Settling In

I like to stay busy. Busy means excitement, friendship, and growth. This week has been gloriously busy. Somehow, without me even really realizing it, my life is once again full of things and people that inspire me. In this month of thanksgiving, I am feeling pretty darn grateful.

Don't you just love this sign?

I kind of feel like this has been my life lately: whichever way we go, there are possibilities.

Here's a top ten list of what we've been up to lately:

10. Attended 2nd week of Mom's Group/Bible Study and continue to be grateful for the warm welcome I have received. Redeemer's pastor, Tim Keller, preached today on the necessity of community in our lives. In order to be a part of a community, you have to be open and personal. The women in this group demonstrate this openness beautifully to me and inspire me to be real with others. The message today also hit home for me and Clay as we continue to be honest with each other about the joys and stresses of this latest chapter in our lives. We realize that this constant conversation and opening of our own hearts to each other is our way into an even closer marriage. Community, on a small and large scale, is crucial to happiness and service.

9. We cheered on the 60,000+ runners at the AMAZING NYC Marathon. We cheered on a constant stream of runners for an hour while we constantly tracked our dear friend, Mary, as she dominated the course in just over 4 hours. There's something about running through all five boroughs with crowds cheering you on the entire way that got Clay and me thinking about how many more marathons we have left in us :-). Dude, if we end up in NYC, I am definitely doing this race. It's a model marathon.

8. Which leads me to the next thing keeping us busy: the job search.

Yup, it's already begun.

Clay has already applied to a number of schools and signed up with the three big educational search agencies, all of which visit TC this month.

Sara has yet to sign up.

She knows she needs to, but her heart and mind aren't in it quite yet.

Please pray that this involved search will result in a position that stimulates and excites Clay, offers me some new opportunities for growth and leadership, and provides a healthy lifestyle for Will and our entire family. At this point, we literally have no idea where we are going to end up.

7. The weather here has been FABULOUS. Mild, mild, mild. The trees are finally changing colors and the holiday decorations are starting to be displayed--and yet today I went the entire day without wearing a coat. Lovin' it.

6. Our weekly date nights continue to be a huge highlight for us. We are much busier during the week than we anticipated, so we look forward to our weekend evening together all week long. This weekend we headed all the way out to Brooklyn for our friend Ali's house warming party. It might have taken us more time to get there and back than the time we were actually there, but we were so glad we went and loved seeing another part of the city together.

5. My 3-4 x week tutoring job continues to go swimmingly, I think I am going to pick up a second Johns Hopkins writing course, my work on my friend's environmental building materials website is constant right now, I am reviewing writing for this online magazine as often as I can, and I have found two friends to help me assemble a published volume of poetry and prayers written by a GPS legend. I wasn't overwhelmed until I realized I needed to also start this job search process and then I may have had a little temper tantrum before resuming my identity as a semi-responsible adult.

4. I have also been determined to read through my awesome list, though, and in the past two weeks, I finished two enthralling ones:

I LOVED Rebecca. My grandmother told me the story of Rebecca when I was a little girl, and while I (conveniently) didn't remember the exact plot that she recounted at the time, I remember how enthusiastically she told the story. My grandmother is a gifted storyteller, for sure, but this story is also one worth telling--and reading.

Thanks, Beth, for the awesome recommendation!

3. Got together with one of my best friends and college roomies, Blaire, yesterday. I cherished every second of my three hours of girl time in the West Village.

2. Went for a beautiful run in Central Park last Saturday only to return home to find a hole in my jacket pocket--and a missing key. 2 hours of family time retracing my steps, a couple visits to the housing office, and many "I am SO sorry's" later, we have yet to hear from the TC authorities about how to fix this problem. Their solution most likely will be to rekey the lock, and thus charge us an arm and a leg, but I am (probably naively) hopeful they will have mercy on us and perhaps just duplicate the key. I mean, my old key is somewhere beneath the dirt and leaves in Central Park. It doesn't even say Columbia University on it. No one's going to use it. But its still a tiny trinket that is probably going to cost us the same amount as two weeks worth of groceries. Dang.

AND #1 (and this is super dated, but who cares): Brittany and Phil came to town!!

They're so fun.

We love Aunt B!

Checking out the sights in the Museum of Natural History.

Love family!!