Yay!

New pair of running shoes, happy little bug babbling on his mat, Mark's not on call this weekend! It's going to be good:)

Ch...ch...ch...changes

I had the pleasure of having lunch today with a few of my good friends from Tyndale. During lunch, they all asked how things were going being at home and it made me reflect a little bit on all that's different in the last few weeks. It's been amazing to not be torn between work and work at home; I love that I'm starting to learn more about Dane and how he operates. It's great to know the difference between an "I'm hungry" cry and an "I'm tired" cry. I also get the pleasure of being around during his happy times, when I was previously at work. I now have time to plan our dinners better and do more stuff around the house, creative and just cleaning-type stuff. Overall, I really think this was the best choice we could have made for this time in our lives. However, I was at a complete loss today, as I filled out the box for "occupation" on a passport application. What am I now? I realized how secure I'd been in my ability to have a good job and pay my way. Now that I no longer have the  typical "job" I was used to, I don't really know what my occupation is. However, if it consists of what I do all day, my title will NOT fit in the box provided. I'm a comforter-bottledeliverer-burpcloth-decorativepainter-householdchef-masteroflaundry-casualphotographer-juggleroflife who collapses into my intern husband's arms on the nights he's not overnight at the hospital...how life has changed! And let me remind myself here that my value comes not from all that I'm learning to do and love, but from the One who first loved me. If I can just keep this in mind, I'll be able to enjoy this time of our lives for all it's worth.

The colors of our house

When we just moved, we decided to switch things up a bit. This is something that, as long as I'm not an interior designer with other people's homes to decorate, will continue happening to wherever we're living. We've gone through a change for each home we've lived in since getting married, going from teal and various reds,

































to teal, red and various greens,

































to teal and various oranges/reds. I love being able to constantly change up our surroundings. It keeps things interesting (at least for me) and gives both Mark and I a creative outlet, which we're sorely lacking in this stage of life.

Our most recent addition to this scheme was a desk we found by the dumpsters, just right for our printer and a few office-y things. We did a quick cleanup and added a new drawer-pull, and voila, free desk! That matches our stuff! Here are some of the colors and textures that we currently have in our living room.

Something I'll never get tired of

Seeing Mark wake up the babe in the morning. It's when Dane's at his smiliest and it's excellent to see them grinning at each other. Makes me very happy!

Furniture on the cheap

This week home has been surprisingly busier than I expected (you all told me it would happen!). While I haven't had much time to start working on Etsy stuff, I have managed to do some actual baking and cooking, along with starting to get the house back together after a week away! Yesterday, Mark and I made a great find near the dumpsters outside our apartment complex. Now, I know that you might associate this with saggy, stinky mattresses, half-dead ficus trees and floor lamps missing shades, but we've actually made a few good finds over the last couple years. This item was a black lacquer desk with a drawer and trestle detailing. It has one pull on the drawer, so I'm hoping to find a cool pull to switch with the existing one.  After some minor repair and some major cleaning, we have a great desk that we're going to keep our printer and some office-y stuff on. It goes really well with our other decor, so yay for one man's trash being our treasure:) The best part is that it was free! Our other good finds lately are all mid-century modern or Danish items, including an awesome console dresser for $30 bucks at a resale shop, 4 beautiful (well, beautiful after a coat of spray paint and changing out the black vinyl seat covering for Marimekko fabric) dining chairs for 7.50 each, and a Danish wooden dining table from Craigslist. We've become pros at hitting the scratch/dent section of the Crate and Barrel outlet and Ikea, checking craigslist regularly and knowing which resale shops get the best furniture. Someday we may justify spending actual money on furniture...but I doubt it; it's too much fun to find the real deals:)

Etsy

This is my first week home and my first project is to start working on an Etsy store. I've got a couple of ideas, including some jewelry and some furniture plans. I'm about to start the first project, a decoupage chair, more modern than the other similar things listed on Etsy. I still need to find a chair to get started on, but in the meantime, I'll be here in the living room, surrounded by baby stuff and magazine pieces:)

Procrastination Friday

Yay for cool design stuff we've been looking at this week!

Good stuff to do with all the fabric scraps you have laying around - I know this was helpful for me!

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/chicago/fabric-textiles/10-easy-ways-to-put-your-fabric-stash-to-use-090781

I'm in love with the dark color of this room. Although, for practical use, you really need to have those high ceilings, or it'd feel like you were living in a cave. It's so dramatic, like a darker version of the periwinkle color I loved when I was little. The little island of warm cognac leather looks so inviting against the dark background.

Lately, we've also had a mild obsession with chandeliers. We bought an excellent one on craigslist, like a vintage George Nelson Bubble Lamp, but much cheaper. I don't love that it's not the pure white of the originals (ours is a cream color), but for a difference of 1200 bucks, I can deal. We removed the contractor special in our apartment's dining room and replaced it with our find. We can hardly wait until we have a house of our own with more than one good spot for fun, hanging lighting. We've been eyeing this one (at DWR), but can't quite justify the price tag. $1200...not sure whose Reach that's Within...not ours.

Mark also sent me a link to this sweet car on Wednesday, the new Mercedes electric, gull-wing sports car. Whoa. I might pass out from too much awesome. The original from 1955, and the new version, set to be available in 2010.

Painting Experimentation

Our new apartment, while being larger, also ended up feeling more desolate because of the large, generic apartment-white painted rooms. So, in an effort to make our big, white space feel like home, we did a little painting. We've done three rooms so far, with plans to eventually do a couple more, including our bedroom. The only problem is that we'll have to prime over all our hard work when we move out. We had thought about wallpaper (too expensive and messy), textured wall tiles (again, expensive), stenciling (not really on a large enough scale) and finally decided to try painting a pattern. The first is one Mark found online that I was able to reproduce using a large, tagboard stencil that I created. This one took about 6 hours to do, using two colors of paint and realizing about 1/4 of the way in that tagboard doesn't hold up well with wet paint.

The guest bedroom, which our moms are using while staying with us for now and will eventually be Dane's room, was done with a couple widths of painter's tape. We based the design on one used by a decorative painter that is a contributor to ApartmentTherapy's ColorTherapy section. It turned out okay, but if I had to do it over, I'd probably use the wider-width tape on all the portions of the pattern. 

Patterned Wall Painting

In our new apartment, Mark and I decided to paint since we knew we'd be here a while. It makes a place feel so much more like home when the walls aren't stark, apartment-building white. In the living room, we duplicated a pattern we saw on a design blog that Mark follows. It was done using a tagboard template I created and took WAY longer than I thought it would at first. The fact that the tagboard started to warp after the first pattern sure didn't help. But with some creative taping and a very cute extra set of hands from Mark, we were able to finish it.

For Dane's room, I want to use the lighter of the blues from the living room, and use painter's tape to create a geometric pattern. But I want to do something more exciting than the typical stripe. I found this on ApartmentTherapyNY, and thought it would be decently easy to reproduce. For the sake of time, I think I'm going to limit the more complicated swath to a smaller stripe around the top 1/3 of the room. The tape I chose is also about 2 inches, versus this thinner tape. I was toying with the idea of doing a 1/8 turn, making the grid square instead of diamond, or maybe trying to use both thinner and wider tape. Not sure yet how it's going to work. I'll put the results up when I'm done. All of this to say that I need projects! My fear of feeling purposeless in this new phase of life is motivating my creativity like you wouldn't believe. I hand-pitted 2 lbs of cherries today while the babe was sleeping. There has to be an easier way...note to self: buy cherry pitter...

Curtains

For the Daner's room, I need to make a set of curtains so it remains dark in the morning, since we're now facing the sun. His bedding is Zoo by DwellStudio for Target. What do you think? Other ideas? THese are just a couple of fun fabrics I found today - not necessarily all for his room, but good stuff nonetheless.

Starting at the beginning...again

As you can see from all the previous blog posts, this isn't something I've been very good at. I'm starting a new chapter of life, being at home to be with our babe, and one of my goals is to rediscover some of the things that used to make me tick. I'm going to work on adding some of the stuff I'm working on and inspired by to this blog, more to keep track of it for myself than anything. I just spent about 30 minutes trying to remember how/where I saw an awesome handmade wallpaper lamp online. Never did find it, but it just goes to show that I need to WRITE STUFF DOWN if I want to keep track of it. I hope you add your thoughts and inspirations as well.

The marathon

So, I've been thinking a lot lately about how to survive tough things when it never seems to end. My parents have given me the perspective of "you should be thankful you have so much; there are people who are REALLY suffering out there". While I know that's the right way to look at it, that attitude is just not one I can manage when I haven't seen my husband for days, am struggling to find meaning in copying or working on Excel sheets for hours at my job,and realizing that my few friends are SO far away geographically. Mark finished his 6 month journey through medicine and surgery, and despite being done with 70 hours/week, overnights, weekends, just general junk schedule, we're now moving on to even more of the same. We've been living like we're just trying to survive for so long that I wonder if the damage we're doing now to finish school is going to be worth the "payoff" in the end. Exactly what that payoff will consist of is still foggy, like so much else in Mark's (our) journey through med school. So, the questions constantly running through my head lately are these: Is this marathon worth it if we end up so battered at the end that we no longer recognize who we were when we started? Is it possible to have a better attitude through this? Of course, we both want to believe that we have years of enjoying the fruit of our struggles ahead. It's so hard sometimes. At work, I have a post-it note on my computer with 2 Timothy 1:7 on it. "For God did not give us a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline." Huh. I don't know about you, but my spirit feels like nothing BUT fear right now. I'm not feeling God's power, I'm SO not loving sometimes and if I had any self-discipline at all, I wouldn't be uncomfortable in a two-piece swimsuit for the first time in my life...ew. How do I get to this spirit of power?

We were reading a devotion last night (literally the first one in like 6 months), and it was talking about prayer. It made the point that when our communication with God is clogged because of unrepented sin, we can't expect growth. This is not a new concept for me, but in talking to Mark about it and being intentionally, sort of painfully introspective, I realized that my prayer life is so frequently full of "God please give this person safety; please let Mark's exam go well; thank you for this" that I rarely take time to look at my actions throughout the day and repent for those that I know were wrong.

Could it be that my spirit of fear is brought on by my lack of repentence? That I'm not living in a spirit of power because there's a self-imposed dam blocking what God really wants for me? If this is true, I am able to clear my relationship with God simply by taking time to repent for the sins, big and small that I live in each day. Like a stream clogged by debris after a hard rain, all it takes for a clear, even flow is to move that debris. That's the goal.

Marriage is wonderful...but not what I expected.

I feel like this statement sums up how I feel lately. I would hazard a guess that I'm not the only who came upon that realization shortly after slipping the wedding rings on for good. Before we were married, I had a picture in my head of how things would be. I saw things like spending sunday afternoons playing frisbee in the park, as sunlight dappled our hair through the leaves (of the huge oak trees we were playing under, duh!). I saw us doing devotions every night, together, growing in love for God with each other. I saw our apartment as a happy place to come home to after a day's work, me sewing things and Mark reading on the couch.

In reality, there are no safe parks near our condo for miles and miles. We're exhausted after work most nights, so instead of taking up self-improving hobbies like sewing, or developing our love for God, we end up collapsing on the couch with dinner, making lunches for the next day, and falling into bed with, at best a kiss or two before Mark starts cocooning into sleep. Hello, rude awakening.

Before all this transpired, we both thought we had prepared fully for the partnership we were about to enter. Due to the long distance relationship, we had spent loads of time on the phone each night, scouring the internet for questions to ask each other.

"Did we already talk about our confrontation styles?"

"I think so. Did I ask you what your favorite Christmas tradition was growing up?"

"Uh, yeah, we just talked about that a couple nights ago."

"Oh"

"What do you want to talk about?"

" I don't have anything."

"Me neither."

"......."

It went on like this until we hit pre-marital counseling through our wonderful, Christ-following, very Bible-based church. We were so excited to have more to talk about until we got to our mentor couple's home and realized immediately that we already knew all of these questions. In fact, we knew them so well we could actually answer for the other person...

Seeking more counsel from our parents proved to bring up no questions we hadn't already discussed with each other, and since we both immediately fit in with our respective "in-laws", it didn't provide much fodder for conversation or confrontation.

Then we got married. The honeymoon was wonderful, full of sun, relaxation, and all the picture-perfect moments I'd always imagined. Already, however, cracks were beginning to form in the unmarred surface of our relationship. I remember stalking down the beach back to the house after a stupid disagreement with Mark, one that had begun because I wanted to take a picture of our names drawn in the sand, and felt he wasn't enthusiastic enough about the idea. I quickly learned that I didn't like annoyed Mark,and he quickly learned that one of the ways I deal with confrontation is to run. On the fight or flight scale, I am fully flight.

These things were just the beginning of the realization that although we both believed we were perfect for each other, that didn't mean either of us were perfect. This is a great thing for couples to realize BEFORE they start living together. If you think your guy walks on air and can do no wrong, wait until it's three in the morning, you're still awake, and want to talk and he's snoring like a lumberjack. If you can't imagine your future wife doing something that could possibly be anything other than adorable, wait until she starts to re-organize your stuff on moving in together.

You can try to prepare in a million ways, but if you don't consciously realize before the wedding that both of you are going to let the other down, you'll be in for a shock. The good news is, as I said above, that even if you're both imperfect people, you can still be perfect for each other.

I'm still alive

This weekend, my parents and I came down to Chicago to visit Mark and usher a BlueMan Group show. My parents don't get a chance to leave work and home super often, so it was really exciting to have them for the whole weekend. We got all dolled up in our matching outfits of white shirts and black pants and headed downtown. We looked like a herd of waiters who escaped from a restaurant, either that or a group of Jehovah's Witnesses. My parents surprised me and did a great job of getting people to their seat, handing out programs and generally entertaining people with their seemingly unrelated questions (oh wait, that was just my dad;)) We watched the show, and then after a quick change, went to Giordano's for a delightful slice of stuffed pizza. Holy cow, it was good! We finished the pizza fest and headed home to bed. What a great day!

So, the last few months have been some of the most stressful in terms of wedding activity so far. I was thinking about it comparatively to the Epic days, and realized how on my most stressed day now, I'm about 1/10 as stressed as I was at Epic. These thoughts came about because of the sermon we listened to today at our possible future church, Calvary Memorial in Forest Park. It was the story of Ruth and how she chose to seize the opportunity provided to her by God. She made a decision and left the results with God. It felt like an analogy for my life this year. God gave me the opportunity to go to Mexico this summer. I was stressed with work and felt like I had too much on my plate. For some reason, I still felt compelled to go. I did, and met Mark. Then, I had a slightly scary opportunity to leave Epic. As frightening as it was, and despite my lack of understanding why I felt I needed to leave and move to CFACT, I did. It turned out to be the best decision I could have made. So, it was really encouraging today to be reminded of the beauty of making a Godly decision and just trusting that He'll use your obedience to further His purpose for you. I don't believe that making a decision you think is Godly will always end up going exactly as you hoped, but at the very least you know that choosing obedience is taking a step toward God. His purpose, while not always matching our limited view for our lives, will be carried out, and is always, despite short term events, the best thing for us and for His glory.

After that thought-provoking sermon, my family (Mom, Dad and Mark!) sat down at Cosi to enjoy lunch and then headed north. We had an amazing weekend, and once again, I'm reminded of how much I have to be thankful for.

Wow

So, when I made that last post in October 2005, I didn't realize it would be a year and a half before the next one. My life is completely different, and completely wonderful. God has been working on me, giving me back joy in life. The most significant change is that I am now engaged to the perfect man for me. His name is Mark, and in God's grace, he loves me as much as I love him, despite both our sets of imperfections. We'll be married three months and three days from now in Madison, and then move BACK to Chicago, a place I was sure I'd never live in again. I am SO excited for the next few months, finishing up planning for the wedding and enjoying my last bit of time as Larissa Moyer. Last weekend, Mark and I visited Beth in Stevens Point to watch her do her thing at CRU. She was fantastic and our time together, as usual, was filled with laughter. She is a bright spot in my life! We braved a snowstorm to get there, and then another to get back to Madison the next day. In the process, I came down with a cold, and had to be coddled back to health by Mark, who was on spring break. He's back in Chicago for another week of school now. Poor him! So, those are the updates. I'll be better this time around. I think. On a related note, it might seem weird for me to leave my old post up, but it's part of how I got here, and I like to remember those things, so I can be encouraged by how far I've come.