How was your year?

Here is a not so short list of milestones from 2007:

- Support raising trip to Colorado in early January. Lots of snow, sub-zero temps, high winds, beautiful landscapes and warm people.
- Birth of our third child Kathryn on March 21. Followed by the requisite recovery time from the c-section, visit from families and friends, etc.
- Preparing our town house for sale in May. Living with some good friends off and on for 6 weeks waiting for our town house to sell. Selling the house in July (closed in August).
-Packing up our house. Determining what to keep, what to send to Spain, and where to put it all in the meantime.
- Driving cross-country July 24 with the kids to Washington DC to spend our remaining time in the States with Faith's parents.
- Faith and I driving to Chicago and back to DC in 3 days to pick up our visas and finish all business in Chicago.
- Depart DC September 3rd
- Arrive in Coruña September 4th. Learn to drive stick shift immediately. Begin looking for a home immediately after checking into a hotel.
- Move into our new apartment September 19th. In that time we opened a bank account, applied for our legal permission to live here, registered the kids for school, met our new church community, and even found time to visit a zoo.
- October 1 - begin two-week intensive course for missionaries in Galicia, conducted entirely in Spanish (and some in Gallego). During this course our church was shut down by the local police and it remained closed for 3 weeks. We had worship outside for three straight Sundays.
- Mid-October, register for and start my Spanish class 2 weeks after classes started.
- Late October - host our first visitors - A college friend stopped by while traveling the world, and Faith's parents stopped by for a week on their way to Romania for a short-term missions trip.
- November 8 - my Grandfather died after a long 3-year battle with cancer. I was not able to return in time for the funeral on the 10th.
- The rest of November we attended an all church retreat with our new church, and hosted some leaders from International teams. Celebrated thanksgiving with other missionaries here in Coruña.
- By the first week of December things felt fairly normal. We were as busy as we had ever been, but the busy-ness felt normal. We finally seemed to hit a schedule and a rhythm to our life. This abruptly came to an end when several things happened seemingly at once.
- December 5th - I had my first significant test for my spanish course
- December 9th - our shipment from the states (40 items - mostly boxes of clothes, kitchen stuff, toys, books, etc) finally arrived. Nearly 2 months after we expected them. This re-ignited some chaos into our little apartment that we are just now nearly finished unpacking. Nearly.
- We also spent more time preparing for Christmas here than I remember doing in the US. We bought a tree and decorations for our house. We tried in vain to plan ahead with our shopping in an unsuccessful attempt to get gifts sent back to the states in time for Christmas. We did a healthy amount of shopping for the boys to help make their first Christmas in Spain a special one.
- We are thoroughly enjoying the 2 week break the boys and I have from our schooling. It feels like the first time in a very long time that we've had an extended period of time together as a family to simply be. Time to exhale, relax, and enjoy time off, and time together.

The Lord has clearly been good to us this year. He has always provided for our needs, but that fact stands out a little more for us this year than in years past. It's crazy for us to think back about how much we've been through this year. It's almost hard to believe.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone!! May the Lord continue to provide you joy in 2008.

Two-thousand Eight-hundred and Thirty-one

This is the first (quality) picture we have from 2007: Pike's peak from my uncle's back yard outside Colorado Springs.

Today Faith and I looked through the pictures we took in 2007. It's hard to describe our year, much less describe looking at a pictorial history of that year. In one sense it seems like it was a really long year when we look back at a trip we took to Colorado in early January, because it seems like it was SO long ago. From here it almost feels like it was another lifetime, almost like looking back onto a previous life from another dimension. On the other hand, the year seems to have flown by to consider the ground we covered, both figuratively and literally.

I started to write a short time line of our 2007 - it's not that short, and would distract from the point of this post. Look for it in a post to come soon : - )

I did the math after our time viewing pictures, and by my non-scientific calculation we took somewhere in the ballpark of 2,831 pictures on the year. I'm not sure about you, but even in our family that is astounding. That doesn't count all the pictures we've accumulated from others (parents, etc). Obviously, not all of those pictures are keepers, and many have been deleted. Nonetheless, I still have 1,887 pictures in my 2007 folder.

I've shared a few of those pictures on this blog over the last several months. I'm going to try to put quite a few more out there in the days to come, before we get back into the regular routines of our lives here. Stay tuned.This is the last (quality) picture taken in 2007. Brennan and Ryan at a castle about 45 minutes drive away.