Everytime I look at pictures of Audriana, it strikes me funny that older pictures of her now look different compared to the little girl that is growing up before my very eyes. Her five month pictures suddenly looked too babyish just yesterday.
We were out at Red Hot & Blue (a wonderful barbeque chain) last night - also to celebrate Audriana's birthday...they gave us a $10 coupon - and we were amused that Audriana still likes to try to eat lemons. I gave her a lemon when she was little and she's loved trying to eat them ever since. Eventually she should grow out of that, but that's one of the memories of the past year that we've enjoyed.
Seeing her walk around is a hoot. Since she's been walking since she was 10 months old, she's gotten quite good at it now - and to see such a little tike bobble around is very fun.
We're staying pretty busy...Vikki has been working more hours teaching ESL recently. Beyond her 5 hours a week that she teaches, we budgeted her to try to supplement our income an additional $75 a month. She's going to be teaching 6 additional classes in the next month as a substitute for other teachers. She works out twice a week with other moms at church, and goes to the church food pantry to help out once a week. Jay is busy with subbing, teaching, getting ready for China, international students, family time, and trying to organize some upcoming trips. He meets with another Christian guy every week and they're looking at planning a camping/hiking trip together with some other guys as well. He's also trying to help coordinate a get-together of some friends from Harding either in April or this summer. We're planning a trip to Williamsburg as well to reward ourselves for minimally exercising four days a week. We're also trying to decide if we'll have time to make it to an orientation for others preparing to go to China at the end of May...and we want to have a couple of garage sales before we hope to spend time with Jay's family in MO/AR/TX this summer. We'll see how much we can actually do - we had initially wanted to go to a seminar today for people interested in pursuing a career in missions, but that was scratched when we didn't make time to prepare this week for it and Jay came down with some sniffles last night.
In all the hustle bustle, it's hard to make sure that we're getting all our priorities straight...I feel as if we're doing a good job - but I guess not always as there are times every once in a while where we feel stretched perhaps too much...and I want things like faith and family to take a dominant role in what we do...but I wonder how much they actually play out sometimes. Like, take for example, the fact that I wanted to do a 21 day purposed time to seek God at the beginning of this year. How hard it seems to be able to make a focused effort for something that I consider to be so vitally important. I didn't make it very far into that 21 days - life has a way of sort of taking over...despite our best intentions to arrange it the way we want. In some ways, I've felt renewed in my relationship with the Lord recently - which I find interesting in that it comes at a time where I've read His word and spent time in prayer less than perhaps any time that I can remember since college.
We've got three more months of probable busyness, in which we should be able to get the rest of our items on our to-do list checked off for China...a budget, a teaching job, a school to attend for language study, shots for Audriana, among other odd purchases and decisions before we'll spend at least a year at a University in China trying to see...whether the situation at that school did indeed suit everything we want as far as budget, environment, and proximity to a good language school we like are concerned...I'm preparing myself to have a year of exploration our first year where we try to adjust to all the new factors in life and if it didn't work out quite the way we want it to, to have time to prepare to change it by the following year at a different school (for teaching or study)...
The picture above is from Elijah Clark's one-year birthday that we recently helped celebrate. We're getting ready to have our own celebration in a week!
2 comments:
ahh! i love my niece!
thanks for sharing!
comments...I love comments. =)
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