One Week and Counting . . .

In a little over one week Josh will have successfully completed his first year of the PHD program!!!! WOW! Praise and thanksgiving to our gracious God. It does not seem like two semesters have passed. Josh just finished an extra class this week and will turn in a paper tomorrow on Hermenuetics. Then next week he will present at Seminars and interact with his colleagues' papers. And on Saturday we will be celebrating!

Only three more weeks until the Spring Program at the preschool and the kids are working hard on their songs and lines.

We are definitely on the countdown! The best part is that we end up in Medford and then Portland to see our families over Memorial Day Weekend. It is amazing what impact of seeing family has as an incentive for us.

I want to tell you about our perfect day even though we don't have any pictures to comemorate it. It started out with an amazing 85 degree day about two Saturday's ago. We went on a bike ride into a fun (little Italy-style) town called Sausalito. We were looking for a beach that someone had told us about and found it. It was also a Kayak rental area that was affordable to our surprise! So we rowed out into the bay for about 40 min among the private boats and yachts. Very fun and a great upper body work out. After riding our bikes back to our car we took off towards Stinson beach. It was beautiful there and so we camped out on our blankets in the sand for several hours to play Settler's of Catan (our favorite board game). We headed home with the sunset in our rear view mirrors and picked up some Grilly's (a Mexican take out spot in Mill Valley) and hung out at home. It was one of those days that you just cannot express how sweet and connected you feel to one another, definitely a gift from The Lord! We just thought that we would share it with those that would have been fun to have along with us:)

One more thing, I started a hobby that has been such a fun outlet! I have been using left over paper from our wedding to make some fun cards. Check it out on the etsy.com website. My "shop" is at greenlittlenotebird.etsy.com. Don't feel like you need to buy anything just have fun looking at a great creative website.

Thanks for reading!