Our Last Night

Well, we are down to our last night here in Eufaula. Meredith and I have been packing, cleaning, playing with boys, or running errands for pretty much 5 days straight now. I am so ready for it all to be loaded so I can just have 10 hours or so of a drive just to chill and relax. Yes, I am so sick of packing that even a long car ride sounds better.

There are so many things that I want to say here at the end of our time here, but I don’t want to go on forever. We are actually still packing. Meredith is in the kitchen cleaning and I am loading up stuff in my car and it is time for my computer to be loaded so I thought I would stop and write before I continue. (For the record I am actually leaching wifi from the Andrews next door, but I won’t tell if you don’t).

This little house is so full of memories. I can’t believe it has just been a little over 5 years ago when Meredith and I moved in. It was that moment, moving from an apartment to our first house (even though it is a rental) that made me feel like a grown up really for the first time. Of course the birth of Nathan less than a month later helped that along too.

Since then this little house has been the place of all of Nathan and Noah’s firsts. Their first smiles, first steps, first words, first everything has been under this roof and between these walls. While Meredith and I were both people who moved here, this has always been their home. It is sort of wild to think that we are moving out and the only memories of this place will come from pictures and videos.

It has been pretty amazing seeing people say bye to them. It makes me sad because these people have been such and amazing part of their young lives and have helped to shaped the men that they will become, and yet for the most part it will go unremembered at least to them. But this place and these people have been exactly what my young men needed and I am excited to have had the opportunity to raise them here.

Now we are set to engage in a new adventure, a new challenge. I know we will find lots of places where we can serve God together and lots of people who will love my boys and nurture them into young men of God. I can’t wait to see what God has planned for us next.

(I especially can’t wait for all of this packing to be finished, but that is a whole different story).

Water World

Being unemployed isn’t always a fun thing (Lack of paycheck probably being the biggest drawback), but one of the coolest thing is all of the time that I have gotten to spend with my boys.

With my “sabbatical” rapidly drawing to a close and Meredith spending the evening at an event at Parkview I took the opportunity to take the boys to Water World in Dothan. They do this thing where on Thursday nights after 5 it is half price (and Noah is free anyway) so it wasn’t that much of a cost and I had been dealing with the heat all day and looking for some nice way to cool off.

Of course the boys loved their time there. Nathan wouldn’t go down the big slides (even though he was tall enough) but he did look at it for a long time trying to decide if he would or not. What he did do was go out in the wave pool by himself and jump over the waves. He spent a good 10 minutes standing in water that alternated between at his knees and over his head. I can’t believe how fast he is growing up.

First Trophy

Nathan finished T-ball back in May but the team just got around to receiving their trophies. Nathan was ecstatic and put his T-ball uniform back on to take some pictures today.