Home Sweet New Home

Alternate Title: Home Sweet New Home +  Our First Married Thanksgiving {and accompanying mishaps.}

Moving is great fun!
Sort of.
Sometimes.
Okay, not really.

Perhaps it would be fun if everything was always as organized as the picture above! But alas... life is not exactly Good Housekeeping Magazine.

The last couple weeks have been somewhat of a tumultuous experience with our move from Kentucky to Alabama occurring over Thanksgiving weekend. We had plenty of loose ends to tie up before leaving Kentucky and several logistics to schedule for our arrival in Alabama; the result was plenty of hours on the phone or composing email correspondences, writing to-do lists, running errands, getting our carpets cleaned and packing. (And sneaking trips to bourbon distilleries!)

I'm glad to be on the other side of it alive (!) even if I am slightly worse for wear. Okay, that may be a bit dramatic.

Kentucky gave us a beautiful but slightly unwelcome send-off with a display of weather on Wednesday night and into Thanksgiving day. On Thanksgiving morning we scraped the snow and ice off our steps and packed up our little apartment into one mid-sized U-haul trailer. The Engineer spent hours going up and down the stairs to our apartment and arranging the items around in the trailer to maximize space and maintain the correct weight distribution while I was a little bit of a pansy and claimed most of the inside work. (Though I did help with all the heavy, two-person items!) After plenty of manual labor we headed off to Denny's for Thanksgiving dinner. Yep! You read that correctly: we spent our first married Thanksgiving at Denny's. We're all about making unique memories around here. :)

Friday morning at o'dark hundred we set off for Alabama with a healthy dose of motivation to conquer the hurdle of moving all by ourselves. We arrived at our new apartment mid-morning to find that the power had unexpectedly been shut off in our unit and we were unable to fix it due to the holiday weekend. This was a rather unfortunate piece of news, but we rallied quickly and managed to make short work of the unloading process to make the best use of daylight. The managers at our apartment community have been so gracious in allowing us to stay in one of their furnished model units because of the unforeseen power outage.

Life recently has felt pretty chaotic and full of emotion. The whole spectrum of emotion. I'm feeling all the feels right now. In light of this, here is an inconclusive list for which I should never cease to give thanks:

I'm thankful

• That I am a chosen daughter of the God, made whole and redeemed by the sacrificial gift of His son who died for me on the cross that I may turn to His embrace and be found pure and lovely despite my sinfulness. 
• That I carry the new title of 'wife' and that I am convinced that the Lord shaped and molded my heart and The Engineer's heart to live as one for life. What a crazy commitment that is! 
• That The Engineer and I have the opportunity and burden of branching out (as we are led) on our own, apart from anything and anyone we know to create a life for ourselves and any future little ones.
• For wonderfully loving and supportive friends and family who have been there through a lot of "thick and thin" moments this year. It's been a doozy. :)

Image above via: Good Housekeeping