Camping out...New York style

Ok, so the week after we came home from Montreal, I hit the house packing hard-core! I ordered boxes from a great website that I would highly recommend to anyone getting ready to move. You can buy inexpensive, high quality, used cardboard boxes, and they'll ship them to you in about 2 days for free!

But, I digress.

I spent the entire week following Montreal packing all our worldly possessions. It was brutally exhausting. It's just an overall more complicated and taxing process when you're 7 months pregnant. But the light at the end of the tunnel...by Friday it would all be over and we would be in our new home! Ok, well, that dream came crashing halt on Tuesday evening. Here's the short story...

Back in September Kevin happened to mention to a friend from work that we were looking for a new apartment...something with 2 bedrooms, and a little more space, roughly in our same neighborhood. Well, come to find out, Kevin's friend was in the process of purchasing an apartment that he was then going to turn around and rent out. It was all too perfect to be coincidence, and we have been breathlessly thanking God for giving us more then we ever hoped for in a new apartment ever since! As so often happens when you're dealing with management companies, banks and attorneys, the closing process on the apartment has taken longer then originally anticipated. So, on that Tuesday, we found out that they still hadn't closed on the apartment, and until they did, we could not "officially" move in. However, we definitely had to be out of our old place, as there were people moving in the very day we moved out!

Needless to say, after several long days of packing chaos, this did not go over so well with the little mama. Sweet Kevin came home with a dozen roses that night, knowing I had very well been pushed over the edge. (And all our vases were packed, so the gorgeous pink roses graced our mantle in my blender!)

Wednesday morning, I awoke with a new found sense of peace from God. I began to see our situation for blessing that it was. God was handing us a gift, and if we weren't careful, we were going to miss it. We had to be out by Friday, and our stuff was going to be moved into storage. Which left us with 2 suitcases and our Aerobed on the floor of our new apartment as "guests" of our friends (who no longer live in this apartment -- it's just a big empty space). So after an exhausting week of packing and moving, God was giving us an entire weekend of...nothing. No television, no internet, no boxes to unpack, to pictures to hang...absolutely nothing. We realized that it was perhaps our last chance to have a totally unstructured, unencumbered weekend to do anything or nothing at all. It was bliss! We slept in, explored restaurants in our new neighborhood, went to a movie, went shopping, met friends for brunch, went to bed early, marveled at the leaves changing in Central Park, marveled at the sheer size of our cavernous new apartment, rested, and were blessedly restored.

It is now 2 1/2 weeks later, and we are still on our Aerobed with our 2 suitcases...but the end may very well be in sight! We are told that closing should go through this week, and we may actually get to spend this weekend moving in. We are so excited about it! But more then anything, we are astonished and grateful for the way God has provided for us over the last few months. We are humbled by his regard for us, his loving consideration, the tender way he meets our needs, and the generous way he gives us more then we could hope to ask for. We are also learning to look at our situations through the eyes of Job, who endured more then we can imagine, and still said, "The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised."