Sundays

There are several momentous things happening in our life right now and Jeff has been getting after me to blog.  I always hate starting when so much is going on, because I feel like I have to catch people up.  Well, whatever, at this point I'm sure there will always be something.

Okay, so this weekend.  It was my second Sunday of my first group of Sundays for leading worship.  If that makes sense.  It still feels fairly new, even though technically last week was the first time and even though I've led at Home Group and for Thursday evening prayer services and led the occasional song on a Sunday morning.  But I have to say being responsible for the full deal is way different.  I spend the half hour leading up to the service trying not to think too much because I just get freaked out that I have no idea what I said we were going to do for the transitions between songs.  Thing is that actually happened today, I had to go back through a section again to give myself time to think and I still have no idea if I did it the way I said I was going to.

*you know, I have no idea how writers who are mother's ever get any writing done. I just got up to help the DH feed Asher, he's still not sure how to prepare the homemade stuff, and I ended up changing over the load of laundry and almost folding the diapers until I remembered I was actually in the middle of something else entirely.  I so want to be writing again, I have no idea how I'm going to manage it.  We'll see.*

Okay, so Sunday morning.  In the end, it went well.  Much better than practice would have indicated.  But of course, as my mom reminded me, the worse the rehearsal the better the performance.  Sucks, but it's true.  I am always amazed at what God uses though.  The song I was least concerned about, not even sure if I was going to do, at the end just in case I decided to drop it, looked at the clock and thought well, we'll just run through it once real quick.  The Spirit starts to move (well I suppose had been moving all along, but you know, more so), Pastor gets up and starts to speak words of wisdom over the church and pray for people, we end up hanging on that song for a good 15 minutes, or at least if felt like it.  God is so cool.

Other momentous things...we just put the mattress level in Asher's crib down this afternoon.  Realized it wasn't even really good enough just to go down by one notch, we had to take it down two.  This will make us practice that whole, 'put them down while they're sleepy not when they're asleep' thing.  Mostly because it won't be so much putting him down as dropping him int there.  At least for me, Jeff's got a bit more height and arm length on me.  Let's just say, Asher has to be able to crawl in and out by the time I'm largely pregnant again because I won't be able to reach him.  He could play a hilarious game of 'run away from mommy' right in his crib if he wanted to.  Real funny.  If any of you teach him that game I will seriously have to reconsider our friendship. 

I honestly think Jeff is more traumatized by this crib thing than I am.  Neither of us are prepared for him to be growing up so fast, but Jeff gets more flustered by 'event's' like putting the crib down.  I, on the other hand, am struck dumb by the fact that I pulled out the nine month clothes last month and now I'm having to put them away in favour of the twelve month ones.  For those of you wondering, Asher turns seven months next Sunday.  I really thought I had the clothing thing licked until at least February or March, now I'm going to be lucky if I have enough clothes to last us until January.  The nice thing is that these hand-me-downs will certainly not look or feel that way.  There are some things that he literally only got to wear once.  

I could talk about Asher all day, and I will, later.  For now, onto other momentous-ness.  Jeff has officially been offered a job in Oxford, England.  I suppose it's not so new to be offered a job in the UK, we've already turned one down this year because it wasn't going to pay us enough to live.  This one is offering more, probably enough to live on, but possibly not quite enough to pay off our debts with.  Having a PhD is great, but it comes with quite a price tag.  Moving across the continent to Chicago is great, but not having expenses paid hurts a little.  Being a stay-at-home mom is awesome, but I haven't been working for quite a bit longer than I've been a mom.  You get the picture.  Anyway, we're still doing the math and as Jeff says, saying no because of money is a sucky reason.  And of course we realize not really a good enough reason.  We want to be saying no only because we're saying yes to where God wants us to go.  (Do you like that turn of phrase?  I was quite impressed with it when I came up with in the car on the way home from church today.  So much so, that I thought I would quote it to you now.  I still have so much work to do on the whole pride thing.)  

So where else might God want us to go?  Well, there's always the possibility of staying here.  Jeff has an interview on Friday with a firm here in Chicago that could be very exciting (and we certainly wouldn't be saying no because of the money).  And then there's the job in France that he's quite excited about.  Right now, it's almost too much to think about so we're putting it off until after his interview.  But I realized today that we will very likely know where we are going (or not going) by the end of November.  Especially seeing as if we are going, it will be within the first couple weeks of January.  Holy crap!!  That's like two months from now.  That's nuts.  Unless of course we stay in Chicago and then all of this will be moot.

Okay, last thing for now.  Jeff's birthday is tomorrow.  Yay!!  He's turning 33.  I'm allowed to share that because I've already turned 33 and he never lets me forget that I'm older than him.  He managed to give me a much better birthday than I'm giving him, poor guy.  He had a surprise birthday party for me and everything.  The best part was that the way he kept me out of the house for people to get in and decorate, was to take me out to lunch for my birthday.  There will be a meal out and presents and a performance of Wicked in November.  That means finding a baby sitter.  Wow, we haven't done that since Father's Day and Asher was a touch less high-maintenance back then.  And hey, now that I think of it, why are we only getting sitters and going out on Jeff occasions, where's my night out baby-free?  Well, that's a blog for another time.