Back and better than ever

Well, I've been back from my honeymoon for almost a week now. We are still enjoying our early wedded bliss. This, despite our cramped 2-bedroom apartment that we are sharing with my brother. The boys used to sleep with me on my bed, but now that I have a wife I've kicked them out into the living room to sleep. So our living room is now not only the T.V. room, dining room, art room, and toy/play room, it is also a bedroom for two. I really wish I could have given my new bride a better home to move into, but this is what we have right now and it will have to do. It's weird the considerations we guys don't even think about when we aren't trying to accommodate a woman. Suddenly I care so much more that the floors are stained and dingy, and there's no matching furniture, and my art supplies are always spilling out into the living room and kitchen counter, and no table to eat at. But my wife is so sweet. When we pray together she thanks God for what He has given us, even our bursting-at-the-seams apartment. I pray that whatever we need to learn from being packed together like this we learn in a hurry, and that a house we can afford will come along soon. In the mean time we are doing a lot of packing away and rearranging to try to fit my new wife and her things in here.

My greatest joy of this past week has been watching Heather interact with our sons. She is a natural, and absolutely brilliant when it comes to parenting. By the way she helps them with their homework and deals with their discipline you would think she was a professional. Well, I suppose she was for a while. She cared for two girls for many years before she met me, and I guess that was God's way of preparing her for this new family she is in. I catch myself staring at them and grinning like a fool when I'm making dinner and she is doing stuff with my kids. It just fills my heart with so much joy because there was such a huge gap in our lives until now, and that longing is being filled. It reminds me of something our pastor said in our wedding ceremony. He said that he saw this marriage as an answer to prayer. He said God put a desire in our hearts. And we were the answer to that desire, the answer to our prayers. Then he said there is a problem with that. The problem being that since God answered our prayers with each other, there is a danger that we will start to look to each other for our needs when we should be going to God first. So I make sure I'm putting my appreciation to God for bringing Heather into our lives. The neat thing about it is that the love and appreciation isn't diverted away from Heather when I feel it for God, but instead magnified. It's hard to explain, but when you recognize how amazing a person is, not just because they happen to be amazing, but because God designed them that way, you get a whole new level of appreciation for them.

Speaking of appreciation and answers to prayer… My oldest son started 4^th grade this year with a substitute filling in until a permanent teacher could be found. Well, it turns out that his new full time teacher is a woman from our church who knows Justin from Sunday school. So even though we can't afford to put him in a Christian school, we have the next best thing: a teacher who prays for him. Both the boys have been doing so well lately. Shane is loving kindergarten, and Justin is acclimating to his peer group much better than last year. They are both loving having a mom around and are thriving as a result.