{ Brewing }

It's a lot of fun to have new experiences and adventures with your spouse. It's also a lot of fun to do new things with another couple. Our church has multiple campuses and is sort of known for attracting lots of young singles. However, the campus we attend is in the suburbs, so there are a lot of young families with little kids. I guess that's what happens when you get young singles together and tell them that Jesus wants them to get married and have babies! Mike and I met at the one singles' Bible study at that campus {now there are several}. The vast majority of our church friends are still single....as in, we were the third marriage to come out of that singles group, and there have been only five total. So we don't have many married friends, young or old. It's an absence I sometimes feel acutely. This doesn't mean I don't value our single friends; simply that having friends who are also a couple brings an added dimension to a friendship. A really good dimension.

In January Mike and I brewed beer at Gallagher's with our friends Luke and Joanna. We were friends with them when they were single, we were friends with them when they were dating, and now they are finally ENGAGED and we are still friends!! Mike and I made a half batch of a porter; Luke and Joanna made a half batch of a winter ale. While Mike and I had really enjoyed our previous experience at Gallagher's {I took Mike there for his birthday while we were dating}, it's even more fun when shared!

Why does Joanna look frightened of the hops? I'll have to ask her...

Lu and Jo got engaged a few days before our double date. They are the cutest couple!

{ Busy busy }

Thank you all for your encouraging words in response to my last post. One of my great struggles is with vulnerability. Letting people see that I don't have it all together is a really frightening thing to me. But then you end up isolated, feeling alone and not known or understood...also not where I want to be. The Lord is gently showing me His love in this time, and part of that is through you ladies. Thank you.

Because life can never be "normal," Mr. Husband and I are driving to Idaho this Thursday to visit my grandma. She's not actually my grandma by blood; she is my cousins' grandma, but lives two miles from my family, across the road from my biological grandparents.

I remember being seven or eight years old and thinking how lucky I was to have three sets of grandparents. I thought it was normal!

Grandma isn't doing very well. She's had cancer for well over a decade; it was diagnosed as terminal a few years ago. In the last month she's started going downhill physically faster. Mr. Husband and I had planned on seeing her and grandpa when we visit my family for Easter next month. No one knows if she will be celebrating Easter here or with Jesus, so we've moved our plans up six weeks.

I've been too wrapped up in my own morose pity-party to even think about the fact that this may be the last time I see her this side of heaven. I want to be intentional in my time with her, to love her in the ways that will be most meaningful to her. I need to make time to process this before we go.

In spite of the fact that it will probably be an emotionally draining trip, I'm excited about:

~ A road trip with my husband

~ Reading The Magician's Nephew aloud in the car {can you believe he's never read The Chronicles of Narnia?!!}

~ Seeing my parents and youngest brother

~ Experiencing springtime, a.k.a. The Season of Mud, in the country for a few days

~ Catching up with cousins and their babies, who grow way too quickly between visits

~ Lunch with this dear friend and getting to meet her baby boy for the first time! {I love you, Oliver!}

{ I've been quiet... }

...because I'm not sure what to say. Honestly, the last few weeks have been difficult for me. I'm still processing, still soul-seasick from rough waters. I don't have many words right now. One of the hardest things for me about blogging is that, on the one hand, I want my small patch of internet to be bright, happy, joyful, creative, and enjoyable; a reflection of God's tremendous grace to me. On the other hand, I also want to be honest, vulnerable, "real;" I don't want to hide the bad or ugly parts of life. I don't want to project an artificial reality of glib cheeryness. God's grace isn't always sunshine...sometimes His grace comes in the form of bad weather, too. But clearly the internet isn't the best place to throw back the figurative curtains and give the world a webcam into the nitty-gritty of one's life. {It appears I have a perpetual online identity crisis, does it not?}

Thus, I quietly stow away, enjoying others' blogs, unsure of what to say on mine.

I've always wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. A few weeks ago it really started to get to me: I have no hope that I'll ever be able to stop working full-time. {Note: I didn't say the situation has become hopeless. Our outlook hasn't changed suddenly; it's just that I have no hope. Big difference.} I've been married a year and a half. Before we our wedding, we half-seriously joked that I should quit my job when we got back from our honeymoon. The reality is that we need both our incomes right now. I don't know when we'll be at a point where I don't need to work. And in the last few weeks, I slammed face-first into a very unpleasant reality: I don't think that day will ever come. I've lost hope. I've given up. I didn't choose to, it's just...gone.

I know in my head that God is sovereign, that He holds tomorrow in His hand, that I don't even know if I'll draw another breath....but knowing this in my heart is an entirely different matter. I want to be done with my career--scratch that, I want to be done awhile ago!

As a result, I've spent a lot of time lately being frustrated, angry, and overwhelmed.

What am I doing wrong?

Why is my life arranged in this way?

Has God forgotten?

Earlier this week I was making conversation with a patient and asked if she has family nearby.

"No, my son is in Connecticut."

"Then how did you end up in Washington?"

"Well, it's a long story..."

She was an Australian war bride during World War II. She met an American serviceman, they married, and he took her back to his family in Connecticut. They were married for 55 years before he died. Some time after his death, she submitted a pen-pal request to the veterans' newsletter for the unit/brigade {I don't remember the term} her husband was part of, asking to correspond with other war brides or people who had served with her late husband. A man in Washington responded, and after they'd written each other for seven months, he flew back to visit her. A month later, he returned with an engagement ring, and she moved across the country with her new husband.

Something in my heart moved a little bit as she spoke. I glimpsed a life that had taken turns she never dreamt of; both good and bad that she never could've imagined had come her way. The whole world explodes into warfare in WWII--and out of that, she meets her husband. She moves thousands of miles away from her family and friends, to another continent--and spends the rest of her life there, gaining new family and friends. Her husband dies after they've had a lifetime together--and from her connections with his veterans' newsletter, she meets another man who loves her and asks her to be his wife.

Trust Me. It's a still, small voice. I've been too furious even to want to listen for it. I still feel the weight of dread, fear, and anger that what I want so much has not been given me. But I also feel this: Trust Me. In an elderly lady's brief recollection of the twists and turns in her own life, I catch the briefest glimpse of a God whose plans are bigger than the horizon I see. For an instant, I can imagine a scenario in which there is hope.

What? Hope? How can I find hope when I'm at work--I thought I felt hopeless because I still have to work!

Your ways are not my ways, Lord. But I want trust You even when I can't see where You're leading me.

If the Lord had not been my help,

my soul would soon have lived in the land of silence.

When I thought, "My foot slips,"

your steadfast love, O Lord, held me up.

When the cares of my heart are many,

your consolations cheer my soul.

~ Psalm 94:17-19, ESV

{ Pursey }

Why, hello there, good-lookin'!

How are you today?

Excuse me, but where did someone as lovely as you come from?

TJ Maxx? Really? For $25?

But you look like you're leather! Nice, fashionably distressed leather!

And you have studs {I have a stud too, his name is Mike} and decorative tassesls and buckles and belt-y things!

And you have pockets!

So many pockets!

Cute pockets! Pockets with zippers for small essentials...

...bigger pockets for things like cell phones and keys...

Be still, my heart! You have inside pockets too! Three separate compartments, so everything isn't smashed together in a big mushy mess at your bottom! I can actually find what I'm looking for when I unsnap you! And look--there's another zipper pocket inside!

I get really excited about generously-sized purses that have dividers inside. Huge bags with no dividers act as a giant black hole that sucks in your life {and your keys, and your wallet, and your list, and your lip gloss, and anything else you could possibly ever want} with no hope of return. Such a poor design--it's one of my pet peeves.

This bag by Sparrow True is exactly what I was looking for this winter. I'm really into faux distressed leather for some reason. I'm sure if I had the money I'd be into real distressed leather, too. ;-) It's just perfectly slouchy and casually dressed up; perfect for work and for date night.

I like you, pursey!

{ Date Night }

Following our Epic New Year Health-And-Hot-Water-Heater Fiasco a few weeks ago, Mr. Husband decided it was high time for us to go on a real, honest to goodness date. We'd been so busy with work and holiday events that we hadn't gone on a date in quite a while. Like, over a month. {For those of you who are married with kids and just snorted when I called over a month "quite a while," please let me enjoy my blissful ignorance of just how long we may or may not go without a real date once we are parents. Please.}

Mike insisted that we go to Target first so he could buy me a new iron. Isn't that a great way to begin a date?! I'm serious! The one we got for our wedding has officially died. It turns itself off whenever it wants and randomly leaks water. I think every iron my parents ever owned eventually did that, too. I certainly hope the rest of my life isn't full of irons with ridiculously short lifespans. Maybe I'm ironing incorrectly...

Then we went to The Macaroni Grill. Love!! Especially the fresh rosemary bread they give you while you browse the menu....it's not Pizza Factory breadsticks good, but it is soooo yummy!

Now, I'm embarrassed to admit this, but Mr. Husband and I have been married for 18 months and two days. And I had no idea that he possessed significant artistic ability. Producing this when all you have to work with is a butcher paper tablecloth and four crayons is pretty impressive, isn't it?

I know, right?! It's the two of us--why I appear to be taller than him, though I have no legs, is due to artistic license. I am definitely shorter than my husband. By about seven inches.

I added the caption below his drawing. It created quite a ruckus on Facebook. People thought we were surreptitiously announcing that I was pregnant with quintuplets through in vitro fertilization. Silly people!

P.S. I'm not pregnant with any number of babies. Seems kind of silly to state that way, but I don't want to start any rumors!

{ There's No Place Like Home }

This week, I've been craving:

breadsticks from The Pizza Factory

and

pizza from Chatterbox

Oh, those breadsticks!! I can eat an entire order of them by myself {and I have!}.

I've never tasted breadsticks like those anywhere else.

What kind of pizza would I get?

The White Rooster?

The Hula Hog?

The Happy Hunter?

It's funny that, surrounded by probably hundreds of eateries within a five-mile radius, I crave food from two restaurants hundreds of miles away, literally in the boondocks, where my family lives. Hopefully next time we make a trip to Idaho, I can introduce Mike to Pizza Factory breadsticks. The Pizza Factory brings back so many memories: birthday parties, extended family gatherings, dates with girlfriends, late-night dinner "in town" {a really big deal when we were kids}--it's even the spot where I first met a few of my cousins' babies {obviously it's a popular eatery in my family!}. And we can take my family out to lunch at the Chatterbox and add our signatures to the corrugated metal wall. I wonder if I can find my signature from a few years back, before I was married?

{ Sweet Finds }

I've been wanting a new purse lately. Is it just me, or are handbags crazy expensive?! The two winter-y ones I have are both 5+ years old; the one I've been using is feeling increasingly...dated. It was perfect for me for so many years, and now it's not. Yesterday I was at TJ Maxx looking for a curtain rod, and lo and behold, they have a HUGE selection of handbags. I found my new buddy: a lovely, slightly slouchy, slightly distressed, deliciously detailed shoulder bag with the sweetest faintly feminine accents and pockets while still being a little "tough" and lived-in. I'm embarrassed to say this, but it made me think of a bag the Pioneer Woman would have, and I liked it all the more as soon as I thought that. I don't think you'll have much luck finding information on Sparrow True {the brand name and my first sweet find} online--I've had none!--but they make great handbags, for only $25!

Today I was browsing Etsy, and stumbled across a shop with dozens of gorgeous earrings, each of which costs only $2. The shop is called Buck'N'Ear--get it? A buck an ear? Look at these examples of loveliness:

You could buy all three pairs and only be out $6 plus shipping + handling! What a sweet find!

So there you have it, my two sweet finds this week: Sparrow True handbags, and Buck'N'Ear's shop on Etsy. It's so fun to find pretty, affordable things to spend money on. I'm sure my husband would wholeheartedly agree with that statement {cough, cough}.

;-)