A 2007 Retrospective

What a year this has been. On January 1, 2007, Karl and I lived by ourselves in row home in downtown Philadelphia. I was employed as a public school music teacher while writing my master's thesis. Karl was a full-time graduate student. Karl was planning on applying for jobs in several cities, but we had no idea where we might be living once the school year was over. We were hoping for a child, but would not discover that I was pregnant until the following day.

On January 2, I watched with delight as the line on my pregnancy test turned pink.

In February, we trekked down to DC for Karl's first job interviews.

Karl accepted a job offer in March. We began researching the real estate market in DC and talking to folks from our church who were interested in buying our Philadelphia home.

I spent most of April trying to complete my master's thesis. I don't remember many details about my topic anymore, but I do remember multiple technology failures, such as crazy margins in MS Word, countless printer failures, and flashdrive chaos. I didn't ask Karl about his memories from this month. I'm not sure if I want to make him relive the stress of being married to an irritable, fatigued, pregnant student.

In May, I marched in Temple's commencement ceremonies, finally completing the master's degree that I began working on in 2001.

June is sort of a blur. From what we can recall, we decided to forgo selling the house in Philadelphia in order to rent to our friends. We selected our home in DC and began the sometimes humorous, sometimes nauseating process of closing on that home. (The process included no less than 4 home appraisals, 3 mortgage companies, 2 mortgage brokers, 2 insurance policies, 2 price adjustments, and, as we like to say, "a partridge in a pear tree.")

We finally closed on the home in July. We moved in the same night and were delighted as friends from our new church helped us to settle in.

I spent most of August unpacking boxes and painting the nursery, while Karl studied the finer details of the federal tax code at his new job.

The Lord gave us Adam in September.

I don't need to recount the rest of the year to you, blog readers, since it is already recorded here.

So, as you can see, 2007 was a banner year. It reminds us very much of 2004, which is the year that we got engaged, got married, and bought our first home. The two intervening years have been wonderful, but relatively uneventful. Kind of like treading water.

It makes us wonder what 2010 will be like. We have been joking that perhaps we will buy a third home and have another child in that year? We certainly wouldn't mind two years of relatively uneventful living until then.