Temptation.

Temptation comes in many and various forms. 

For those of us that love Pyrex, temptation comes in the form of finding these in one of the cabinets in your vicarage house. 

I will not steal this Pyrex when we move. I will not steal this Pyrex when we move. I will not steal this Pyrex when we move. 

I won't even "accidentally" forget that it isn't mine. 

Promise. 

The Single Parent

Ben went out of town this weekend to take some high school kids to a conference in Salina. This is the first time that Ben has been gone for more than a day since we've had kids, and probably since we've been married.

I learned a couple of important things in the time since Friday night.

1. If Ben ever died in some horrible way, I could take care of these kids by myself. 
2. I don't want this to happen. EVER. 
3. My kids really don't want this to happen. EVER. EVER.

Ben and I have a system. It is the Ben uses his deep voice and gets the kids in line while Tamara provides a calm and stable environment system. It works pretty well. Except for when he isn't here to use his deep scary voice. That means that I have to use my scary voice and I think that it kind-of freaked the kids out. 

I have a whole new respect for the single mother, and a whole new understanding of the phrase "my kids are stressing me out."

I am looking forward to Ben's return. If he wanted a pet pony (or you know, more board games), today when he gets home would be the day to ask. But....don't tell him that. 

Our house, in the middle of the street.

Here are some pictures of our new house.

 Front of the house. 

 These are the steps we have to climb to get up to the house. I'll either need knee replacement surgery by this time next year or will be in way better shape than I am now. 

 Every old house should have a porch swing and ours totally does. We love it. 

 The living room. The TV belongs to the parsonage. We are going to get pretty spoiled this next year. 

 The rest of the living room along with a sleeping Sophie. 

Stairs going up to the bedrooms.  

 Dinning room. 

 This is the biggest kitchen I have ever had. I love it. 

 Play area. This is actually the rest of our dinning room, but I thought it would make a great play area. 

Ben's parents bought me this kitchen desk and hutch at an auction. I love it. 

We are getting pretty well settled. I am excited to get all the bedrooms set up, but we still have a little ways to go on those. 

A Letter to Sophia

Dear Sophia:

Gentle is not a word that our mother says a million times a day for her own amusement.

And...Ow.

Love,

Elinor

Ruby Slippers

Last Saturday we pulled in front of our house in Atchison, Kansas, dredged up the hill to our front door, and saw for the first time the inside of what will be our home for the next year. It's good to be home. 

It was a long trip, but not a horrible trip. The kids were actually pretty good, well...at least the two that rode in my car were pretty good. I was kind enough to let my mom drive the two year old. I pretended this was fair because I took two kids and one of them was a baby. In all honesty she totally drew the short straw because riding in a car with Connor and Elinor is like a picnic compared to spending five minutes in a car with Sophia Jane. My mom was kind enough to say that Sophia was pretty good during the trip. 

Atchison is an old railroad town, the home of Amelia Earhart, and where you'll find Trinity Lutheran Church and, for the next year, Vicar Benjamin Ockree. Our house is half a block from the church which is pretty awesome. We can walk to church on Sunday. There are a lot of perks to living here. 

Things I am going to love about the city of Atchison:

1. The city is built on a grid. With numbered streets going one way and named street another. Just like a city is meant to be built. 
2. There is a Sonic here (I may have already indulged in roughly a million strawberry limeades)
3. People say hi to you, at the store, as you're walking down the street, wherever you go. People say hi. 
4. People here are just nice. It isn't that people in Indiana were rude, they were just kind of indifferent. I missed nice people. 
5. They drive kindly here. I have not been honked at even once since we got here. This is a pretty amazing accomplishment considering I got honked at basically everyday in Fort Wayne for doing such horrible things as stopping at a stop sign, not turning fast enough, being in my lane, and going the speed limit. 

The very best thing about living here so far has been the amazing people at Trinity. They have been very welcoming to our family.  

1. When we showed up on Sunday afternoon to unload the truck there was a group of able bodied men and women to help us unload. It only took us 40 minutes to unload the entire truck. 
2. A member brought over brownies for us while we were unloading. 
3. When I opened my fridge there was already food inside. Someone had made us baked spaghetti!
4. We found ice cream and freezer pops in the freezer.
5. Another member brought over a breakfast casserole for our first morning in the house. 
6. We also were given another meal by a couple of teachers at the school. Sloppy Joes!

I could get used to this. 

I'll post some pictures of the house and town soon. 

Farewell dear friend.

We are leaving Fort Wayne on Friday. Although I am excited about Ben's vicarage and the new friends and experiences that I know we will have there, it is a sad kind of excited. Another chapter in my life, a really good chapter, is ending. Like a good book, I have to move past the part of the story that I already know and move on to see what the conclusion will bring.

There are things I won't miss about Fort Wayne - like the crazy way they drive and the fact that you can't get Chinese food delivered to your door without paying another company to go get it and bring it to you, but there are a lot of things I will.

I'll miss Lynne. A lot. A lot, a lot. She has been an amazing friend to me while I was here. The kind of friend that you can call at 3:00 am and ask for help. The kind of friend where you can rattle off a quote and you both start giggling. Also, she is one of the approximately seven people in this world that actually get me. She gets my weird sense of humor, my love of being snarky, and my general oddness. This doesn't happen very often.

I'll miss the seminary. I think that the seminary campus is one of the most beautiful and serene places I've ever been. I'll miss the students too. Because of my work in the library, I've been able to get to know a lot of these young men. They are amazing, funny, and smart guys that are going to be amazing pastors. I'll miss getting to spend time with them. I'll miss the fact that I can throw out words like tentatio or complain about my old Adam and everyone in the room knows exactly what I am saying.

I'll miss living across the street from Target. I mean...it's Target. What's not to miss?

So far, this is the place where my kids have been raised. Connor was so little when we moved here that he has basically no memory of living in Topeka, he only remembers the friends and family we have there. This is the only home that Sophia has ever known. The place she thinks about when we say we are going home. She and Elinor are Hoosiers, and it makes me sad that they won't remember ever being Hoosiers when they grow up.

In a lot of ways Fort Wayne is also the place where Ben and I grew up. It is the place where we became our own family. The place where we learned to rely solely on each other. Our parents couldn't come and rescue us when life got stressful, we had to deal with it. It was hard in the beginning, but also amazingly good for our marriage. We learned that we could deal with the tough stuff...by ourselves...if we needed to.

Goodbye Fort Wayne. You've been good to us. Now it is time for us to start another chapter in our life and see what it brings.

Thank you to everyone that has been a part of our lives for the past three years. We will miss you all so much.

Satan and the Bees

Three years ago at about this time we were loading up a moving truck to move to Fort Wayne. The majority of our belongings were sitting in Ben's parents garage in boxes. The rest of our stuff was in their house and would be most easily loaded into the truck via the garage.

A week or so before we were ready to load the moving truck we noticed that there were a number of bees in the garage. Then we noticed that this was probably because there was a hive in the garage. Ben's parents did what any good parents would do in this situation, they called an exterminator who informed them that killing the bees wouldn't solve the problem. You had to get rid of the hive or more bees would move into the ready made home. And...killing the bees would also be roughly eleven million dollars...give or take. So, being the super awesome parents that they are, they called some sort of bee whisper lady (the details are a little fuzzy) who could come and coax the queen bee out of the hive and that all the other bees would abandon the hive if their queen was gone. She would then take the hive out. This also cost them roughly eleven million dollars.

Since Ben and I didn't have eleven million dollars and I am guessing his parents didn't either, we opted for option number three. We decided to move our junk out early in the morning when the bees would be less active and pray that we didn't get stung a bunch.

The day of the big move arrived, we picked up the truck, opened the back, opened the garage and....there were no bees. They were just gone. We loaded up our stuff and moved to Fort Wayne.

At the time, the bee situation seemed like such a big deal. It seemed like just another roadblock that Satan was throwing in our path to keep Ben from going to seminary. Over the past three years we have experienced so many instances of Satan throwing road blocks in our path that the whole bee situation seems a bit...well...lame.

What are bees compared to cutting our income in half, moving eleven hours away from our family, totaling a car, car repairs, a miscarriage, and our newborn needing surgery right before we move. Bees, which seemed like such a big deal at the time, are almost laughable to Ben and I know. We sometimes think back on that day and say "Really Satan, bees? Were bees really going to stop this from happening?"

Throughout these three years God has provided so fully for us and taken care of our every need, and even quite a few of our desires. It has taught us to trust. To trust that in the midst of the worst situation we can find joy and comfort in the knowledge that God will take care of us. Joy and comfort in the knowledge that He has already taken care of us in the way that matters the most. He has sent His very own Son to die on the cross for our sins and our salvation. Jesus has redeemed me in the eyes of the Father. Making me worthy of salvation in a way that I could never hope to do on my own.