for permission to take the entire week, so that we were able to be home for the Thanksgiving holidays to be able to be with our families as well. We are very fortunate to have wonderful and understanding bosses and professors, and so we made plans to spend two weeks in California. However, this meant we were having to spend a lot of time working ahead – I had to have sub plans ready for the week I am missing, and Nick had to contact all his professors and get textbooks ordered in preparation for the new quarter. We also had to do all the work that comes with a trip – making sure we had places to stay, and rides to and from where we need to be, as well as the laundry and packing and cleaning we needed to do in the week before we left! It made for several very chaotic weeks.

In addition to all the trip preparation, things were a little extra crazy at work for me! In the first week of November, I put on an event called Kindergarten Round Up. This is an opportunity for preschoolers and their parents to come and learn about the Kindergarten program at our school, meet me, and see the classroom. It was a great success, but a lot of extra work! I also was working on getting all our Operation Christmas Child boxes ready! In addition to keeping track of boxes, I was in charge of making sure they were all ready to go, with labels and all the appropriate items inside, and moving them up to the church for a dedication prayer, and then back to my classroom, and then out to my car, and then finally to the collection center. We had 90 boxes in all and it was a very successful project, so it was all worth it! I also had the privilege of being asked to sing for a wedding at our church during a weekend in November. It was a new experience for me, but it was a fun way to make a little extra income to go toward my student loans!

Nick was extra busy at school as well. November encompasses the last few weeks of the fall quarter, so he was swamped with readings, papers, sermons, and tests. In addition, he was scheduled to preach church services at our church one of those weekends, so he had an extra sermon to write and preach in that time. He also came to Our Savior and led a chapel service on the Wednesday in his first week of break!

In this time, Nick and I both ended up sick, which is no surprise, with the stress and changes in the weather. Nick got a cold and cough, of course, right before the weekend he had to preach his sermon. He spent several days on hot tea and chicken noodle soup and lots of cough drops to get him through that weekend. The following week, I wasn’t feeling well either, and just thought I had gotten a cold from Nick, but when it wasn’t going away, I stopped by urgent care. They diagnosed me with strep and shingles the Wednesday before our trip! Thankfully, they put me on the medicines I needed, and after just one sick day at home, I was back at school in time for our Thanksgiving party and (mostly) healthy in time for our trip! We are both thoroughly enjoying the time that we have to rest now and let our bodies recover.

On top of all this, we started out our month with our 10K trail race! It was a really fun experience! The race was at a state park, and the run took place through trails and hills, going up and down hills and stairs and across creeks. It is a really beautiful run, and it was a lot of fun to be out there with so many other runners! We finished the run in just over an hour, and we were really happy with how we did! Nick was actually the 2^nd runner in his age group for our race! We even got a full meal at the end of the race, which was really fun. However, that race pretty much wiped us out for the rest of that weekend!

After running the Skippo, a 10K trail race

Our trip to California has been fun and restful. We flew out of St. Louis at 7:00 a.m. on the Saturday morning before Thanksgiving, arriving with enough time to eat lunch and rest a little before the wedding of our friends Zach and Amber.

With Zach and Amber at their wedding!

We had such a wonderful time seeing a beautiful wedding, and getting to see friends that we haven’t seen since our last visit in June! After that, we caught a ride with Angela, Nick’s sister, to Bakersfield, and spent a few days with Nick’s family, doing fun things like playing board games and baking and having good family bonding time. Nick and I were thankful for the opportunity to rest! We spent Thanksgiving with both of our families at my parents’ house in Visalia. I’ve had some fun adventures – I worked a Black Friday shift with my sister at her job in the mall, and I spent the weekend in Southern California for my friend Whitney’s bachelorette party, while Nick spent some extra time with his family. Once again, however, I am very glad to rest after that busy weekend, because I haven’t seemed to fully recover from being sick. So now we are just enjoying the chance to spend time with family – especially little Teagann! – and relax, at least until this weekend! We have been fortunate to get some Christmas celebrations in with our families as we help decorate their homes for Christmas, as we won’t be able to come back to California for Christmas this year.

Nick went rock climbing with his little brother Tony

I love getting to see our niece Teagann!

We are thankful for so many things in our lives – God has richly blessed us in so many ways! Although Thanksgiving is a time to reflect on those things, I find that it’s important to reflect on those things all year long. We are thankful for each other, for our families we love so much, and for the way that God has provided for us every step of the way throughout this journey. We thank Him for all of you, who support us through your prayers and your donations. We ask Him to bless you all for showing us His love through your actions!

In the name of Christ our Savior,

Nick and Mikaela Duerr

Plugging Away

Dear friends and family,

The month of October has been business as usual for us here in Duerr household. We have gotten back into the swing of things as far as school and work go, and we are enjoying the routine that it has provided.

Now that my students have begun to grasp what it means to be Kindergarteners, I have had the opportunity to start to push their learning. We’ve been learning about fun things like pumpkins and bones and Christopher Columbus – this is the fun thing about Kindergarten! Pumpkin week included a donation of pumpkins from a parent of one of my students, which meant that each child got to explore, measure, and observe their pumpkin…and then decorate it of course! Bone week involved having a full-sized skeleton model in the classroom (I felt bad for the janitors who were in there each night!) and each child getting to make a life-sized skeleton painting of themselves! This month also brought parent-teacher conferences. Thankfully, with a year of teaching under my belt, plus the fact that I know my students’ parents much better this year on account of home visits, I was not nervous and really had a good time with them! It also helps that with such a small class, I had a light load! I’m also excited to be heading up Operation Christmas Child at OSL this year, which is a project that has been dear to my heart since my elementary school days! It’s taken some extra time to coordinate all that, but I think it will be well worth it when all those shoeboxes full of gifts come in to be sent off to children around the world! Nick and I had fun this weekend shopping to fill two shoeboxes for the project, hopefully just the first of many times we will do this as a family!

Nick has also been busy at school. October is an interesting month because at the beginning of the month, it is still early in the quarter, but by the end of the month, it is crunch time before finals. He’s been enjoying learning about writing sermons, and learning to develop his style and skill as a homiletician. He has been writing a LOT of sermons, but seems to be thoroughly enjoying the process and seeing growth in himself in this area. He also had a lot of fun writing a paper on St. Nicholas, and learning about how the myth of Santa Claus developed from the historical figure. He was saddened to discover, however, that it is unlikely that St. Nicholas actually slapped Arius at the Council of Nicaea.

We have been pushing our boundaries with our running this month! At the end of September, we had just completed our first race, a 5K (3.1 miles), proud of ourselves for actually training for a month straight. Now, another month has passed, and each week, our mileage goes up and we’re running farther than we ever have before. Just a week ago, we set out on the same loop that we ran (but mostly walked) at the start of all this, the big 5.5 mile loop around Forest Park, and we ran the whole distance. That was a fun accomplishment for us. This coming Saturday, we will be completing a 10K trail race, which will be tricky not only because of the distance but also because it will be on dirt paths, crossing streams, and have significant elevation changes. We are very excited about this race though, and are happy to challenge ourselves. 

Nick had a really fun opportunity at the beginning of the month. The seminary asked him to travel to Concordia Irvine to help the seminary admissions officer with recruiting and to give a student's perspective to college students. It was a fun, if brief trip for him, because he got to spend time with his family, and see some old friends and professors. It was a strange few days for myself, as I spent a night alone in our apartment for the first time ever, but I survived, and was very happy to have Nick back…even if he ate In-N-Out without me.

Another big event of this month was our second pre-vicarage meeting. In this meeting, Dr. Nielsen, the vicarage director, walked through the interview sheet with us. Basically, he told us what we have to tell him about our desires for our vicarage placement. This ranges from things like deciding location preferences, ministry experiences and desires, housing needs, and more. There are a lot of factors for him to consider in placing us for vicarage, and we are fully trusting that God has a place for us somewhere! We ask for your prayers as there are a lot of decisions for us to make in the next month regarding our desires for vicarage year, especially taking Nick’s needs as a vicar and my job at OSL into consideration. Our vicarage interview is on December 17^th, so we ask for prayers leading up to that time for wisdom and clarity for our needs, and on that day for the words to communicate our needs and desires to Dr. Nielsen.

We thank you again all for your prayers and financial support! We see God’s hand in so many ways in our time here. A few weeks ago, someone tried to break into our car. Thankfully the damage was very minimal (we didn’t even notice it right away!), and we still have our car, but the lock was badly messed up, so we need to get it replaced. The day I took the car into the shop to get the assessment of the cost, we received an unexpected check from a church that will cover the cost of the repair. For things like this, we are so grateful, and we are especially grateful that we see God working in these blessings, so that we don’t take them, or you, for granted. We are truly encouraged by the loving support we receive as Nick trains for the ministry. God bless you for all you do!

In the name of Christ our Savior,

Nick and Mikaela Duerr

Settling into a New Year

Happy Fall everyone!

Here in St. Louis, we are so happy to be feeling the cool fall weather, although it’s seemed to almost go from summer to winter in a week! Compared to last year, it stayed hot longer this year, so it was nice to get a cool down. We especially like it because it means we can stop using the air conditioning and save money on our electric bill! So here I am on October 4^th, sitting in warm socks, long pants, and a sweatshirt, because it’s been overcast and under 70 degrees all weekend. It all brings back lots of flashbacks from last winter. Although the prospect of another long winter is a little daunting, it’s important to remember the exciting things that come with this time of year: the holidays, the fall colors, cool afternoon walks, and of course, delicious treats involving pumpkin and candy corn! This year, we get to throw a visit to California into the mix!

Life is back in full swing again for the both of us. September included a number of evening meetings, weekend events, and of course, the usual work for me and homework and school for Nick. Nick is really enjoying his classes this quarter. He is especially enjoying his Homiletics 2 class, in which he is learning more about the art of preaching and delivering sermons. He will get the opportunity to preach several times at Our Savior this year. Nick continues his job as a supervisor in the mailroom on campus, as well as his other odd jobs helping out around campus. He goes to campus each day and stays on campus the whole day, riding his bike back and forth right now while the weather is still nice.

My month in the classroom has been a month of adjustment and learning. As I look back on pictures from the beginning of the school year, I see how much my students have already grown, and that is so encouraging! This month included one day off to go to a professional development seminar called “Teach Like a Pirate.” The speaker and author, Dave Burgess, was really inspiring and helpful! It also included our first class field trip of the year, to a fun place in St. Louis called The Magic House, which is essentially a children’s museum, but probably the coolest children’s museum I’ve ever been to. It was a fun experience for me and for the students!

Together, we have been working hard toward our training goals for our half marathon this month. Well, really, this month was just a “Let’s see if we can actually run and train!” And it turns out we can! After deciding at the beginning of September to work toward the goal of a half-marathon, we signed up for a 5K and a 10K and wrote out a training plan for the 10K. We ran the 5K last Sunday in Forest Park. It was a nice, cool morning, but still humid, which was a bit bothersome. It was a fun event, and, running the whole race together, we ended up finishing around 25:00, which is the best time we’ve run since we started training a month ago. He finished 11^th in his age category (males ages 21-29 or somewhere around there), and I finished 5^th in my age category for females. Now we are working toward a 10K trail race on November 7^th, which we are really looking forward to. It will be a new experience for both of us! We have also officially registered for the half-marathon in April, so we are fully committed and enjoying working towards this goal together.

Another September event was our first vicarage preparation meeting! This begins the year-long process of meetings, interviews, and then the worst…waiting. The first meeting was a pretty basic informational meeting, mostly comprised of information that we have already acquired through our friends who went through this process last year. But it was good to go and get to know the professor who’s in charge of assigning vicarages, and to be in a room with all the other people who will be going through the process with us. Our next meeting is this upcoming week, and this meeting is the one in which we will be given information about the interviews, and the things that we will have to think about and decide our preferences for when he is assigning the vicarages. We would really appreciate prayers for wisdom and patience as we go through this process!

We thank you all again for all the support and prayers! We are so appreciative of the financial blessings that we receive – it is so comforting for us to know that we are not going in more debt during this time in seminary, and that we are actually able to be aggressive in paying off our current loans! We have received an extra blessing in that the Food Bank at the seminary has announced that everyone will be able to shop twice each month throughout this school year, rather than once a month that we did last year. This is an extra blessing and we are very excited! God constantly provides for our needs.

In the name of Christ our Savior,

Nick and Mikaela Duerr

adulting (verb) the act of being a grown-up

As a teacher, August is always a veeerrrry looonngg month, so the fact that I'm writing our August blog post brings me joy and satisfaction that it's almost over!

For myself (Mikaela), August began with three days of faculty meetings and then a day of professional development with the Lutheran Association for Special Education. I also filled my evenings that week with home visits. At our school, the teachers go and visit their students in their homes before the school year starts. I have a love/hate relationship with these home visits, because on one hand, it took a lot of time to drive to all their homes, spending my evenings bouncing around to houses, and the nerves and uncertainty about driving to a new place, hoping I'm at the right house, and making conversation with strangers. On the other hand though, it was so good to meet my students in their own space. I learned so much about them and their families in a short time, making the first week of school easier, because I knew names and faces and they knew me. Thankfully, due to all my work in the classroom in July, the second week of August was relatively calm. We had Back to School night and CPR training that week, but besides that and some planning, I was able to be flexible about the hours I spent in the classroom, and I wasn't stressed out. That was a huge blessing. School started on August 19th, so I have just completed my first full week of school. After 8 days, I am happy to say that the days are a bit less exhausting each day, and I'm seeing progress in the students' understanding of classroom rules and routines! I heard lately that as a Kindergarten teacher, if you can make it to October 1st, you'll be okay. :-)

Nick has spent August working...and working and working and working. He was pretty much the only one available to work at his mail room job for a few weeks, so he was taking all the shifts. This was nice for him, because he didn't have to sit around the apartment while I'm gone all day. Also, the extra income has been very nice for us!

Outside of work, I would have to say  that the theme of the month has been "adulting." Maybe that sounds silly, considering we've been married and living on our own for over a year, plus four years of college before that. But there are some things that just make us feel like we're really grown up and having to be responsible for ourselves. This month, in a rush of inspiration to finish our "summer" to-do list, mostly due to the deadline of the end of summer, we've scheduled dentist and doctor appointments, gotten routine maintenance done on our car (I didn't even know that was a thing outside of getting the oil changed), finished up projects like our wedding album and honeymoon scrapbook, gone shopping for the bridesmaid dress and shoes I will need for December, got our wedding rings re-plated to make them pretty and shiny again, on top of all the normal cleaning and shopping and cooking and budgeting and paying bills that we do. I guess to any adults who have raised a family, that all sounds like normal stuff. But to a young married couple who have only recently begun to be really responsible for ourselves, it's a pretty big accomplishment to us not only to be getting these things done, but also to have the money to do it all. (Thank you Dave Ramsey!)

A few more fun "grown-up" things we did this month...first of all, we bought our first TV! I know, we're a poor seminary couple, how do we afford a TV? Again, due to good budgeting. Like Dave Ramsey says, a budget isn't restrictive, a budget is freedom. Because we have a good budget set, we know that we had this money set aside from birthday and Christmas gifts that we could use to purchase a TV. It was a bit of a spur of the moment decision, which came about as I was making the transition to a new laptop, but we are really happy and excited about our purchase. It's nice to watch Netflix on a real TV, not a little laptop or iPad screen. The second fun thing about this month was that on August 16th, Nick got the chance to preach at Our Savior. This is the second time he has preached, and it's so much fun to see him preach and listen to the Gospel message he proclaims. (It shows me that all this time at Seminary is paying off!) However, I was also asked to sing for the church service that day, which consisted of a few solos and cantor pieces. It was fun to be working together for the church service, and we had a lot of comments about what a good team we make for a church. The best part is that our church services over the summer have been broadcasted on the radio, which is live-streamed online, so our parents back home were able to enjoy hearing us participate in the service as well. Lastly, we made another plane ticket purchase! We will be traveling to California in November-December for two weddings and to spend Thanksgiving with our families. We were especially grateful to Nick's parents, who helped us out a bit on the cost of plane tickets!

Another important thing about being a grown-up is exercising to be healthy to set long-term habits in place. Nick and I want to begin healthy habits now, so that when we get into the ministry, start a family, and life gets crazy, we can not only stay healthy for ourselves, but also to set a good example to our congregation and our kids. We've been exercising on and off, and working on eating healthier for a while now. But yesterday morning, we decided to go for a run in Forest Park, and decided, what the heck, let's do the 5.5 mile loop around the park (We've really only been doing runs around 2-3 miles, and not very consistently). Well, we did the loop, and it was exhausting, but it was fun to exercise together and talk and enjoy the beautiful morning. And after that, we decided we're going to train for a half marathon. There is a large marathon event in St. Louis in April, so we figure that in the 8 months between now and then, if we train consistently, not only will we be ready for the half marathon, but we will make this a lifestyle. It's going to be our big project for the year. Now we are just working on creating a training plan, and saving up the money for the registration costs, as well as the cost of the things we will need as we train, like new shoes and new gear, especially for the winter, since we're not well-equipped for exercising when it's below freezing and dark outside. But we are excited about the prospect of completing a half marathon together and the way that the training will bring us closer together.

Nick will be starting his second year of seminary on September 8th. We are so grateful to all of you who have been supporting our journey through your prayers and your financial gifts. Nick is really excited about his classes this year, and he has been learning and growing so much. This year will also be the preparation year for vicarage. Throughout the school year, there will be meetings to prepare both Nick and myself for our time on vicarage, as well as paperwork and interviews to help decide where we will be placed for vicarage. Everything is in God's hands, and we trust in His plan for our lives, and we know that throughout everything, He is always faithful.

In the name of Christ our Savior,
Nick and Mikaela Duerr