My new job, among other things.

I thought after we graduated that we would be able to blog daily about the mundane events in our lives, but it appears that real life has usurped our ability to express ourselves after a long days work, and instead we end up passing out on the couch. Oh well, I'm doing it now, and isn't that what matters?

We have been very busy these past couple of weeks. K Sweat came and stayed with us last weekend and we had lots of fun. We went to a place called Sprinkles Cupcakes, which has about 20 flavors of $3 cupcakes with icing that will coat your arteries in .5 milliseconds but they were really good. She also helped me coral an out of control batch of bread that I was making. Apparently when the recipe says, let it rise for 2 hours, they mean only two hours in order to prevent your oven from exploding with batter. Yikes.

When Alex started working with Frito Lay, he joined one of these diversity inclusion groups called the RISE network (it's really for Native Americans but they focus on the environment as well). This has been a great decision. The founder of the network works at the plant in Irving and she asked Alex if he wanted to be in charge of the environmental fact of the month for the entire RISE network (it's like a club). He accepted. Now, he's meeting people from headquarters who are members of the network and he's writing a short environmental fact every month that gets sent out to every PepsiCo employee over the listserv. I'll get the website for you and put it here so you can see his workmanship. He has a meeting next week with a head Finance honcho at Plano headquarters, so please be praying for that.

Guess what? Remember how I used to have zero jobs? Now I have TWO! That's right! I'm still teaching my adult ESL night class. It has been a blast. I love coming up with new ways to make learning English fun. To practice listening, I've been find songs and printing off their lyrics (and making them miss some of the words) so the students have to listen to the song and fill in the blanks. To practice pronunciation, we did tongue twisters and at the end we had a competition to see who could say it the fastest. It's just a great job. It does take some time, but I really don't mind. I could definitely do this in the Middle East. In fact, Alex and I have talked about just moving over there and teaching if the whole transferring with Pepsi doesn't work out. God has His plan, so we just have to rest in that.

My NEW job happened pretty quickly. Two weeks ago, I applied for a few more jobs online to possibly fill my time. I wasn't expecting anything, of course, because I hadn't gotten any bites yet (except my night job). The next day, they called to set up an interview for a Bilingual Speech Therapist assistant position. So the next day I went to the interview. The funny thing was that one of the ladies interviewing me was a friend of Alex's mom and she had been to our wedding and everything! During the interview, they pulled in a Spanish speaking secretary and she talked to me in Spanish. I almost passed out from nerves. I was afraid she would ask me about marine biology or advanced calculus but she didn't and I passed their little test. They called me that day to offer me the job. I went and filled out paperwork and I started this past Wednesday. Essentially, my job is to translate for the Pre-K and early elementary kids during their speech therapy sessions. It's going to be challenging because I have never really been in a true translating position and these kids have speech disabilities to begin with. Add Spanish speaking on top of that, and they are very hard to understand. Great! I travel from school to school, so it breaks up the day, which is great. My first few days were wonderful. The kids are so dang cute and every therapist has been really nice.

I have an office (fanfare please) that I share with three other people. While I do have an office, I lack a desk right now. I have two skinny tables in the corner of the room. They gave me a laptop (I'm pretty sure that it's serial number is 000000000000003 making it the third laptop to ever be in existence) so I can email people with my new official email address. So, it's pretty cool.

I'm excited about this opportunity to love on some kiddos and get out of the house for a bit, so Alex can sleep in peace! I'll keep you posted on how it's going. Thanks for your prayers. They worked double time!

This whole job searching experience has helped me to realize how God's plan really is that much better than ours. I went to lunch with Alex's mom, Debbie, yesterday and we were talking about our plans and His plans. She said that in order for God to show us His plans, we must first stop looking at how to put our plans into action. Her example was looking for love. We think we know what we are looking for, so we only focus in this one direction. But really, God is waving his hands and doing a dance and saying "Hey! Look over here! This is better! This is what you really want!" Until we make the decision to let go of what we want, then we cannot see His plans for us. I thought I knew what I wanted to do, but I had to turn away from my desires to see what I truly desired. It's pretty crazy how this concept applies in every apsect of my life, yet this seems to be one of the hardest things to learn. If I could just learn to stop looking and trust Him, then I would be much better off.

Psalm 37:4- Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.