Christmas in 5 days!

It has been so much fun putting together our house and doing all of our new Christmas celebrations together as a newlywed couple. As it is our first Christmas, I've been trying to make it extra special. I bought a fake tree at Target the day after Thanksgiving and we decorated it that Saturday. Some may think it's sad that we'll never have a real tree, but I feel good knowing we'll never contribute to cutting down trees for Christmas.

I also made sure to send out our first Christmas cards. This picture isn't the one we ended up using for the cards, but it was one of my favorites. Also, last night we just celebrated Christmas with my extended family and gave everyone wedding pictures. This was a big deal as people have been asking about them for months and we've been putting it off, knowing we wanted to give them away for Christmas presents. It was wonderful to see how happy everyone was with their pictures. I also made sure to send in the mail all the other Christmas pictures for relative who live far away.

Anthony keeps reminding me every day that their are __ more days 'til Christmas and we're both so excited to celebrate our first Christmas together.

Rounding to 30

Monday was my birthday and now I'm a 26-year-old. For those of you who haven't reached here yet, it doesn't feel any different from a 25-year-old except for one thing... you're now rounding to 30. Now I don't mean to offend anyone, but to me 30 seems so foreign. I still have a hard time admitting I'm an adult and 30 is very much adulthood. However, as I look back on all of the adventures I have had up to 26, I am reminded how full of a life I have lived so far and I'm thankful.

Invisible Resume?

Lately I've been feeling rather useless when it comes to finding a job. I've known for a while that I wanted to be a teacher, and after graduating & completing student teaching, it is quite discouraging to be living during economic times where no one seems to want to let me teach. I've been filling out so many applications, but with each one I get more and more discouraged due to the lack of response. I've never been in a situation where I've filled out numerous applications just to receive absolutely no response. It sucks! It's like the applications are getting lost in thin air as soon as they enter the outgoing mailbox.

I have been trying to focus on the positive right now. I do have a job in the meantime. Granted, it is part-time, but I should just be thankful I have something. There are many people who have nothing. Today I am going to spend a solid 2-3 hours completing as many applications as possible in hopes that someone will respond. Wish me luck!

Finding New Fellowship

For the past three months Anthony and I have been exploring the art of "church hunting." It has been both frustrating and lonely until this morning. For the first time we attended a church and I could see myself there.

Our quest for a new church home was a decision we made before we got married. Both of our families attended churches and rather than decide whose side we would join, we wanted to have a fellowship which would be ours rather than mine or his home church. While I agreed with this decision, it became increasingly difficult when we were attending church after church and not finding anything we liked. We really wanted a church with other newlywed couples, contemporary worship, good Biblical teaching and close enough to our new home in Long Beach so we could have fellowship with those in our area.

Now I don't want to be too hasty to say this new church is the one we've decided on, because we didn't get a chance to hear the senior pastor preach this morning. However, we've decided to attend again next week & I'm excited.

(Lastly, I purposely didn't mention the name of the church... just in case it's not the one for us.)