January

So far we've had a pretty exciting January. Jared is back in school and Meghan is just working in the evenings and doing an at home internship helping the English Language Center assessment and technology guy do some research. It's awesome. I just go in once a week and check up with him and get new assignments and then work from home on some really cool research. I still love interpreting and am glad I can still get in a few hours a day.

 Lucy decided to put her diaper on her head. It was hilarious.

Right now I watch Lucy the first half of the day and then Jared comes home around lunch time and I go work a few hours while he watches Lucy. It honestly is perfect. She is such a joy to watch and we both love spending time at home with her. We are so blessed to have good jobs that pay the bills and don't require us to work many hours. It seriously is awesome. Every day Jared comes home and I tell him how much I love spending time with Lucy. I have until August to finish my thesis and get in 150 hours of internship work and then I'm done with school, and Jared is really loving his classes this semester. We really couldn't ask for anything more in life.

She is getting good at sitting up and holding her head up and so we play a lot more and she explores a lot. She loves to lick her hands lately (and everything else she can get close to her mouth) and she's really good at swatting the toy turtle that hangs from her bouncy chair. It is so fun to watch. We read lots of books together and practice holding toys and wiggling. She is so stinkin cute and so much fun to be with. She loves bath time now and she's learned that if she wiggles her arms and legs while she's in the bath it splashes water everywhere, and she LOVES it. We've had to move the bath to the kitchen tile instead of just in the living room on the carpet but it's worth it. It is so much fun to watch. I laugh so hard every time.

I guess the only real "news" of the month would be that Woody the station wagon was donated to cars for kidneys last week. The poor car wasn't going to pass inspection and we just knew it was time, and we were able to donate it to an organization that uses the money it gets from the car to help with research and dialysis treatments and other things for people with kidney problems. It was surprisingly really hard for me to let it go, but we knew it was the right thing to do and it definitely helped the car insurance payment go down :) I got a few good pictures of Lucy in the wagon before they took it away.

Oh and one last note. I've been reading a book called "Believing Christ" by Stephen Robinson that talks about the Savior and the atonement and it is amazing.

I highly recommend it. It explains the atonement and how we can apply it to our lives in a way I've never heard it explained before. This book especially addresses the issue of perfectionist attitudes many women have and how hard they can be on themselves in a more effective way than I've ever seen before. It is enlightening and strengthens my testimony of how much the Savior really loves us and how accessible the atonement really is to every single person on the earth. God really does love us, and the Savior really made it possible for us to be happy and healthy and return to live with God and our families again. What a blessing.