So Long, 2014!

2014 has been a very eventful year for our family! We started it off with a super fun trip to Disney World in January.

In February, we excepted an offer on our house, and we put in a offer on another house. Even though there was another offer on the same house, we were thrilled when our offer was accepted!

We found out in March that the buyers for our house were walking away. That was a HUGE blow. We were locked into the contract on the other house, so we that meant we would own two houses even though that's not something that we wanted to do. In spite of the house turmoil, we celebrated our sweet Alaina's second birthday in March.

In April, we closed on our new house and moved in! The plus side to owning two houses was that we were able to take our time with the move.

I went to New York City with my friend Ashley to visit our friend Sarah Denley in May. That was such a great trip! Jude flooded our upstairs bathroom in late May, and the water came through the ceiling and ruined a lot of our floors and ceilings downstairs. We spent a "fun" week with huge fans and dehumidifiers in our house :-/

I got a life changing phone call in June about a sweet little baby who was due in October. Our family spent a wonderful week in Florida the next week, and we corresponded with that baby's birth mother and she ultimately chose us to parent her child. That will definitely go down as one of the best weeks of the year! While we were on vacation, we had our hardwood floors redone because of the water damage.

I helped chaperone a trip for our church youth group with my friend Megan in early July.  It was fun to get to go to the beach again! Jude turned 4 in July, and we enjoyed celebrating him! The rest of the summer was spent preparing our hearts and minds for our new baby who would arrive in the fall.

In August, we signed a lease on our old house. Renting it was not what we were hoping for, but after trying unsuccessfully to sell it all summer, the Lord provided the ideal rental situation for us.

Aubrey celebrated her 6th birthday in September, and a few days later she started kindergarten and Jude started K3. I enjoyed having Alaina to myself a couple of days a week, and we worked on establishing a good homeschool routine.

In October, our sweet, precious Francie was born, and David and I traveled to be with her. That began a whirlwind 6 weeks! Francie had surgery on October 15th and spent the next 4 weeks in the hospital recovering.

On November 17th, our prayers were answered and our entire family was finally able to be at HOME together! We were able to celebrate Thanksgiving together in our own home, and what a wonderful Thanksgiving it was!

In December, we enjoyed the Christmas season and then spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with our families. We're closing out the year with house projects galore! ;)

Wow, what a year it's been! When I look back over our year, what strikes me the most is the Lord's faithfulness and how His plan for us is always good. There were some really fantastic, exciting days in 2014, and there were some hard, stressful days when we questioned the Lord's plan and couldn't understand what He was doing. There were also a lot of ordinary, mundane, normal days, too, that probably never even made the blog :) I'm thankful for all of these days, and I'm so excited to see what the Lord has in store for our family in 2015! I'm so glad that we can enter this new year with the assurance the the Lord will be with us through it all!