I'm Done!

It's hard for me to write a post without a picture, so I'll start with this. This gives you an idea how entertaining this kid is. Just before we left town, Stone had his 3 year check up, and Emerson her 6 month. Isn't this kid hilarious??

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At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, the last few weeks have been some of the hardest ever. I am not one to get stressed out. I rarely feel overwhelmed. In fact, I'm quite the busy bee. I enjoy a plate full of responsibility and tasks. But everyone has their limits, and I recently surpassed mine.

If you don't feel like reading this post, the following 36 hour stretch I recently lived through describes the kind of life we've been living the last three weeks (and I wish I were exaggerating). It went something like this:

Drove from Lubbock to El Paso, shot a wedding in El Paso, shot a bride {plus groom} session at White Sands (awesome! and our kids had fun there, too), headed to Detroit and Flint Michigan for a new-business pitch (if you read my blog, you know I work from home for an advertising agency), won said business (hooray!), immediately headed back to Lubbock to finish packing the moving truck, got positioned in our moving caravan about 3am, started our trek to east TX, and arrived safely in Longview, Texas. Those 3 days were HARD. Have I even mentioned on here that we were moving? Well, we did.

Those 3 days were intense, but that is the pinnacle of it all. However, the events leading to it were nearly as intense. Like, getting as ill as I've ever been (possibly strep, but there was no time to see a doc), completely (100%!) loosing my taken-for-granted sense of taste and smell for about a week (agh!!), aches and pains, a horrible cough, some kind of sinus infection, etc. Today was my first day to wake up with a normal throat. To add to it all, Cliff was wrapping up his summer studies of the bar (and if you're not familiar with the prep for this test, to say it's intense is the greatest understatement ever made), and that made him pretty unavailable. PRIOR to all of this, I started packing, THEN, I got the invitation to be a part of the new-business pitch, which led to an advancement in my company once we obtained said business. But the preparation for the business pitch took me from a part time employee for two weeks to not only a full time employee, but an overtime employee, ON TOP of still being a full time stay-at-home mommy. Which meant, I was doing a lot of work in the middle of the night and early morning, completely and totally ill, while still fitting some major packing into the mix.

There, does it sound like I'm drowning in self pity? Oh well. I can't begin to describe the feeling of relief I have, now that these 2 weeks are behind, and we are settling into our new place. I finally took an overdue nap today, my health is returning, and things are looking bright. And while these last few weeks were so stressful, a lot of it was good stress, but stress, nonetheless.

So how did we move across the state of Texas with two kids, and my absence from packing for 24 hours whilst in Michigan? Her name is Marcy Jessup, my mother-in-law. Holy cow, this lady is an answer to our prayers. I really did not know how we were going to make it through those 3 days, and she came to the rescue. I'm sure she had NO idea how much she would be working. I thought I had made great progress packing before we headed to El Paso, so you can imagine my discouragement when Cliff said they packed all my boxes in the truck in about an hour, and the other 13 hours were spent packing up the rest of the house. Cliff's AC in his truck went out, and Marcy generously drove it across the state of Texas, while Cliff drove the moving truck, and I drove our car. All while being an amazing grandma to my kids. We don't even know how to express our gratitude.

In closing, I need to say that Heavenly Father knows each of us individually and knows our needs. We have struggles, but he's always there for us, and he answered my prayers these last few weeks in different ways. Some people might argue that if he listens to us, we wouldn't have these trials, but I know that we have these trials to build our faith in him, to make us stronger people, and to prepare us for bigger things down the road. He heard me this week, and my faith grew. My words probably don't describe the intensity of our lives these last few weeks, but it was tough, and I'm grateful to have a loving Heavenly Father to watch over and protect us.

THE END.