Here's a glimpse of what we've been up to in this crazy year of a pandemic and canceled everything. Maybe someday I'll add pictures and add more details, but this is all I've got for right now.
January: Started the month off in Uganda and Kenya on our humanitarian trip. Then spent the rest of the month trying to adjust back to real life.
February: More real life. As per usual, it felt like a long month of short days and lots of places to go and things to do. Emma got her mission call to the Toronto, Canada--Spanish speaking mission to start the MTC on July 15th.
March: This is when the world started falling apart. It started off normalish, then Cami came home for spring break, which was pretty much right COVID started hitting hot and heavy. Our spring break trip to France, Germany, Norway, and Portugal was canceled, my parents came home from their mission, and we tried to leave the home as little as possible.
April: I learned that I can't digest gluten properly anymore. I think subconsciously I knew it for the last couple of years, as I had been gradually eating fewer and fewer grains. But all the COVID baking made me realize that it's not grains....it's gluten....and it 100% makes me sick, even when I eat very small amounts. I'll be honest, this was a tough realization for me and I've cried over it more than a few times. On the bright side though, my digestive system hasn't felt this good in years. Emma came home from BYU at the end of the month and my parents returned to their home in Utah.
May: We get desperate to figure out what we're doing this summer. Things were falling apart at Glen's job and he didn't feel like it was in the long-term cards to stay, however it also wasn't the right thing to leave yet. So we soul-searched and prayed, and ultimately decided that we needed to commit to stay here for another year. Our landlords were returning from overseas in July, which meant that we were hot and heavy looking for a new place to live.
June: We made a last minute dash to Texas to bring Spencer our extra car, after his was totaled while parked on the side of the road. It was quick, but great to spend time with Spence in Dallas and Cami and Garrett in Austin. While we were in Texas, Glen picked out a new place for us to live. Many places were not allowing showings and rentals were flying off the market, so we were grateful to find something in a nice neighborhood at a reasonable price. It was a little crazy committing to it sight unseen, but we had little choice and it turned out to be a good thing.
July: This was a crazy month. We packed up the bit of stuff we had with us in Malvern, got the rest of our stuff out of storage in Virginia, moved into the new place in Phoenixville, then Emma started at-home MTC...all within a week. It was crazy to say the least, but it was surprisingly lovely to see all of our stuff again after it had been in storage for so long. We weirdly felt more at home in this new rental within a couple weeks, than we ever had living in the pre-furnished house in Malvern for an entire year.
August: This was a month of getting settled in and enjoying having a missionary living in our home. It was a blessing to have her around for a bonus 6-weeks and my only regret is that we couldn't provide her a more peaceful, put-together environment for her MTC experience. By the time she left at the end of the month, was when we finally started to feel like things were pretty settled. She was reassigned to serve in the SLC-West mission and left unendowed, because the temples were still closed.
September: It's a weird school year for everyone, but we tentatively jumped in and tried to make a go of it the best we could. We've really enjoyed being able to talk to Emma on a weekly basis and we were very excited when she let us know that she was scheduled to be endowed on September 28th and that we were welcome to fly out to accompany her. Glen had a huge deadline to get through, but happily the endowment date came right AFTER the deadline, so we decided to make it our belated summer vacation. Cami and Garrett came up from Texas and Spencer finished up his sales job in Las Vegas, so it was fantastic to be all together as a family for a couple of days.
To be continued...