Family

First I need to get at least one picture of my little sweet girl on here. Seriously I think that every day I fall more in love with her! Yesterday as we were leaving church, a lady whom I have never met stopped us and commented on how she always stares at Emma during church but she can't help it because she is so beautiful. Of course I think she's beautiful, but I'm a little biased as her Momma so it's such a joy to hear others affirm how special she is! Here's a picture I captured the other night after bath time. I've started reading to Emma occasionally and she sits so nicely. I let her Daddy give it a try and it was such a sweet moment!

Jarred and I had only been married for about 2 months when we found out we were pregnant with our first baby. So technically we are still newlyweds and just celebrated our first anniversary in July. It was a crazy year filled with busy work schedules (me teaching and Jar farming), moving and completely renovating an old farmhouse, awful morning sickness and pregnancy hormones, and preparing for a baby! Somewhere in the midst of all that, we are slowly working at learning how to be man and wife. It's a hard process, one I'm sure we'll be working at for the rest of our lives. Lately we've been dealing with communication and figuring out how to improve it in our marriage. I have been thinking through this dilemma: The middle of an argument is not the time to work through all of your "issues" but when things are going well, I hesitate to bring them up because I don't want to start something. We found ourselves talking over this question last night and agreed that neither of us really knew the answer to it. We decided to set aside every Sunday evening to "family time." We will devote ourselves to keeping this time free of other obligations and focusing on our marriage and family. Jarred felt strongly that he didn't want this to be an open invitation to bring out your boxing gloves and play the blame game but rather a fun time where we create an environment that we feel freedom to talk about things. I want to make sure we do make it a priority to talk however, because I feel like it could be easy to let the fun and happy stuff to take the forefront and just push the serious stuff to the back burner. I am thinking about looking into getting the book Love and Respect. I think they have a DVD to go with it and I thought that we could work through that together. It's be a purposed time of working on our marriage, but in a structure that would prevent a blame game free for all.  I'm excited about this journey of family life. It is definitely work, but so worth it!