Here, There and Everywhere

The past two months have been crazy. I feel like we've been everywhere besides home. We started out December by spending a long weekend in Seattle to celebrate our second anniversary! It was so fun. We spent a lot of time at Pike Place Market, went to the tippy top of the Space Needle, got drinks from the first ever Starbucks and ate a lot of really good seafood to celebrate two years of marriage.

In front of the original Starbs!


We were then home for two weeks, in which we attended two work parties, two Young Life parties, one church party and one family party. Six Christmas parties in two weeks, guys. It was a lot.

We traveled to Kentucky and spent a few days before and Christmas there. Then we drove to South Carolina to spend a handful of days with my parents. Then we drove back to Ohio and stayed at our house for approximately 28 hours. Then we headed back to Kentucky for a few days to celebrate our niece's birthday and see some friends. Then flew to Orlando for YL75! WHICH WAS THE BEST. We attended a pre-conference so we were there for 8 glorious days.We got to hear from awesome speakers (Matt Chandler, Louie Giglio, Jen Hatmaker and Dave Ramsey, just to name a few), visited Harry Potter world, went to Disney's Hollywood Studios while it was rented out just for us and got all the free food (and ice cream) that we could possibly eat, hung by the pool and spent a lot of time with friends that we don't get to see very often. It was great!

Purposely not lightening up this picture so you can't see how sunburned we were


I came home last Sunday but Dan headed to St. Augustine for an extra week. He had training for Young Life and his seminary classes. He finally got home last night and I felt like I could take a deep breath for the first time in a month and a half. We are all finally home.

We moved to Chillicothe exactly a year ago from yesterday. I can't fathom that we've been here a year. It doesn't make sense in my brain. I feel like we've been here maybe a few months. But we haven't. It's been a whole year. And it's been a good year but it also has been a tough year. Guys, starting Young Life in a brand new area that has never even heard of it is so hard. So much harder than I thought it would be. And it's even harder not to feel like a failure when you're still not running club or you still don't have any leaders or whatever other young life-y thing we measure success by. But anyway, amidst all that tough and hard stuff, I realized that we're finally home. The thoughts that run through my head aren't "I'm so glad that we're all back in Chillicothe and I can breath again and get back to normal life". The thoughts have been "I'm so glad that we're home".  I'm not sure when that happened. When this place went from Chillicothe to home, but it did. And I love that.



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