Hello from Reston!

Well here we are! Reston is our new home, and it's finally starting to feel like it. It's taken these couple of weeks to get settled and make the mental adjustment of calling a new place home, but now I find myself looking forward to going home after work or feeling the comfort of home after a long day. For the first week I thought that would never come, but it crept up on me and one day I just realized that I had a home again.

We've been enjoying getting to know our new area and finding new fun things to do. We're right across the street from the Reston Town Center, which offers so many possibilities for date nights, girls' nights, and good times in general. Last weekend Erin and I walked over to meet Kara for a free outdoor concert they have every Saturday night during the summer. The Air Force jazz band (Airmen of Note) were playing, and we sat at an outdoor table of a restaurant to enjoy the tunes.

View from outside our condo entrance

Trying to get these two to move out here so we can be in the same town again!

In terms of getting settled in, we're just about there! There are still a few lingering boxes, several things that are yet to adorn the walls, and an extra project or two to complete (like painting our bathroom and cleaning off the patio), but we're making progress. My goal is to have the guest room and bathroom finished off in time for Samantha, my mother-in-law's arrival next weekend. (Very excited about that!)

Right now I have so many different posts in mind, so stay tuned! I have so much more time these days to do new things and come up with new ideas to share (thanks to my ONLY-5-minutes commute!), so expect to see more in coming days. -Including a mini-tour of our new home, snapshots of our 2nd Anniversary, and some goals I have for how to use the extra time in my day. :-)

Moving to the Beat of the Moving Drum

To clarify, the moving [to Reston] drum. And that drum beats like this: beat  beat  beat beat beat beatbeatbeatBEATBEATBEAT.

We started with a yard sale last Saturday morning, and have been in nearly full swing since then. I say nearly, because now that I know what it really means to spend a night packing, I realize we could have gotten so much more done on the evenings earlier in the week when the sense of urgency had not yet hit. But now we're down to only one more day between us and the big move, and I'm trying to keep myself as unstressed as possible. I'm not always successful, but I try.

For instance, I've given up the packing for tonight, brewed some tension tamer tea, turned all the lights in the living room off except one lamp, said forget about updating the budget, and started blogging instead. All the best choices all the way around.

Even though it's been stressful at times, and even though it feels like working two full days in one every single day, I've really enjoyed working next to my man so much. We've spent evenings painting at the condo...evenings packing at the house...and we don't always talk the whole time, but we do when we want to, and we're just together, which is my favorite part of all.

I've been doing a terrible job of taking pictures of our process so far, but my goal is to take more in the coming days. For now, we've been seeing a lot of these two things: paint, and boxes. Even in my sleep. (And I was too tired to do any editing on these tonight, so bear with me.)

At least by my next update...we'll be moved in! I'm SO excited about setting up house in a new place, with some new furniture, new colors, and a new atmosphere. There is so much fun to be had!

It's Official

Due to the 60 miles I travel and roughly 100 miles that Levi travels every day for work, we've decided to start looking for a place to live in Reston. It would cut my travel down to less than 10 miles total and Levi's down to about 30 total, which when combined, is less than mine alone right now! Our lease is up here at the end of July, so we have at least a few more weeks, but they are going to go by fast.

It's taken me a long time to come around to the idea of moving because I love where we're at so much. There's just something about the first place you live together. I remember coming here for a party when the Olmsteads lived here before us, and thinking what a cute little place it was. Then I came another time when Jennifer was designing our wedding invitations, and thought again what a cute little place it was. They were in the process of moving out that time, and we hadn't lined up a place to live yet, so within a few weeks, it was ours to rent! I was amazed at how it worked out, and I couldn't wait to move in.

When we got back from our honeymoon, we opened the front door to piles of wedding gifts and unpacked belongings strewn all over the house. For I think just the first night, we slept in the living room because that's the section of the floor that our mattress happened to occupy at the time. It looked like this:

 We did eventually get settled in though, and had a lot of fun in the process. Two years have flown by since that time, but it also feels like we've just always been here. There are a lot of things I'll miss about this happy place.

I'll miss hearing the baseball games that go on across the street. I'll miss the sort-of musty smell of an older house that says "welcome home" when you've been gone for a while. I'll miss the solid wood cabinets in the kitchen that have the latches you push when you want to open them. I'll miss the creaky floorboards. I'll miss having a full basement with extra storage space, and a little red shed in the back yard. Speaking of that, I'll miss my own yard. I'll miss the chance to garden in it, even though the most I ever did was pick the fresh mint that someone else planted.

We'll miss a lot of things, but we're also excited about what we'll gain. For instance, it will be GREAT to have a dishwasher! We're looking forward to carpet to walk on and I'm looking forward to vacuuming. I love vacuuming. We'll have pool access, be in close proximity to the Town Center with lots of fun restaurants and shops, AND...we'll be close enough to DC to be able to go in more often for date nights or Saturday adventures.

Don't tell anyone, but the more I warm up to the idea, the more excited I get about it. That doesn't take away how much I'll miss this house and the little town of Purcellville that has been home for the past 4 1/2 years, but it won't all be doom and gloom. We'll make more memories and keep growing in love no matter where we are, and that's always something to look forward to.

I took this picture I think on the first day Levi had to go back to work after we moved in. I was waiting for him to get home any minute and I remember just being so excited about my new life with him. That's always what I'll think of when I see this picture.

Ordering Our Ways

With a new year always comes new goals (or maybe old goals that were never realized) and refreshed motivations. For me there is always an extra spring in my step when I'm doing my everyday tasks - cleaning the house, organizing spaces, making menus - and even an extra excitement over tackling otherwise dreaded projects.

Because that's what you do when new years come, right? You realize everything is new. Everything is fresh, especially your motivation. You have that feeling that you're going to do everything right, and everything is going to be organized. And for a while, it probably is, until that motivation diminishes around the end of January. If you even last that long. ;-)

But something I was thinking about this morning during my devotional time, was the parallel between organizing your physical spaces and organizing your spiritual spaces. Or more accurately, I was thinking about how those two spaces are actually more similar and related than we may realize. When my physical spaces - mainly those in my home - are organized, they draw me into peace and tranquility, which helps me to also order my spiritual spaces. And especially when my spiritual spaces are ordered - when I'm drawing near to the Lord and making his ways my ways - it motivates me to keep my physical spaces ordered. The harmony between the two, especially the reflection of spiritual order in physical order is amazing.

Psalm 50:23 came to mind as these thoughts were rolling. It says, "The one who offers thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies me; to one who orders his way rightly I will show the salvation of God!" Earlier in the psalm, the author explains God's order for sacrifices - how sacrifices void of thanksgiving are unacceptable. "Ordering our way rightly" involves so many things, including sacrifices of thanksgiving, prioritization of God's Word, obedience to his commandments, and yes, even responsible stewardship of our resources and organization of our homes. All these things compose our "ways." They are all intertwined, and they all please the Lord. And through their proper organization, God will show us his favor.

Happy New Year!

In With the New

There was a time in my life that I contributed regularly to a personal blog. That time was around five or six years ago when I was approaching the end of high-school and beyond. That was back when I wrote about the little insignificant things that were happening to me on any given day -- how tired I was, what unholy hour I went to work that morning, chronological lists of what I did all day, how many cups of coffee I drank, and so forth. You get the picture.

Since then, I have gone to college, gotten academic warnings, learned the value of sleep, learned a little bit more about life, people, and God, and caught myself a husband. I am now living out my life-long dream of wearing real diamonds and being a wife (ok, not in that order), and I guess you could say I've grown up. Less significant now are the little details about me -- my day, my schedule, my "lol, like that was soooo funny--except not really" moments that made headline news in highschool.

Instead, I now have thoughts about how to take care of my man, how to make wise decisions about life with him, and how to plan for our future together. I think about priorities, the value of time, and my relation to the rest of the world at large. I wanted to create a new blog to chronicle my new life and to share some of these thoughts with my friends and family.

I am still making finishing touches to the design of the blog, but ultimately, I hope that you are blessed by what you read and that through the process of sharing I am able to learn even more about myself -- about what I find important and what my mind has a tendency to consider.

Love,

Mrs. Kauffman